We all repaired to a local restaurant as guests of El Director. The food was sensational, the conversation lively. Once again I was spared probing questions by my lack of Spanish.
In a three-car convoy, we descended on the prison. There was immediately a problem, but I was expecting it. Prison guards are the same the world over. I’m sure there is a multi-national somewhere that manufactures the basic model, probably in association with Microsoft. The gist of the matter was, they didn’t give a flying f--- who we were. It wasn’t visiting day and we didn’t have a valid visiting order. So we couldn’t see Garavito, who obviously wasn’t their favourite prisoner anyway.
Impasse! But suddenly help arrived in the form of the senior prosecutor for the entire province. Dr Janet Espinosa was a statuesque, middle-aged woman, in a flame-red evening gown that she had obviously been wearing at the function she had so recently left. Perhaps El Director had phoned her for help. Dr Espinosa didn’t suffer fools gladly and, clearly, she felt that she was confronted by fools. Like sheep behind the shepherd, we followed in her wake as she forced a bridgehead through the assembled ranks of the guards and past the main gate. Here, in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer walls of the prison, battle commenced.
Various lower order officials duly appeared and entered the fray. Overweight guards, carrying machine guns, pistols and riot sticks like small trees, milled about in confusion. Dr Espinosa was magnificent. Wielding her mobile phone like a short sword, she cut through the various levels of bureaucracy. One final, telling phone call to someone extremely senior in Bogota seemed to do the trick. But first we would have to leave until the paperwork was done.
Danny, Julia and myself had been watching quite passively as the battle raged around us. Now, as I turned to leave I asked Danny about the inscription over the gate leading to the inner prison proper. Danny translated it as saying, “Here enters the man, not the crime.”
“Is that where Garavito is?” I asked Julia through Danny.
“No, he’s over there”, she replied, pointing.
I followed the direction of her finger and saw a small, squat, one-roomed building that seemed to have been added almost as an afterthought to a one-storied, white-painted administration office that stood barely thirty paces away. It had been built of concrete blocks and left unpainted. The whole thing looked decidedly temporary. The one window was heavily barred but unglazed. In the opening stood Helga and the figure next to her could only be Garavito. He had been watching us all the time.
We had been so close to him that now I didn’t want to leave. However, there was no option. We withdrew to a café that stood opposite the jail and spent a fraught 20 minutes waiting for the next development. In the event, it was a compromise. “They will allow you to see, him, but only for ten minutes” declared Dr Espinosa.
As we entered the jail again two things that Helga had said kept coming back to me. “Call him Alberto not Luis. His father always called him Luis and it upsets him.” And, “You mustn’t show that you’re afraid of him.”
Then first warning I would strive to remember, but the second wasn’t relevant at all. I had met too many crazy and dangerous killers in my time in jail. Most of these had chosen fully grown adults as their victims, yet I had stood my ground. In fact, a child killer like our Alberto here would have stood a very good chance of being severely bashed in many of our long term jails. And more likely than not by myself, had I had the good fortune to bump into him. So of all the emotions that were exercising me at that moment, fear wasn’t one of them.
Whatever was going on inside of me at an emotional level though, at an intellectual level it was absolutely clear that I had to be professional. I truly felt that, in many ways, I was ideally suited to get into Garavito’s head. Handled properly, he would be a fount of information on what drives serial killers. This information could be crucial in other investigations. It would take a while to win his confidence, but over time I was confident that he would more clearly describe this ‘strange force’ that overwhelmed him at the time of each killing.
I approached the barred window and put out my hand. Garavito reached through and shook it. As he rattled away in Spanish I was frantically trying to size him up in the short time I knew was available. ‘Nondescript’ was the word that sprang to mind. He was the janitor of your apartment building who you only spoke to in passing; he was the driver of the school bus. The handshake was weak, his eyes vacuous and empty. If he was a driven man, then the demon that had driven him was noticeably absent today.
According to Danny’s translation, Alberto was very interested in the proposed documentary. He cursed the Colombian press for calling him a monster. Clearly, he felt that the BBC would be more circumspect. He stressed that he didn’t want to be exploited.
All the time, Helga hovered in the background. I had been so focused on Garavito that I hadn’t noticed anything else. Suddenly I became aware of the dozens of canvasses that stood on easels, chairs, tables and were spaced about the room on the floor. Mentally, I gasped. They were quite breathtakingly beautiful. All were oil paintings showing in exquisite detail the flora and fauna of various jungle scenes. In the middle of each was the corpse of a young boy. This was how he was working with Helga to locate missing bodies. Garavito’s recall was phenomenal. Each painting had proved accurate down to the last detail.
The juxtaposition of the two extremes of beauty and horror was spellbinding. With Garavito in the foreground and Helga drifting in and out of the paintings it was all quite surreal. I was sure that, in such a setting, a documentary would prove to be mesmerizing.
Suddenly, Garavito started to jig about and sing. The unexpected movement snapped me out of my reverie and caused me to jump. I instantly regretted it. I was determined to show no weakness to this man. Around me Helga, Julia and Danny were all smiling broadly. Quite clearly I was missing something.
Danny explained to me that the jingle Garavito was singing was from a popular Colombian TV soap called something like ‘Betty the Ugly’. Garavito had put his own words to it concerning himself. If nothing else it alerted me to the fact that our Alberto was something of a narcissist.
All too soon the visit was over. Garavito reiterated his intention of cooperating with the documentary and, in fact, signed a note to that effect which Danny had quickly drawn up. My enduring memory is of him standing amongst his paintings and waving as we retreated to the gate.
We assembled in the café opposite the prison again and this time we were joined by the Director of the Prison. Lt. Col. Manuel Martinez had been 30 years in the police before assuming his present post. Strangely for someone in his position, he was a pleasant, avuncular man, whose time-worn face seemed forever wreathed in smiles. He had never seen the like of Garavito. “He is a stone in my shoe”, he confessed. “It’s a full time job just keeping him alive. If the other inmates got hold of him they would kill him. So would some of the guards.”
Dr Espinosa joined us and proved to be a fount of information. As the senior prosecutor of the province she had been the first to question Garavito. She maintained that he told her that the true number of his crimes was 1,800 murders and 3,000 rapes.
She further remarked on the significance of the area in which Garavito was born. Armenia, the capital town of the comparatively tiny Quindio Province, has the highest number of Satanic groups of any town in Colombia. The previous year, Armenia was devastated by an earthquake. The local people said that it was God’s punishment.
Back in Bogota I was jubilant. Not only had I managed to do the cocaine factory story, to the delight of Eoin and ‘Front’, I now had a potential TV documentary for the BBC as well. I immediately phoned Tom Mangold and filled him in on all the details. I fully expected to be coming back the following week with a TV crew.
Tom’s tone was doubtful. “What language does he speak”, he queried?
“Well, Colombian Spanish, of course Tom”, I couldn’t fathom why he was being so obtuse. All was soon to be revealed though.
“That’s the problem, Norman. We had a good line into an Indian serial killer but he only spoke Urdu. If they don’t speak English the Beeb aren’t interested.”
So even though I had been the only journalist ever to be allowed to meet with Garavito and had a world exclusive for a documentary, no one was interested in doing it. I cursed the realities of the media world I was still only discovering.
On the plane back I measured the numerological significance of Garavito’s name. Using the system A = 6, B = 12, C = 18, D = 24, etc, etc, I summed the letters of ‘Garavito’. I got the number 558. If you further sum 5 + 5 + 8, you get the number 18. The significance of 18 is that it is the sum of three sixes.
And as we all know, 666 is the number of the beast!