Carlos Busqued - Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer

Copyright 2018 by Carlos Busqued

English translation copyright 2020 by Samuel Rutter

First published in Spain in 2018 by Anagrama

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-948226-68-4

Jacket design by Jenny Carrow

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

Phone: 866-400-5351

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949692

Printed in the United States of America

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The following text is the condensed result of over ninety hours of dialogue with Ricardo Melogno, recorded between November 2014 and December 2015. The conversations were much longer and more disparate, and the topics were covered with less continuity and greater chaos than in the current text. My edits respect the words of the interviewee while compressing, grouping, and organizing them chronologically and thematically, with the goal of providing structure to his story. I believe I have respected the concepts expounded by Ricardo, but I take full responsibility for any differences or mistakes arising from the editing process.

This text was authorized by the Juzgado de Ejecucin Penal No. 1 in Morn, Buenos Aires Province.

Buenos Aires

September 2016

A current that circulates via a conductor generates a magnetic field around the conductor. The intensity of the magnetic field is proportional to the current circulating.

Ampres Circuital Law

Contents

I was told that someone saw you levitate.

[Melogno furrows his brow, then smiles with amusement.]

Who?

Someone who knew you from Unit 20 and was convicted again. They brought him here, and when he saw you, he asked to be kept as far away as possible. He said that you were evil, and that he had seen you levitate.

Oh, I know who that is, haha... Well, you see, that kids real impressionable. Among other major issues he has.

Heres the thing with me. In prison, things pass from mouth to mouth and they start adding up. Over the years its sort of snowballed. Even now, when they send in the search partiestheyre not guards from here, but from the regular prison, and they come every two or three monthsthey find the shrine in my cell with all the offerings and the candles, they say: Old man, what are you getting up to here? Whats all this strange stuff? But these guys are more modern nowadays, they ask more out of curiosity, not out of fear.

[On his left arm he has a tattoo with three symbols stacked above one another: at the top is a 666, in the middle an inverted crucifix, and on the bottom a reversed swastika. The line of symbols is flanked by two snakes writhing rampantly from left to right.]

Why the reversed swastika?

The regular swastika, the one used by the Nazis, represents turning toward the sun, toward the light. So I got mine tattooed like this, turning toward the darkness.

Who gave you this tattoo?

I did it myself, watching my arm in a mirror.

Why do you pray to the Devil?

Because I feel him.

Doesnt the Devil inspire evil deeds?

If thats what I thought, Id be a Christian. Evil comes from within a person, not from religion. Just because someone has a dark side... that doesnt necessarily mean theyre evil in their life. The idea that because I worship Satan, I must be a son of a bitch, is a Christian idea. Its like saying that the youth has turned to shit because they listen to rock and roll. Youth turns to shit for a thousand other reasons, but not because of rock and roll.

Youth Turned to Shit

In September 1982, a series of brief, strange, and almost restrained murders took place in the city of Buenos Aires. Over the course of one week, in an area spanning no more than a few blocks in the neighborhood of Mataderos, the lifeless bodies of four taxi drivers were found. Each corpse appeared in the early hours of the morning, slumped forward in the front seat of a taxi, with a .22 caliber bullet hole in the right temple. The taxis were parked on dark corners, with their interior lights and engines switched off and their headlights ablaze. There was no sign of robbery, although registration documents for the vehicles and ID for the victims were missing. Except for the last incident, the taxi meters all read zero.

Only three of the four murders made the news. On September 24, the La Razn, Crnica, La Prensa, and Clarn newspapers devoted only a few lines to the discovery of the body of A.R. on the corner of Pola and Basualdo Streets. Four days later, slightly more space was dedicated to the discovery of C.C. on the 1800 block of Oliden Street. The individual in question was not yet dead, but he was dying. He had a hole in his skull that was bleeding profusely, and in the end, he died on the way to the hospital. Following this second incident, the 42nd Precinct organized a sweeping operation, swarming Mataderos with their own officers as well as reinforcements from the Robbery and Assault, Crime Prevention, and Investigations units. Despite all this activity, on September 28, the body of J.G. was found on the corner of Basualdo and Tapalqu Streets, only four hundred meters from the other bodies. Later, two more attempted holdups of taxis would take place in the same area, in which the drivers received wounds from blunt objects but emerged relatively unscathed. One of the drivers gave a description of his attacker, which was drawn up into an Identikit and disseminated through the newspapers and television.

Police were unable to shed light on the crimes. The only facts ascertained by the agents were that all of the crimes were the work of a single individual and that the perpetrator had not moved from the rear seat of the taxi during the attacks.

The gaps in the investigation were filled in by the Buenos Aires media with hypotheses of varying degrees of craziness.

We cannot rule out the possibility that this psychopath is a woman in disguise, with very short hair.

The murderer might be a student attending night school who is mentally unstable and attacks taxi drivers after class.

This maniac called the 42nd Precinct and vowed to attack again, saying that nobody could stop him.

The murderer is a psychopath with a complex personality; it is thought that he kills only on the corners of streets whose names have an even number of letters in them.

Taxi drivers began attacking passengers they thought resembled the Identikit. In several sweeps, the police detained over twenty persons of interest, none of whom turned out to have anything to do with the crimes.

On the morning of October 15, 1982, a man presented himself at the Palace of Tribunals in the Federal Capital and asked to speak with the judge presiding over the case. He said he was coming to clear his name. The taxi murderer was his brother, who at that very moment was with their father, having breakfast in an apartment in Caballito. He offered to take the police there. He assured the judge that his brother was unarmed and that they would be able to arrest him without incident.