Serial Killers: Pedro Lopez And Pedro Rodriguez Vega

Serial murder is the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events (Morton, 2005). For centuries serial killers have plagued society. These social deviants cunningly meander through communities murdering the most vulnerable: women, children, the homeless, and the elderly (Guillen, 2002). This paper will focus on two serial killers; Pedro Lopez and Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega.
Pedro Lopez
‘ The man who would grow up to become the notorious “Monster of the Andes” had the sort of childhood almost guaranteed to produce a criminal psychopath. Born in rural Colombia in 1949, Lopez—one of thirteen children of a penniless prostitute—was raised in utter squalor. At eight, he was kicked out of his home after his
He was briefly taken under the wing of a sympathetic American couple who enrolled him in a school for orphans. This relatively normal interlude in his life ended abruptly when he stole some money from the school (allegedly after being molested by one of the male teachers) and ran away.
By his mid adolescence, Lopez had turned to car theft, a vocation that landed him in jail when he was eighteen. Two days after he started his seven-year sentence, he was gang-raped by a quartet of older inmates. Not long afterward, Lopez killed all four of his attackers with a homemade shiv. Deemed an act of self-defence, the killings earned him only an additional two years.
Released in 1978, Lopez embarked on a nomadic career of sadistic lust-murder that would earn him international infamy as possibly the most prolific serial killer of all time. Traveling widely through Peru, he raped and strangled scores of young girls, many snatched from Indian tribes. Once, after being caught during the abduction of a nine-year-old Ayacucho’s child, he was beaten, tortured, and nearly buried alive. Only the timely intervention of an American missionary saved
Following his 1986 release from prison on a rape charge, he began talking his way into the homes of solitary old women under the pretext of performing minor household repairs. Once alone with his victims, he would strangle and rape them (in that order), then set about expunging every sign of his presence.
He did such a thorough job of cleaning up after himself—neatly tucking the bodies into bed and removing all traces of incriminating evidence—that most of the deaths were chalked up to natural causes. Only after his arrest—when police found the cache of “trophies” he had removed from his victims’ homes—did the full extent of his crimes become known: sixteen murders in all, earning him a place in the criminal record books as the most prolific serial killer in recent Spanish history.
During his 1991 trial, the sadistic Rodriguez Vega seemed to revel in the grief he had caused his victims’ families. He was sentenced to 440 years in prison, though—given the leniency of the Spanish penal system—there is every likelihood he will end up serving no more than twenty.’ (Schechter, The Serial Killer Files,