October 30, 1999
Web posted at: 12:56 a.m. EDT (0456 GMT)

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BOGOTA, Colombia (CNN) -- Colombian authorities are investigating what could be the world's worst case of serial killings, following a confession by a handyman who told them he had raped, tortured and beheaded 140 children over five years.

Colombia's chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gomez, said that Luis Alfredo Garavito, 42, lured his mostly poor victims by assuming various identities, including a beggar, a cripple and a monk.

"This has no precedent in Colombia," Gomez told a news conference Friday.

"Luis Alfredo Garavito has admitted the murder of about 140 children, of which we have so far found 114 skeletons, and we're still investigating the disappearance of other children," Gomez said.

Garavito, a handyman known as "Goofy," was arrested in April in the eastern city of Villavicencio on charges of attempting to rape a 12-year-old boy. He confessed to the 140 deaths during a court session on Thursday.

"The bodies were beheaded and bore signs of having been tied up and mutilated," Gomez said, adding that Garavito would drink heavily and then bind his young victims with nylon cord.

He said Garavito would not be charged with the murders until the investigation was complete.

Many were children of street vendors

Mutilated corpses of mostly male victims between the ages of 8 and 16 have been discovered near more than 60 towns in at least 11 of Colombia's 32 provinces, the prosecutor said.

Many of the victims were children of street vendors, who were left unattended in parks and at city stoplights to solicit money from motorists.

Garavito passed himself off as "a street vendor, monk, indigent, disabled person or a representative of fictitious foundations for the elderly and children's education, in that way gaining entrance to schools as a speaker," Gomez said.

VIDEO Colleen McEdwards reports on the man who has admitted to killing 140 children in Colombia Windows Media 28K 80K     MESSAGE BOARD Unrest in Colombia

Until November 1997, police had few clues into the multiyear rash of child disappearances. It was then that the remains of at least two dozen boys were found in a ravine and an overgrown lot near Pereira in the central coffee-growing region.

At the time, investigators believed the children may have been murdered as part of a satanic ritual. The discovery prompted authorities to create a nationwide task force that began to encounter similarities between cases across the country, Gomez said.

That effort turned up an arrest warrant for Garavito in a 1996 homicide case of a child in the north-central city of Tunja.

At the time of his arrest in Villavicencio, where he is being held, Garavito was living under an assumed name, prosecutors said.

Investigations also under way in Ecuador

Garavito moved around the country frequently after the killings began in 1994, and also spent time in Ecuador, where investigations are under way to determine whether he might be linked to child slayings in the neighboring country, Gomez said.

Most of the Colombia killings took place in the western state of Risaralda, of which Pereira is capital, where 41 bodies have been found, and in bordering Valle de Cauca, where another 27 turned up.

Gomez said Garavito was apparently abused himself as a child, and would undergo extensive psychological examinations.

Among the worst known cases of serial killings in recent decades is that of former sailor Anatoliy Onoprienko, who has been sentenced to death in Ukraine after being convicted of murdering 52 people from 1989 to 1996.

The aunt of two young paperboys, whose bodies were found last November in Pereira, said the boys "disappeared a year ago, but for us it still feels like it was yesterday."

"If this man is really the assassin of my two nephews, I want him to get the death penalty," Maria Aleida Velez told The Associated Press by telephone.

Reporter Alexandra Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.