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The Beast Of Colombia That Literally Sold His Soul To The Devil · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Picture this. It is nighttime in Columbia, and we're somewhere
• 0:03
  in the nineteen nineties, right. You are in a small
• 0:06
  town just walking past one of those absolutely breathtaking seventeenth
• 0:10
  century cathedrals.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: Oh, I know the kind you mean, Yeah.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Exactly, the vaulted ceilings that look like three stories tall,
• 0:18
  domed archways, intricate goal detailing just everywhere.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, very ornate.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: And you have these stained glass windows reflecting whatever moonlight
• 0:27
  is available, casting these shadows onto heavy, ancient wooden pews.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: It is supposed to be a place of absolute quiet reflection.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Exactly, But tonight the lights are off. Yeah, and from
• 0:39
  inside you hear someone weeping.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Which is just a haunting image. I mean, it's the
• 0:43
  absolute last thing you expect in that silent darkness, right.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: So naturally, maybe you gently push open those heavy wooden doors.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Just to peek inside.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just peek your head in. And there, kneeling on
• 0:54
  the cold stone floor, looking up at the altar with
• 0:57
  all these dripping, melting candles, is a man.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: And he's not just crying a little bit, No.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Tears are streaming down his face. His expression is completely
• 1:06
  scrunched up, as if he has just witnessed something utterly terrifying, something.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: That just broke him, like profound grief.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Yes, and he is violently beating his own chest with
• 1:17
  his fist, tearing at his hair and sobbing over and over.
• 1:21
  Miaculpa mea culpa exactly. And he is obsessively reciting verses
• 1:26
  from the Book of Psalms, like the fool says in
• 1:29
  his heart, there is no God. Their deeds are vile, vile, vile.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: And you know, to a casual observer, to someone just
• 1:35
  passing by on the street, this is a picture of
• 1:39
  absolute overwhelming devotion. Latally, it looks like the crushing weight
• 1:43
  of profound spiritual guilt.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: In fact, one passer by whispers to another like, who
• 1:46
  is that? What is going on right? And the other replies, Oh,
• 1:50
  I think that is the new priest in town. The
• 1:52
  poor man just looks overwhelmed. But they were wrong, They
• 1:54
  were so so wrong, because this man was not a
• 1:58
  new priest, burdened by the sins the swat, not even close.
• 2:01
  This man was Lewis Garavito, the Beast of Columbia, a
• 2:04
  man who had just committed atrocities so unspeakable, so entirely vile,
• 2:10
  that he would eventually confess to the murders of at
• 2:12
  least two hundred and twenty.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: One children, and that number, honestly, it's horrifyingly enough only
• 2:18
  considered the baseline.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Which is insane to think about.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: It is when you look at the sheer timeline of
• 2:22
  his activity and the missing person's reports from that specific era,
• 2:26
  many analysts believe the true number of his victims could
• 2:29
  easily reach into.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: The four hundreds, four hundred children. I just you need
• 2:33
  a second to even process a number like that, you
• 2:35
  really do. Welcome to today's deep dive. We are embarking
• 2:40
  on a journey into one of the darkest, most unfathomable
• 2:43
  true crime cases in human history.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: We really are.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: We are going to unpack the sheer horror, the baffling investigation,
• 2:50
  and the deeply twisted psychology of a man who managed
• 2:53
  to operate in plain sight.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: And for you listening as we navigate this, it is
• 2:58
  crucial to understand the real purpose of exploring such a dark.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Chapter, right. This isn't just for the true crime shock
• 3:04
  value exactly.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: We aren't recounting these acts just to be sensational. This
• 3:09
  case is frankly a masterclass in criminal profiling it really is.
• 3:14
  It forces us to examine the stark reality of societal
• 3:17
  blind spots, how communities, underfunded authorities, and entire national systems
• 3:22
  can unwittingly create the perfect insulated environment for a predator
• 3:27
  to operate unnoticed for over a decade.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Which is exactly what happened here.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, it offers a fascinating, albeit deeply challenging exploration of
• 3:35
  the differences in global justice systems and how they handle
• 3:38
  the truly irredeemable.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: So to really grasp how this all happened, we have
• 3:43
  to mentally transport ourselves back to nineteen nineties Columbia.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: The environment is absolutely everything.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: In this case, we are talking about a place where
• 3:51
  extreme systemic violence is almost a daily reality. The country
• 3:55
  is just in the absolute grip of Cartel's paramilitary groups,
• 3:59
  widespread embedded corruption. Yeah, I'm trying to think of how
• 4:02
  to describe the investigative atmosphere to someone today, and it
• 4:05
  is like trying to hear a pin drop at a
• 4:07
  heavy metal concert.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: That is highly, highly accurate. When psychologists and criminologists study
• 4:13
  this specific era, they often talk about the concept of
• 4:16
  background noise.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Background noise, right.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: The baseline level of societal violence in Colombia during the
• 4:21
  nineties was astronomical. I mean, we're talking car bombs, car bombs,
• 4:26
  political assassinations, open warfare in the streets. That was just
• 4:31
  the daily.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: News, just a regular Tuesday, exactly.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: And when a society is completely saturated in organize, loud violence,
• 4:40
  a disorganized, localized serial killer can essentially camouflage themselves within
• 4:45
  that chaos.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Because the cops are busy fighting a literal war.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, the authorities are calibrated to look for armies, they
• 4:52
  aren't looking for a single deranged individual hiding in the brush, which.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Perfectly sets up the first baffling clues in this case.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the early days of the investigation.
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  Speaker 1: Imagine being a Lobal detective in a small Columbian town
• 5:03
  back then you start getting these incredibly strange reports, very strange.
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  Eight little boys, completely unconnected to one another. They do
• 5:11
  not go to the same school, they do not play
• 5:13
  hide and seek together, their families do not interact at all.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Right, no obvious link.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: But over a period of time they all suddenly.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Lose a thumb, just a single thumb.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Just the thumb. And the physical mutilation is bizarre enough, obviously,
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  but the psychological change in these children is what truly
• 5:30
  signals a deeper horror.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: Because these were kids who previously had boundless energy right
• 5:36
  running around the town square playing soccer.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, completely normal kids, and suddenly they are walking around
• 5:42
  like ghosts.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: They flinch at every single shadow.
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  Speaker 1: They cling to their mothers, completely drained of life.
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  Speaker 2: And the townspeople are incredibly confused. I mean, at first,
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  you'd wonder if it is some weird, dangerous game the
• 5:54
  boys are playing.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Maybe they were daring each other.
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  Speaker 2: Well, maybe there is a defect in some machinery in town.
• 6:00
  Did they all get their hands stuck in the same
• 6:01
  sugarcane press?
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  Speaker 1: Right? You look for a logical explanation first.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: But then the whispers start. This was not an accident.
• 6:07
  Someone in the town is actively doing this.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: And the most terrifying part is that the boys are
• 6:13
  entirely too scared to talk. They refuse to say who
• 6:16
  did it, or why or how.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: They've been subjected to an impenetrable wall of silence built
• 6:22
  on pure terror.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Like, whoever did this? Scared them so badly they won't
• 6:26
  even tell their.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Own parents exactly. The threat hanging over them must have
• 6:30
  been so profound that it overrode their natural instinct to
• 6:33
  seek comfort and protection.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: And amidst this localized paranoia about some phantom thumb cutter,
• 6:41
  the local authorities are called out into the nearby.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Woods and this is where everything changes.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There they discover something that shatters any illusion of
• 6:48
  this being a straying of bizarre localized accidents.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: What did they find?
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  Speaker 1: They find a mass grave thirty six tiny bodies children.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Oh god, it is a devastating discovery, un imaginable for
• 7:00
  those cops, and immediately it alters the entire trajectory of
• 7:04
  the police work because this rules out self inflicted harm
• 7:07
  or environmental accidents completely, right. This is intentional, methodical murder
• 7:12
  on a mass scale.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: So the investigators are standing over this mass grave of
• 7:16
  thirty six kids and they are completely baffled. I mean,
• 7:20
  they have virtually zero forensic clues to go.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: Off of the crime scene was probably a.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Mess, yeah, exposed to the elements. So where does their
• 7:28
  mind immediately jump to the biggest, baddest wolves in the forest.
• 7:33
  The cartels, specifically the Medellin cartel run by Pablo Escobar, which, if.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: You understand nineteen nineties Columbia, is a highly logical starting.
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  Speaker 1: Point because they were behind almost everything.
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  Speaker 2: The Medellin Cartel was arguably the most ruthless powerful criminal
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  organization and modern history. The sheer scale of their operations
• 7:53
  is almost impossible to comprehend today.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: People forget how much money we're talking about.
