TODAY COLOMBIA (EFE) A jailed alleged serial killer in the Bogota may be responsible for the deaths of at least 16 people, authorities said Friday after the suspect admitted the number of victims was higher than he had originally indicated.
“Today he’s going to show us the place where he supposedly buried seven more (people),” National Police chief Gen. Humberto Guatibonza told reporters.
Fredy Armando Valencia Valencia, a 34-year-old living in a makeshift dwelling near Monserrate hill, a tourist attraction and pilgrim destination on Bogota’s eastern outskirts, initially told investigators after his arrest last Saturday that he had killed eight women.
But after a ninth body believed to be linked to the suspect, dubbed the “Monster of Monserrate,” was found on Thursday, Valencia on Friday morning confessed that he had killed seven more people.
Police happened upon the suspect near Monserrate and caught him with garbage bags containing human remains in his possession, according to Colombian newspaper El Espectador.
The suspect said in remarks to reporters after his arrest that he had acted in “self defense” and denied that he was a “monster.”
Valencia sought out women aged 18-22 on Calle Bronx, a seedy area of Bogota where many of the city’s addicts buy their narcotics, promising them food, clothing and drugs in exchange for sexual favors, authorities said.
He later took them to his hut made of wood and recycled material in a thicket near Monserrate, where he gave the women what he had promised them and demanded they accede to his request for sex.
“I wanted to bathe them, change them, so they’d more easily be able to go out and get money. When I invited them to my house, I asked for five minutes of pleasure in return for all I offered them,” Valencia told reporters.
The suspect confessed that he strangled the women after they did not fulfill their end of the bargain, later chopping up the bodies, putting them in garbage bags and burying the remains in the vicinity of Montserrate, according to investigators.
“He says he strangled them and then had sex with the corpses,” Guatibonza said Friday.
The National Police said the murders, which were announced to the public on Tuesday, were committed between 2010 and November 2014.
