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I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. And to be honest, I have been somewhat tired of staying in Europe and North America for so long. So tonight, dear listener, let us dress in summer clothes, don some nice sunglasses and perhaps a Panama hat. Because we are going to Brazil. I usually do not give out so-called trigger warnings on my show.
But this episode is an exception. Tonight I will present to you very graphic and gruesome details of serial murder involving victims from the age of 4 to 14. It is very disturbing and not recommended for children or people sensitive to gruesome graphic content. Although most serial killer stories we hear about originate in the USA or Europe,
These are not the places of the most extreme cases of serial murder. Previously on this show, I have covered the case of Pedro Lopez, the serial killer with the world's highest number of confirmed victims. He was a resident of Colombia. There are, however, far more killers like Lopez in the sun-kissed lands of South America. In Brazil...
A killer hunted young victims from 1991 up until his arrest in 2003. He killed at least 30 children and is suspected of as many as 42. He tortured and mutilated his victims and I think it is very odd his name is not more known here in the West. I am of course talking about none other than
Than Francisco Das Chagas Rodriguez Debrito. The media has not given him a serial killer nickname, but if they had, I suspect it would be the Beast of Maranhao. Also, a quick update on my Patreon. I have now introduced bonus episodes and exclusive content for patrons that donate $10 or more.
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Before I continue with the tale of Chagas, let me give you a brief warning. I do not speak Portuguese, so my pronunciation of names and places throughout this episode will probably be terrible. I am sorry about this, and I hope my Brazilian and Portuguese listeners will forgive me. The End
His eyes are meat, the skin is light brown, and the body thin, only one meter and 62 centimeters high. Nothing scares the mechanic Francisco das Chagas Rodriguez de Brito, 38 years old.
But he is possibly the greatest serial killer in Brazilian history. He is accused of having raped, murdered and maimed 42 boys during 15 years in the interior of Pará, in São Luís, the capital city in the Brazilian state of Maranhão.
On Wednesday, the 25th of October 2006, he was sentenced to 20 years and 8 months in prison for only one of the deaths, that of the boy Jonathan Silva Vieira. There were 41 more horror stories to be told. Chagas was born in 1965 in the interior of Maranhao, where he lived in the city of Altamira.
It is suspected he started killing as early as 1986 in Altamira. There it was twelve boys who died following his attacks, while three other boys managed to survive, dragging themselves, covered in wounds and blood, out of the woods. They had had their penis sliced off with a knife.
emasculated, forever marked and disfigured by Chagas. In 1991, Chagas went to live in the capital. He settled in an area of popular houses known as the Tropical Garden. There, he continued killing. For eight years, he hunted young slender boys whom he would kidnap, rape, torture, and kill.
One of the victims, the boy Daniel Ferreira Ribeira, only four years old, was taken from his home while his father slept. Chagas was a volunteer in the search carried out by the police. The boy's mother, Mónica Regina Ferreira, is quoted as saying, "'This pain I'll take with me forever.'"
Chagas was finally arrested in December of 2003 after the death of a 14-year-old boy who lived near his work. Chagas had called the boy, named Jonathan Silva Vieira, to collect achai in the woods. Before leaving, the boy warned his older sister where and with whom he would go.
When police began investigating Jonathan's disappearance, Chagas thus became the prime suspect. At his home, investigators discovered bodies of other victims, including Daniel. At first, no one imagined the possibility of serial killings. We worked with the hypotheses of organ trafficking, black magic, and even terror actions, said prosecutor Samarone de Zusa Maia.
who served on the indictment in Jonathan's case. Her prosecutor was further quoted as saying, To begin with, the police had difficulty proving Chagas' guilt in all deaths with similar characteristics.
They visited the researcher Ilana Kasoy from the Forensic Center of the Institute of Psychiatry of the Hospital Das Klinikas in Sao Paulo. She traced the psychological profile of the probable killer and compared it to that of Chagas.
As I have mentioned several times in previous episodes, most serial killers, especially the compulsive ones, have a specific signature, a modus operandi. The signature of the Chagas homicides was the emasculation of the victims and the type of victims. They were all slender boys no older than 14 years.