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  Speaker 2: We are talking about an organization bringing in over two
• 8:00
  hundred million dollars a day in profit a day. Escobar's
• 8:04
  personal income was estimated at two billion dollars a year.
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  Completely untaxed, they supplied an estimated ninety six percent of
• 8:12
  the United States cocaine consumption.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: At their peak, they practically ruled the world. I mean
• 8:17
  they were wildly creative in their logistics, which is a
• 8:20
  weird word to use for a murderous cartel, but it fits.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: They were very innovative criminals, like they.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Would soak denim genes in liquid cocaine, export them completely
• 8:30
  legally to the US, and then their chemists would literally
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  wash the genes with a chemical compound to extract the
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  liquid and dry it back into powder.
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  Speaker 2: It's brilliant in a deeply evil way.
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  Speaker 1: They even trained carrier pigeons to deliver secretive mail between
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  operatives like this is straight out of a spine off.
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  Speaker 2: And their capacity for violence was absolute. It is estimated
• 8:50
  they murdered at least four thousand people during their reign.
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  Speaker 1: Escobar famously kept every threatening note he ever received in
• 8:57
  a little scrapbook, treating them like sent mental tokens.
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  Speaker 2: He felt completely untouchable. So for the local authorities, the
• 9:04
  logic is sound, right. Who else possesses the sheer audacity
• 9:08
  and the logistical capability to murder thirty six children and
• 9:11
  dump them in a mass grave.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: But they actually debunked this theory pretty quickly. Yeah, they did,
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  and the reason why is almost ironic given how evil
• 9:20
  Escobar was. Ye, for all his absolute ruthlessness, Pablo Escobar
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  was a massive philanthropist in his local areas.
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  Speaker 2: He really cultivated that Robin Hood image.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly, and his absolute favorite cause helping local children in need.
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  He built soccer fields, he funded local schools, he handed
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  out cash in the slums. It just did not fit
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  his operational style or his carefully cultivated public persona to
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  have a random mass grave of children in his territory.
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  Speaker 2: When organized crime syndicates commit violence, there is almost always
• 9:54
  a clear, albeit twisted business motive.
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  Speaker 1: It's transactional exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It's about sending a message to a rise, eliminating a
• 10:01
  political threat, or silencing informants. Right, A random mass grave
• 10:05
  of children doesn't achieve any of those organizational goals. It
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  brings heat without profit.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, So if not Escobar, what about the Cali Kartel
• 10:13
  because they were the other major player at.
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  Speaker 2: The time, right, Yes, the Cali Cartel. But they were
• 10:16
  structured very differently from Adellan. They operated less like a
• 10:19
  street gang and more like a fortune five hundred company.
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  They were a highly sophisticated billion dollar business.
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  Speaker 1: They even owned a Boeing seven to twenty seven, didn't
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  they They did.
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  Speaker 2: They used it to fly drugs from Mexico to the US,
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  sell the product, literally, load the plane with physical cash,
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  and fly it back to Columbia. They had bankers, lawyers,
• 10:40
  logistics experts, wholesalers all on their payroll.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: But they also had a very dark, radical side that
• 10:47
  wasn't just about business.
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  Speaker 2: Right, the social cleansing aspect.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had these subgroups obsessed with what they called
• 10:53
  social cleansing. They targeted people they deemed discardable from society.
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  Speaker 2: Sex workers, street children, the unhoused, petty thieves.
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  Speaker 1: They would drive around in trucks with signs saying clean Cali,
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  Beautiful Cali, and toss bodies into a nearby waterway that
• 11:08
  locals dubbed the River of Death.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: And that specific subgroup activity, it makes the Cali Cartel
• 11:13
  a very plausible suspect for a mass grave of marginalized people.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: It definitely tracks.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: However, investigators ultimately debunk this theory two for two main reasons. First,
• 11:22
  the geographical location was completely wrong.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: This grave was found far outside Cali territory exactly.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: Second, the scale and methodology didn't match. Cartel's social cleansings
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  were typically scattered opportunistic dumps. They didn't usually take the
• 11:37
  time to dig a concentrated mass grave, specifically for young
• 11:40
  boys in a secluded woodland area.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: It's like I'm picturing these investigators sitting in a smoky
• 11:45
  room just crossing these massive criminal empires off.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: A whiteboard, back to square one.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: So they pivot to the next logical business motive, which
• 11:53
  is organ trafficking.
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  Speaker 2: Ah.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, because Colombia had become a huge hub for what's
• 11:58
  called organ tourism. You had desperate foreign patients flying in
• 12:03
  for black market transplants.
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  Speaker 2: The economics of the illicit organ trade are staggering. It
• 12:07
  is a multi billion dollar global industry.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, how much does a black market organ even
• 12:12
  go for?
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Black market kidneys can easily go for up to sixty
• 12:15
  thousand dollars, corneas for thirty thousand, livers for up to
• 12:19
  one hundred thousand, hearts, and lungs for one hundred and
• 12:22
  fifty thousand dollars.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Wow, and the brokers are making it killing well. The victims,
• 12:26
  if they even survive the procedure, might get am easily
• 12:29
  two thousand.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: Bucks if they're lucky.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: So authorities think, okay, thirty six kids children's organs are
• 12:35
  highly valuable. Maybe this is a massive harvesting operation supplying
• 12:39
  underground clinics.
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  Speaker 2: It makes a twisted kind of economic sense on paper
• 12:43
  until the medical examiners actually examine the bodies, right. They
• 12:46
  found that the cuts on the victim's stomachs and torsos
• 12:49
  were completely erratic, messy, and disorganized.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Which completely destroys the organ trafficking theory. Yeah. I mean,
• 12:57
  professional organ harvesters are basically rogue surgeons. They have to
• 13:00
  be they have to be incredibly precise. If you are
• 13:03
  extracting one hundred and fifty thousand dollars heart, you need
• 13:06
  a sterile environment, ice coolers, and a perfect decision.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: You don't want to taint the product with a slobby
• 13:11
  knife wound.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and more importantly, the medical examiners found that the
• 13:16
  actual organs were still there.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: They were left behind.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: You do not run an organ harvesting ring, mutilate the bodies,
• 13:22
  and then leave the valuable organs behind in the dirt.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: This is exactly where the investigation hit a brick wall.
• 13:28
  The authorities had exhausted all the logical, financially motivated or
• 13:32
  politically motivated avenues.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: I keep thinking about this like imagine a major corporation
• 13:39
  brings in a team of elite investigators to solve a
• 13:42
  case of massive corporate espionage.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, I like this analogy.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: The investigators were looking for rival CEOs, secret wire transfers,
• 13:50
  offshore accounts falling the money, but the reality is that
• 13:53
  the corporate headquarters was just hit by a rogue tornado.
• 13:57
  The authorities in Colombia were trying to apply logical business
• 14:00
  driven motive money territory power to a crime that was
• 14:05
  actually driven by pure irrational, chaotic sadism.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: They were looking for a boredroom conspiracy, but they were
• 14:11
  dealing with a force of nature a monster. That is
• 14:14
  a phenomenal way to frame it, and it highlights how
• 14:17
  deeply the systemic violence of Columbia influenced the investigation.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: It blinded them.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: When every major crime for a decade has been tied
• 14:25
  to drug money or political power, your investigative lens is
• 14:29
  fundamentally altered. You become blind to the anomaly.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Because in their minds, serial killers are a luxury of polite,
• 14:36
  stable societies.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: That's a grim way to put it, but it's true.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: You don't worry about a Loane weirdo in the woods
• 14:41
  when a cartel might literally drop a bomb on a
• 14:45
  prison from a fighter.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Jet, which actually happened.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: The Cali cartel got an a thirty seven Dragonfly jet
• 14:53
  and were ready to bomb Pablo Escobar's luxury prison. That
• 14:57
  is the background noise these cops are.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Dealing with, exactly when an aerial bombardment by a drug
• 15:02
  cartel is just a regular Tuesday. A disorganized string of
• 15:05
  murders in the woods doesn't immediately compute as the work
• 15:08
  of a single deranged individual.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So having ruled out the cartels and the traffickers, the
• 15:14
  authorities are left grasping its.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Straws They even started wondering if it was witchcraft or
• 15:19
  a satanic cult.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Just because nothing else made sense of.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: The mutilations, specifically why many victims were decapitated and bizarrely
• 15:27
  had only their right foot chopped off and left at
• 15:29
  the crime scene.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Only the right foot. They loved it there, which makes
• 15:33
  zerious sense if you're harvesting or sending a cartel message,
• 15:35
  none at all. So who is the road tornado? Who
• 15:39
  is the man behind this unimaginable horror? We need to
• 15:42
  go back and look at Luis Garavito's early life in Genova, Columbia.
