James Marrison - The Worlds Most Bizarre Murders

CONTENTS

Did child-killer Santos Godinos odd features offer a clue about why he liked to torture toddlers and slaughter infants?

W hile there have been many cases of children who kill, perhaps none has been as instinctively savage and ferocious as that of Santos Godino. The sixth of seven children, Godino was born on 31 October 1896 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Deformed at birth, with saucer-sized ears, a short body and overly long arms and legs, he soon became known as the local neighbourhood freak, dubbed el Petisu Orejudo, or the short big-eared one.

Godino grew up in the neighbourhood of Parque Patricios. Today, this is a pleasant enough locale of Buenos Aires; trees line the streets among the fairly modest high-rise tenements. A hundred years ago, however, it was a poverty-stricken slum and home to an enormous slaughterhouse; four whole blocks of it were cut off each day as the cattle were driven in and killed on the streets, in plain view of the local residents.

As if the sight of blood and the sound of screaming cattle werent bad enough in the morning, at night the whole of the citys waste was brought to Parque Patricios, and then burned. Since most of the houses there were made out of salvaged junk, it went by the name of the city of tin or the bonfire; the neighbourhood stank of stale blood and burning rubbish. The majority of people who lived there were Spanish or Italian immigrants who had come to Argentina looking for a new life and found themselves working at starvation wages in the local slaughterhouse. In short, it was the kind of place that would swallow you whole in around five seconds flat if you didnt know your way around. Perhaps nobody would come to know the streets of Parque Patricios better than Argentinas first and most notorious serial killer.

As his home life was utterly dismal, Godino spent most of his time trying to avoid it. School didnt provide much escape: expelled almost instantly from every institution he ever attended, from the age of ten he took to wandering the streets, returning home only when hunger drove him to it. His father had been drunk for as long as Godino could remember and frequently beat his wife and kids senseless. But Godino, uncontrollable from the start, came in for special attention and his father frequently thrashed him around the head with a belt buckle. By the time he was 16, he had 27 scars on his head to prove it.

Most people regarded him as a slightly demented but harmless local pest; in fact, behind his somewhat vacant gaze, Godino was a fairly resourceful killer. At the age of seven, he was busy torturing to death every animal he could get his little hands on, and then keeping them under his bed in a box. Whats more, on his daily jaunts about town, he was single-mindedly luring children to abandoned houses and wastelands and murdering them.

It took him a while to get it right.

When he was seven, he beat up 17-month-old Miguel de Paoli and then threw him into a razor-sharp thorn bush, but was spotted by a policeman who had seen the small boy crying and rushed over to see what was happening. The resourceful Santos began caressing the boy, told the policeman he had found him in the bush and insisted that he take him back to his mother. When he got back with the child, he was rewarded with some sweets.

Godino wasnt the brightest boy in the world, but he had a cunning streak. Of the 11 times he tried to kill, he was interrupted five times by nearby adults or police but managed to talk his way out of it every time. Even when he was taken to the police station (which happened three times), his age worked in his favour and he was released soon afterwards. Moreover, in most cases his victims were too young to even talk.

A year after trying to kill De Paoli, he hospitalised toddler Ana Neri for six months after trying to cave her head in with a rock. Believing the girl dead, he found the girls father and told him that he had found her lying on the ground and that she had fallen over. Shortly after that, he claimed his first fatality. He was never able to remember her name properly and her body was never discovered but he did remember later that she was too young to walk so he had carried her to an abandoned patch of land where he buried her alive in a ditch.

It was March 1906 and Santos Godino was nine years old.

In the same year, his father gave up on him and took him in to the local police station, complaining that his son was utterly indifferent to any kind of authority whatsoever. As well as hurling rocks at the neighbours and seriously injuring them, by now Godino was also attacking his brothers and sisters. His father told the police that, if they didnt take him into some kind of custody, he would kill the little bugger himself. (He had, so legend has it, on that very morning found a dead bird in his boot a present from Santos, no doubt.)

According to a statement signed by Francisco Laguarda, the head of the local police station, Godinos father Fiore walked into the station and filed official charges against his own son. The statement reads as follows: In the city of Buenos Aires on April 5 1906, a person appeared before me and identified himself as Fiore Godino, a 42-year-old Italian immigrant who has been living in Argentina for 18 years. During his testimony, Fiore Godino said that he had a son called Cayetano Santos who is an Argentine citizen by birth and who is nine years and five months old. Fiore Godino contends that his son is uncontrollable and rebellious and does not respond in any way at all to any discipline of any kind and so he formally requests that the police take charge of his son and place him in whatever institution they see fit and for as long as they see appropriate.

Godino spent two months in the reform school but was soon back to his usual tricks and some new ones. At the age of ten, he discovered the wonders of masturbation and started masturbating three times a day. Meanwhile, he continued to attack children.

In 1908, now 12 years old, he tried to burn a girls eyes out of her sockets by setting light to her eyelashes and also tried to drown 22-month-old Severino Gonzlez Cal in a water trough. Luckily, the farmer heard screaming and came to her aid. Santos blamed the crime on a short woman dressed in black, explaining that he had actually come to the little girls assistance and luckily arrived just in time to save her.

After another two months had elapsed, his parents simply couldnt stand him any longer and put him into another, much tougher reform school; he would stay there for the next three years, until he was 15. It was on his release that his true reign of terror began.

Reform school had only made Godino worse. He had been able to escape out of there most nights anyway and, along with his only friend, had begun stealing watches and selling them to buy alcohol. He was soon drinking almost as much as his old man and had also discovered another new hobby.

Maybe it was the sight of the rubbish burning constantly on the horizon at night, but Godino was now unable to resist setting fire to something if it looked like it would go up in flames fast enough. Thief, murderer and now pyromaniac, he set alight a wine cellar creating a conflagration that took firemen three hours to put out a lumber mill, a shop, a tramway station and two warehouses.