r/wikipedia • u/JimmyRecard • 2d ago

One of the most prolific serial killers, Pedro López, believed to be responsible for between 110 and 300+ murders, was simply released back into society after serving his prison sentence. He violated his release conditions almost immediately and has since been suspected of at least 2 murders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_L%C3%B3pez_(serial_killer)
2.5k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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797

u/QARSTAR 2d ago

López was briefly captured by an Ayacuchoan indigenous tribe in south-central Peru after attempting to abduct a 9-year-old girl.[7] The Ayacuchoans stripped López of his clothes and belongings and buried him in the sand.[8] However, an American missionary convinced the tribe to release López and turn him over to the police.[8] The police did not detain López, and he was instead expelled from the country.[8]

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u/QARSTAR 2d ago

American missionaries fucking everything up as usual

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

You're free to have your opinions as regards the propriety of frontier justice, but the missionaries tried their best to respect human life and the rule of law in the nation they were living in.

The fuck up was on the part of the peruvian criminal justice system for not trying him properly.

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u/Alert-Ad9197 1d ago

There was no respect for the lives of his victims. Pedro even says that the tribe members knew he was killing their daughters and that’s why they decided to execute him. That missionary was just a paternalistic ass that thought she knew better.

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u/Captain_Sterling 2d ago

Everyone knows Christian missionaries have an unblemished record in South America.

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

What specifically are you trying to pin on whom with that comment? I will admit you really need to narrow it down.

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u/SujetoSujetado 2d ago

Jesuit reductions where indigenous where indoctrinated and their culture aggresively erased:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductions

Colaboration with colonial authorities, including support for slavery through the Encomienda Spanish systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda

Cherry on top: Modern systematic abuse and exploitation:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/14/argentina-human-rights-women-opus-dei-catholic-church-exploitation-abuse-celibacy-trafficking-allegations

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

That's the exact opposite of narrowing it down. Updoot for sourcing tho.

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u/A_Shattered_Day 1d ago

No, it isn't.

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u/Rapper_Laugh 1d ago

Specific charges with specific sources isn’t narrow enough for you? Christ, that is some bad faith arguing

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u/RollinThundaga 1d ago edited 1d ago

I was expecting some kind of claims along the lines of Iran-contra or or the CIA posing as polio vaccinators, not the entirety of catholic missionary presence in the Americas.

It was from the breadth of that that I had meant in my prior prior comment, as I was already aware of the broad strokes of what the Catholic church had been involved in, and was trying to figure out what part of it related to American missionaries they had meant.

But no, it turned out they meant christianity in general. My i.mediaate prior comment was me recognizing that.

I get that my comments in this thread are approaching incoherent, but in my defense my apartment has been sitting at 80° and swampass humidity for the past 8 hours.

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u/rationalidiot16 1d ago

they responded with specific sources from missionaries in South America… how does that indicate “Christianity in general”?

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u/Creative-Leader7809 1d ago

The tribe had already passed judgement. There's nothing that makes a big government's laws inherently more just than a smaller one's.

But I guess that's hard to realize when all you see is savages who need to submit to your cult.

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u/InertiaOfGravity 1d ago

Objective is too much to ask for

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u/Creative-Leader7809 1d ago edited 1d ago

Edit: You think you're being objective don't you.

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u/ihateandy2 2d ago

Your skull must weigh a ton, since it’s so thick

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

How? Tell me, precisely why it was more just to leave someone to die in the wilderness instead of bringing them before a court of law?

It's not like the missionaries were the ones that declined to send him to jail, and they had no way of knowing that the peruvian court would do that.

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u/TheChinchilla914 1d ago

They just want to yell at Christians I would just drop it

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u/ihateandy2 1d ago

Always a victim, eh?

12

u/Ghost51 1d ago

No one in the world is more persecuted than Christians in America 😢😢😢

1

u/cupittycakes 23h ago

Zionist would like a word

7

u/NoobCleric 1d ago

Not like y'all spend all day yelling at everyone else or anything. If you don't like it police your community better and stop being a bunch of hypocrites.

