The World's Most Bizarre Murders

by James Marrison

In his heyday, Sagawa travelled the world over, enjoying all-expenses-paid trips to Germany, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Iceland and India. The fact that he had murdered a young woman and eaten her seemed to have been forgotten. He lectured on the nutritive values of human flesh. He featured as a meat expert for a gastronomy column. He planned to open a vegetarian restaurant.

  However, Sagawa’s popularity soon faded. The media work, which started to peter out in the late nineties, has now all dried up completely apart from a brief interview with Sixty Minutes and an interview for an HBO documentary. Nowadays, Sagawa (who is diabetic) spends much of his time belly-aching about his lack of cash and his inability to get a job. There are no family payouts any more – both his parents are dead – and for a while he was even forced to claim welfare.

  In fact, according to a recent report in the Scotsman on Sunday, Sagawa is now broke and living under an assumed name in a small apartment outside Tokyo. He does still see Western women from time to time, however, and one, according to the same report, even begged him to eat her. On Saturday nights, Sagawa occasionally still haunts Tokyo’s red-light zone, Roppongi, where he chats up the Australian nightclub hostesses and strippers and often gets their numbers. According to a recent report, Sagawa even managed to pick up an Australian girl and go on holiday with her to Canada, until she realised who he was.

  He still makes the occasional headline. In 2002, Japanese tabloid Shukan Shincho reported that Sagawa was spotted attending an anti-war rally in Tokyo. ‘People are all beautiful. People shouldn’t kill people,’ his sign said. Apparently angered by the United States’ attack on Afghanistan, the diminutive cannibal told the newspaper that he planned to spend the rest of his days studying what ‘life is’. But nobody seemed to take much notice of him and he shuffled off soon afterwards.

  In October 2007, for the magazine Jitsuwa Knuckles, Sagawa told writer-photographer Noboru Hashimoto, ‘When I see a beautiful girl while riding the train, I feel like eating her.’ He also referred to the killing of Renée Hartevelt, telling the journalist, ‘I invited her to join me for some Japanese food. But Japanese restaurants in Paris were expensive, so I said I’d prepare sukiyaki at home. No one else came along, and usually a girl would be on her guard to be alone with a man at his place, but Renée was completely at ease.

  ‘The sukiyaki got burned and stuck to the pot, and, while she stood at the sink washing it, I got this feeling while looking at her from behind – I don’t know why – that she looked like a whore, and I was overcome with this compulsion to eat her.’

  The fact still remains that, for years, Sagawa cashed in on the murder of a young woman, reducing his horrible deed to nothing more than a sick joke, and the media was more than happy to play along. Today, his novelty has worn very thin, though. The joke isn’t very funny any more, even in Japan.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARCELO COSTA DE ANDRADE: THE VAMPIRE OF RIO

  Ex-rent-boy-turned-religious-maniac Marcelo Costa de Andrade made headlines in Brazil in 1992 when he confessed to a nine-month murder spree. Brazil’s most infamous killer said he had raped and slaughtered 14 boys from the slums of Rio so they would ‘go to Heaven’.

  Amillion people live in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The most notorious ghetto is Rocinha, which sprawls down the hillside and overlooks the elegant high-rises of Sao Conrado and some of Brazil’s most spectacular beaches. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the disparity between the haves and have-nots more striking than here, and there is no more potent reminder of that imbalance than the thousands of homeless kids who constantly roam its streets.

  Rocinha has an estimated population of 150,000. Armies of children maraud their way through its labyrinthine alleyways, and youngsters die in the shantytown in such numbers that Brazil has been compared to a country at war. Between December 1987 and November 2001, 3,937 children died violent deaths – the majority were victims of an ever-escalating drug war that had been raging in the slums since the cocaine trade took hold there in the early 1980s. Employed as ‘soldiers’ by drug lords to protect and expand their turf, armed teenagers murder each other in pitch battles and innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire almost every day.

