#313: The Beast Of Colombia - Serial Killer That Literally Sold His Soul To The Devil & Sacrificed 221 Children

29:33I also do really want to disclaim, we really wish that we could share more of who the victims were, what they were like, but unfortunately there just aren't that many stories of Lewis's victims out there. I was provided some context by our researchers and they stated, when a boy went missing in Colombia at the time, the most likely reason was either being a victim of a gang, drug cartel, or a paramilitary group, or maybe they left home due to extreme domestic violence from the parents. Most parents did not file missing persons reports because a lot of them were just straight up scared. If we went to the police and most police forces are run by cartels and the cartel took our kid, we reported to the police who the cartel controls, then our child would be in even more danger.

30:17What if they think that our child snitched or we're causing too much trouble to keep the child alive? As for Lewis's assault victims, even if they came home and told their parents what had happened, parents felt like going to the authorities was just not an option. Not only was justice rarely ever served for cases like this, their child is now going to be subject to life-threatening social shame. And all for what? To not get justice? And just victimize their kid even further? A lot of Lewis's victims are still not identified to this day. And now that's both his assault victims and later his murder victims.

30:53After 12 years, he would escalate into phase 5. Murder. mind you he already has 200 victims in his little blue notebook this is before killing before he starts killing he's got 200 victims and his first kill was almost on a whim he said that he was drunk he left a bar and decided you know what today is the day he went bought a pack of cigarettes a cord a knife and a cheap bottle of brandy he stumbled into the park waited for a boy to be lorded he kept holding out change in his hand to see if any boy that passed he'd be like hey do you want some money? This is an area where a lot of children go out and they they try to work because they need to bring food home for the family.

31:33Of course they want money. Typically they would ask what kind of job are you offering? Do you want me to shine your shoes? Do you want me to sell candy on your behalf? Run errands? Lewis would tell the boy no you can just take a walk with me. Lewis grabbed his hand and led him into the wooded area of the park and this park connects to a huge like mountainous area that surrounds the city and once it was secluded enough lewis tied the boy up like the 200 victims before him he bit him everywhere and then assaulted him but he said that he just felt this anger he said it was the strongest impulse of his entire life and it was the impulse to punch this boy so he sat on this boy and quite literally beat this boy to death with his bare hands he was sat on like he sat on the boy yeah so he like the boy cannot get up and then he walked off covered in blood nobody stopped him whether nobody saw him or they minded their own business i don't know but he went home took a shower grabbed his little notebook to write down another name but this time in a new section phase six is a phase that sets serial killers and murderers apart, which is serial killers typically take trophies.

32:50So unlike killers who kill for life insurance, love, greed, revenge, they usually want to get rid of anything that ties them to the crime. Serial killers, they want that connection open. They want to go back and reminisce about that moment. They want to relive it. Lewis had his little blue notebook, but later he would rummage through the victim's pockets. He's typically looking for some sort of student ID. and if he found it, he would sit there and cut out just the pictures of the boys. So he would never bring home the full student ID, just the picture part. If he didn't find a student ID, he would just take their underwear.

33:24Later, they would all be found folded up in his drawer right next to his own underwear. He would also sit there in his house, clipping any newspaper headlines about his crimes. I mean, he really loved his trophies. And then the last phase is the depression phase. once lewis was done with his first kill like most serial killers he fell into a state of depression for some serial killers this includes the feeling of guilt lewis said he was so disappointed in himself which is honestly such a weird way to describe it like i get disappointed in myself all the time but for small mistakes he's disappointed in himself because he killed someone i don't it feels like such a light word to use but he said he was so disappointed in himself he walked himself into church, weeped in front of the statue of Jesus, and he just cried.

34:15If I'm being honest with you, I don't think that this man really felt guilty. So what exactly does that mean when he said he felt depressed and cried and go to church? I think it's a procedural memory. So he was raised devout Catholic family, and anything that he did wrong or he perceived as wrong, he was forced to confess. He was forced to cry. That's how you get rid of your sins. So if there was a part of him that still had any of that faith that he needed to be saved, this was purely for that, I believe. It was narcissistic. It's, I want to be saved. I want to go to heaven. So I need to confess to my sins.

34:54I don't think there was genuine remorse because it's hard to imagine he feels even a little bit guilty, but still went on to kill 220 more times. So he did that and then he continued and so it's like a back and forth and back and forth. Every time after a kill, at least for the first, I don't know, dozens, he said that he would go to church and just cry because he was so remorseful. I truly don't believe he was remorseful at all. You know, I think that these outbursts of emotions are just procedural memory, that part of his brain that's lighting up again. Or I think that it's just some sort of narcissistic tendency to make this whole fantasy feel even more real and complicated.