• 15:45
  Yes we do, and listener a heavy warning here. The
• 15:48
  details of his upbringing are severely, severely traumatic.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: When analyzing a case like this, we have to examine
• 15:55
  the early years, not to excuse his later actions, but
• 15:58
  to understand the specific fix psychological architecture of his pathology.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: How is a monster built?
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: Precisely? Garvito was the eldest of seven children, and his
• 16:08
  home life was ruled by an absolute tyrant of a father.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: His dad was a severe alcoholic who spent almost all
• 16:15
  the family's meager income at the local.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: Bar, leaving them in abject poverty, and.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: His rule at home was absolute terror. When the father
• 16:23
  came home, the entire family, all nine of them in
• 16:26
  this tiny house, would literally scramble to hide under their beds.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: That's not a figure of speech.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: No, they literally hid because if anyone was even in
• 16:34
  his line of sight, he wouldn't ask them to move,
• 16:37
  He would just take off his belt and start whipping them.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: The physical abuse was extreme and relentless. If Garvito's mother
• 16:43
  didn't have dinner perfectly ready the second he walked in,
• 16:46
  she was severely beaten.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: And as the eldest son, young Lewis initially tried to
• 16:50
  step in and protect.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: His mother, but the punishments for intervening were barbaric.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: His father would drag Louis outside, strap him to a
• 16:57
  tree trunk, and beat him with a machete.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: He was being battered with a deadly weapon by his
• 17:02
  own father.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: Eventually, Louise just broke He stopped trying to protect his mom.
• 17:07
  He realized she wasn't going to leave, likely because she
• 17:09
  would be completely destitute in that society, and he was
• 17:12
  just absorbing endless beatings.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: It was a survival mechanism to shut down.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: He would show up to his elementary school with massive
• 17:20
  red welts all over his legs and back, unable to
• 17:23
  even sit down in his.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: Chair, and that profound, constant physical pain bread a deep
• 17:29
  simmering resentment inside him. You can imagine he would look
• 17:32
  around at his classmates, kids who could sit comfortably, kids
• 17:35
  who were excited to go home at the end of
• 17:37
  the day to loving parents, and he genuinely despised them.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: He hated them for being safe.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: He developed a burning hatred for anyone who possessed what
• 17:45
  he was denied a normal, safe existence.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: But the physical beatings were only one layer of the nightmare.
• 17:51
  His father forced him to take bats where the father
• 17:54
  would intimately bade every inch of his body, even when
• 17:57
  Louise was far too old for that kind of.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: Parental and it completely shattered his concept of bodily autonomy.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: And then the horror escalated when a quote unquote family
• 18:07
  friend entered the picture.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: This individual would come over under the guise of visiting
• 18:11
  the father, but would wait for moments to get Louise alone.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Just a predator waiting for an opening.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: He would tie the boy up and brutally assault him.
• 18:20
  And this is where we see the introduction of highly
• 18:22
  specific ritualistic violence that would later mirror Garvito's own horrific crimes.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: The abuser would use the flame of a candle to
• 18:32
  burn Louise in highly sensitive.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Areas, and he would violently bite him. These weren't nips, right, No,
• 18:37
  these were full on, painful chomps, designed to make Louise
• 18:41
  cry out in pain while the abuser satisfied himself.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: This nightmare went on for two agonizing ears until the
• 18:47
  family finally moved to a new town. But then it
• 18:51
  happened again.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: They made a new family friend, a local.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Priest of all people, who also proceeded to abuse Lewis.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: So we have a child who is experiperiencing absolutely zero
• 19:01
  safety in any domain of his life, no where to run.
• 19:04
  His home is a war zone, his body is treated
• 19:07
  as public property, and the ultimate authority figures in his life.
• 19:11
  His father, a trusted family friend, a man of God,
• 19:15
  are all active predators.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: And you'd think maybe schools an escape, Maybe he just
• 19:20
  put his head down in a book.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: No, it was worse.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: He wasn't the tough guy at school either. He's the
• 19:24
  one getting bullied endlessly.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Kids can be cruel.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: He had to wear these very thick prescription glasses which
• 19:30
  made him a physical target for other kids, and his
• 19:33
  last name, Gottavito, sounds like ga veto in Spanish, which
• 19:37
  roughly translates to doodle or scribble.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: So he was mercilessly mocked as the doodle boy.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: The sheer accumulation of this trauma deeply altered how his
• 19:46
  brain wired itself during its most critical developmental phases.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: When you look at this level of sustained abuse, you
• 19:52
  have to understand how it rewires a developing brain. Psychologists
• 19:56
  call this procedural memory.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, procedural memory. Let's make sure we really understand this.
• 20:02
  It's kind of like when you're typing on a keyboard.
• 20:05
  You don't have to look down and consciously think where's
• 20:07
  the letter T, where's the letter E.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: Your fingers just know the procedure.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: Or if a glass slips off the counter, your hand
• 20:14
  shoots out to catch it before your conscious brain even
• 20:18
  registers the thought the glass is falling.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Right, It's an automatic, ingrained response.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: So how does that apply to violence?
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: That is an excellent way to conceptualize it. It is
• 20:27
  implicit memory that dictates automatic responses without conscious awareness. For
• 20:32
  most functional adults, procedural memories are tied to motor skills
• 20:36
  or simple helpful.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Routines like catching the glass.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: But for Luis Garvito, his trauma ingrained a procedural memory
• 20:43
  for extreme sutain violence. His brain learned that the automatic
• 20:47
  subconscious response to any feeling of anger, frustration, or jealousy
• 20:51
  was immediate physical destruction.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: If he felt a negative emotion, his default procedure was
• 20:56
  to raise his fists and swing. Exactly, he would brutally
• 20:59
  beat up classmates just for accidentally borrowing his pencil without asking.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Just zero to sixty instantly.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: But the defining, terrifying manifestation of this violent procedural memory
• 21:12
  happened shortly after he was assaulted by that family friend.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: The bird incident.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was out in a field and he managed
• 21:20
  to catch two live birds. He grabbed a heavy stone
• 21:23
  and he literally pummeled and tore those birds apart with
• 21:27
  his bare hands.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: And the chilling part.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: When asked about it later, he said, the act of
• 21:32
  destroying something smaller than him made him feel quote unquote
• 21:35
  very very good.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: That is the turning point right there.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: But look here's where I have to push back. And
• 21:41
  I know you listening are probably thinking the exact same thing.
• 21:44
  Millions of people suffer unimaginable trauma. Of course, millions of
• 21:48
  children endure horrific abuse, grinding poverty, and relentless bullying. Yet
• 21:52
  they grow up to be kind, functional, deeply empathetic adults.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: Many do, yes, some even.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Become social workers or advocates. To stop the cycle. They'll
• 22:02
  become monsters who murder hundreds of children. So where's the line.
• 22:06
  Where does trauma stop being a tragic explanation for a
• 22:09
  troubled kid and start becoming a weapon wielded by a psychopath?
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: That is the essential million dollar question in criminal psychology.
• 22:17
  Trauma is not a destiny, it is an influence right.
• 22:21
  As you mentioned, many survivors of abuse develop hyper empathy.
• 22:25
  Garavito's divergence lies in a toxic, rare intersection of severe
• 22:29
  trauma and deep seated psychopathy.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: Meaning he fundamentally lacked the biological hardware to feel empathy
• 22:36
  for another living thing.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: Precisely, he lacked the capacity for genuine remorse or connection.
• 22:42
  So the trauma didn't create the killer. The psychopathy did, okay,
• 22:46
  But the trauma provided the methodology and the focus of
• 22:48
  his rage. The biting, the candles, the tying up. These
• 22:52
  were direct.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: The transition from victim to serial killer was driven by
• 23:00
  an active, psychopathic desire to reclaim power. He didn't want
• 23:04
  to heal from his trauma. He wanted to become the
• 23:06
  god of his own violent universe by inflicting his exact
• 23:09
  suffering onto innocence.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: He saw his abusers holding total power over him, and
• 23:13
  he decided the only way to never be a victim
• 23:15
  again was to become the ultimate abuser.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: It's a conscious choice to take the nightmare you were
• 23:19
  handed and pass it on to someone else, which.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Leads us right into how he actually evolved into this predator.
