Cannibal Killer and Rapist of Hundreds of Children is Free to Kill Again

The term “monster” gets thrown about a lot in true crime circles.

And, when you hear the word “monster” applied to a serial killer, certainly the likes of Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy come to mind. But their deeds — vicious as they were — pale in comparison to the truly horrific Pedro Alonso Lopez, better known as “The Monster of the Andes.” 

Lopez is alleged to have killed over 300 victims, all of which were children, mostly young girls. 

Lopez was a child predator in every sense of the word. He was a kidnapper, rapist, serial killer, necrophiliac, and cannibal.

But worst of all, he is now free, and his whereabouts are unknown!

By all accounts, Lopez, born on October 8, 1948, in Columbia, is the worst serial killer to ever walk the earth, with an estimated body count of 300 plus victims, all children.

Like many who grew up to be sociopathic serial killers, Lopez had a rough start in life. His father was killed before he was born. He was the 7th of 13 children. Lopez admitted that his mother was abusive and had to turn to prostitution to take care of the family, often bringing home customers and sometimes having sex in front of Pedro and his siblings. 

Pedro was kicked out of the home at 8 years of age. He joined a gang and found himself living on the street and doing what he must to survive. One cold night when he was 10, a stranger offered him a bed. Desperate to get out of the cold, he agreed, but instead, the stranger took him to a vacant building and sexually assaulted him. Not that it excuses his later gruesome actions, but Pedro’s horrific childhood was the perfect storm to create a literal monster.

As a killer, much as he was as a young child, Lopez would often lure victims from markets with trinkets and promises of money before grabbing them and taking them into the woods to a location where he would kill and bury them. He would rape his victim before he killed them and buried their bodies in shallow graves.

He would often return to visit the spot and dig them out of their resting place and have sex with their rotting corpses again and again until they had become too decomposed to do so. He is also said to have eaten the flesh of many of his young victims.

After being caught by a group of people while trying to kidnap a young girl, a missionary convinced the group not to kill him but instead allow the authorities to extradite him back to his native Columbia to face justice there, but the Columbian police showed little interest, and he went free.

However, he was later caught again in public trying to steal a young girl, and this time he was arrested. Lopez has confessed that from 1969 to 1980, he murdered and sexually assaulted more than 300 victims across Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru and led police to one of his killing fields, where 53 bodies of girls between the ages of 9 and 13 were recovered.

He was convicted of killing 110 girls in Ecuador and confessed to an additional 240 murders in Peru and Colombia. 

Despite his own confession and the overwhelming evidence of his heinous crimes, Lopez was released from a prison asylum in 1998. In fact, he got an early release because he was a “model prisoner.” He then disappeared into to crowd and has stayed off the radar ever since. 

“The Monster of the Andes” has been free to kill for decades. The big question is, how many more kids has he stolen, abused, and murdered since his release? And how could the justice system fail so horribly and put him back on the street? 

There is currently a $25,000 bounty on his head, raised by the victim’s families, but his whereabouts remain unknown.