Barbosa Daniel Camargo - Colombian killers: the true stories of the the three most prolific serial killers on earth

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A clichd question, asked of nearly every child. An easy question with anything but an easy answer. For all the million answers children have given to this question over time, the answer is never remorseless paedophilic mass murderer. Its unlikely that these individuals were born with this intention. To commit such atrocities, an individual must have encountered numerous or significant damaging events in his or her life.

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubilos, known as La Bestia (The Beast), Tribiln (Disneys Goofy), El Cura (The Priest), or Bonifacio Morera Lizcano, was born in the small village of Gnovo in Quindio of Colombia on the 25 th of January, 1957, a few months before the deposition of President Gustavo Rojas and at the threshold of a decade-long civil war that would ravage the country. He was the son of Rosa Delia and Manuel Antoni, the first of seven children, to be followed by three brothers and three sisters. He lived a relatively impoverished childhood and was subjected to frequent abuse. Psychologists have been quick to attribute to Luis the three characteristics that define most sexually driven serial killers: acceptance seeking, repressed hostility, and incompatibility amongst peers--or narcissism, sadism, and loneliness.

While this trifecta is what many claim drive the average lust killer--each of these traits also stands individually as a marker of the desperation that can fuel serial murderers, especially when they are imbedded in one at such a young age.

Defining these traits allows us not only to identify individual aspects of personality development, but to do so while directly tying them in with the hedonistic urges (or in this specific case, isolative rejection) as well as physical, emotional and sexual abuse that drove Luis Garavito to become what he became.

It has been widely theorized that, of the factors that affect most organized serial killers such as Luis Garavito, the one that acts as the catalyst for all other factors is malignant narcissism. Garavito was born a healthy first-born son in an impoverished Colombian family in the middle of a civil war that was decades long. He was, as such, the perfect child. His own sense of self would have thus been built up considerably into an almost overwhelming sense of self-worth.

Unfortunately for Garavito, such a sense of self-worth is as fragile as it is formidable, making it easily disturbed. For Garavito, the affronts to his fragile self-worth would come in the form of his six younger siblings, making it seem almost as if he was usurped six times over and replaced at least three times.

Coupled with this struggle was the physical abuse Garavito suffered at the hands of his father and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his two neighbours--actions that caused him to develop within himself a frustrated neurosis in terms of parental ideals. He was betrayed in the worst possible ways by those who were meant to protect him. It was from this moment that his fixation with his own age at the time (seen later in terms of victimology) and the fiduciary relationships he had formed during that time period began to solidify as a perverted power struggle.