• 23:27
  Profilers often talk about a framework right an escalation of
• 23:30
  behavioral stages that a serial killer goes through. They do,
• 23:34
  and it is chilling to see how perfectly Garavito's life
• 23:37
  aligns with this devolution.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: While not all behavioral analysts adhere to a rigid stage model,
• 23:43
  it provides a highly effective lens to understand how a
• 23:46
  person moves from simply having violent, intrusive thoughts to committing systemic,
• 23:51
  real world murder.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: So let's walk through how he escalated. Profilers often describe
• 23:56
  the initial phase as a withdrawal period. The aura phase
• 24:00
  killer starts pulling away from society, isolating themselves from friends
• 24:03
  and family, and retreating entirely into a dark fantasy world.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: For Lewis, he never really had friends or a supportive
• 24:09
  family to pull away from in the first place.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: So he just marinates in these fantasies. He sits alone,
• 24:13
  imagining turning the tables, taking the immense pain he felt
• 24:16
  and forcing it onto a random, innocent boy.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: And because he is so isolated, there is no external
• 24:21
  reality check.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Nobody to say, hey man, that's messed up right.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: There's no healthy influence, no mentor no friend to interrupt
• 24:29
  or challenge this violent ideation. The fantasy leap just plays
• 24:33
  over and over, growing more complex, which bleeds directly into
• 24:37
  the next phase, testing the waters.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Toying with the idea of making the fantasy a reality,
• 24:43
  starting to think what would this actually look like if
• 24:45
  I did it?
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: And we see Garavito do this at just fifteen years old.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Is the eldest sibling. He acts like a deranged drill sergeant.
• 24:52
  In the house. He forces his younger siblings to line up,
• 24:55
  strip down, and he inappropriately touches them.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: There are reports that he took it even further, forcing
• 25:01
  them to sleep unclosed in his bed while he held
• 25:03
  the power.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: He is practicing control and violation in a low risk
• 25:07
  environment where he knows they are too scared of him
• 25:09
  and their father to tell anyone.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: He is testing boundaries and realizing that he can, in
• 25:14
  fact exert complete power over others. He crosses the line
• 25:18
  from thought to action, and.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Once that barrier is broken, the focus shifts outward.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: This is where the killer becomes hyper focused on finding
• 25:26
  the perfect victim, pool, gaining trust, and building a sustainable
• 25:31
  facade to hide behind.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: And Garvido's facade in his twenties was almost flawless.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: It really was.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: If you met him on the street, you would never
• 25:39
  ever guess what was brewing inside his head. He got
• 25:43
  a job at a local bakery, spending his days baking
• 25:46
  fresh bread and cakes, very normal job. He attended church
• 25:49
  every single Sunday without fail. Recognizing he had a drinking problem,
• 25:54
  he even went to alcoholics anonymous meetings to address it.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: He wore these big, thick eighties style eyeglasses and always
• 26:01
  dress neatly.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: To the outside world, particularly to the middle aged women
• 26:04
  in his town, he appeared as a hard working, pious,
• 26:08
  humble man who was actively trying to better himself.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: He was just a quiet baker with the glasses who
• 26:13
  never missed masks exactly.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: These women would come into the bakery, buy a loaf
• 26:17
  of bread, and literally shove pictures of their single daughters
• 26:20
  in his face, trying to set them up on dates.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: He was considered a catch in the community.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: He would always politely decline, saying he had a lot
• 26:27
  on his mind or was focusing on his faith, which
• 26:30
  is the understatement of the century, because while he's baking
• 26:32
  bread by day and smiling at mothers by night, he
• 26:35
  is actively entering the capturing phase.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: And this is where the timeline of Garavito's crimes becomes
• 26:41
  a horrifying anomaly in the annals of serial murder. The
• 26:45
  capturing phase is when the killer actively begins hunting, taking
• 26:49
  and assaulting victims.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: By this time, he is ambushing boys in local parks.
• 26:54
  He would hide in the dense bushes with a machete,
• 26:57
  wait for a boy to walk by alone, jump out,
• 27:00
  put the blade to their throat, and threatened to tell
• 27:02
  them if they made a single sound.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: There is a specific early victim named William Trujillo, who
• 27:07
  Garavito managed to hold captive in a secluded area of
• 27:10
  a park for twelve excruciating hours twelve hours. William survived
• 27:15
  and later said the worst part wasn't just the physical
• 27:17
  torture and the biting, It was that Garavito was completely
• 27:21
  unnervingly silent the entire time. That's terrifying, and William noted
• 27:25
  he smelled heavily of sweat and dirt, like a farm
• 27:28
  worker after a long day of intense labor.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: The psychological torment was paramount for Gervito. He fed on
• 27:34
  the fear as much as the physical act.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: When William finally couldn't take the silence anymore and asked,
• 27:39
  terrified when he would be let go, Garavito broke his
• 27:42
  silence and simply whispered when the church.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: Bells ring, which wasn't until five am the next morning.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: He forced his victim to wait in agonizing uncertainty in
• 27:52
  the dark for hours, holding the power of life and
• 27:55
  death over him.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: And here is the most staggering, incomprehensible detail of this
• 27:59
  entire story. Garavito spent twelve years in this phase. Twelve years,
• 28:05
  twelve years. He assaulted and released over two hundred children
• 28:09
  before he ever committed his first murder.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: He kept a little blue notebook with two hundred names
• 28:13
  written and at two hundred kids who survived his torture.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: From a profiling and criminological standpoint, an offend of remaining
• 28:20
  in the capturing and releasing phase for over a decade
• 28:23
  without escalating to murder or being apprehended by the police
• 28:26
  is almost unheard of.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: It is. It represents an abysmal systemic failure of society
• 28:31
  at every level.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I just do not understand how a community loses that
• 28:36
  many kids to severe assault, two hundred kids and nobody
• 28:41
  forms a mob. How does a man assault two hundred
• 28:44
  children in a localized area over twelve years and not
• 28:47
  get locked up.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: We have to look at the societal context we talked
• 28:50
  about earlier.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: Why one parents screaming from the rooftops. Why weren't they
• 28:54
  marching on the police station.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: Because of fear, complete paralyzing existential fear. Try to imagine
• 29:02
  the reality for these families. If a child went missing
• 29:05
  or came home severely assaulted in Columbia at that time,
• 29:08
  the parents felt completely trapped. They couldn't go to the
• 29:10
  police right.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Because the police forces in many of these rural towns
• 29:13
  were deeply corrupted underfunded or outright controlled by the local
• 29:17
  cartels and paramilitary groups. Exactly if a mother drags her
• 29:21
  assaulted son to the cops and the cartels somehow had
• 29:24
  a stake in whatever happened, Or even if the local
• 29:27
  gang boss just didn't like the extra police heat the
• 29:29
  investigation brought to the neighborhood that mother is putting her
• 29:33
  entire family in lethal danger.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: The cartel might think they were snitches, or consider.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: The alternative, even if the assault wasn't cartel related. Taking
• 29:43
  a young boy to the authorities for a sexual assault
• 29:46
  in that deeply conservative, machismo driven culture would subject the
• 29:51
  child and the family to immense social shame and stigma.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: And they would endure that shame with virtually no hope
• 29:57
  of actual justice being served because the police were too
• 29:59
  b he fighting drug wars to care about a poor child.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Silence became a tragic survival mechanism for these communities.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: They kept their heads down and stayed quiet just to
• 30:08
  survive the week.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: But their silence became the ultimate enabler for the beast.
• 30:12
  It gave him a twelve year playground with zero consequences.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: But eventually, as with all addictions, the thrill of just
• 30:18
  assault wasn't enough to satisfy the urge.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: The violent fantasy demanded more. He had to escalate to murder.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: His escalation to murder was shockingly impulsive compared to the
• 30:28
  methodical twelve hour tortures he had been orchestrating.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: It happened on a random day. He was heavily drunk
• 30:34
  on cheap brandy, bought a pack of cigarettes, a nylon cord,
• 30:37
  and a knife, and stumbled into a local park.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Just looking for an opportunity.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: He held out some loose change in his hand, just
• 30:44
  standing there, waiting to lure a desperate child who might
• 30:48
  be looking for odd jobs to help their family.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: When a young boy approached, asking if he needed help,
• 30:53
  Baravito grabbed him.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: Led him deep into a secluded mountainous area, tied him up,
• 30:59
  and began his youth routine of biting and torture.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: But then something snapped.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: He said he felt the strongest impulse of his entire life,
• 31:07
  an impulse of pure, blinding anger. He just sat on
• 31:11
  the boy's chest and beat him to death with his
• 31:13
  bare hands.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: He crossed the ultimate threshold.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: He took a life, and immediately he enters the next
• 31:19
  behavioral phase by beginning his collection of trophies.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: This is a crucial distinction. Unlike a cartel hit man
• 31:25
  who kills for profit or revenge and wants to destroy
• 31:28
  all evidence of the crime, a serial killer wants to
• 31:31
  preserve the memory.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: They want a tangible, physical link to the psychological high
• 31:36
  of the kill.
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: He started sectioning off his little blue notebook.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: After a murder, he would rummage through his dead victim's pockets.