35:34This is purely speculation. A lot of serial killers have some sort of personality disorder that makes them unable to feel human emotions or empathy. I mean, they feel human emotions such as anger, but they don't feel empathy. So a lot of them will mirror people. And I wonder if this is him mirroring what he thinks is expected after something like this. Because I genuinely don't think that he's sorry at all. Yeah. When he was 23 years old, he did end up going to a psychiatrist. and this is why I think that he's a little bit dramatic. Wait, he's only 23 right now? Yeah. Wait, you say it's been 12 years?

36:07Yeah. Oh, he started when he was... Wow. Okay. And he would go on for like another, geez, like two decades. This part, I don't know how else to describe it so I'm just going to try to describe it the way that I think people will understand the message the best. I'm not trying to like trivialize it but I feel like he is kind of dramatic in the sense that he wants these main character moments. I think that's part of his weeping at church after the kills. Because listen to this. He goes to a psychiatrist in his 20s and he gets diagnosed with reactive depression, which typically indicates that someone has significant distress that is oftentimes out of proportion to the severity or the intensity of the external stressor.

36:52So this type of depression is triggered by something that happens in their life. It's reactive. They have a big life event. and now this person does not feel like they can handle the stressors of life, so they feel depressed. So if someone steps on another person's foot by accident and this person has reactive depression, a normal reaction would be feel physical pain and potentially a little annoyance. In Lewis's case, his mind would send him off the rocker. Reactive depression is usually temporary, meaning once the situation that the patient lives in, this external situation improves, the reactive depression also improves.

37:27Or if the external circumstances persist, the patient does not develop a way to cope, then it develops into chronic depression. And this is not to say that reactive depression isn't very painful and very real and potentially life-threatening because it can develop into chronic depression, which can end someone's life. But reactive depression is typically not classified as a high-risk diagnosis. But of course, it's case by case, and it could very quickly evolve into something that's more high-risk. Lewis gets told that he has reactive depression. He claimed he wanted to end it right then and there.

38:01But then he never would, you know, and he just like kept telling people in interviews later on that it just made him really depressed to have reactive depression. Yeah. And like, I mean, it's it's very interesting because later his reactive depression, some psychologists stated, did evolve into clinical depression or chronic depression. right so he's claiming he's very depressed he would go down to his therapist feel even more depressed because his therapist is like you're depressed then he would go to a meetings feel extra down because he's an alcoholic and then that night he would go to a bar get drunk and then try to kill someone afterwards yeah and he just kept using the excuse that he was sad and depressed like i say this with such not really much sympathy because i feel like so many of us are sad and depressed and none of us go out there and commit heinous acts of violence so i i don't even know if that's really what he claims he's doing this because he's all sad yeah he's sad and then he kills and then he goes to church because he's so so sorry do you get what i'm saying like none of this is making any sense and then he said he would feel sad after a kill and he would start thinking back to the last time he felt any sort of happiness and that was while he was committing his crimes he stated that he would start flipping through his little blue notebook and pleasuring himself at the memory of his crimes.

39:23And he realized in order to feel happy again, he would have to kill again. And these kills would only get more gruesome. So he would punch the victims all over. He specifically would target their hands, which this part, I mean, if you've been around younger ones, you know how their hands are so small. It feels like a natural universal feeling to see a child's hand and want to protect them. Lewis would specifically target these hands. He would punch them until he shattered the bones in the hands. He would punch and slice them on their bottoms as well. He would try to lightly stab into their kidneys.

39:58He said that he chose to stab near the kidneys specifically because he realized that there's not a lot of, he thought, major arteries in that area. So victims would typically not bleed to death before he was done with them because he wanted them alive for a very, very long time. The final acts of torture included him slitting their throats while actively assaulting them. And then when he was done, he would decapitate them. He would cut off their private parts and place their private parts into their mouths of the decapitated heads. This was almost his signature. And I'm not saying that as a figure of speech.

40:34Serial killers typically have something called an MO. Now an MO is how they operate. This is how they find victims, trap victims, kill victims, and then dispose of their bodies. A signature, these are words profilers use. I'm not calling it a signature. is something that is almost unchangeable for each serial killer. It's an action or something that is done during the kill that indicates this is why they're committing these crimes in the first place. This might be the ultimate action. It's not the kill itself. This could be where we need to look into. It's a signature for a reason. So MOs, they typically evolve.

41:08They change. Serial killers adapt. They find new techniques. A signature usually stays the same. It reflects a deeper psychological reasoning behind these kills. And him placing the victim's private parts into their own mouths was a bit of a signature for Lewis. So that's not an MO. No. Later his MO would evolve, and he would add a lot more steps to this process before his victims were dead. He would take a screwdriver to gouge out their eyes and their ears. Sometimes he would use a knife or tool to detach the fingers from their hands. He would use tools to detach their right feet from their legs.

41:46Then after the torture, he would cut open their stomachs while they were still alive, open and remove all of their intestines, and place them next to their face on the ground. The victims would be alive to see their intestines laying in the grass next to them, which is something that is technically medically possible. If someone's vital organs like their heart and lungs remain untouched, and the laceration cuts on the stomach do not hit any major blood vessels. It's said that someone who is disemboweled can actually remain alive for several hours in immense shock and pain. Then once he was done with that, he would finally decapitate them and move on to commit his signature.

