December 13th, 2022. At 4:15 in the afternoon, inside a modest house in the Las Voletas neighborhood of Cordoba, Argentina, six prison guards were doing what half the country was doing. Watching the World Cup semi-final between Argentina and Croatia. The tension was thick. The score was tight. And in that moment, with everyone’s eyes glued to the screen, a 59year-old man with three life sentences under his belt told the guards he needed to use the bathroom.
They nodded. He stepped outside and within minutes, Roberto Joseé Carmona, known across Argentina as the human hyena, was gone. 15 minutes later, a taxi driver named Javier Bokealone was dead on the street, stabbed 11 times in the neck, chest, and leg. His body was stuffed in the passenger seat of his own cab, blood pooling on the floor mats.
Carmona had crashed the car at the corner of Santa Ana and Felix Pad Street, stumbled out, walked into a nearby supermarket, and carjacked another vehicle from a random couple. By the time police caught him hours later, he crashed that car, too. But the damage was done.
Another life taken, another name added to a list that stretched back almost four decades. For a man who’d already murdered a teenage girl, killed two inmates behind bars, and terrorized Argentina’s prison system for 36 years. This was just another day, another victim, another headline.
Because Roberto Carmona wasn’t just a killer. He was a predator who thrived in chaos, who smiled when he talked about stabbing people, and who showed zero remorse even when locked in a bulletproof glass cage during his trial. But the real question ain’t why Carmona killed again.
It’s how he was ever allowed to walk outside a prison in the first place. How does a serial killer with three life sentences get conjugal visits? How does a man who threw boiling water on another inmate’s face, who stabbed prisoners in their sleep, who earned his nickname because he acted like a scavenger hunting prey? How does that man get trusted enough to step outside for a bathroom break? That story don’t start with a World Cup match or a murdered taxi driver.
It starts in 1963 in Buenosaris where a baby was abandoned by his mother and left to survive in a system that didn’t care if he lived or died. And what came out of that system wasn’t human anymore. It was something else. Something they called the human hyena. Roberto Jose Carmona was born in 1963 in Buenosaris province, Argentina to a woman named Magdalena Bonet.
His father unknown, never named, never claimed him. Magdalena was young, broke, and couldn’t afford to raise a child on her own. So, when Roberto was just 3 years old, she made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. She left him at the Villa Elisa Children’s Home in La Plata, a state-run institution for abandoned and orphaned kids.
Years later, when Carmona talked about his childhood, he said it was hell. He claimed he was abused by other children, beaten by the staff, and left without food as punishment. Whether all of that was true or whether some of it was exaggerated to justify what he became, nobody knows for sure.
But what’s clear is that Villa Alisa didn’t save him. It broke him. From there, Carmona was moved to a convent where he also claimed to have suffered physical abuse. Then he was transferred between several juvenile institutions as a teenager, each one failing to rehabilitate him. Each one just another stop on a road that led straight to violence.
By the time he was 10 years old, Roberto Carmona had already committed his first crime. He broke into a police car and stole a45 caliber pistol. Not a toy, not a prank, a loaded firearm. And from that moment on, the system couldn’t catch up with him. Around age seven, his mother briefly took him back in, but she was absent for most of the day, working whatever job she could find.
Carmona grew resentful. He felt abandoned again, this time in plain sight. That resentment turned into anger and that anger turned into violence. He started using drugs early, marijuana and pills, anything he could get his hands on to numb the pain or maybe to feed the rage that was building inside him.
As a teenager, Carmona became a client of the juvenile justice system, cycling in and out of detention centers. He robbed, he consumed drugs. He fought. And every time he was locked up, he said he experienced the same abuse that had defined his early childhood. He never specified exactly what happened to him in those places, but the anger, the rage, the complete lack of empathy, all of it was building inside him like pressure in a sealed container.
At 18 years old, Carmona received his first adult conviction. 10 years in prison for aggravated robbery, deprivation of liberty, and drug use. He was sent to some of the toughest prisons in Buenosari’s province. Omos, La Plata, Junin, Sierra Chica, and San Nicholas. These weren’t reform schools.