According to the experts, he cut off the genitals of the boys with a knife. Before doing this, he strangled the boys until they passed out, and then proceeded to anally rape them. The cause of death was sometimes the strangulation, but other times it was the hemorrhage resulting from the brutal emasculation.
According to the police investigation, Francisco Chagas took the boys to closed woods, persuading them to gather fruit or to hunt birds. After killing them, he performed a strange ritual. With a cone made of green leaves, he collected blood from the emasculation wound. If necessary, he made new holes in the body until filling the cone with blood.
He drew a cross on the forest floor and covered it with the dead boy's blood. The male organ was wrapped in a piece of the victim's shirt and thrown into a body of water. It could be a river, a pond, or the sea. Not infrequently, small pieces of the body were also amputated. Ears, fingers, calves, hands, or nipples.
The corpse was covered with tucum leaves, always tucum, a species of spiny palm common in the region. On rare occasions, the victim was only passed out from the strangulation and would wake up later to excruciating pain from the multiple wounds before dying of blood loss and exposure.
In later interviews and interrogations, Chagas said he heard voices and saw a white being floating about 40 centimeters off the ground to show his next victim. Psychologist Maria Adelaide de Freitas Caires, also from the H.C. Forensic Center, made the psychological report of Chagas.
According to her, he was an outwardly patient man. He took patients to hospitals, bought medicine, and helped clean up his neighbor's land. He had already run for president of the Residence Association where he was discovered. The psychologist further testified at his trial that Chagas was, to some extent, aware of his actions.
by four votes to three. The jury considered it semi-attributable. This means that he was legally responsible for his actions, but may have a reduction of up to two-thirds of the penalty. The judge awarded him a one-third reduction. It will not make much difference because the penalties are cumulative.
and the upcoming trials ensured that Chagas spends the rest of his days in prison. So, let us for once speculate a bit on the phenomenon of serial killers. Here on the podcast, I try to tell my listeners the facts and stories of the life of the world's many serial killers, but I have not done very many episodes discussing the phenomenon itself.
What, for example, makes a willing and caring person in your community to commit monstrous acts? According to experts, there is little to no conclusive explanation. Serial killers are a worldwide phenomenon. There are thousands of films made about them, like the excellent film The Silence of the Lambs, and my personal favorite, Zodiac.
But no one claims to completely understand them. Psychiatrist Ilana Caso says there are still very little scientific studies done on them. Even so, Chagas' childhood suggests some answers. He grew up in poverty, the youngest of five farmer's children, and he lost his mother at the tender age of four.
He was raised by his maternal grandmother who beat him with a liana, according to him and a sister. The grandmother would put a piece of paper on the wall where she wrote down punishable acts. When they got to eight, the kid himself had to go to the woods to get the vine he would be beaten with. Chagas said during the trial,
that he had been sexually abused by a much older 15-year-old boy, whom his grandmother took into the house. According to Chagas, this happened at least three times. Childhood trauma and abuse is thought to be conductive to abusive behavior as an adult.
Psychiatrist Ilana Kassoy claims that in more than 80% of cases of serial felons, there was sexual abuse in childhood. In the case of Chagas, the victims always had the same characteristics, physical and social, that he once had. They were thin and poor boys.
So, it is not implausible that in each victim, Chagas saw the child that he had been, and he wanted to kill his own past. Chagas himself says he has never felt any remorse for the murders. He did not feel sorry for the victims or their families, which I will detail more in a complete interview at the end of this episode.
Like the far more famous, but far less prolific serial killer known as Son of Sam, Chagas blames his acts on hearing voices and a supernatural force making him perform his evil deeds. It is impossible to know if it's true he had these delusions, but I suspect this may be a way for him to better handle the enormity of his crimes.
A way for him to simply live with himself. Another characteristic of Chagas that are also quite common among serial killers is intelligence. He completed only four grades in elementary school. Even so, he speaks with aplomb and a vocabulary far above the average of his social group. The coefficient of intelligence, IQ test,
That he did indicated a score of 105, a level considered excellent for those with his socio-economic background in Brazil. The tale of Chagas seems more and more like a cliché Hollywood serial killer film. The police even say Chagas was playing some kind of game with them. His accounts of the deaths followed a cycle of evolution.