  Those who don’t run drugs are forced to survive any other way they can. They scavenge for food, sell gum, polish shoes, beg, steal, mug people… and sometimes kill. Blamed for the spiralling crime rate, and for making Rio one of the murder capitals of the world, the children elicit very little sympathy from the citizens of Rio. Universally despised, they are routinely beaten, abused and attacked.

  The situation was made even worse in the 1990s, when they were regularly being picked off by roving extermination squads, made up primarily of off-duty policeman and security guards. These squads were on the payroll of normally law-abiding citizens, and their mission was to clean up the streets. In 1991, at least four children were being executed every single day on average.

  For a murderer, especially one with a liking for young boys, the conditions on Brazil’s streets at that time could not have been more ideal. Such was the daily death toll, the Brazilian authorities didn’t even notice that somebody else, acting on their own, was slaughtering young boys in the slums just for fun.

  For Marcelo Costa de Andrade, who had spent almost his entire life on the streets, it wasn’t difficult to blend in and lure children away from prying eyes to abandoned spots and their slaughter. The children from the Rio slums were wary of the dangers that constantly surrounded them, but De Andrade seemed to be one of the few adults they could trust, with his harmless appearance, a gentle manner and a soft, childlike way of speaking.

  The 23-year-old lived with his mother, regularly attended church, had a normal job and made constant allusions to his faith in God when talking to children. Having grown up poor in the Rocinha slum, his childhood was in many ways the same as that of the street kids: no food on the table, no running water, constant abuse and hardly any school. De Andrade spent most of his time on the street hustling, and was just ten when he ran away from home for the first time. At 14, he started selling himself to adults for sex.

  On the rare occasions he was at home, De Andrade was beaten senseless by both his step-parents and was sexually abused. At 16, he moved in with an older man, but when he was thrown out he went to live with his mother in another nearby Rio slum. Aged 17, he tried to rape his ten-year-old brother and started listening obsessively to tapes he had made of his brother crying.

  But it was only after he had left hustling for good and was attending church regularly with his mother that his killing spree began. According to De Andrade, it was an encounter with a young transvestite that was the trigger. And once he’d begun there was no stopping him.

  ‘One day when I was walking I met a 14-year-old boy. A transvestite,’ De Andrade recalled in an interview with Epoca magazine in 2003. ‘He propositioned me to go to a hotel with him. I had sex with him and kissed him on the mouth. I paid him 50 Reais [£12]. I never got to see him again. But it sparked the desire for new boys. As I didn’t find another one like him I ended up forcing myself on others. I always took them to a deserted spot.

  ‘The sadism went to my head. I ended up killing some of them… I do not remember their faces very well. The first one I caught was in Niterói. I only know that his name was Anderson. I offered him money. I said he could help me light candles in the church. I took him to a deserted place. When we got there I raped him. I then strangled him with his own shirt. I returned to the spot where the body was three times, to see if anyone had discovered anything. Nobody ever suspected me.’

  De Andrade went on to murder 13 other street kids, following the same pattern as the first. He lured them with sweets and money to secluded spots, raped them, strangled them or beat them to death and had sex with their corpses. He then buried them in shallow graves.

  De Andrade targeted the ‘prettiest boys’ he could find, always hunting for ‘smooth legs, and a pretty face and body’ and later declared that he had k
illed them so they would ‘go to Heaven’. (He also removed his victims’ shorts and kept them as trophies.) In two instances, he drank his victims’ blood. After sexually abusing them, often for an entire night, he would crack their heads open and collect the blood in a bowl to drink – allegedly so that he would be ‘as young and cute as them’. The majority of his victims were found in the Niterói, just outside the capital of Rio across Guanabara Bay, and as this was the site of his first victim it earned Andrade the nickname in Brazil of ‘the Vampire of Rio’.

  But there was also a religious motive for his murders. The church De Andrade attended was the controversial Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Founded by Edir Macedo, a state-lottery employee turned American-style evangelist, it is the fastest-growing religion in Brazil and now has branches in 172 countries. From its beginnings in 1977, the church has often received fierce criticism from more established religious groups. Part of the criticism levelled against it has been the emphasis on the payment of tithes. These can often constitute upwards of 10% of a congregation member’s income, an amount that many believers are quite happy to pay in the belief that this money will be paid back in full and with interest – not on the Day of Reckoning, but in the church member’s lifetime. The church has particular appeal among the impoverished who, of course, take comfort from its message of guaranteed future remuneration.