• 31:42
  If they had a school student ID card, he would
• 31:45
  carefully cut out just the picture of the boy's face
• 31:47
  and keep it.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: If they didn't have an ID, he would take their underwear.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: And he kept these trophies neatly folded in a drawer
• 31:53
  in his room, right next to his own underwear. He'd
• 31:57
  also clip newspaper headlines about the missing boys. He was
• 32:00
  essentially creating a private shrine to his own monstrosity.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: But the psychological aftermath of a kill is rarely a sustained,
• 32:07
  unbroken high. The adrenaline crashes, which often leads to what
• 32:11
  profilers call the depression phase.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Following his first murder, Garavito claimed to fall into a
• 32:16
  state of immense guilt, self loathing, and disappointment in himself.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: This circles us. Right back to the very beginning of
• 32:23
  our discussion the scene in the cathedral.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: He walked into a church, threw himself down on the
• 32:28
  stone floor in front of the statue of Jesus, and
• 32:31
  wept uncontrollably, beating his chest.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: He even willingly went to a local psychiatrist when he
• 32:36
  was twenty three and was officially diagnosed with reactive depression.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Which sounds like a heavy clinical term, but really it
• 32:43
  just means a state where a person experiences a significant
• 32:45
  distress that is wildly out of proportion to an external
• 32:48
  Stressor if.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: Someone accidentally steps on your foot, you feel briefly annoyed.
• 32:53
  Someone with reactive depression might feel their entire world is
• 32:56
  collapsing and they are utterly worthless.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Garavito use this medical diagnosis as a shield.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: He would tell his therapist he was deeply depressed, go
• 33:05
  to his AA meetings and act heartbroken about his drinking,
• 33:08
  and then use that overwhelming diagnosed sadness as a justification
• 33:13
  to go to a bar, get drunk, and hunt another
• 33:16
  child to make himself feel better.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, I am pushing back hard on this whole depression narrative.
• 33:20
  Please do is he actually sad that he took a
• 33:23
  child's life, or is he just upset that the adrenaline
• 33:26
  high of the murder wore off like a drug addict crashing.
• 33:30
  Is he genuinely sad for the victim or is he
• 33:32
  only sad for himself.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: Your skepticism is entirely justified, and it aligns with how
• 33:37
  modern analysts view his behavior. The consensus is that his
• 33:40
  weeping in the church and his depressive episodes were highly performative.
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: It was a classic manifestation of narcissistic mirroring.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Narcissistic mirroring break that down for us in this context.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Garevito was raised in a devoutly Catholic environment, where the
• 33:55
  established procedural response to committing a sin was dramatic confession, penance,
• 34:00
  and tears.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: He didn't feel genuine empathy for his victims.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: No, his underlying psychopathy precludes that entirely. But he completely
• 34:09
  understood the mechanics of religious salvation.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: He thought to himself, if I cry loudly in church,
• 34:14
  I am acting exactly how a good Catholic should act
• 34:17
  when they sin, and therefore God must forgive me and
• 34:20
  I will be saved.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: He was mimicking remorse to soothe his own narcissistic fear
• 34:25
  of hell, not out of any true grief for the
• 34:27
  lives he ended. It was a purely transactional performance.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: That makes total sense. He's just acting out the script
• 34:33
  of a penitent sinner while completely lacking the emotional core
• 34:36
  of one.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: So he cries. He feels empty, and then to cure
• 34:39
  that emptiness, he goes back to his room, pulls out
• 34:41
  his little blue notebook, looks at the faces of the
• 34:43
  boys he killed, and decides he needs to kill again
• 34:46
  to chase that high.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: Once he abandons the facade of remorse, his methods shift drastically.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: We start to see a clear distinction between how he
• 34:54
  caught them and why he killed them, which brings us
• 34:57
  to a vital concept, inguishing between a killer's MO and
• 35:02
  their signature.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: This distinction is the bedrock of behavioral analysis. The MO
• 35:08
  or modus operandi is the operational method. It's how the
• 35:12
  killer executes the crime, how they lure the victim, how
• 35:15
  they control them, and how they dispose of the evidence.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: The critical thing to understand about an MO is that
• 35:22
  it is fluid. It evolves as the killer learns from
• 35:25
  their mistakes and strives for greater efficiency and lower risk.
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Right, It's like imagine a burglar. They might start their
• 35:32
  criminal career by just throwing a bucket through a window
• 35:34
  to get into a house, but they realize.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: That makes a ton of noise and attracts cops.
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: Exactly, so they learn how to pick locks because it's
• 35:40
  quieter and more efficient.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: Their MO changed, But a signature is entirely different exactly.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: The signature is the psychological why. It is a highly specific,
• 35:49
  often functionally unnecessary ritual performed during the crime that exists
• 35:53
  solely to satisfy the killer's core emotional, sadistic, or psychosexual fantasy.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: Unlike the MO, signature rarely changes because it is the
• 36:02
  very reason the killers committing the crime in the first place.
• 36:05
  If they don't fulfill the signature, the crime doesn't satisfy
• 36:08
  the urge.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: So let's look at Garavito's evolving m O. First. His
• 36:12
  methods of controlling his victims became incredibly elaborate and terrifying.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: He started tying victims up with nylon cord and forcing
• 36:21
  them to walk in tight circles in the woods for
• 36:23
  hours while he held them a sheety inches from their necks.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: He would scream at them, detailing all over horrific things
• 36:29
  he was going to do to them if they stopped walking.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: This served a very specific dual purpose in his mom Yes,
• 36:36
  it terrified them, which gave him a psychological thrill, but
• 36:39
  operationally it physically exhausted the victims.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: By forcing them to walk under extreme stress until their
• 36:45
  legs literally shook and gave out. He was ensuring they
• 36:49
  had absolutely zero physical energy left to fight back or
• 36:52
  run away when the actual assault began.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: It was a method of absolute control.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: And his cruelty in keeping them alive is just hard.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: To Stomachy stomatically target their hands, punching them until the
• 37:03
  small bone shattered so they couldn't untie themselves.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: He would make shallow stab wounds across their bodies, specifically
• 37:10
  and carefully avoiding the major arteries near the kidneys and
• 37:12
  the neck, because he wanted them to survive the torture
• 37:15
  for as long as possible.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: He would even take smoke breaks.
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: That part is so chilling.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: He was a massive chainsmoker, and he would sometimes smoke
• 37:23
  a full pack of twenty cigarettes during an assault. If
• 37:27
  you assume it takes maybe five or six minutes to
• 37:30
  smoke a cigarette. That's nearly two straight hours of him
• 37:33
  just sitting there on logs, smoking, watching the victims suffer,
• 37:37
  prolonging the agony.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: That level of sustained, deliberate pacing shows a terrifying comfort
• 37:43
  with his environment. He isn't rushing in a panic. He
• 37:45
  possesses absolute, terrifying control over the situation.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: But amidst this highly efficient, evolving mo we see his
• 37:52
  signature crystallize into something deeply barbaric.
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: His signature was absolute butchery. It escalated far beyond the
• 37:59
  initial beat.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: He would eventually incorporate disembowelment, removing their intestines and placing
• 38:05
  them next to the victim's face. While they were still
• 38:07
  in agonizing.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Shock, he would decapitate them, and then.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: The absolute core of his signature, he would sever the
• 38:14
  victim's genitals and place them directly into their own mouths.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: That act of post mortem desecration serves absolutely zero operational purpose.
• 38:23
  It doesn't help him escape, It doesn't make the kill
• 38:26
  easier or quieter.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: It is a pure, distilled expression of his pathology.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: It is highly likely rooted in his own history of
• 38:33
  severe sexual humiliation and a twisted desperate desire to completely
• 38:38
  obliterate the victim's humanity and masculinity.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate sick trophy of asserting dominance. And
• 38:45
  speaking of psychological power, we have to revisit the eight
• 38:48
  missing thumbs from the very beginning of the.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: Deep Dive, the eight boys who survived but were mutilated.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Because those thumbs weren't really an mo to make the
• 38:56
  crime easier, and they weren't his ultimate signature either. It
• 38:59
  was an experiment.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: Indeed, we know he let these eight specific boys go
• 39:04
  after hours of torture and cutting off a single thumb.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: He would untie them, tell them he was going to
• 39:08
  count to a random number, and if they made it
• 39:10
  to their family's houses before he caught them, they lived.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: He didn't even chase them. He just sat there and
• 39:16
  let them run away into the night.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: So why do it? Why risk leaving eight living, breathing
• 39:22
  witnesses who know exactly what he looks like.