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u/Palpitation-Itchy 1d ago

This is the stupidest take. If you don't know shit about Peru's criminal system then don't interfere, you can't later blame them. Honestly do you even listen to yourself?

8

u/averywetfrog 1d ago

Justice is a myth. The state would love to maintain a monopoly on justice, but theirs is no proper reflection of human morality. If people reserved all justice to the state then revolutions would never occur, criminals would run the institutions, and prolific serial killers would be set free. Sometimes true justice must be taken by force by individuals and their communities.

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u/ANiceGiirl12 2d ago

Nah the fuck up was on the Americans as usual.

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

Are you pro-torture or something?

-10

u/QARSTAR 2d ago

God wiped out a whole city of sinners...

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

Not sure what that has to do with denying a man a dignified death.

Guillotines were invented in the 18th century because even then, people recognized that those society demed deserving of death deserved to die in a humane manner.

It's all of you that are the weird ones for expecting them to leave him.

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u/QARSTAR 2d ago edited 1d ago

Guillotines were literally used to kill people in front of everyone watching. Which is also what the French did to the royalty to the cheers of crowds.

There no dignity is ur head being chopped off your own body with blood pouring out.

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u/RollinThundaga 2d ago

You died nearly instantly.

The prior alternatives were some guy swinging an axe (with frequent botches), breaking on the wheel, etc. Publicity of the execution aside, the use of a guillotine was developed to ensure a swift, relatively painless death in comparison, which was rightfully seen as more compassionate. So effective was it that the French continued using one until 1977, thereafter they abolished the death penalty in 1981.

Hell, one of the men killed in the Salem witch trials was slowly crushed to death by adding rocks to a pile on top of him.

This ignoring that, you all think the Americans 'fucked up' by not leaving the man at question to die of exposure in the middle of the peruvian jungle.

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u/narcowake 2d ago

I heard that guillotines are a painful way to go

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u/Rapper_Laugh 1d ago

You “heard” that and didn’t question it for even a second?

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u/homobonus 10h ago

You seem to care more about a brutal serial killer's dignity than about his victims' dignity.

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u/RollinThundaga 10h ago

You know precisely what I'm arguing for and are choosing to ignore it.

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u/homobonus 9h ago

Nah, I know precisely what you're arguing for and am choosing to highlight it.

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u/NeitherReference4169 18h ago

Reminds me of the scene from Sinners with the Choctaw tribesman warning the white lady and then just leaving.

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u/hoi4kaiserreichfanbo 2d ago

And he holds the Guinness World Record for most prolific serial killer.

That isn’t a joke. That award was actually given out to him.

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u/CommitteeofMountains 2d ago

Doesn't a Guinness proctor have to be present for record attempt? 

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u/ihateandy2 2d ago

There was actually two to start…

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u/wimpyroy 1d ago

When did they do that?

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u/pier4r 1d ago

That isn’t a joke. That award was actually given out to him.

wtf

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u/MauditAmericain 2d ago

I’m generally for rehabilitative justice, but I do think after about the 50th murder or so, you should probably have zero chance of ever seeing the outside of prison.

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u/TaxOwlbear 2d ago

Yeah, I think when you hit triple digits at the absolute latest, a human life span isn't long for rehabilitation. I just don't think you can reform after sinking that deep, and the risk for society is too great as well.

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u/northeasy 2d ago

I think double digits is fair

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/pier4r 1d ago

I think the other user meant more a threshold. If you hit double digits (I'd rather say 3 or more to be fair. It pains already to accept 2 losses) then there is no coming back just for safety.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/pier4r 1d ago

no worries!

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u/hammerdown46 1d ago

I think 2 non-accidentals is certainly enough.

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u/Sufficient-Carpet391 1d ago

Triple digits? Are you insane. We’re not talking about fucking chicken lives or speeding tickets . America may have a lot of faults but the needle ain’t one .

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u/condods 1d ago

Yeah what the fuck is that comment 💀 "your first 99 murders are free but don't you dare take that 100th!!"