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These were concrete jungles where the strong survived and the weak got eaten alive. Carmona learned how to survive. He learned how to fight. And he learned how to kill. But here’s the thing. After just 4 years, the justice system gave him a gift. On January 10th, 1986, Roberto Carmona was released on parole.
He walked out of prison at 23 years old, supposedly reformed, supposedly ready to reintegrate into society. 4 days later, he murdered a 16-year-old girl. On the night of January 14th, 1986, Carmona was driving his Ford Tais through Villa Carlos Paz, a popular tourist town in the hills of Cordoba Province.
It was late, past midnight, and the roads were mostly empty. That’s when he saw three young people on the side of Route 20 standing next to a broken down Fiat 600. They were 16-year-old Gabriella Chepy and her two friends, Guiermo Elena and Alejandro Delio. The three of them had been out dancing at a club and were heading home when their car got a flat tire.
Carmona pulled over. He smiled. He was friendly, helpful even. He offered to lend them tools to change the tire. He even placed his jean jacket over Gabriella’s shoulders because the night was cold. The kids trusted him. Why wouldn’t they? He seemed like a good Samaritan, just a guy stopping to help some stranded teenagers.
But once the tire was changed, everything shifted. Carmona’s face went cold. He pulled out a gun from his waistband, pointed it at the three of them, and asked, “Do you know me?” Before anyone could answer, he grabbed Gabriella, forced her into his car, and drove away.
Her two friends stood there frozen, watching the tail lights disappear into the darkness. Carmona even told them, “Don’t worry, I’m not a rapist.” as he drove off with their friend. It was a lie. Carmona drove Gabriella to a secluded area near Toledo, a small town about 22 km southeast of Cordoba. He raped her twice.
Then he forced her out of the car, took out a 22 caliber rifle, made her kneel on the ground, and fired a single shot into the left side of her face from about a meter away. Gabriella Sepei died instantly. Carmona left her body there, exposed to the elements, and drove back to Buenosis like nothing had happened.
For 29 days, Gabriella’s body lay in that field. Her family searched, her friends cried, the police investigated, and Carmona, he kept moving, kept robbing, kept terrorizing people. On February 11th, 1986, almost a month after the murder, Carmona was arrested in General Pacheco Buenosiris after he kidnapped a cab driver and a family at gunpoint to rob them.
When police took him into custody, they had no idea they just captured a murderer. But during the transport back to Cordoba, Carmona confessed he was calm, almost casual about it. He told the officers where Gabriella’s body was. But here’s where he earned his nickname. He lied multiple times. He gave police false locations, sending them on wild goose chases across the province.
He toyed with them, playing games, enjoying the power he had over the investigation. He led them to empty fields, abandoned buildings, wrong coordinates, and each time they came back empty-handed, he smiled and gave them another location. Finally, on February 13th, 1986, Carmona told the truth.
Police recovered Gabriella’s remains exactly where he said they would be. The press went wild. The case became a national scandal. And that’s when the media gave him his nickname, the human hyena. The name came from his behavior. The way he scavenged for victims. The way he toyed with investigators like a predator playing with its prey.
The way he smiled when he talked about death. In August 1986, Carmona was put on trial in the fifth criminal chamber of Cordoba. The evidence was overwhelming. He was convicted of qualified murder, repeated qualified robbery, qualified unlawful deprivation of liberty, and aggravated kidnapping. The judge sentenced him to life in prison.
one of the longest sentences in Argentine history at the time. Carmona was 23 years old and he would never see freedom again. Or so they thought. During that first trial, something remarkable happened. The presiding judge, Carlos Laveras, asked a forensic psychologist named Liliana Deitra a pointed question.
If you had to put someone in the defendant’s chair, who would you put? Society or Carmona? Her answer was chilling. I would put both. society because it creates people like Carmona with its juvenile institutions that don’t rehabilitate anyone. Instead, they form psychopathic personalities with sociopathic traits like the one Carmona has today.
That statement still resonates because Carmona wasn’t born a monster. He was made into one. But does that excuse what he did? Absolutely not. Carmona was transferred to the San Martin prison in Cordoba to serve his sentence. Inside, he didn’t reform. He didn’t rehabilitate.
