Daniel Camargo Barbosa

Daniel Camargo Barbosa (22 January 1930 – 13 November 1994) was a Colombian serial killer and rapist.

He was first arrested in Bogotá in 1958 for petty theft.

Camargo had a de facto union with a woman named Alcira and had two children with her.

He fell in love with another woman, Esperanza (age 28), whom he planned to marry, but then found out that she was not a virgin.

This became the root of Camargo's fixations.

He and Esperanza formed an agreement that he would stay with her if she aided him in finding other virgin girls to rape.

Thus began a period of their partnership in crime.

Esperanza was Camargo's accomplice, luring young girls to an apartment under false pretenses and then drugging them with sodium seconal sleeping pills so that Camargo could rape them.

Camargo committed five rapes in this way, but did not kill any of the girls.

The fifth child that they abused in this way reported the crime, and both Camargo and Esperanza were arrested and taken to separate prisons.

Camargo was convicted of sexual assault in Colombia on 10 April 1964.

A judge sentenced him to three years in prison, and Camargo was initially grateful for the perceived leniency of the judge, swearing to repent and mend his ways.

However, a new judge was given precedence over the case and Camargo was sentenced to eight years in prison.

This provoked Camargo to rebellious anger.

He served his full sentence, and was then released.

He is one of the most prolific serial killers in history and is believed to have raped and murdered at least 72 young girls in Colombia and Ecuador during the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1973 he was arrested in Brazil for being undocumented.

Due to a delay in sending Camargo's criminal records from Colombia, he was deported and released with his false identity.

When he returned to Colombia, he took up a job as a street vendor in Barranquilla selling television monitors.

One day when passing by a school, he kidnapped a 9-year-old girl, after raping her, he murdered her so that she could not inform the police as his previous victim had done.

This was his first known assault involving murder.

Camargo was arrested on 3 May 1974 in Barranquilla, Colombia, when he returned to the scene of the crime to recover the television screens that he had left beside the victim.

Even though it is believed that he raped and killed more than 80 girls in Colombia, Camargo was imprisoned in Colombia after being convicted of raping and killing a 9-year-old girl.

He was initially sentenced to 30 years in prison, but this sentence was reduced to 25 years, and he was interned in the prison on Gorgona Island on 24 December 1977.

In November 1984 Camargo escaped from Gorgona prison (known as the Colombian Alcatraz) in a primitive boat after having carefully studied the ocean currents.

The authorities assumed that he died at sea and the press reported that he had been eaten by sharks.

He eventually arrived in Quito, Ecuador.

He then traveled by bus to Guayaquil on 5 or 6 December 1984.

On 18 December he abducted a 9-year-old girl from the city of Quevedo, in the province of Los Ríos, Ecuador.

The next day a 10-year-old girl also disappeared.

From 1984 to 1986, Camargo committed a series of at least 54 rapes and murders in Guayaquil.

The police at first believed that all the deaths were the work of a gang, not understanding that one man could have killed so many.

Camargo slept on the streets, and lived off the money he gained by reselling ballpoint pens in the streets.

Barbosa was stabbed to death in prison by a fellow inmate in 1994.

Camargo's mother died before he had even reached the age of one and his father was overbearing and emotionally distant.

Afterwards his father married another woman, Dioselina Fernandez, who had fertility problems.

This caused his new stepmother to become abusive to Daniel, humiliating him in various ways.

She dressed him up as a girl and then forced him to go to school dressed that way; his peers and classmates made fun of him.

Despite this humiliation, Daniel stood out as a great student at the León XIII school in Bogotá with a reported IQ of 116.

However, his desire to continue studying was hampered when he was forced to drop out of school to help his family financially.