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: Speculation among profilers suggests this was a calculated experiment in
• 39:29
  psychological warfare. It certainly wasn't born of a sudden pang
• 39:32
  of mercy.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: He wanted to test if he could drive a permanent,
• 39:36
  remote satisfaction without having to kill.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: He wanted the sick, lingering thrill of knowing that every
• 39:43
  single time those eight boys looked at their hands, every
• 39:46
  single day, for the rest of their natural lives, they
• 39:49
  would remember him in sheer, unadulterated terror.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: He was effectively branding them, turning them into living, breathing
• 39:56
  monuments to his own power.
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: But that twisted psychological experiment created a massive domino effect
• 40:02
  for his operational.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: MO because suddenly Gervido is lying in bed one night
• 40:06
  and the reality hits him. Wait a minute, there are
• 40:10
  eight kids out there who know exactly what I look like,
• 40:12
  what my voice sounds like, how I smell.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: If even one of them finally gets the courage to
• 40:16
  talk to a competent cop, I'm dead.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: The anxiety of exposure finally sets in. The experiment in
• 40:22
  remote terror backfired into a massive unacceptable liability exactly.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: So he vows to himself right then and there never
• 40:31
  leave a survivor again. He fundamentally changes his MO. He
• 40:35
  decides no one walks away, and.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: To further protect himself from the inevitable police scrutiny, he
• 40:40
  starts wearing shoes that are a full size too big
• 40:43
  to disguise his true footprints. At the crime scenes.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: He is adapting.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: He's becoming a truly chameleonic predator. Because while Garavito is adapting,
• 40:51
  the police are finally starting to realize they are chasing
• 40:54
  a ghost.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: Enter Detective Mark duran He is one of the few
• 40:57
  who starts to see the broader picture.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: He begins looking at a map of the region, plotting
• 41:01
  the missing children and the found bodies, and he realizes
• 41:04
  the killings aren't isolated to one single jurisdiction.
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: The killer is actively and constantly moving across a network
• 41:11
  of ten to fifteen different small towns, and he's.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Not just moving physically, he's shaveshifting socially. Detective Duram starts
• 41:17
  interviewing townspeople and they are giving wildly conflicting reports of
• 41:21
  suspicious men seen near the victims.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: Some say the suspicious guy was a local priest.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: Others swear he was a homeless beggar or the local
• 41:29
  crazy man who mutters to himself, or a practitioner of witchcraft,
• 41:33
  or a nonprofit worker walking around with a clipboard collecting
• 41:37
  donations for a charity.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Detective Mark realizes a terrifying truth. These aren't conflicting reports
• 41:44
  of five different men. It's the exact same man, utilizing
• 41:48
  highly specific, carefully chosen personas.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: And there is a brilliant predatory logic to the disguise
• 41:55
  as he adopted.
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: I thought about this, and it's brilliant in the darkest
• 41:58
  way possible, using to wear society's blind spots.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: Think about it like the psychology of a uniform. If
• 42:04
  someone puts on a neon, hives vest, a hard hat,
• 42:07
  and carries a clipboard, they can walk into almost any
• 42:09
  restricted building in the world completely unquestioned.
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: People just subconsciously assume they belong there to fix the
• 42:14
  internet or check the lights.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: Garavito's disguises were the human equivalent of an invisibility cloak
• 42:21
  made of social expectations.
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: That is a very apt comparison. He explicitly weaponized the
• 42:26
  social contracts we all subconsciously obey every single day.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: Right. If he dresses as a priest, he holds immediate,
• 42:33
  unquestioned authority and reverence. In a deeply Catholic country, parents
• 42:38
  willingly give him access to their children because he represents God.
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: If he's a nonprofit worker, he seems inherently charitable and safe.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: But the other disguises, the beggar, a local mad man,
• 42:50
  those work on the exact opposite psychological principle. People actively
• 42:54
  look away from them to avoid awkwardness or discomfort.
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: You don't make prolonged eye contact with the town crazy
• 43:00
  person ranting on a park bench.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: You avert your eyes and walk faster. You ignore them.
• 43:05
  So he is hiding in plain sight because nobody wants
• 43:08
  to look closely enough to see the monster standing right
• 43:10
  in front of them.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: He exploited societal discomfort and societal reverence with equal mastery.
• 43:16
  But despite Detective Mark's brilliant realization that they were dealing
• 43:19
  with a shape shifter, the investigation was still painfully stalled.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: The police force was criminally underfunded and completely overwhelmed. They
• 43:28
  had a massive suspect list of over one thousand names
• 43:30
  and absolutely no resources to process them.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: They didn't have funding for advanced FBI style profiling, and
• 43:36
  DNA testing was still in its relative infancy and too
• 43:39
  expensive for local Colombian departments.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: The missing children cases were piling up by the dozens,
• 43:45
  and families literally had to organize protests outside police stations,
• 43:49
  fifty families at a time holding pictures of their missing sons,
• 43:53
  just to beg the authorities to connect the dots publicly
• 43:56
  and admit there was a serial killer operating.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: The media finally caught wind and dubbed him the Beast
• 44:01
  of Columbia.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: When an underfunded, overwhelmed justice system is pitted against a
• 44:05
  highly adaptable, cautious predator, apprehension almost never comes from brilliant,
• 44:09
  deductive reasoning alone.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: It usually relies on a mistake, a single moment of
• 44:13
  carelessness that shatters the killer's operational security.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: And that turning point finally came. It was a simple,
• 44:19
  incredibly stupid mistake.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: Garavito was out in a dry cornfield torturing a victim,
• 44:25
  and he decided to take one of his infamous smoke breaks.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: He tossed a lit cigarette on the ground, but he
• 44:30
  didn't crush it out fully with his boot. The dry
• 44:34
  cornstalks caught fire.
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: And because everything was so dry, the blaze spread so
• 44:38
  fast that it completely surprised him.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: He panicked the flames were licking at him, and he
• 44:43
  fled the scene so quickly and in such absolute terror,
• 44:47
  that he left behind the victim's body, his oversized shoes,
• 44:50
  and his vintage eyeglasses right there in the dirt.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: That cornfield fire is the absolute watershed moment of the
• 44:57
  entire case. It provided the authorities with a forensic gold
• 45:01
  mine that they desperately needed.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: Let's break down exactly what the profilers managed to extract
• 45:05
  from those two seemingly simple items left in the ashes,
• 45:09
  the glasses and the shoes.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Starting with the eyeglasses, obviously, they provide a specific medical
• 45:13
  prescription indicating the killer had significantly failing eyesight.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: But more intriguingly, the style of the frames was vintage.
• 45:22
  They were thick frames specifically popular about ten years prior
• 45:25
  to the crimes.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: Profilers interpreted this detail psychologically. It indicated the wearer was
• 45:30
  clinging to a past esthetic, likely tied to a peer
• 45:33
  in their life when they felt they were at their
• 45:35
  peak or in their prime.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: By cross referencing the style of behavioral data, they estimated
• 45:40
  his age to be between forty and forty five.
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: It's amazing what a fashion choice tells a profiler about
• 45:46
  a suspect's mental state.
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: And the fact that the glasses were completely off his
• 45:50
  face and folded on the ground implied he wasn't just
• 45:53
  sitting there watching. He was likely taking a nap next
• 45:56
  to the dead body while the fire started, which is
• 45:58
  bone chilling.
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: The shoes. The shoes broke the case wide open.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: They did first by analyzing the actual sweat and pressure
• 46:07
  imprints inside the oversized shoes. They determined his true shoe
• 46:11
  size and accurately estimated his height at a diminutive five
• 46:15
  foot three to five foot four.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: But the critical case breaking clue was found on.
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: The soles the wear patterns. The left sole was massively
• 46:23
  noticeably more worn down than the.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: Right soule exactly. Such a significant discrepancy in treadwaar indicates
• 46:29
  a severe uneven distribution of body weight. The profilers deduced
• 46:34
  the killer must walk with a pronounced, habitual, likely permanent
• 46:39
  limp on his right leg.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, here's where all the pieces locked together in this
• 46:43
  horrifying puzzle. Why had the killer been systematically chopping off
• 46:47
  the right feet of his victims and leaving them at
• 46:50
  the scene.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a cartel warning.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: Because his own right foot was ruined. It was pure
• 46:54
  unadulterated jealousy. He destroyed their healthy, youthful right feet because
• 46:59
  he hated his own limp.
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: He was forcing his physical defect onto them. The psychological
• 47:03
  projection is just staggering to comprehend.
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: It is a textbook almost literal example of a physical
• 47:09
  insecurity manifesting as a ritualistic crime element.