42:27And this whole process would take hours, if not half a day, to a full day. Lewis was also a chain smoker and he would take smoking breaks in between the acts of torture. It stated that sometimes he smoked an entire pack of cigarettes during his kills Back then cigarettes in colombia were exclusively sold in packs of 20 and on average it takes six minutes to smoke a cigarette So that's at least two hours of him just pausing to smoke Two hours of extra torture that the victims would have to endure Louis tried not to kill too late at night mainly because he said he was scared of the dark But sometimes it was unavoidable and that was fine for him there was another thing that Louis was starting to get scared of and it was the idea of getting caught.

43:09He had been an active serial killer in the area for years now potentially even a decade at this point and only just recently people started noticing. People started hearing the whispers around town. Mothers would be pulling their kids closer to them while they were running errands and then there was that incident. He had just finished murdering another victim when someone had apparently seen him attacking the kid in the woods. He hears the police coming. the victim wasn't dead yet. He quickly finishes, does what he does, flees as fast as possible, and breaks his leg in the escape. The witness did not see what Lewis looked like, so he had a close call, but he would get off without a charge.

43:48And the only thing that angered him was that now, because he broke his leg, he had a limp on his right foot. And that right foot would never be the same and he hated seeing people with perfectly healthy right feet so that's why he chopped wow a lot of people speculate that he started gouging out the victim's eyeballs because his eyesight was deteriorating he was having problems with his eyes now this added a little bit of anxiety to lewis's life and there was the situation of the eight boys with the missing thumbs. He went from assaulting boys, torturing them, letting them go, and then into killing boys.

44:30But during his kill phase, he actually let eight of his victims go. And that would haunt him forever. And it's not because he messed up. It's not because he thought, oh, let me just let these kids go because they said something that I liked. They did something that I liked. He felt sympathy. It wasn't that. He thought it would be more fun. He was experimenting. So he chopped off each of their thumbs, cut the cords off of them, and let them free after hours and hours of torture. And he said, I'm going to count to a random number in my head. If you make it back to your family alive before I catch you, then you get to live.

45:05At this point, the boys are already running. He never even chased them. He just set them free. Now, there are theories about why he would do this. And it's not because he had remorse for these eight boys. But the general theory is that, well, he was trying to see if it was going to give him some sort of sick satisfaction to know that these boys would never live a single day without thinking about him and they would live the rest of their lives in utter terror and that itself is a very strong form of torture he did this to eight little boys so eight little boys in columbia were traumatized by him and forever mutilated with missing thumbs why why the thumb i guess he was trying to start another signature for this part is it because he like he he can see which one is his victims?

45:50Yeah, it's pretty easy to see, I guess. Yeah. Wow. And that could be very, very true because he only operated in like 10 to 15 towns, pretty small towns too. But now these eight boys were keeping him up at night. They had seen his face for hours. They had heard his voice for hours. They knew what he looked like. They knew what he smelled like, everything. Like what if they went to the police? He was annoyed with himself and he vowed never to let another one go ever again. And he made adjustments to his MO as insurance policies. He always wore shoes that were one size too big and he made sure that no boy could get away now.

46:23There would be no ninth boy without a thumb alive to tell the tale. But he was also tweaking his method to make it more efficient. Efficient in terms of how to make the torture last longer for him so that he can get the pleasure but not waste his energy on other things. So he came up with this method where before the torture and before the attack he would chain up his victims with some sort of rope or cord and he would force them to walk around in circles while he held out a machete near their necks. They were made to walk in circles until their legs shook. This part of the process took hours in some cases.

46:57Wait, what does that mean, their legs shook? They're walking in circles nonstop for hours until their legs are shaking because they're so tired. Oh. The whole time he's yelling at them about how he's going to kill them. They're all dead meat. He's going to bite their privates off. He's detailing every single act of visceral torture that he's about to commit on them. and this was two birds one stone for him. It was pleasurable for him to see his victims shake in fear but it was also to tire them out so they had no chance of fighting back. They were genuinely so out of energy. Not that they even had a strong chance of escaping before this because it's a full-grown man against seven-year-olds but this was his insurance policy.

47:36Lewis did satanic rituals with the bodies. There's not much credible information on what the rituals consisted of but we do know that he used a Ouija board with the dead bodies and he's very excited to make a deal with the devil each time he killed. This is why I think that the whole church thing is nonsense. Like I think it's nonsense. I don't think he's religious. I don't think he's remorseful. He said the first time he sold his soul to the devil, it was a feeling he would never forget. He said, It turned out that when I made a pact with the devil, a voice moved the curtain, my hair stood up on the ends, and I entered into a psychotic state where I heard a voice tell me that it loved me.