If anything, he got worse because now he wasn’t just killing people on the outside. He was killing people inside the prison. People who had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. In 1988, just 2 years into his life sentence, Carmona got into an argument with another inmate named Martin Castro. The details are murky, but according to Carmona’s own testimony, Castro refused to lend him his wife for sex.
Carmona was known for harassing other prisoners, demanding access to their girlfriends and spouses when they came for conjugal visits. When Castro refused, Carmona stabbed him with a shank. Castro survived the stabbing. But that same night, while Castro was sleeping in his cell, Carmona heated up a pot of caramel until it was boiling, snuck into Castro’s cell, and poured it over his face.
The burns were so severe that Castro was permanently disfigured. His skin melted. His face was destroyed. Other inmates started calling him Freddy Krueger because of the scars. Carmona was convicted of the attack and given additional prison time, but he didn’t care. He’d proven his point. Cross him and you pay.
In 1994, Carmona killed again. This time, the victim was Hector Vicente Bolia, a prisoner who had some influence over the other inmates. Bolia was part of a group that had tried to lynch Carmona. After Carmona got into another fight, the mob rushed him, screaming Viador, rapist, trying to beat him to death, but Carmona fought back and in the chaos, he managed to stab Ballea multiple times.
Bleia died on the spot. The murder weapon was never found, but Carmona was convicted anyway and sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison. At that point, prison officials realized they had a serious problem. Carmona couldn’t be housed with other inmates. He was too violent, too unpredictable, too dangerous.
So they made a decision. Transfer him out of Cordoba. In 1997, Carmona was sent to the regional prison in Resistencia, Choco Province, a maximum security facility in the far north of Argentina near the border with Paraguay. But the move didn’t stop him. In July 1997, just months after arriving, Carmona killed another inmate.
This time the victim was Dimmitrio Perez Arajo. Carmona fashioned a homemade spear out of a sharpened broomstick and stabbed Perez Arjo to death in the chest. It was Carmona’s third murder behind bars. He was convicted again and sentenced to a second life term. At this point, he had accumulated more prison time than most people live.
Prison officials didn’t know what to do with him anymore. They couldn’t keep him in general population. They couldn’t let him interact with other inmates. So they transferred him back to Cordoba to the San Martin prison and built him a special cell. It was shaped like a cage isolated from the rest of the prison with reinforced walls and 24-hour surveillance.
The other inmates called it La Leona, the lion’s den, and it became an obsession for some prisoners who fantasized about breaking in and killing Carmona themselves to settle old scores. But in February 2005, that almost happened. A massive prison riot broke out at San Martin and a group of the riers had one goal, get to Carmona and kill him.
They smashed through doors, overpowered guards, and were closing in on his cell when the penitentiary service managed to rescue him just minutes before the entire prison was taken over by the inmates. It was that close. After the riot, Cordoba officials made it clear Carmona could not stay in any prison in the province.
He was too dangerous and other prisoners wanted him dead. So they sent him back to Choco where he had another conviction pending for the 1997 murder. And that’s when something strange started happening. Despite being one of the most dangerous murderers in Argentina, Carmona started receiving love letters from women on the outside. Dozens of them.
Some wanted to visit him, others wanted to marry him. One woman in particular, Angela Elizabeth Etude Diaz, a 74 yearear-old from Cordoba, fell in love with Carmona through letters and prison visits. Eventually, they got married in a prison ceremony. In 2011, psychiatric evaluations confirmed what everyone already knew.
Carmona was a psychopath. He was incapable of empathy, incapable of remorse, and according to the reports, he killed for simple pleasure. Psychologist Judith Beodo, a forensic specialist who interacted with Carmona, described him as a rare and lethal psychopath whose egoentrism precludes any consideration of others perspectives or suffering.