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, police deduced from the speed and nature of the
• 47:15
  Cornfield fire that the fleeing suspect, having lost his shoes
• 47:18
  and glasses, must have suffered severe second and third degree
• 47:21
  burns on the left side of his body as he
• 47:23
  escaped the flames.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: So the police take their massive, impossible list of a
• 47:28
  thousand suspects. They cross off anyone with prior crimes against Curls,
• 47:32
  bringing the broader regional suspect pool of registered offenders down
• 47:36
  to sixteen hundred.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: They cross off anyone under forty or over fifty. Now
• 47:40
  they have ninety five names.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: They cross off anyone taller or shorter than five foot
• 47:44
  three or four fot four. Suddenly, this impossible thousand person
• 47:48
  list is surgically narrowed down to just twenty five.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: Men, and they hypothesize that the killer, bearing fresh, severe,
• 47:55
  extremely painful burns, will be forced to seek medical treatment
• 47:59
  in the immediate future.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: And Garret Veto did need treatment, but he was crafty.
• 48:03
  He knew a hospital would legally have to report severe
• 48:06
  third degree burns to the police, especially with a manhunt on.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: So he went to a local veterinary clinic.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: He spent an elaborate, pitiful lie to the vet about
• 48:14
  a terrible fireplace accident at his home, offered to pay
• 48:17
  in straight cash, and the vets, perhaps needing the money
• 48:20
  or just not wanting to get involved, treated his burns
• 48:23
  without asking further questions.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile, the police briefly arrest the wrong man from their
• 48:28
  list of twenty five move a tragic misstep where a
• 48:32
  man's sister found a bag of newspaper clippings about the
• 48:34
  murders in his room and turned him in, but.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: They quickly realize his physical profile doesn't match. It's the
• 48:40
  wrong guy. Then the real break happens.
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: A young boy in town bursts into a police station
• 48:46
  and reports an attempted assault by a strange man.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: Detective Mark and his team rush out, put the terrified
• 48:52
  boy in the back of the patrol car and starts
• 48:54
  scouring the streets of the area.
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: And this scene is straight out of a Hollywood thriller.
• 48:59
  They are driving down the main highway and they see
• 49:01
  a solitary man walking right down the middle of the road.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: The police cruiser is loud, driving right up behind him,
• 49:07
  sirens likely blaring, but the man doesn't flinch, He doesn't
• 49:10
  look back over your shoulder.
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: He just keeps walking at this slow, steady, agonizingly limping pace.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: The boy in the back seat points a shaking finger
• 49:18
  and says, that's him.
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: The officers pull up, step out and ask the man
• 49:22
  his name. He calmly, almost serenely, claims to be Bona
• 49:26
  Fassio Morrera, stating he has a well known local politician
• 49:29
  from a neighboring.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: Town, which is the dumbest lie ever because he is
• 49:33
  covered in dirt, smelling of sweat, and looks absolutely nothing
• 49:37
  like a wealthy Columbian politician.
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: And more importantly, as he's talking, Detective Mark is looking
• 49:43
  him up and down. He sees heavily scarred, healing, burned
• 49:47
  tissue all over the left side of his exposed skin.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: He sees the heavyweight distribution leaning entirely to the left
• 49:53
  leg to favor a right sided limp.
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: He sees the vintage style glasses perched on his nose.
• 49:59
  He realizes with absolute certainty he is looking at the
• 50:01
  beast of Columbia.
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: They arrest him without a single punch throne. He offers
• 50:06
  no resistance. He is brought into the interrogation room, where
• 50:09
  Detective Mark sits across the table from him.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: Mark doesn't yell. He leans in and tells him, I
• 50:14
  have followed every footstep you've taken. I've seen every victim
• 50:17
  you left behind. I have breathed every breath you took.
• 50:19
  For two years we caught you.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: Garvido just stares at him. Then he asks if he
• 50:24
  can pray. He walks to the corners a small interrogation room,
• 50:27
  drops to his knees, starts sobbing hysterically, and begs God
• 50:31
  for forgiveness.
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: And then, over the next few hours, he confesses to
• 50:34
  two hundred and twenty one murders.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: The sheer concentrated weight of what he was calmly admitting
• 50:40
  to the graphic details of the butchery was so physically
• 50:44
  repulsive that at one point Garavito himself actually leaned over
• 50:49
  and vomited directly into the interrogation room trash can.
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: And yet in the very next breath he tries to
• 50:55
  minimize his own evil. He wipes his mouth, looks at
• 50:58
  the cops, and says, really, my only problem is my
• 51:00
  bad leg. My psychiatric health is very good. I've never
• 51:03
  had psychiatric problems.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance is absolute and imtenetrable. He confesses to
• 51:09
  butchering over two hundred children to acts of unspeakable defilement,
• 51:13
  yet insists his mind is perfectly healthy and normal, save
• 51:17
  for a physical limp.
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: He even tried to claim at one point that he
• 51:20
  decapitated the boys to, in his words, help them die
• 51:23
  more smoothly, completely ignoring the hours of agonizing torture, exhaustion,
• 51:27
  and disembewlment that preceded the killing blow.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: He demanded to the detectives that he not be looked
• 51:33
  at as a monster, but as a normal human being
• 51:35
  who just made some mistakes.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: Well, this quote unquote normal human being was finally facing justice.
• 51:40
  And this brings us to a part of the story
• 51:42
  that is going to make your jaw hit the floor.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: Garavito goes to trial. He is officially convicted of one
• 51:48
  hundred and sixty two murders. The prosecution couldn't definitively locate
• 51:52
  remains or prove all two hundred and twenty one beyond
• 51:55
  a reasonable doubt, but one hundred and sixty two was enough.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: The courts tally up the individual's sentences for each specific
• 52:01
  horrific crime, and the judge formally sentences him to one thousand,
• 52:05
  eight hundred and fifty three years in prison.
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: Just for contacts on that number. The United States of
• 52:10
  America as a sovereign nation has only existed for roughly
• 52:12
  two hundred and fifty years. He was sentenced to nearly
• 52:15
  two millennia behind bars.
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: However, this is where we must objectively examine the structure
• 52:19
  of the Colombian judicial system, which operates on fundamentally different
• 52:23
  constitutional principles than the US model.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Right because in the US justice system, if you get
• 52:29
  handed consecutive life sentences, you are dying in an eight
• 52:32
  x ten cell period. They throw away the key.
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The US system heavily utilizes a punitive and incapacitation model,
• 52:39
  allowing for consecutive sentencing that ensures a severe, unrepentant offender
• 52:43
  never returns to society.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: The Colombian constitution, however, was built on a deeply held
• 52:48
  philosophy that the right to human life is sacred and inviolable,
• 52:53
  even for the most heinous unforgivable criminals.
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: Their legal framework dictates that condemning someone to a life
• 53:00
  life behind bars without the hope of rehabilitation, without a
• 53:03
  light at the end of the tunnel is inherently cruel
• 53:06
  and inhumane.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: So how does a philosophy of hope and rehabilitation apply
• 53:10
  to a one thousand, eight hundred and fifty three year
• 53:13
  sentence for a man who slaughtered one hundred and sixty
• 53:17
  two children.
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: Columbia employs a legal mechanism called sentence unification.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: Essentially, if a person is convicted of multiple crimes, they
• 53:25
  do not serve the time for each crime consecutively stacked
• 53:28
  one after the other.
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: They serve the sentences concurrently, meaning they only serve the
• 53:32
  length of their single most severe penalty.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: In Gervito's era, the absolute maximum time any human being
• 53:37
  could legally serve in a Colombian prison, regardless of the
• 53:40
  staggering number of victims or the severity of the acts,
• 53:43
  was capped at forty years.
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: Forty years one eight hundred and fifty three years mathematically
• 53:48
  slashed to forty years by a constitutional rule for a
• 53:51
  man who tortured and dismembered a generation of children.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: And listener, it gets worse because of work study programs
• 53:59
  offered in the prison, he got good behavior sentence reductions.
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: His forty years was nearly cut in half, down to
• 54:04
  just twenty two years.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: Meaning the Beast of Columbia, a man who kept a
• 54:08
  notebook of two hundred victims was legally slated for release
• 54:12
  in the year twenty twenty three.
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: It is a profound, deeply unsettling paradox of jurisprudence. The
• 54:18
  system is functioning exactly as it was constitutionally designed to function,
• 54:22
  upholding the idealistic principle of universal rehabilitation and human rights.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: Yet when that idealism is applied to an extreme statistical outlier,
• 54:31
  like a prolific, psychopathic serial killer, the result deeply challenges
• 54:36
  the public's intrinsic sense of proportional justice, morality, and most importantly,
• 54:40
  public safety.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, how can a system logically deem a man
• 54:43
  who committed two hundred atrocities rehabilitable just because he swept
• 54:47
  floors in a prison work study program. It is mind boggling.
