Free Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Page B

commissioner had conducted seven hundred interviews and received six hundred items of information since the first bags were discovered in March 1997. The killer is believed to be a man, probably with local geographic and historical knowledge. Belgian authorities have called on the FBI for help profiling the elusive killer. The serial killer seems to be taunting authorities by leaving the dismembered remains of his victims in places with emotive names. The remains have been left in the Rue du Depot (Dump), near the River Haine (Hate), on the Chemin de l’Inquietude (the path of Worry), and on the banks of the River Trouille (Jitters). The last of the bags found containing body parts was on RueSt. Symphorien, named after a third-century French saint who was decapitated and whose relics are in church nearby. Apparently the killer did not dismember the bodies by hand. He rolled his victims through a machine—used for chopping logs—with circular blades placed at twelve-inch intervals. Each body fragment so far found measures exactly one foot.
    Until recently the Third World accounted for only 3 percent of the world’s reported serial murders, but by now that number must have climbed. 42 Because these regions have police systems that are underfinanced—or focused on political repression—and huge populations of impoverished, underprivileged, and unwanted people, Third World serial killers individually murder extraordinary numbers of victims.
    Pedro Alonso Lopez is another of the twentieth century’s most prolific serial killers. A native of Colombia, he is believed to have murdered three hundred girls in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. His prostitute mother threw him out of their home at age eight for fondling his younger sister. He was then picked up by a pedophile and sodomized against his will. By the time he was eighteen he had been gang-raped in prison and retaliated by killing three of his assailants. After his release he migrated to Peru, where he killed at least one hundred girls, until he was confronted by an angry mob in a marketplace when he attempted to walk away with a victim. He moved on to Ecuador, where he said girls were “more gentle and trusting, more innocent.” He murdered three girls a week until he was captured in 1980, when a flood exposed some fifty-three buried victims, all girls ages eight to twelve.
    In 1999, police in Colombia arrested Luis Alfredo Garavito in connection with the murders of 140 children. Police recovered 114 mutilated bodies of mostly boys between ages eight and sixteen. Garavito was the oldest of seven children. He was repeatedly beaten by his father and raped by two male neighbors. Garavito was also a heavy alcoholic and was treated for depression and suicidal tendencies. He said he committed most of the murders after heavy drinking. Garavito had just five years of schooling and left home at age sixteen, working first as a store clerk and then as a street vendor who sold religious icons and prayer cards. Prosecutors said Garavito found most of his victims on the streets, gaining their confidence by giving them soft drinks and money. 43
    On March 16, 2000, a Pakistani court in Lahore sentenced Javed Iqbal to death for the murder of more than a hundred children. His three accomplices, including a thirteen-year-old boy identified only as Sabir, alsowere found guilty. Sabir was sentenced to forty-two years in jail; the other two accomplices were sentenced to death. Iqbal wrote in a letter to the police that he killed the children, who were mostly beggars, in retaliation for the abuse they inflicted on him following a previous arrest when he was accused of sodomy. On October 25, 2001, Iqbal and Sabir were found dead in their cell. Their apparent suicides by poison—as stated by prison authorities—came just four days after Pakistan’s highest Islamic court had agreed to hear Iqbal’s appeal against the death sentence.
    South Africa,