She noted his tendency to view people as mere objects for exploitation coupled with an enjoyment of inflicting pain. But one woman didn’t care. In 2014, a judge in Choco named Juan Sema granted Carmona an extraordinary privilege. Temporary leave to visit his wife. The arrangement was simple. Every four months, Carmona would be transferred from Ro Sans Pñena prison in Choco about 800 kilometers away to Cordoba where he would spend three days at his wife’s house in the Las Vatus neighborhood. The reason given was compassionate. Angela suffered from severe osteoarthritis that prevented her from traveling and she also had a quadriplegic son who needed medical assistance. Carmona’s presence, the judge argued, was necessary to support his family. But before those visits even started, something remarkable happened. In an effort to rehabilitate Carmona, the Choco Penitentiary Service made an agreement
with their counterparts in Corientes Province and transferred him to Grana Yate, a minimum security farm prison where inmates were self-governed and had minimal supervision. Think about that for a second. A serial killer with three life sentences sent to a farm where prisoners basically ran the place themselves.
Judge Sema later described the arrangement. For 5 years, Carmona was housed at the Yatai model farm in Corientes, where prisoners self-managed and had minimal surveillance. He would go running to the river about 4 km away daily. He never tried to escape. He had no problems. And that’s when temporary leaves to see his wife were authorized.
For 5 years, Carmona ran 4 km to the river and back every single day. He had the freedom to escape at any moment, but he never did. Not once. Because Carmona was smart. He knew that if he played by the rules, if he showed good behavior, he’d eventually get what he wanted, access to the outside world.
But in 2017, Carmona broke the discipline at the Corientes farm. The exact nature of the violation was never made public, but it was serious enough that he was immediately transferred back to Ro Sans Pñena prison in Choco, back to a high security facility where he belonged. Still, the conjugal visits continued.
Six prison guards were assigned to escort him, a driver, a nurse, and four guards. During the day, Carmona could spend up to 9 hours at his wife’s house. At night, he was supposed to sleep at the Bower Prison in Cordoba. The arrangement continued for years without incident. In total, Carmona made 18 trips to Cordoba between 2014 and 2022.
Then came the CO9 pandemic. The trips were suspended. Carmona couldn’t see his wife. He couldn’t make his phone calls. And in October 2021, he did something that made headlines across Argentina. He sewed his mouth shut inside the penitentiary complex 2 in science penacho. He was protesting because prison authorities refused to give him a cell phone to communicate with his relatives.
He sat in his cell, lips stitched together with thread, refusing to eat or drink until officials finally relented and allowed him limited phone access. It was just another example of the control Carmona tried to exert even from behind bars. Because that’s what he did. He manipulated. He terrorized.
He killed. And even when locked in a cage, surrounded by guards with no freedom and no future, he still found ways to make people afraid. By late 2022, the conjugal visits had resumed. And on December 13th, 2022, Carmona made his 19th trip to Cordoba. It would be his last.
That day, Argentina was playing Croatia in the World Cup semi-final. The entire country was watching. Streets were empty. Businesses were closed. Even the prison guards were glued to the TV. At 4:15 p.m., in the middle of the first half, Carmona told the guards he needed to use the bathroom. They barely looked up.
He stepped outside and he ran. Within minutes, Carmona flagged down a taxi driven by 42-year-old Javier Bocalone. Bocalone had no idea who he was picking up. He stopped the car. Carmona got in and then he attacked. He stabbed Bocalone five times in the neck, four times in the chest, and twice in the left leg.
11 stab wounds in total. Bocalone died on the spot. Carmona shoved the body into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and started driving. 15 minutes later, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed it at the corner of Santa Ana and Felix Pad Street. He abandoned the crash cab, stumbled into a nearby supermarket, and attacked a random couple, stealing their Volkswagen Gold, at knife point.
He drove that car for a few blocks before crashing it again. Then Carmona went to the Vez Sarsfield Clinic where he tried to steal another car from a woman and her mother. When the woman resisted, Carmona drew a knife and slashed her hands, injuring her badly. By then, police had launched a massive ground and aerial operation to find him.
They caught him at 6:15 p.m. just 2 hours after his escape, walking the streets, covered in blood, unarmed, but still defiant. The escape lasted less than a day. But in that time, Carmona had murdered another innocent person, and the outrage was immediate. The Argentine press went wild.
