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- BOGOTA (AFP) - A 42-year-old
man has confessed to killing 140 children in a five-year killing spree
across 11 provinces -- a breakthrough in the biggest criminal investigation
in Colombian history, according to the chief prosecutor's office.
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- Luis Eduardo Garavito had been in police custody since
April 22 in the city of Villavicencio, 115 kilometers (70 miles) south
of Bogota, where he was arrested for the 1996 murder of a boy in the city
of Tunja.
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- On Thursday, Colombia's chief prosecutor Alfonso Gomez
announced that Garavito had confessed to a massive, years-long child-murdering
campaign.
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- "Our studies showed that cases of children disappearing
in Tunja, Pereira and Armenia had similar characteristics, allowing us
to come up with photographs of 95 possible suspects," Gomez said.
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- After narrowing the search down to three men, and then
uncovering Garavito's involvement in the Tunja killing, police ultimately
discovered that he had been present in 60 different towns where children
had disappeared between 1994 and 1999.
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- The massive police effort that eventually led police
to Garavito had begun in 1998, when the bodies of 36 children were found
in the coffee-growing town of Pereira, central-western Colombia.
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- As police looked into that massacre, they were able to
link Garavito to the murder in Tunja, in central-western Colombia, and
the April arrest followed.
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- Gomez described Garavito as mentally ill, and said he
was apparently abused himself as a child.
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- Most of Garavito's victims were poor children -- either
young workers, students, peasants or beggars, Gomez said. Garavito would
pose as a street merchant, a monk or an aid worker to enter schools or
other gatherings of children and find his victims, officials said.
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- Offering the youngsters food and drink, he would invite
them to go for a walk with him, lead them towards lonely areas and, when
they tired, would attack them.
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- Police had innitially arrested a man identified as Pedro
Ramirez, on December 16, 1998, on charges of kidnap, rape and murder of
two children from the same family. But now it appears Garavito was the
perpetrator.
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- So far, police have found 114 corpses of children they
believe to be Garavito's victims. His "modus operandi" was to
slit children's throats, first torturing and mutilating them, according
to prosecutor Gomez.
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- Killing For Pleasure: Serial Killers Of The 20th Century
(How many are never caught?) http://asia.yahoo.com/headlines/301099/world/941298180-91030154354.newsworld.htm
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- BOGOTA, Oct 30 (AFP) - Luis Eduardo Garavito, said by
Colombian prosecutors Saturday to have confessed to the killing of 140
children in a five-year killing spree, would rank among the worst serial
killers of the century.
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- Following is a list of other notorious killers this century.
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- Anatoly Onopriyenko, 30, was sentenced to death last
April for killing 52 people including 10 children, 43 of them committed
in a five-month orgy of murder that took him from Zhitomir to Kiev in central
Ukraine, Odessa in the south of the country, Lviv and Rivne in the west
and Dnipropetrovsk in the east.
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- Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov butcher", was
found guilty by a Russian court of 52 sexually-motivated killings carried
out between 1978 and 1990 and executed in February 1994. A former philosophy
graduate and teacher, he was examined by psychiatrists and pronounced sane.
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- Moses Sithole, a 32-year-old South African, was sentenced
to a total of 2,410 years in prison in December 1997 for 38 murders and
40 rapes.
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- John Wayne Gacy, nicknamed the "killer clown",
admitted raping, torturing and strangling 33 young people, of whom 29 were
found buried under his house. The worst serial killer in US history, Gacy
was executed in the state of Illinois in March 1994.
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- Jeffrey Dahmer, nicknamed the "Milwaukee butcher"
carried out 17 killings between 1978 and 1991. He admitted eating the flesh
of three of his victims, boiling the heads of others, and of having "sexual
relations" with two severed heads. He was killed by a fellow prison
inmate in November 1994.
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- Dennis Nilsen killed and dismembered 15 young men in
his north London home between 1978 and 1983. He attempted to dispose of
the bodies by boiling them down and flushing the remains down the toilet.
His killings were discovered when the local drains blocked. He is currently
serving a life sentence.
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- Rosemary West was sentenced to life in November 1995
for 10 killings, including that of her daughter, carried out in the so-called
"House of Horrors" where she lived in Gloucester, England, with
her husband Frederick West. She was suspected of another nine killings
carried out with her husband who committed suicide in prison before he
could be tried. He had previously admitted to 12 other killings.
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- Alberto DeSalvo, the "Boston strangler", terrorised
the eastern seaboard of the United States from 1962 to 1964 during which
time he murdered 13 women. He admitted the killings and claimed to have
raped a thousand women. He was stabbed to death in prison in 1967.
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- Marcel Petiot, a doctor and former mayor, profited from
the German occupation of France to kill, chop up and burn his victims in
a Paris hotel. He was found guilty of 24 murders and executed in 1946.
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- Peter Kurten, the "Dusseldorf vampire", was
executed in 1931 for nine murders of girls and young women. Sixteen other
killings were attributed to him, and he claimed a total of around 50. He
derived his nickname from his habit of drinking his victims' blood.
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- Henri-Desire Landru, known as "Bluebeard",
attracted his victims via small ads in the matrimonial columns of the French
press. He disposed of their bodies by cooking them. Ten women are believed
to have fallen prey before he was arrested and executed in 1922.
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