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: But for those twenty two years he was required to serve,
• 54:53
  he was sent to the absolute abyss.
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: The facility he was sent to, the maximum security prison
• 54:58
  in Colombia is a a dystopian nightmare. It is environments
• 55:02
  like this that test the very limits of human endurance insanity.
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: The descriptions of this place are genuinely stomach turning. We're
• 55:09
  talking about a facility so overcrowded and under resourced that
• 55:13
  the smell of urine and feces is so overpowering your
• 55:17
  eyes water Before you even enter the main cell blocks.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: There are no functioning toilets for the inmates because there
• 55:22
  is almost no running water in the entire facility. The
• 55:26
  first floor gets water for maybe fifteen minutes a day total.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: Consequently, prisoners are forced to relieve themselves in small plastic
• 55:33
  bags and to avoid the unbearable stenchi in they're tightly
• 55:36
  packed unventilated cells. They throw these bags through the bars
• 55:40
  down into the communal courtyard spaces below, where they burst
• 55:43
  upon impact, creating a literal floor of biohazard.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: When the water is finally turned on for those precious
• 55:49
  fifteen minutes, it's total bloody chaos. Prisoners line up with
• 55:53
  empty plastic jugs in one hand and crude homemade shanks
• 55:56
  in the other, ready to stab someone to death over
• 55:59
  a few liters of drinking water.
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: The overcrowding is so severe that thin mattresses line the
• 56:04
  concrete hallways. Because the cells are full and the sheer
• 56:08
  desperation to escape these horrific conditions leads to nightmare scenarios.
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: The reports describe inmates tearing their thin bedsheets into strips
• 56:17
  to create makeshift hammocks, tying them to the window bars
• 56:20
  to dangle outside the physical building suspended mid air just
• 56:24
  to get a breath of fresh air away from the stench,
• 56:26
  or attempting to scale the exterior walls to fetch water
• 56:30
  for the violent gang leaders who control the upper floors.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: But the guards don't care. They are so desensitized and
• 56:36
  brutalize themselves that they would actively go around and make small,
• 56:40
  hidden incisions in these tied bedsheets, so that when a
• 56:43
  prisoner climbed out the window to rest in the hammock,
• 56:45
  the sheet would suddenly tear under their weight and they
• 56:48
  would plunge four stories to their death on the concrete below.
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: Nobody blinked an eye. The violence was absolute and unchecked.
• 56:55
  The conjugal visit rooms were reportedly covered in dried blood
• 56:58
  from assaults. Maintenance plumbers even found the dismembered remains of
• 57:01
  one hundred people clogging the underground drain pipes of a
• 57:04
  similar Columbian prison during that era.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: It is an environment meticulously designed by neglect to crush
• 57:10
  the human spirit. Yet ironically, within this terrifying vortex of hyperviolence,
• 57:16
  Luis Garvito was largely insulated.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: And protected because he was such a high profile, infamous inmate.
• 57:22
  The prison wardens and guards were terrified of the international
• 57:25
  media fallout and losing their jobs if the Beast of
• 57:28
  Columbia was murdered by a rival gang on their watch.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: So this monster gets his own private cell, He gets
• 57:34
  personal gang affiliated bodyguards to escort him to the yard.
• 57:37
  He is treated like a bizarre vip. He even started
• 57:41
  charging journalists exorbiting cash fees for exclusive interviews.
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: And in those interviews conducted from the safety of his
• 57:47
  protected cell, the full, unvarnished scope of his delusions became apparent.
• 57:52
  Extreme isolation and national infamy often bread a profound disconnect
• 57:56
  from reality, especially in highly psychopathic individuals.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: He was completely detached from reality. He told one visiting
• 58:02
  journalist that he never actually assaulted any of the boys
• 58:05
  sexually because he suffered from severe rectel dysfunction, claiming his
• 58:08
  ex girlfriends from decades ago could prove it in court.
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: He genuinely believed this flimsy lie completely exonerated him of
• 58:15
  the sexual nature of his crimes. His private cell was
• 58:18
  a bizarre shrine to his fractured, narcissistic mind. He had
• 58:22
  posters of Adolf Hitler, mother Teresa Mahatma Gandhi, and Princess Diana,
• 58:26
  all mixed together, taped to his concrete wall.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: It reflects a mind entirely incapable of distinguishing between infamy,
• 58:33
  evil and reverence. To him, they were all simply famous,
• 58:38
  powerful people whose names were known globally, and he saw
• 58:41
  himself rightfully sitting among their ranks. He even stated on
• 58:44
  record that his ultimate goal upon his scheduled release was
• 58:47
  to run for office and become a congressman to an
• 58:50
  I quote, fight for children's rights.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: It makes you want to throw up. And the Colombian
• 58:54
  public was absolutely terrified. As the year twenty twenty three
• 58:57
  slowly approached, the year of his legal release, the country
• 59:00
  was in a state of rolling panic.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: People were writing thousands of letters to the president, to
• 59:04
  local congressman, begging them to find any legal loophole, any
• 59:08
  technicality to keep him inside. No one actually knew if
• 59:11
  he even wanted to leave. Some analysts said he knew
• 59:13
  he'd be assassinated by vigilant He's the absolute second he
• 59:15
  stepped outside the prison gates.
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: He bizarrely had a Facebook fan group of one hundred
• 59:20
  and seventy people, but the rest of the country wanted
• 59:22
  him dead.
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: But the public's widespread fear of his impending release was
• 59:26
  ultimately rendered moot by a twist of biological fate. In
• 59:30
  October of twenty twenty three, just as he was nearing
• 59:33
  potential freedom and the legal debates were reaching a fever pitch,
• 59:37
  Luis Garavito died in the prison hospital.
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: He died of leukemia, but also a very aggressive, incredibly
• 59:43
  rare form of eye cancer.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: It is difficult for an analytical scientific mind not to
• 59:47
  remark on the bizarre, almost poetic irony of his demise.
• 59:52
  Here is a predator who spent his final years of
• 59:54
  freedom meticulously and sadistically, he gouging out the eyes of
• 59:57
  his innocent victims because of his own deep seated insecurities
• 1:00:01
  about his failing eyesight and having to wear thick glasses.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: And in the end, it was a cancer of the
• 1:00:07
  eye that consumed him from the inside out in a
• 1:00:09
  prison cell, ensuring he would never walk free in the
• 1:00:11
  sun again.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: It's the closest thing to cosmic karma you could ever script. Okay,
• 1:00:15
  let's take a breath, step back and bring this all together.
• 1:00:18
  What have we actually learned from diving into this darkness today?
• 1:00:21
  We've looked at a perfect devastating storm.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: We had a child subjected to horrific systemic abuse who
• 1:00:28
  chose to weaponize that trauma into psychopathy.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: We had a society completely paralyzed by cartel violence, creating
• 1:00:35
  a deafening background noise that blinded authorities to a localized
• 1:00:38
  serial killer. We had underfunded, overwhelmed police forces, and a
• 1:00:43
  predator who brilliantly exploited the blind spots of societal roles,
• 1:00:48
  hiding behind the collar of a priest or the invisibility
• 1:00:51
  of a beggar.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: A complete system's failure allowed a monster to roam free
• 1:00:55
  for over a decade.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: The relevance of this case extends far beyond the borders
• 1:00:59
  of nineteen nineties Cive Columbia. It serves as a grim,
• 1:01:02
  vital reminder for all of us operating in modern society today.
• 1:01:06
  We must remain constantly vigilant about the invisible corners of
• 1:01:09
  our own communities.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 2: We must constantly question our inherent assumptions about who holds
• 1:01:13
  authority whom we implicitly trust with our families, and crucially,
• 1:01:17
  whom we choose to ignore when we walk down the street.
• 1:01:20
  Predators do not announce themselves. They thrive in the quiet
• 1:01:22
  spaces where our attention and our empathy fail.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: And that leaves me with a lingering thought something for
• 1:01:27
  you to mull over as you go about the rest
• 1:01:29
  of your day. In today's hyperconnected world, with a smartphone
• 1:01:34
  in every pocket, high definition CCTV on every street corner,
• 1:01:38
  and massive digital footprints tracking our every move, we like
• 1:01:42
  to comfort ourselves.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: We like to think a predator like Luis s. Garavito
• 1:01:46
  could never operate for twelve years undetected. Today we think
• 1:01:49
  technology has eradicated the shadows, but as.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: Constant surveillance forces criminals to adapt their mos and find
• 1:01:56
  new ways to hunt, are we actually safer or have
• 1:01:59
  the alne spots in our society just moved from the
• 1:02:01
  physical streets of small towns to the infinite, invisible alleys
• 1:02:05
  of the digital world.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: A chilling question to consider.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: Until next time, remember to look closely