48:12I said I wanted power. And it said it wanted to serve me. It said, I want to serve you, sir. I sold my soul to the devil. And that's how it went. He would think about that joyous moment as he made his victims walk in circles. Detective Mark Duren was assigned to this case and he was walking in circles with his team. They knew way too late that they had a serial killer on their hands. Even the mass grave, they genuinely weren't even thinking of a serial killer. Because remember, they're thinking of a cartel, a different cartel, Oregon trafficking. satanic cult. Serial killer, they're not even on their minds.

48:48And now, now they're too late. Now they're trying to track the killer's movements, but it's all over the place. They're literally going in circles. New neighboring cities, new towns, just when they thought they were gone or dead, the serial killer, a new body would turn up. Every person he asked saw something. Town goers were saying, no, he was a priest. You have to look at the churches. He was a priest. Others said, no, oh, he was a beggar. There was a suspicious guy. I think he's the killer and he was a beggar. But he left town. So everyone knew it's him. A lot of people knew what he looked like, but they couldn't really pinpoint him.

49:19Oh, okay. And he jumped from towns. So it's not like he was staying in one town and Mark is like, oh, let me go find this guy. You know, it's like, now we don't know where he went and the townspeople are telling me, oh, he was like a beggar. We don't know a name. We don't know anything. This is kind of what he looked like. No, he looked like this. And people are like, no, that's the different beggar. It was just so many different sources. People are like, yeah, go look for people without homes. He's a beggar on the street. They're like, actually, he's a monk. You got to go to the temples and that's where you're going to find him.

49:48Or people are saying, no, you're not going to find him at all. He works with dark magic and he's a witch. It was clear to Detective Mark that the killer assumed a new identity with every town that they went to. And maybe even with every person that they met. Who's to say that they only had one identity each time they went to a new town? I mean, that's the interesting thing, though, that Detective Mark realized were the types of personas he would take on. Priest, a generally respected position. You are in a position of authority. But then the next town over, he'd be a beggar, a generally looked down upon position.

50:25Not my personal feeling, but the harsh reality of society. You're in a position of vulnerability. you are likely ignored discarded people don't want to look at you they don't want to make eye contact with you the local crazy man was another persona he took on generally again another look down person in society and then a practitioner of witchcraft this one is a mixed position either people will look at you with respect fear or they will look down on you i mean i guess depending on their own personal beliefs one would imagine that this type of guy wants to be in a position to be revered and respected.

50:58That's what serial killers want, right? To have that immediate authority over people. But no, he chose all sorts of random personas. And Mark's team initially were very confused about it. But Mark wasn't. He knew what the killer was doing. All these personas have a few things in common. Can you guess? Beggar and the priest. Ah, people don't want to talk to them. Is that right? They are held at a distance by general society. As much as you might respect a priest or practitioner of witchcraft, you might not want to ask about their lives. You might not ask questions. You might not want to be too close to them.

51:36They might be judgmental. They're a little scary. Beggars, you also don't really want to hang out with them, right? Typically society doesn't. I'm not saying like you don't, right? Same with the local crazy man. They're always held at some sort of distance by society. You don't really ask them, hey, what are you doing here today? Where you from? Who are you seeing? It's a position in society where a little mystery is expected. And, you know, these are positions where I don't think a lot of people would question if they're talking to kids. The priest, of course, is talking to children. It's a beggar.

52:08He's probably trying to hustle that kid. That's a madman. He's got nobody else that listens, so he's talking to the kids. The practitioner of witchcraft? I mean, we never know what they've got brewing, right? Also, it was later discovered that when he wasn't using these random personas to go around and murder children he was fronting as a non-profit employee gathering donations that he would pocket yeah and at this point a serial killer had gone from 10 to 15 towns following the same ritual to kill hundreds of little boys and i'm not the head of the police force but i don't think it takes a professional to realize hey something is going on but they didn't really put a lot of resources into this it took the constant pleading of detective mark durham for the higher-ups to even consider categorizing these murders as the work of a serial killer.

52:54Detective Mark had nothing but a bunch of guesses and leads. I mean, there was no way to narrow it down and it seemed like nobody else on the police force even cared. So it's up to Mark to learn everything about serial killers, sexually motivated serial killers, and really any other category this monster would fit into. There would be times where parents were getting fed up finally with the amount of missing children in their town. They would gather outside the police station with all the missing kids families. There were 50 families gathered in one night. And the police would still look at Mark and say, you know, it's concerning, but we should just keep an eye on it.

53:28The townspeople were not feeling like that. They were beyond the point of just being concerned. They had dubbed the serial killer the Beast of Columbia. Later, he'd be dubbed the Monster of Genova. And it's wild to me when people know first that something is really wrong before the police know, because technically it's their job, right? but I digress. Now, to add some context, the cops aren't just bad people. I mean, you could argue that they were, I guess, right? But there's a lot more nuance to the whole situation. The Colombian police department as a whole at this point, and probably still now, is criminally underfunded.