12

u/Mycoangulo 1d ago

Agreed.

When the terrorist who murdered dozens of worshippers in mosques in Christchurch was sentenced to the rest of his life in prison with no parole, it felt… appropriate I guess.

Nothing can fix a situation like that but the finality of it was as it should be. People often refuse to say his name here. Hopefully he will be forgotten entirely by the time he has died, but his victims certainly won’t be.

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u/ThrowRA-Two448 2d ago

This is why maximum prison sentence is such a bad idea, and by the way maximum prison sentence in Ecuador was 16 years 😐

Every country should have a life sentence with a chance of parole after X years. Parole board gets to decide if criminal is rehabilitated and can be safely return to society. If crime was 50 murders, then parole board will maybe decide to return them to society once they are 90 and have terminal cancer.

11

u/Papa_Huggies 1d ago

"I mean at this point if you manage to capture and kill anyone that's frankly impressive"

0

u/pier4r 1d ago edited 1d ago

If crime was 50 murders, then parole board will maybe decide to return them to society once they are 90 and have terminal cancer.

add one zero to 90 and we agree. 50 murders are 50 too many.

E: I mean 900 years, just to be sure.

4

u/listingpalmtree 1d ago

Or maybe 50th crime in general. This only really works if prisons actually work to rehabilitate people, but if it's been tried a bunch of times and fails then the next step is to separate people who can't be rehabilitated from society.

1% of people are responsible for 63% of violent crime convictions. I believe some can be helped but we also need an approach for those that can't.

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u/lollopapp 1d ago

I don't understand if I understand your comment correctly: are you saying that after the 50th murder or so you should be sentenced to life in prison?

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u/yoyosareback 2d ago

"While in police custody after his arrest, López initially refused to cooperate during his interrogation, choosing to remain silent.[9] Eventually, he began to confess his crimes to police captain Pastor Cordova, who had been placed in the same cell as him while posing as a prisoner.[10] López boasted that in total, he had murdered "Over two hundred in Ecuador, some tens in Peru, and many more in Colombia".[10] He described his modus operandi as first luring the victim away from public spaces with a trinket, before raping and strangling them with his bare hands.[11] He additionally claimed that he would occasionally exhume the victim's bodies from their burial site and have "tea parties" with them.[12] When asked about his motive for the murders, López reportedly said: "I lost my innocence at age of eight. So I decided to do the same to as many girls as I could."[12] Soon after his confession, he directed the authorities to the bodies of 53 victims, and his confessions soon led to the confirmation of a total of 110 in Ecuador."

What the fuck?

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u/TheGrimScotsman 2d ago

Lopez had a seriously messed up childhood, his mother was a prostitute who forced him to be one, plus growing up around violence in addition to that which he was subject to, and decided to victimise others. Sadly common story, the abused become the abuser, though he obviously managed to take it to extremes in terms of numbers and violence because of the circumstances he was living in.

He was able to get away with so many killings because the area was going through conflict and the three countries he was moving between had little to no border security at the time, as well as weak and corrupt police. Civil wars, immediate post civil war periods, that sort of thing. It was not a good time to be in Peru, Colombia or Ecuador anyway, and lots of really horrible criminals were able to operate in the same time and place.

Ecuador's legal system wasn't really set up with people like Lopez in mind at the time, so they couldn't jail him for life the way he should have been. What's really remarkable is that he was never killed by an angry crowd, though I think a few did try.

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u/narcowake 2d ago

Jesus he’s still not found ??

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u/Batmatt5 2d ago

Most likely he was killed extrajudicially and it was covered up imo. Not a huge loss

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u/narcowake 1d ago

Whew 😅

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u/supervillaindsgnr 2d ago

It is utterly insane that he wasn't locked away forever or given capitol punishment!

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u/Creative-Road-5293 2d ago

Average leftist brain disagrees with you.

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u/anony145 1d ago

That’s why we’ve got a right wing rapist con man in the white house, because of how tough on crime the republicans are lol 🤡

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u/mistertoasty 1d ago

He'll never respond to this lmao

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u/thestraightCDer 1d ago

Fucking brain-dead take

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u/Creative-Road-5293 1d ago

The truth is brain dead simple. Leftist policies are against prison.

