THE BEAST

That’s the plain record. What happened inside that house comes mostly from Luis himself, from the stories he told psychologists, investigators and television interviewers after he was caught. I want you to keep that in mind as you read this chapter. A man who killed more than a hundred children had every reason in the world to make himself look like a victim. Some of what he said may be true. Some of it may not. But a lot of it has been repeated so often, and by so many experts, that it has become part of his story. So I’m going to tell you what he said, and I’ll tell you what I think of it.

According to Luis, his father was a drinker and a womaniser. He was hard, strict and quick with his fists. He beat his children, and he beat his wife, even when she was pregnant. Luis said he was the only one of the children who ever stood up for his mother. “I was the only one who defended her,” he told one researcher. For his trouble, he was beaten too.

He said the children learned to hide when their father came home from work. They never knew what sort of mood he’d be in, or what would set him off. He said his father kept a stick for the sole purpose of punishing the children. He said that when he was only six or seven, he was tied to a tree for hours at a time. He said he was beaten with the flat of a machete.

His mother was no comfort either. Luis described her as a hard, violent woman who gave him very little love or care. The parents fought constantly, screaming and swearing at each other. “I had the misfortune of being in a family that spent its time arguing, fighting and throwing insults at each other,” he said.

He also said his father wouldn’t let him have friends. Not at school, not in the street. Later, he wouldn’t let him have a girlfriend either. The boy was there to do what he was told, work when he was told, and keep his mouth shut.

So what sort of boy did that make him?

A lonely one. At school he was quiet and kept to himself. He wore glasses, and the other children gave him a nickname, Garabato. It means a squiggle, or a scribble, a play on his surname. They teased him and picked on him. Teachers remembered him as withdrawn and introverted.

But there was another side to him too. Every now and then, without much warning, the quiet boy could turn violent.

He wasn’t a good student. He struggled to remember things, and his father wanted him out earning money for the family. Around 1968, when he was eleven, he left school for good in the fifth grade. That was the end of his education. For the rest of his life, Luis Garavito would have only a few years of primary schooling to his name.

Then, he said, came the worst of it.

When he was about twelve, a man the family knew, a neighbour who ran a chemist’s shop in the town, took him into the back of the shop. Luis said this man was a friend of his father’s. And he said this man sexually assaulted him, and while he did it, he bit him, burned him and cut him. Luis said it wasn’t the only time. He later told investigators he was sexually assaulted on several occasions by two different men in Génova.

He said he never told anyone. Who would he have told? Not his father. Not his mother. He carried it by himself.

Now, here’s where I have to be honest with you. Experts who have studied Garavito have questioned whether all of this really happened, or whether at least some of it was made up, or made worse, by a man trying to explain away the unexplainable. We’ll never know for sure. Everyone else who was in that house or that shop has stayed silent, or is dead.

But let’s say every word of it is true. Let’s say Luis Garavito was beaten, tied to a tree, unloved, and sexually assaulted as a boy, and that he was bitten and burned and cut by a grown man he should have been able to trust.

What do you notice about that list?

Because I noticed it straight away. Biting. Burning. Cutting. Tying up. Those were exactly the things that would one day be done to the boys he killed. Investigators would find bite marks on the bodies. They’d find children bound with rope. They’d find cuts all over them. If his story is true, then he didn’t just survive what was done to him. He learned it. And then he went out and did it to somebody else’s child, again and again and again.

I’ll say it now, so you know where I stand from the very first chapter. A terrible childhood can explain a great deal about a person. It doesn’t excuse a single thing he did. Thousands of children in Colombia grew up poor, beaten and abused. Most of them grew up to be decent people who would never dream of hurting a child. Luis Garavito made his own choices. Every one of them.

At some point in his early teens, the family moved. Like so many poor families in the coffee region, they went where the work was. They ended up in Trujillo, a coffee-growing town over in the neighbouring department of Valle del Cauca. Luis said that soon after they arrived, a neighbour there showed him pornography of men and women, laughed at him when he didn’t like it, then beat him and sexually assaulted him.

It was around this time that he started drinking. It came, he said, through his own family. Alcohol was everywhere, and a boy who wanted to blot things out found it easily. It would become the great constant of his life. In the years to come, Luis Garavito would almost never be far from a bottle.