54:01And the organizational power at the time in Colombia were the cartels. They had considerable interest to keep the police powerless. Each town's police force had a plethora of murder cases on their hands. They didn't have the resources for outside help, serial killer profilers. They didn't even have enough to really fund any evidence or DNA being tested. They just had at least 100 similar murder cases around 8 different towns, so many bodies, and the detectives are walking in circles. They had more than 1 ,000 names on their suspect list. And not enough resources to narrow that list down or to even start investigating any of them.

54:41Until the night of the cornstalk. The corn stalks caught on fire. The serial killer had been in a cornfield assaulting and killing another victim when he lit a cigarette and put it out on the ground. It wasn't fully out. The corn stalks around him burst into flames. When the police arrive at the scene, they put the fire out and they see the body of a victim and they know that this is the same serial killer. The MO, the signature, everything is there. And this is clearly a recent crime. And they've got a few pieces of evidence a pair of shoes and a pair of eyeglasses did he rush away yes how much information do you think you can get from two pieces of evidence like that besides the obvious what their shoe size is and their eye prescription shoes and eyeglasses like if some if a police officer had your shoes your eyeglasses what do you think that they can tell about you other than you know the generic his shoe size is this does that mean like he doesn't need eyeglasses to see the world So he doesn't wear eyeglasses usually.

55:41There's a prescription there. Oh, there is. Okay.

55:55Let's start with the glasses. Obviously, the suspect wore glasses for poor eyesight. They did have prescriptions in there. But what else can they gather? The style of the glasses suggests that the individual had a liking for older, more classic styles. These styles were probably more popular 10 years ago. So they're thinking he was probably in his prime 10 years ago. So that means he's either in his 20s or typically for men, they consider the 30s the prime. And that was about 10 years ago. So he's in his 40s more likely. Because you typically have a peak, they call it in your lifetime, and you almost hang on to your style when you felt like you were at your peak because you're almost clinging onto that youth, that feeling that you had by clinging onto these styles and designs.

56:42So now they believe that the suspect is anywhere between 40 to 45 years old. They could actually tell a lot more with the shoes. Just like the glasses, the shoes can point towards a more accurate picture of the suspect's style, their attire, potentially even profession because most people don't generally wear work boots unless it's for work-related things. I don't know a lot of random people that own steel-toed boots for fun. and it's a very specific person that wears very specific types of shoes. So those are given, but they can actually tell more than that with your pairs of shoes. Firstly, Lewis was fooling no one.

57:16The detectives immediately knew that the killer was wearing a size too big of a shoe to throw them off. His feet in prints were right there. They were much smaller than the shoe. The divots that his feet made inside. So they took his actual shoe size and they started measurements. Shoe size can more or less estimate height. He was about 5 '3 to 5 '4, which narrows down the search more. Because the average man in Colombia is about 5 '6. So now we have height and shoe size. Shoes actually tell profilers a lot about someone. So my mom and I have the same exact pair of sneakers and we wear the same exact shoe size.

57:51But I can tell when I accidentally slip on my mom's. It's not because they look different or they're more worn or less worn. But the sneakers have molded to my feet. And so have the soles. and you would be surprised at how much your feet can tell about you. When people distribute their weight differently, that can tell what your posture is like, that can tell profilers what you look like, how much you weigh potentially, what kind of styles you would wear. And they can even tell if you have anxious personalities at some points because anxious people tend to kind of rock back and forth and there could be signs of that on their shoe soles.

58:29It's very interesting. They analyze the shoes and they realize that the soles at the bottom of the shoes, they're uneven. The left sole looks more worn, which meant this person must walk with a slight irregular rotation of the foot and puts a lot more weight on his left leg. And it's a lot more. So if it was slight, they could wonder if maybe their body proportions lean just more to the left or if it's become a habitual thing. But because it was such a difference in the soles of the shoes, they're thinking this person must have a noticeable limp. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow. And with that, they can kind of guesstimate how he walks.

59:08These days, okay, so this was not happening in this case, but in 2023, there's actually a podiatrist who work with the police forces. And let's say you have a killer's shoes. They can tell you what the gait is like. They can tell you how they walk. And judging from CCTV, they can match the gait with the shoes. gait meaning how you walk because the wear of the shoes can determine how you walk and they're really good at analyzing how you walk so even if the killer's face is not on camera they can say these shoes belong to this person based on the way that they walk yeah that's very cool so they know that he has a noticeable limp the suspect also fled the scene fast in such a hurry that he left his glasses and his shoes meaning that he must have been surprised by the fire but in what situation would he have been surprised by the flames and have his shoes and his glasses off?

59:57Shoes are maybe a bit more explainable, but his glasses? They guessed accurately that the suspect was taking a nap. He's the type to smoke cigarettes while torturing his victims. He should also be the type to lay down next to a dead victim's body and go to sleep. There was no further explanation on why his glasses would have been off in the first place. Then the fire started while he's napping. He had to flee so quickly that he left his shoes and his glasses, which would likely mean that he's got second degree burns to his body. And this is when the police put together that the killer has a bad right foot and had been dismembering the right feet of his victims.

