He confessed to his first murder at age nine. By the time police arrested him at sixteen, he had killed four children, attempted seven more, and set fire to seven buildings. What made his case different from ordinary violence was how methodical and repeated it was — and how long it took anyone to stop him.
Born Into Chaos
Cayetano Santos Godino was born October 31, 1896, in Buenos Aires, to Italian immigrant parents from Calabria — Fiore Godino and Lucia Ruffo — who had arrived in Argentina in 1884. He was one of eight or nine children in an overcrowded, impoverished household marked by alcoholism and physical abuse from both parents. His father had contracted syphilis before Cayetano's birth, causing significant health problems including the short stature that would follow him through his short life.
He had no stable schooling, expelled from one institution after another, and by early childhood was already killing cats and birds and showing a fascination with fire.
A Pattern That Escalated
In September 1904, at age seven, Godino attacked a two-year-old boy and threw him into a ditch. A passing police officer intervened. He was released because of his age.
In 1905, he attacked an eighteen-month-old girl with a rock. Another intervention, another release.
In March 1906, at nine years old, he committed his first murder — luring a three-year-old girl named María Rosa Face to a vacant lot, strangling her, and burying her alive. He would confess to this later; by the time he did, the lot had been built over, and her body was never recovered.
The pattern continued through 1906 to 1912: attacks on young children, fires at buildings across Buenos Aires, attempts that didn't kill and some that did. In March 1912, a five-year-old girl named Reyna Vainicoff died days after Godino set her dress on fire.
The Arrest
On December 3, 1912, Godino lured a young boy named Jesualdo Giordano to an abandoned house with the promise of sweets, then attacked him — ultimately hammering a nail into the side of the child's skull. The boy's father found the body minutes later, and Godino was arrested the following morning at age sixteen.
When arrested, he confessed to all of it. Police connected him to four murders, seven attempted killings, and seven counts of arson across Buenos Aires going back to 1906.
What Happened After
Because of his age, the court did not sentence him to death despite public pressure for it. Doctors declared him insane and he was sent to a mental hospital, where he promptly attacked non-violent patients and attempted multiple escapes. In 1915, authorities gave up on psychiatric treatment and transferred him to a conventional prison. In 1923, he was moved to the Ushuaia Penitentiary at the southern tip of Argentina — the so-called "prison at the end of the world."
He died there on November 15, 1944, at age 48. The official cause was internal bleeding from a gastrointestinal illness, though some accounts suggest he may have been killed by other inmates. He had attacked and killed two cats belonging to fellow prisoners in 1933, an act that reportedly prompted a beating severe enough to hospitalize him for several months.
A Case That Left a Mark
Argentine journalist Rodrigo Palacios has described Godino as the first documented serial killer in Argentina's history, meeting the FBI's formal criteria for serial murder — three or more victims in separate events, with cooling-off periods between them. His crimes became a lens through which Argentine society examined the stresses of mass immigration, poverty, and the limits of early criminology.
His nickname — El Petiso Orejudo, meaning roughly "the little person with big ears" in Spanish — became part of Argentine folk culture for generations, invoked by parents to quiet unruly children in the way some cultures use the bogeyman. It's a dark, complicated legacy for a case that began with a seven-year-old attacking a toddler and ended with a convicted killer dying alone at the bottom of a continent.
Sources
Cayetano Santos Godino — Wikipedia
Cayetano Santos Godino — Grokipedia
Cayetano Santos Godino: Argentina's Child Serial Killer — Medium