  In fact, De Andrade seemed far more interested in another aspect of the church – namely the casting out of demons, something that happens quite regularly during services in the Church of the Kingdom of God. As well as offering protection from voodoo and witchcraft, the church claims that ‘demons’ are responsible for people’s problems (including homosexuality, which is viewed by the church as a disease). De Andrade’s church would cast out these ‘demons’, and to this day the murderer claims he was possessed by evil spirits who forced him to kill because ‘they like children’s blood’.

  In the midst of his killing spree, the devout De Andrade still attended church four times a week, for up to five hours at a time. He later declared that a priest had told him that boys who died under the age of 13 automatically went to heaven. He misunderstood the priest’s message, he claimed, interpreting it as meaning that by killing the boys he was not only ending their awful existence in the slums but also ensuring them a one-way ticket to paradise. It was for this reason that De Andrade never targeted girls. Girls, he claimed, were different from boys because they didn’t go to heaven – and, of course, boys were ‘prettier’.

  Dr Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist and well-known serial-killer profiler, went to interview De Andrade in Brazil in November 2001. Dr Morrison interviews murderers for hours and hours at a time, believing that they are only able to copy normal behaviour until the mask cracks. She believes that serial killers are born, not made, and are genetically prone to kill. Morrison has interviewed at least 80 serial killers during her career, including John Wayne Gacy, the convicted killer of 33 young men and boys. (In fact, Morrison actually took possession of John Wayne Gacy’s brain after he was executed and donated his body to science. She keeps it in the basement of her house.)

  She recounts the experience of her interviews with De Andrade in her fascinating book My Life Amongst The Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of The World’s Most Notorious Murderers. Through an interpreter, De Andrade reiterated to Dr Morrison his claim that he had been doing his victims a favour by killing them. ‘The children have bad lives here,’ he told her. ‘If they are children when they die, they go to heaven. A better place.’

  But De Andrade went much further than gently sending them on their way. After raping and killing 11-year-old Odair Jose Muniz, whom he had met near a football pitch, he returned later in the night with a machete, which he told his mother he was taking to cut some bananas. Back at the scene of the crime, he hacked the boy’s head off. ‘Why?’ asked Morrison. In order, De Andrade told her, that the other children in heaven would make fun of him because he wouldn’t have a head. After all, the kids used to make fun of him at school.

  De Andrade’s killing spree was prolific but mercifully short-lived. On 11 December 1991, brothers Altair (aged ten) and Ivan Abreu (aged six) were picked up by De Andrade, who offered them $20 if they both accompanied him while he lit candles in a nearby church. The boys readily agreed. But as soon as they were away from public view, De Andrade turned on Altair and made to kiss him. Altair tried to run, but his molester was too quick for him, grabbing the boy and throwing him to the ground.

  Then he turned his attention to Ivan and started strangling him. ‘I was so paralysed by fear I could not run away,’ Altair later recalled. ‘I watched in horror, tears streaming down my cheeks, as he killed and then raped my brother.’

  When it was all over, De Andrade moved towards Altair, opening his arms wide. According to Morrison, the terrified boy could smell his dead brother all over De Andrade’s clothes and was convinced the monster looming above him was going to kill him. Instead, De Andrade embraced him. ‘I have sent Ivan to heaven,’ the killer told him. ‘I love you.’

  Too terrified to try to make a run for it, Altair agreed to spend the night with De Andrade, sleeping rough in the bushes behind a petrol station. The next morning, De Andrade even took the boy to work with him in the tourist district of Copacabana, where he handed out fliers for a jewellery shop. However, Altair managed to escape and find his way home. He told his mother what had happened and a warrant was issued for De Andrade’s arrest.