1:00:34They also check his prescription. He has pretty bad eyesight and he was now tending to gauge out the victim's eyeballs. And the killer's signature, he places the victim's private parts into their own mouths. Likely, the killer had been a victim of some sort of sexual abuse or trauma growing up. So now they have a lot more to work with. They thought this killer has to be on the sex offender list because that just doesn't make sense. Like, you're committing these level of crimes? There's no way. But that registered offender list consists of more than 5 ,200 names. So that's more than 1 ,000. Their suspect list was originally 1 ,000.

1:01:09They eliminate all the names that had been charged with assaulting girls because the victims are all boys. That's 1 ,600 names left. Then they took off anyone younger than 40. That's now 95 names. Then they eliminated anyone that was shorter or taller than 5354. And now they had a list of 25 names. And they believed one of these 25 people were going to seek medical attention soon for their burns. They were right. Wow, they got so good all of a sudden. All of a sudden, yeah. Yeah. They were right. Lewis had burns all over his body. He forced himself to run on foot for six hours despite his burns, which I don't say that sympathetically.

1:01:50I'm saying that to emphasize this guy really, really did not want to get caught. When he stops running, he realizes I've got second to third degree burns all over my body. Second degree burns, they look a little bit blistered. Third degree burns, they look like charred wood or they looked really white, like cooked white meat. And it's not as painful in the immediate time. A little later, probably feel like hell. But the nerve endings are typically destroyed initially for third degree burns. Where was he burned? All over his leg and like kind of the left side of his body. Yes. You know, Lewis, like all other serial killers that we've talked about, he had a very strong self-preservation mindset.

1:02:29He knew that he couldn't go to the hospital for his burns, but he had to get something. He went to a vet, a vet clinic, and lied, said that he had gotten into an accident in his fireplace, gave this very elaborate story, offered to pay for treatment, they did not ask questions. They treated his burns. December of that year, every single newspaper had the same explosive headline plastered all over it. The Beast of Columbia caught. The killer's face and name were front page on every major publication in town. And the shameless killer had the audacity to deny all the crimes that led to him. He had an injury on his right leg that caused him to limp.

1:03:06The shoe quite literally fit, and he was exactly five, four inches tall. He had a history of abusing minors. He loves cheap brandy and he's sitting there and he's like, I'm not the beast of Columbia. And they're like, you are despicable, dude. The beast who had on average killed two to three kids a month for almost a decade. And now, now he's sitting there looking cops in the eye saying, that wasn't me. What? While the beast was in custody, Detective Mark received a phone call. Four more bodies were found. And they were recent. They were killed in the same way, same MO, same signature as the Beast of Columbia.

1:03:43The person sitting in prison about to be tried for the serial killings was not their beast. Don't get me wrong, he was a rapist and he should be behind bars, but this was not Luis Garibito. They took him off the list and went back now to a list of 24 names. Detective Mark went to talk to each of the 24 families of the suspects. One of the sisters of the suspects did notice something strange recently. She said, you know what? My brother did stop by a few days ago and he told me to hold on to his little bag and not look into it. And I haven't looked into it. They look into it. It's newspaper clippings of the crimes.

1:04:20That's how they caught him? Yeah. Luis Garabito. Mark looks into this guy. At 15, he was arrested for the first time for trying to assault, say, a seven-year-old at a train station. He was caught and let go. He had actually been brought in years before for murder, torture, assault, and beheading of a kid, but they said that they didn't have any other evidence, so they just let him go. And you would think that since he had already been brought in for such a similar crime, that once these serial killer investigations started taking place, people would be like, oh my goodness, that's the guy, right?

1:04:53They didn't. He was not. Outside of the crimes, he managed to live a normal appearing life. He had a few girlfriends, never had children of his own, but his girlfriends who lived with him had children from previous relationships. they never noticed anything odd about him they said they said that he was really good with kids actually and even after breaking up sometimes he would still send money he's very nice they said as detective mark is investigating a call is made to his unit a boy had been discovered in town completely shaken up and he said that a man tried to assault him he rushes over puts the boy into his patrol car and they start driving around looking for this man because they're like this is going to be the Beast of Columbia.

