They found the body of a man tied up in a hotel in the center of Medellín

A UNICORN CORPSE

The scene seemed ready to be filmed. The meticulous detail stood out beyond the lifeless body that lay in the bathtub. The first to attend the meeting were the hotel workers themselves. And just as it happens in the movies, the first thing that was heard on the site was a tremendous cry of fright. Immediately, the curious people crowded in the room and had it not been for one who did not want to succumb to amazement, they would all have stayed talking and it would not have occurred to them to call the police.

It was 10:30 in the morning, on the last day of March. The night before, they had seen him enter the room and leave a couple of times. But the next day, when it was time to clean, one of the people in charge knocked on the door of the room. Since no one answered the call, he decided to open the door with the backup key. The tenants and workers of the Nuevo Milenio Hotel would never have imagined encountering such an image.

When the agents arrived at the site, in race 48, at 58th Street, the Prado Centro neighborhood became the crime scene that all of Medellín wanted to see. The body, as white as the wall of a psychiatric hospital, rested tied hands and feet, his mouth gagged, in a bathtub that was not luxurious and whose color blended perfectly with the scene. He was identified, hours later, as Hernán Macias Lopez. He was 28 years old.

His body had no injuries, no blows. There was no sign of a struggle on the part of the murderer. He was just there, tied with the shoelaces of his own shoes and the towel with which he would dry after the bath, tied around his mouth. Her killer left no clues other than her busy escape after taking her life. They couldn't identify his face and hotel records don't get a precise note of who he might be.

The killer would have killed his victim after having done it on other occasions with different people. His modus operandi seems to become increasingly meticulous and cold. Officials suspect that he would already have behind him the deaths of three people, recorded in the city between communes 13, 11 and 8. His actions would always respond to the same pattern. It is believed that he cites his victims through applications, distracts them with their stories, keeps them interested and when he already feels that he has them insured, he asks them to meet them in a hotel, if possible away from the big urban bustle, and kills them in the middle of the night. While the officers in charge have their suspicions, they are not yet venturing to reveal names. His identity remains a mystery, beyond the fact that he has been vaguely captured by security cameras.

Macias Lopez, with a calm face and black hair, had a medium smile that went through his face. Broad eyebrows, not very crowded, and eyes of the same hair color, which gave the impression that he looked at everything with doubt. He was in love with men, and to more than one, whom he frequented, he sent photos of himself. He had studied on the Seine and worked as a watchman in a residential complex. Those who knew him at work describe him as a calm and kind person. He came from Florence, in the department of Caquetá. No one on the site knew him more, no one could have known, even guessed, what his plans would be that night, let alone anticipate his sudden death.

Homicide is, today, a matter to be resolved. The investigation by the authorities is still ongoing and the victim's family has not yet decided. There are no voices of friends, there are no signs that can help to clarify the mystery. Today Macias Lopez is just another corpse in the morgue waiting from the beyond, or wherever, for someone who finds his killer. In one of his last posts on his social networks, he wrote: “I feel butterfly in my stomach and I see pink unicorns.”

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