  In the meantime, the killer, who often revisited the scene of his crimes and left trays of food and other offerings to his victims, had returned to Ivan’s corpse to tuck the tiny boy’s hands into his pockets so the rats wouldn’t chew on his fingers.

  Instead of making a run for it, De Andrade carried on as if nothing had happened, and was arrested at work in Copacabana. Initially, he confessed to only the murder of Ivan, but, when his mother was called in for questioning two months later, she reluctantly told police that her son had once asked for the use of her machete and had come back the next morning with it smeared in blood.

  De Andrade finally confessed to 13 other murders and led police to the burial sites. Found insane by psychiatrists on 26 April 1993, he was formally declared to be mad and incapable of understanding his acts by a judge two months later and placed in a psychiatric hospital in Rio. He is evaluated annually; each year since then, he has been declared insane.

  I managed to track down Ilana Casoy, a well-known expert on Brazilian serial killers, to ask her about De Andrade, whom she had met and interviewed in the Henrique Roxo hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Casoy found herself in the media spotlight a few years ago for her work as a profiler in the investigation into another famous Brazilian murderer, Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito otherwise known as ‘Chagas’, who is believed to have killed a number of young boys over a 12-year period in the Brazilian states of Para and Maranhao. Casoy and her profiling team were able to help lead police to Chagas, a 42-year-old bicycle mechanic. When the police interviewed him, he confessed to a slew of further murders and when the authorities searched his home they found the remains of two bodies buried under the floor of his shack and the remains of another young boy buried in the jungle near his home. In fact, Chagas has superseded De Andrade in the annals of Brazilian crime as the most prolific serial killer in its history. Although he has only been formally convicted of one murder, he faces further charges in the future for the disappearances and murder of 40 boys, some of whom he is believed to have castrated and decapitated in a satanic-style ritual. In 2004, Chagas told an interviewer from the BBC that he had killed them because ‘Something was guiding me, directing me. It was like a voice in my head. And it was that thing – the voice – that determined what happened.

  ‘Sometimes I’m revolted by what I did but you must understand that something was using me to do this. Good people will understand that.’

  In some ways, De Andrade was not so different to Chagas, in that he be
lieved that by killing young boys he was in some ways being manipulated by a force that was higher than himself, a force that he was helpless to control.

  ‘Many serial killers in Brazil kill children, but each one has their own way of doing it,’ Casoy told me. ‘Each one of them has his own fantasies and symbolism, his own ritual way of killing someone. But my meeting with De Andrade was different to my meetings with other killers like Chagas, in many ways, because by meeting De Andrade I could really understand what it is to be an insane person. De Andrade has this mental illness and you get the feeling he doesn’t know the true scale of what he did, the difference between right and wrong. There is no cure. Nobody knows what treatment he should receive, so they give him drugs to keep him under control, and that’s about all they can do.’

  In her chapter on De Andrade in Serial Killers Made in Brazil, Casoy changed the names of his victims to biblical names, so the mothers who read it would never know which child was their own. Casoy has interviewed and met some of Brazil’s worst killers and helped investigate their crimes, but what was it like to meet someone like De Andrade, a monster who had shown such terrible and sickening cruelty to innocent children? Her encounter with De Andrade is something Casoy says she will never forget. ‘Meeting someone like Marcelo Costa de Andrade is very hard for any human being. I was sick in bed for four days after I talked to him. He is like a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. Look at him and you would never for a single second imagine what he is capable of doing with children.’

  De Andrade even played a sick joke on the veteran profiler. ‘As soon as he told me that he took the shorts off every child he killed and kept them as trophies he asked me to bring him a gift – a pair of new shorts,’ she said. ‘I’d never give them to him. I hope he stays in the lunatic asylum for his entire life.’

  Unbelievable as it may sound, despite the fact that De Andrade was known to be a merciless killer of children and would in all likelihood kill again if he ever got the chance, security in the first mental institution he was placed in was so lax that he managed to walk out though the front door. In January 1997, a guard accidentally left a door open; De Andrade absconded and was on the run for 12 days straight. The press went ballistic while police held their breath and prayed that he wouldn’t get his hands on another child.