1:05:34And they see something straight out of a horror movie. As they're driving, they see a man walking in the middle of the road and their patrol car is loud. As they're driving up towards this man whose back is facing them, this man does not move, does not run faster. He just keeps walking at the same steady, slow pace, blocking the way, not even looking back to see who or what is behind him. And the kid is like, that's him. that's him they pull up and they ask the man for his name and he very calmly says oh my name is bonfacio yeah what's my name okay it's a very specific name bonfacio what was your last name bonfacio marrero very interesting while the partner is asking generic questions like what are you doing why are you walking you're walking to the next town over that's 55 miles away you got lost where did you get lost detective mark looks down and sees scarred and healing burns all over the left side of his body his weight is heavily distributed to the left side he's wearing glasses and suspiciously looks identical to the suspect photo of lewis garavito he was finally arrested he didn't try to run he didn't try to fight but he did insist that he was bonifacio okay which was not the smartest thing because bonifacio marrera was a well-known politician from the next town over and he kept up this whole shtick of being a well-known politician even though he looked nothing like the well-known politician and he looked more like lewis garavito and he's like i don't know who that guy is they brought in detective mark and detective mark is kind of like your quintessential detective that you would see in those sleepy small town murder thriller books He said that he put his whole life on hold for this case.

1:07:20He sat down in front of Lewis, looked him in the eye and said, I have followed every footstep. I have seen every single victim. I have breathed every breath that you took for the past two years. And now we finally caught you and it's over. Lewis calmly asked if he could pray, walked to the corner of the room and started sobbing while begging for forgiveness. He also confessed to 221 murders. At one point during the confession, he leaned over and vomited into the interrogation trash can. Yeah. He also said in the same breath as he's confessing to the murders, he said, really, my only problem is my leg.

1:07:58My psychic health is very good. I've never had psychic problems. I'm assuming he meant psychiatric. Most of his interrogations, at least the ones that our Spanish researchers could dig up, it's of Lewis recounting his crimes. But there are certain parts that we haven't covered that kind of stand out. at one point the investigator asked him why he decapitated the boys and he said I don't know because I made those decisions possibly it was because the boys didn't suffer and they died more smoothly that's why he's stating that he was trying to help the boys pass in a softer way this is the man that disemboweled his victims while they were alive so he also kept saying I don't want people to look at me like I'm a monster I'm a human being yeah well he could live out the rest of his human being life in a Colombian prison then He was sentenced for 162 murders.

1:08:45The courts counted up all the years that he would get for each individual case, and it came down to 1 ,853 years and nine days. To give context, the United States of America has only been around for 247 years. This man is being sentenced to 1 ,853 years. But Colombia has a max prison sentence. The philosophy behind it, Colombia is one of the countries where they believe that even criminals should have the right to life. Life is sacred and these criminals deserve to have a light at the end of the tunnel. And to condemn someone to a life behind bars without hope is inhumane. Okay, so when you argue it like that, I see it, right?

1:09:24I see the humanity aspect of it. But I don't see it in the sense that I could never look a parent of a victim in the eye and tell them that their child's murderer has the right to hope. You know, so, but some countries can. Colombia has something called sentence unification. If you are sentenced to multiple crimes, then you will only serve the term that's the worst, that's the longest. It's basically serving your sentences concurrently rather than consecutively. So we kind of have that in the US. So in Colombia, if you get sentenced to three crimes, two years for one, five years for one, and six months for one, instead of spending seven and a half years in prison, you'll just spend five years.

1:10:02Because it's your harshest sentence. And just like that, 1 ,853 years turned into 40 years. 40 40 for the worst serial killings in history where he kidnapped hundreds of children tortured them dismembered them disemboweled them assaulted them decapitated them used their bodies for satanic rituals that we don't even know because he won't talk about 40 years but people are like okay let's have some hope because Colombian prisons are notorious for being harsh and Lewis was sentenced to the maximum security prison in Colombia probably one of the worst in the entire country, which apparently the prison itself was inspired by the U.S.

1:10:42penitentiary system. So there's that. But it's really, really bad. People have stated that the first thing you'll notice before you even walk into the prison is the whole smell. I mean, the place stinks of urine and feces to the point where even if you walk in covering your mouth and nose, your eyes start to water because of the stench. There's only running water for about 8 to 15 minutes a day and only on the first floor. Now, there's no guarantee that you're allowed to go to the first floor when water is running. If you don't have a first floor cell, more likely than not, you get access to no running water.

1:11:14It's really bad. Since there's no running water, there's no toilets. So the prisoners are forced to relieve themselves in plastic bags. I'm talking both types, urine and feces, into plastic bags. But if they leave these plastic bags in their cells, it starts to stink up the entire cell. So they toss the plastic bag through the bars of their cell into the communal space beneath. And more often than not, these bags plop and they splatter to the ground. And since water is never on, prisoners basically have water rations. They have water deliveries where the prisoners are forced to line up shoulder to shoulder.

1:11:46They're stiff. It's tense. They've got empty jugs in one hand and they've got the guards will pour their water into those empty jugs. And then in the other hand, they just have like a knife out in the open, an improvised weapon, like a shank that they made. In prison. Because usually the violent outbreaks happen during water deliveries. The cells themselves are jam-packed with prisoners. Even the hallways of the jail are filled with mattresses because of how many people are in there. It's really bad. And they are exposed to the elements in most cases. In the maximum security tower where Luis is a prisoner, they are allowed out of their cells for one hour a day.

