Daniel Camargo Barbosa was born on January 22, 1930, in Colombia. His mother died before he reached the age of one, leaving him to be raised by a father described as emotionally distant and authoritarian. His father later remarried a woman named Dioselina Fernández, who reportedly became abusive toward Daniel. According to later accounts, she humiliated him regularly, including forcing him to attend school dressed as a girl, which resulted in ridicule and bullying by classmates.

Despite this abusive environment, Camargo showed strong academic ability. He attended León XIII school in Bogotá and was reported to have an IQ of 116. His academic progress was cut short when he was forced to leave school early to help support his family financially.

As an adult, Camargo entered into a long-term relationship with a woman named Alcira, with whom he had two children. Later, he became involved with another woman, Esperanza, whom he intended to marry. When he discovered that she was not a virgin, this triggered obsessive beliefs that would later define his criminal behavior. The relationship devolved into criminal collaboration, with Esperanza assisting Camargo in locating and drugging young girls so he could sexually assault them.

Camargo was first arrested in 1958 for petty theft. His criminal escalation continued into sexual crimes, culminating in his 1964 conviction for sexual assault in Colombia. After serving a lengthy prison sentence, his hostility toward women intensified rather than diminished.

Following his release from prison, Daniel Camargo Barbosa resumed offending, this time escalating to murder. In the early 1970s, after being deported from Brazil due to documentation issues, he returned to Colombia and worked as a street vendor in Barranquilla. It was there that he committed his first known rape-murder, abducting and killing a nine-year-old girl to prevent her from reporting the crime.

Camargo was arrested on May 3, 1974, after returning to the crime scene to recover items he had left behind. He was convicted of rape and murder and initially sentenced to thirty years in prison, later reduced to twenty-five. On December 24, 1977, he was transferred to the high-security prison on Gorgona Island.

In November 1984, Camargo escaped from Gorgona Island using a crude boat after carefully studying ocean currents. Authorities believed he had drowned at sea, and his escape was widely reported as fatal. In reality, Camargo reached Ecuador, eventually settling in Guayaquil.

Between 1984 and 1986, Camargo committed an extraordinary series of rapes and murders, targeting young girls from impoverished backgrounds. He lured victims by pretending to be a foreigner seeking directions to a church or offering them work. Once isolated, he raped and murdered them, often strangling or stabbing them, and left their bodies in wooded areas. Police initially believed the killings were the work of multiple offenders.

Camargo was arrested on February 26, 1986, in Quito, only minutes after murdering a nine-year-old girl named Elizabeth. He was found carrying bloodstained clothing, body parts from the victim, and a book. Although he initially provided a false name, he was identified by a survivor of his earlier attacks. During interrogation, Camargo calmly confessed to murdering at least seventy-two girls in Ecuador alone and led authorities to multiple body disposal sites.

In 1989, Camargo was convicted and sentenced to sixteen years in prison, the maximum sentence permitted under Ecuadorian law at the time. While incarcerated, he claimed to have converted to Christianity. He was imprisoned alongside other notorious offenders, including Pedro Alonso López.

On November 13, 1994, Daniel Camargo Barbosa was stabbed to death in prison by Geovanny Noguera, the nephew of one of his victims. He was sixty-four years old at the time of his death. His crimes remain among the most prolific and disturbing cases of serial murder in Latin American history.