And it was in these years, as a teenager, that the boy who had been hurt crossed over and became the one doing the hurting.

He was fifteen. That would make it about 1972. He cornered a little boy, a child of about five, and tried to sexually assault him. We don’t know the little boy’s name. We don’t know where he lived, or what he looked like, or what he grew up to be. All we know is that he did the bravest thing a five-year-old could do.

He screamed.

He screamed loud enough for people nearby to hear, and they came running. Luis was caught. The police were called and he was picked up. But he was only fifteen, and he was a minor in the eyes of the law, so they let him go.

I want you to stop and think about that little boy for a moment. Twenty years later, the man who grabbed him would be walking boys not much older than him out into the fields, one after another, and not one of those boys would get the chance to scream for help. That five-year-old may well have been the first child Luis Garavito ever attacked. And he was one of the lucky ones. He got away.

So what did Manuel Antonio Garavito do when he heard what his son had done?

He threw him out of the house.

But here’s the part that turns my stomach. From everything Luis later said, his father’s fury wasn’t about the little boy at all. It wasn’t about a child being frightened and hurt. What enraged his father was that his son had gone after a boy. In that time and place, in a hard macho household, that was the shame. In one of the stories Luis told, his father even scolded him for not choosing a woman instead.

Not “how could you hurt a child”. Just “why a boy”.

And so, at fifteen, Luis was out. Things in that house had always been bad, and now he didn’t have a home to go back to at all. For a while he drifted, coming and going from his family as tempers rose and fell. He would later say that his younger brothers took his father’s side, and that his father had always favoured them over him. He carried a deep resentment towards all of them for the rest of his life.

The record from these years is patchy, and some of it comes from sources I don’t fully trust, so I’ll stick to what is solid. By the early 1970s, Luis was working. Around 1973, he took a job on a coffee plantation in Trujillo, picking and hauling like so many young men in the region. Later he moved to Armenia, the capital of Quindío, the biggest city in the coffee country, and got work in a local bakery. He also, for a time, went to Alcoholics Anonymous.

So he knew he had a problem with drink. He knew it, and somebody was trying to help him with it. It didn’t stick.

Over the years that followed, he moved through a string of jobs. He worked as a shop assistant. He worked in a chain of stores. Later, he would sell things on the street, the way thousands of poor Colombians scraped a living, standing in the plazas and bus stations with a tray of goods. Among the things he sold were religious cards and little pictures of the saints. Keep that in mind. A man selling holy pictures to the faithful, in a country where people trusted anyone who seemed close to God.

There were small, ordinary things about him too. He loved a kind of old Colombian country music called música de carrilera, the sad, twangy songs about heartbreak and drinking that played in rough little bars all over the coffee towns. He was religious, in his own twisted way. He went to church. He would later claim to have gone to Mass with a woman he was fond of.

To the people around him, he didn’t look like a monster. He looked like what he was. A thin, poorly educated, hard-drinking working man with glasses and a moustache, who was a bit odd, a bit of a loner, and kept to himself. There were thousands just like him in Colombia.

That’s what makes it so frightening. You could have stood beside him at a bus stop in Armenia, bought a holy card from him in a plaza, or sat near him in church, and you’d never have known. He was ordinary. He was invisible. And as he grew from a teenager into a man, he learned that being invisible was the most useful thing in the world.

Because the thing inside him that had grabbed that five-year-old boy hadn’t gone anywhere. It had only been driven underground. And every drink he took, every year he spent drifting from town to town, every humiliation he swallowed, fed it a little more.

Later, he would talk about it as if it was a separate thing living inside him. A force. Something stronger than himself, something he couldn’t control. He would claim it wasn’t really him at all.

I don’t believe that for a moment. And by the time you’ve finished this book, I don’t think you will either.

By his twenties, Luis Garavito was a man with a drink problem, a deep hatred of the world, and a hunger for hurting children. He had already attacked one little boy and got away with it. He had learned that if you were caught, the police might just let you go.

And soon, the beatings he handed out would no longer stop at bruises.

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters and about 21,961 words in the full book.