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.

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

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

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

[3][5] 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.

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

[5] Camargo selected helpless, young, lower-class girls in search of work and approached them, pretending to be a foreigner who needed to find a Protestant pastor in a church on the outskirts of town.

[5] Camargo was arrested by two policemen in Quito on 26 February 1986, only a few minutes after he had murdered a 9-year-old girl named Elizabeth.

They found that he was carrying with him a bag containing the bloody clothes and clitoris of his latest victim, and a copy of Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

When he was arrested he gave a false name, Manuel Bulgarin Solis, but he was later identified by María Alexandra Vélez who was one of his rape victims that had escaped.

[4] Daniel Camargo calmly confessed to killing 72 girls in Ecuador since escaping from the Colombian island prison.

While he told the Ecuadorian authorities of the locations of the bodies and how the sadistic crimes were committed, he showed no feelings of remorse.

In June 1986 Francisco Febres Cordero, a journalist for the newspaper Hoy (Today), managed to arrange an interview with Camargo.

In this penitentiary he was imprisoned with Pedro Alonso López (also dubbed "the Monster of the Andes"), who is believed to have raped and killed as many as 300 girls in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.