First, he said he did not remember anything, but at every discovery of the inquiry he was confronted with, he said, there, you got me, and then he gave new information as a sort of reward to researchers. Psychologists have no doubt that he has killed all 42 boys. They cite the peculiar signature of every homicidal serial.
and they claimed that he not only claimed responsibility for the murders, but also identified the death sites, and provided details that could only be described by those who participated in them. Chagas's arrest and the following investigation led to the review of all criminal cases. Five people had been arrested for the killings in Maranhao, and one of them had been convicted.
These cases were reviewed and the innocent men released.
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i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care but it's good to have some things that are non negotiable for some that could be a night out with the boys chugging beers and having a laugh for others it might be an eating night
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. The police of Para, however, did not accept the conclusions that Chagas was solely responsible for the many child killings. There, the case was treated as a series of 19 victims that six people were responsible for.
They, according to the police, mauled them during black magic rituals and then sacrificed them. These six were part of a sect called LUS, translated as Superior Universal Alignment in English. The president of the sect, Valentina de Andrade, author of the book Deus, the Great Force, was the only one acquitted.
Today she lives in Argentina, where she is the seat of the sect of the six convicts. Two are in prison, three have fled, and one is suspected of being dead. Francisco Chagas is a farce, says Rosa Pessoa, president of the Association of Relatives of the Victims and mother of one of the boys killed in Pará.
We believe that he can be part of the group that killed the children, but he could never have acted alone. What you're trying to do is cover up the powerful, she says. She refers to two doctors and a businesswoman suspected in the murders. What reinforces the thesis of the investigators in Pará is that there were at least five similar attacks in Altamira, when Chagas was already in Maranhão.
Taking Altamira to help locate the missing bodies, he indicated a wrong location. There were only animal bones in the place he showed, says Maria Raimunda dos Santos, the aunt of one of the dead boys. She is part of a committee in defense of the lives of Altamirense's children, formed after the tragedy by relatives of the victims.
One hypothesis is that Chagas had contact with the members of the sect, learned his macabre technique, and replicated the murders in Maranhao. Chagas says he knew only one of those convicted of the deaths in Pará. He is one of the culprits, says the committee's Antonio Mello. What families want is for all those convicted to be arrested.
The case of Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito took many years to reach a conclusion. It is a cause of controversy in Brazil and was actually reported to the Organization of American States, OAS, as a miscarriage of justice on behalf of all those victims who died before police took action.
According to the Secretary of State for Human Rights and Popular Participation in Brazil, abbreviated as SEDIPOP, the case of emasculated boys led the state of Maranhão to recognize its responsibility for violating human rights and to develop educational actions, as well as strengthening public policies.
Francisco Gonsalves said that Governor Flavio Dino sent a bill to the Legislative Assembly to give a pension to the families of the dead boys, which would initially be paid for 15 years and to continually update its value.
A panel, coordinated by Prosecutor Sondro Lobato, brought together Prosecutor Gerolides Menon Dancha Castro, who served in the investigation of the case of the emasculated children and the lawyer and Secretary of State for Human Rights at the time, Salvio Dino. The case lasted more than two years and began dealing with crimes that apparently...
had no connection to each other it was the defense center's father marcos passarini that began to catalogue the cases identifying the existence of similar characteristics after the denunciation offered by the defense center to the oas
The Maranhao Public Prosecutor's Office set up a task force with other organs to act directly in the investigations of the cases. This joint work led to the identification of Francisco das Chagas Rodriguez de Brito, who later confessed to the crimes.
Chagas was ultimately sentenced to 580 years and 10 months of imprisonment for the murder of 28 boys. The remaining 14 boys are disputed, with Chagas saying it was him and the Pará prosecutors saying it was the LUS cult who murdered them in their rituals.