How could a serial killer with three life sentences be allowed outside prison? How could six guards lose track of him during a soccer match? How could the Choco Penitentiary Service not even notify Cordoba police that Carmona was in the city? The blame game started immediately. The Choco Prison officials said they’d followed protocol.
The Cordoba authorities said they were never informed. The judge who granted the conjugal visit said the arrangement had worked for years without problems, but none of that mattered to Javier Bocalone’s family. Their husband, their father, their loved one was dead because the system had failed.
Within hours, Carmona was transferred to Cruz Delehe prison in Cordoba under special security conditions. Then on December 17th, just 4 days after the murder, he was moved again to Bower Prison where he would remain in isolation until his trial. The six prison guards from Choco were arrested and charged with facilitating escape.
Prosecutor Horatio Vasquez led the investigation, trying to determine if the escape was planned or if it happened due to negligence. Carmona was charged with escape and murder to facilitate a crime and aggravated robbery with the use of weapons. Carmona’s trial began in May 2024, and it was one of the most disturbing court proceedings in recent Argentine history.
Carmona was kept in a specially reinforced bulletproof glass cage during the hearings to prevent him from attacking anyone or trying to escape. And when he testified, he showed no remorse. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it. According to reports from the courtroom, Carmona recounted the murder in graphic detail, describing how he stabbed Balon in the neck because he wasn’t stopping the car.
He spoke calmly, almost casually, like he was describing a trip to the grocery store. When family members of the victim broke down crying, Carmona’s face remained expressionless. Psychologists later said that psychopaths often rejoice in their cruelty, and it’s exacerbated when they realize their actions and words cause more pain.
Carmona fit that profile perfectly. When asked why he escaped, Carmona gave a response that summed up his entire worldview. I don’t know. They painted me as the violent one. As if 36 years of murder, torture, and terror were just a misunderstanding. As if he was the victim.
On May 30th, 2024, a unanimous jury found Roberto Carmona guilty of the murder of Javier Bakalon. He was sentenced to another lifetime, his third. At 61 years old, Carmona now holds one of the longest cumulative sentences in Argentine history, second only to Carlos Robo Puk, another notorious serial killer who has been in prison since 1972.
Looking back, the question everyone asks is, how did this happen? How did a child abandoned at age three turn into one of Argentina’s most dangerous serial killers? How did the system fail him so completely that by the time he was an adult, he was already beyond saving? The answer is complicated.
Carmona was abandoned, abused, and neglected at every stage of his development. The juvenile institutions that were supposed to rehabilitate him only made him worse. The prison system that was supposed to contain him couldn’t. And the judges who granted him privileges based on good behavior didn’t account for the fact that psychopaths are masters of manipulation.
But does that excuse what he did? Does that absolve him of the murders, the rapes, the torture? Absolutely not. Gabriella Chepy was 16 years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. Javier Bokealone was a working man, a father just trying to make a living driving a cab. Hector Bollea, Martin Castro, Demetrio Paris Arajo, all of them were human beings with families, with stories, with lives that mattered.
And Carmona took all of that away, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Because he enjoyed it. Because in his twisted mind, other people’s suffering didn’t matter. To this day, Roberto Carmona is still alive, still serving his sentence in a highsecurity prison in Argentina. He’s 62 years old now, and he will never see freedom again.
His name is still spoken in fear. His crimes are still remembered, and his nickname, the human hyena, is still used by the press, by the public, by anyone who knows his story. So, what do you call a man who murdered a teenage girl, killed two inmates behind bars, poured boiling caramel on another prisoner’s face, and stabbed a taxi driver to death while escaping during a World Cup match.
That’s the question Argentina has been asking since 1986. And maybe the real lesson here isn’t just about one man’s evil. It’s about the systems that failed to protect vulnerable children, the prisons that couldn’t contain dangerous criminals, and the decisions that allowed a serial killer to walk outside his cell just so he could kill again.
Because Roberto Carmona might be locked up for life, but the failures that created him, those are still out there. And until those systems change, there will always be another monster waiting to be