1:12:22The conditions in there are so bad that some prisoners have taken to sewing their mouth shuts as a protest against the horrid conditions. Others have made these cocoons out of their bedsheets. So they make these hammocks. And I guess the window bars are enough for them to get out of their window. But they can't really escape because I guess there's guards everywhere and it's completely isolated, right? So they make these little hammocks that they tie on the cell window bars. They get out of the building and they're just basically dangling off the side of the building, but four stories tall. Now the guards, they don't like it.

1:12:55So they start cutting little incisions into the prisoner's bedsheet so that if they try to do this, their bedsheets will fall apart and they will fall four stories potentially to their death. One volunteer stated that he saw multiple men scaling the inner wall of the jail, climbing from the ground floor to the fifth floor. Someone was pulling down bedsheets so that they could climb up while balancing water jugs around their neck. It's because the top dogs of the fifth floor wanted some water. So the bottom people had to go fetch water. Many of them would slip and fall to their deaths and the guards would not even look.

1:13:33Nobody cared. Ironically, outside the prison, there is a fish pond with a constant stream of running water poured into it. It's interesting. Even visitors were not safe in the conjugal visit room, which is where prisoners are allowed to spend alone time with partners. It's typically filled with blood and used condoms. And recently in a separate Colombian prison, but similar, the drain pipes were clogged. Plumbers came to work on it. They found the remains of 100 people in the drains of a prison. Inmates, visitors, nobody was safe. And while he's in here, Louis, people thought maybe he's going to get killed in prison.

1:14:11I mean, a lot of people were hopeful that would be the cause because they didn't want him out in 40 years. That's for sure, right? So a lot of people were hopeful, but he was treated kind of like a king. He got his own isolated cell because this is such a high profile case. The guards were scared that if he was murdered, their jobs would be on the line. So he had like his own personal bodyguard the whole time. There were journalists lining up to interview him and he was like a picky little princess. He would charge a big sum of money to be interviewed. And that's why we don't have a lot of interviews of this guy.

1:14:40And most of the time, he would just ramble on about nothing in his interviews. It's very hard to follow. He never provides much new information that could help bring closure to families. he just starts lying in his interviews at one point he straight up claimed in an interview that he never essayed a single victim and that he does not consider himself a rapist he also stated he thinks that he should be able to get out of prison because it's just not fair you know he's learned his lessons and he's not a rapist because he has erectile dysfunction and if you need proof you should just go ask his ex-girlfriends because he could never get it up with them like this is literally his thought process and he's like i need to be let out of prison because I've got life goals now.

1:15:20The journalists are like, what's your life goal? I'm going to be a congressman and I want to fight for the rights of children. I cannot make this up. He also goes on a rant about how he sees himself in some of the most unsavory dictators and mass murders. They went to his cell and it was decorated with posters of Hitler, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and Princess Diana. It was a very, very strange mix of people. Another interesting thing to note, One journalist who interviewed Lewis directly in jail said, There was something about his eyes where I felt like they were sucking the energy out of me. It was terrifying.

1:15:55But it gets worse. Louise receives multiple sentence reductions, the largest of which took off almost half of his sentence because he did a work-study program in jail. Yeah. With that reduction amongst others, Lewis's sentence was now 22 years and he was scheduled to get out of prison in 2023. Luis was up for release in 2023 and everyone was terrified except for a Facebook group where he had 170 fans that just loved him. Loved him. Could not wait for him to be free. And eventually, October 12th, 2023. Last month? Mm-hmm. Luis Garavito was pronounced dead in prison. he had leukemia and a very aggressive form of eye cancer which a lot of people believe to be karma because he had bad eyesight he gouged out the victim's eyes and now he was dead from eye cancer wait is that true yeah leukemia and eye cancer it wasn't foul play there are some suspicions but but so he's about to come out yeah but he died yes he also didn't really want to come out there's mixed conversations about did he even want to get out so a lot of people were trying to boycott him coming out so they were writing letters to congressmen local officials to the president and everybody was doing everything in their power to make sure that this man does not get out on the street some sources made it seem like he wanted to get out on the street and he's fighting with these judicial people but a lot of other sources said this guy wants to stay in prison he's doing okay in prison and he knows the minute that he steps out he's dead on site okay like who's gonna hide him who's like he has no power he's not pablo escobar like where is he gonna go you know so i don't know i don't know if it was foul play the official statement is leukemia and eye cancer but i don't know if it can even be considered karma because he took so many lives i don't know i mean this is just one of those cases where i keep thinking about the ripple effect it's not just the 400 kids which already in itself is an insane number but it's their parents, their siblings, their friends, relatives that are all traumatized and impacted.

1:18:03And there are still rooms full of boxes of bones of children who are yet to be identified. But I guess it's better dead than free for someone like Luis Garavito. What are your thoughts on this case? Did you guys know about the story of the Beast of Colombia and how he was set to be released this year?