Ominous eldritch true stories

Pedro Lopez: The monster of the Andes

Pedro Alonzo Lopez was born in Tolmia, Colombia, in 1949, during the height of the country's "La Violencia" period. This was in fact the last place on earth anyone would have wanted to be born. The country was ruled by riots and unthinkable acts of violence. The problems began just one year earlier, in 1948, when a popular Liberal politician, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala, was assassinated and a civil war broke loose. The war would continue for the next 10 years and take over 200,000 lives before it was over.

Pedro Lopez
The son of a penniless prostitute, Pedro was the seventh of 13 children, and his early years could be described as anything but joyous. His mother was an overbearing woman who dominated her children with an ironclad fist. Regardless of his home life, anything was better than being out on the mean streets. Human rights violations by the guerrillas, paramilitaries, and members of the national armed forces were commonplace, and the country's crime rate was fifty times higher than all other countries in the world.

In 1957, at the age of eight, Pedro's mother caught him having sexual relations with his younger sister and his worst nightmare became a reality - he was exiled to the streets and ordered never to return home again. As bleak as the situation appeared, things quickly began to look up when an older man picked him up off the streets, and offered him food and a place to stay. Pedro could not believe his luck and quickly accepted the offer in blind faith. Nonetheless, it was in fact too good to be true. Instead of being taken to a plush home with food and bedding, the man took Pedro to an abandoned building, where he sodomized him numerous times before tossing him out onto the cold hard streets.

Following his misfortune with the older man, Pedro became terrified of strangers. He slept in alleyways and deserted buildings, and would only meander out at night in search of food from trash cans and local dumps. It was almost a year before Pedro finally built up the courage to travel about the country and eventually ended up in the town of Bogotá. After a few days of begging for food and scavenging dumpsters, a resident American couple approached him. The elder couple was distressed by Pedro's skeletal appearance and was heartbroken watching him beg for food. They provided him with a warm meal and asked him to come live with them. With little other choices left, Pedro accepted their offer and went home with the couple. He was provided with free room and board and eventually enrolled in a day school for orphans.
Regardless of Pedro's apparent good fortune, as with everything else in his life, it was not meant to be. In 1963, at the age of 12, a male teacher sexually molested him at his day school. All of Pedro's previous fears were reborn and anger grew within him. Following the incident, he stole money from an office in the school and ran away from home.

Pedro returned to the only safe place he knew - his first true home, the streets of Colombia. The country's civil war was becoming a thing of the past and the cold war was nearly over. The government was reorganizing, and factories, which had been built during the depression, were slowly beginning to reopen. Nonetheless, Pedro had never been skilled in any trades and held only a minimal education. He spent the next six years of his life begging for food and committing petty thefts in order to survive.

By his mid-teens, Pedro began stealing cars to support himself. He had little to lose and local chop shops paid him well for his services. He was a very proficient car thief and was looked up to by younger apprentices of the trade.

In spite of his skills, in 1969, 18-year-old Pedro was arrested by authorities for car theft and sentenced to serve seven years in prison. He served just two days behind bars before being brutally gang-raped by four older inmates. Following this most recent attack, Pedro swore to himself that no one would ever touch him again. In retaliation, he fashioned a crude knife from prison utensils and spent the following two weeks getting his revenge by individually murdering each of the four men that had raped him. Authorities deemed the murders self-defense, and simply added an additional two years to Pedro's initial sentence for the car theft.