Way back in my July 2024 newsletter, I talked about Gilles de Rais, a French knight who palled around with Joan of Arc and enjoyed molesting and murdering young boys.
Well, folks, we have found our modern-day Gilles de Rais. Luis Alfredo Garavito was so awful that he actually prompted Colombia to change its laws around incarceration!
Like de Rais, Garavito targeted children. Like de Rais, he was seen as a harmless, generous benefactor to those living in the poorer areas of Colombia.
And like de Rais, he was luring kids in with promises of a better life, then torturing and murdering them.
In the hundreds.
After decades of this, he was finally caught and police were astounded when he led them to grave after grave after grave…
Garavito was sentenced to almost two thousand years in prison! But sentencing and serving are two different things. See, Colombia not only does not have the death penalty (and good on them!), but it also has no provision in its legal system for life in prison!
By statute, the longest anyone can actually serve in prison in Colombia is forty years. And since Garavito helped the police find all those bodies, his sentence was reduced to twenty-two years. Meaning he would be released in 2023, at which point he declared he would…run for public office…in order to help abused children…
I can’t even.
Luckily for the decent people of Colombia, Garavito died in a hospital in 2023. Almost like an ironic universe decided to give him life in prison after all, eh?
But the prospect of Garavito back on the streets was so inflammatory, so outrageous to Colombians that the law was changed. It is now possible to sentence someone to up to sixty years in prison.
Which still isn’t life, but gets a lot closer.
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