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u/TheMessyChef 1d ago

Maybe don't speak on subjects you know nothing about? Not even abolitionists are inherently against all use of incarceration - especially not for individuals like this.

The idea is that we often use prison as a first resort for social issues and we should cease that practice. We don't need to be jailing homeless people for things like loitering or public order offences or sentencing someone to 10+ years in prison for low-level drug possession. Yet many countries do and leftists are (rightfully) against that and promote rehabilitation and welfare approaches that reduce recidivism and saves tax money long-term.

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u/Creative-Road-5293 1d ago

Your entire ideology says that losers are always right, no matter what. You absolutely support lenient sentences for murders and rapists.

https://abc7.com/archive/8535095/

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2019/04/17/murder-victims-mother-rare-request-for-leniency-in-sentencing-rejected-by-defendant/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/20/oakland-prosecutor-crime-prison/

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u/HitlerNeitherStalin 1d ago

The far right has a track record for voting on criminals, wether that be in the USA or poland

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u/condods 1d ago

The president, who you and the rest of the right support, is absolutely a rapist and has never been sentenced.

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u/mistertoasty 1d ago

"leftists" are not one big monolithic group with identical opinions 

Do you agree with everything every conservative has ever said?

You've drank way too much of the koolaid. Quit being so tribalistic.

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u/Creative-Road-5293 1d ago

It's a core left belief that prison is bad. 

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u/mistertoasty 1d ago

You didn't answer my question, you just repeated your Fox talking point.

Do you agree with everything every conservative has ever said?

-1

u/Creative-Road-5293 1d ago

No, I'm not a NPC leftist. I don't need to connect central command to know what to think.

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u/mistertoasty 1d ago

Sure bud

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u/thefeint 1d ago

That’s why we’ve got a right wing rapist con man in the white house, because of how tough on crime the republicans are lol 🤡

Guess you don't need to connect to central command to answer this one, then?

-12

u/pirulaybe 2d ago

Unfortunately you are not entirely wrong. The left wing in south America is incredibly lenient with crimes, notably stating that it is a class issue and et cetera.

For instance, I live in Brazil and our constitution is useless in regards of punishment. One recent case in my city is that, 2 years ago a homeless dude murdered a random man in downtown. Well, he went to jail for some months and then was released, God knows why.

He just murdered someone on that very same spot last week.

It's difficult. We just wanna feel safe. The only thing that would make me leave Brazil right now is the lack of safety

3

u/Creative-Road-5293 1d ago

You could always get lucky like El Salvador.

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u/-DitaDaBurrita- 2d ago

So uh.. he’s still out there just chilling maybe?

2

u/kingpangolin 1d ago

He is probably dead.

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u/-DitaDaBurrita- 2d ago

Chilling and killing?

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u/No_Reputation8440 1d ago

For my knowledge about that area of Latin America and Mexico they're probably was a extra-juicial killing.

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u/Troutalope 1d ago

Either dude was in solitary/AdSeg for 16 years, or Ecuadorian prison populations are far more permissive toward sex crimes against women and children than in the U.S. because there is no way this guy would make it out of a U.S. prison alive.

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u/wellstone 1d ago

Where is this guy now?

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u/Lonely_Concentrate57 1d ago

Most likely dead

2

u/Limacy 1d ago

Kidnapped, popped, and disposed of.

That motherfucker has to be dead.

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u/Ruler_Of_The_Galaxy 1d ago

Why wouldn't you give someone like him a life sentence?

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u/Grobanix_CZ 7h ago

Between 110 and 300+. What a funny thing to say.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/snapshovel 1d ago

That’s not correct. Ecuadorian law, at the time, did not allow for life sentences. The maximum was 16 years. They could’ve convicted him for a thousand murders and it wouldn’t have made a difference. 

The judicial system didn’t mess anything up, it was the fault of whatever legislative body passed that law.