Francisco das Chagas now spends his days in the maximum security prison in Sao Luís, in an isolated cell. The management of the prison fears that the other prisoners will attack him if they have contact with him. What follows is the transcript of an interview done by the newspaper magazine Season. Season. Was your condemnation just, Francisco das Chagas?
Justice is doing her job and was correct. But, in my opinion, it is necessary to judge the person on the side of solidarity, on the more human side. Do not just look on the side of evil. What happened to me can happen to anyone. The bug is out there on the loose. We can all be tempted at any moment. Season 2
"'To the jury, you told a version of a childhood suffering, without the parents, with mistreatment and sexual abuse. Does your past justify the crimes you committed?' Shagas. "'I do not really like to talk about my childhood. No one likes to talk about suffering. I did not have affection from a father, attention, that love that a child needs. At four, my father left my mother.'
Then my mother died. My maternal grandmother was to raise us. I was a child who never had the pleasure of getting a gift, and I wished the Brazilian people could pay attention to their children. When I was six years old, my grandmother called a boy to live there with us. That was something I kept. I hid from my family because of the shame. When my grandmother was going to make purchases in the city—
This boy about three times abused me. I told them these stories now because they asked me, but it does not mean that the things that happened are an excuse for what I did. Season. What was the meaning of the ritual in the deaths you practiced? Chagas. I am not homosexual. I feel very disgusted when they call me that.
"'I like women. My business is women. That does not matter. I did not have sex with the victim. This is not true.' "'Police found your semen on the bodies. How do you explain that?' "'That's not true. If it was, I'd say.' "'How did the deaths begin?' "'I never had the desire to hurt anyone.'
I have always been a regular person. When I was about twenty, I began to feel that difference in myself. That love was gone. There was a voice that spoke to me. Yes, people think this is crazy, but it is not. Season, did you repent? Shaggaz. When I was in that mess, I did not regret anything. No. People say this is a monster.
But what happened to me can happen to anyone outside. Season. Did you want to be forgiven, Chagas? A mother, there on the jury, said she could forgive me, but only after she bit me. How can a person like this be forgiven by God? God gave his only son for the sacrifice. If the person does not forgive their neighbor, God cannot forgive that person. Season.
If you had not been discovered, would you kill again? Chagas. I do not know. I do not think so. That had a certain determination. Now it's gone. I'm not a bad person. Season. If you could go back in time, what would you do differently? Chagas.
I was going to be a quiet and happy person. I was never going to do a bad thing to anyone, because I already knew the reaction that exists when we do evil. I am a person who still thinks about being happy. I still want to be a respectful citizen, and I want to be respected as people respected me. I thought about ending my life, but one thing told me that God still has joy for me.
I will not appeal the sentence. I just want God to give me another chance. Research for this case has been very difficult, as little information exists in English. I had to read Brazilian sources, but in any case, in honor of the children who lost their lives to Chagas, and for them to be the
Well, if not lasting memory, then at least the last names from this case you hear instead of him. I will now list the names of the 28 boys Chagas was convicted of murdering. Alexandre de Lemos Pereira Antonio Reis Silva Bernardo da Silva Modesto Bernardo Rodriguez Costa Carlos Wagner dos Santos Sousa
Daniel Ferreira Ribeiro Diego Gomez Arroyo Edivan Pinto Lubato Eduardo Rocha da Silva Evanilson Cantaneje Costa Hermogenes Colares Ivanildo Povuas Ferreira Halson Alves Viana Jonathan Silva Vieira Josemar de Jesus Batista
Julio Cesar Pereira Melo, Laércio Silva Martins, Nerivaldo dos Santos Pereira, Nunatu Alves da Silva, Rafael Carvalho Carneiro, Raimundo Luis Sousa Cordero, Raimundo Nunatu da Concei Chau Filho, Ranier Silva Cruz.
Wilson Frazao Serra. Alexandre Dos Santos Goncalves. Sebastia Ribeiro Borges. Hondalvanis Machedo Scotland. Emmanuel Diego de Jesus Silva.
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And so ends this stand-alone episode regarding the Beast of Maranjau. Next week I will cover a fresh new serial killer expose. Perhaps I'll even bring you a superstar. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun.
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