Marcelo Andrade

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Marcelo Costa de Andrade (born January 2, 1967 in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil ) is Brazil's most famous serial killer. He confessed to 14 murders of boys aged six to 13 whom he raped and killed over a period of nine months in 1991.

Childhood and youth

Marcelo Costa de Andrade grew up as the son of poor migrants from the northeast in the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro without running water. He was regularly beaten up by his grandfather, stepfather, and stepmother, and was sexually assaulted when he was 10 years old. At the age of 14, he sold his body to survive, after which he was sent to a reformatory , from which he was able to escape.

At the age of 16 he entered into a homosexual relationship with an older man, but this did not prevent him from continuing to work. Andrade left the slum and lived with his partner. At the age of 17, he tried to rape his 10-year-old brother. While Andrade lived with his partner, the family left the Rocinha slum and moved to Itaboraí , another slum on the other side of the heavily polluted Guanabara Bay .

At the age of 23, his relationship broke up and Andrade moved back to live with his mother and brothers in Itaborai, where he found a low-paying job distributing leaflets in Copacabana . He also entered the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God , where his views were heavily influenced by a priest's sermons. Andrade went to church four times a week. Until April 1991, except for a few oddities and his strange and incoherent laugh, his life seemed normal.

Murders

In April 1991, Andrade began killing. His chosen victims were all poor street children whom he led into remote areas, raped and strangled. In some cases he would molest the corpses, crush the skull of a victim, behead another victim and in two cases drank the blood of the victims, which earned him the nickname 'Vampiro de Niterói' (in English: Vampire of Niterói). He later testified that he drank the victims' blood "to be as beautiful as they (the victims)" .

Since the murder rate in the slums of Brazil is already very high, the increasing number of missing street children was not noticed and nobody thought that this could be the craft of a brutal serial killer. Andrade said in an interrogation that he "preferred young children because they are prettier and have softer skin" . He was also convinced by the sermons of the priest of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God that "boys who die before their thirteenth birthday automatically go to heaven and I have done them a favor" .

Overpass

His series of murders ended in December 1991 because Andrade fell in love with ten-year-old Altair de Abreu and spared him. Andrade met the young beggar and his six-year-old brother Ivan at the bus station in Niterói and offered the two children money if they would help him light candles in Saint Georges Church. Altair de Abreu later told the police that they were passing a vacant lot on their way to the church when Andrade suddenly turned around, strangled Ivan in front of his brother and then raped him. Altair, paralyzed with fear , was unable to run away. After Andrade killed and raped Ivan, he turned to Altair, hugged him, and told him he loved him. Fearing to death, Altair agreed to spend his life with Andrade.

After a night together in the bush, Andrade took his new 'partner' with him to work on Copacabana. When they got there, however, the shop was closed and Altair managed to escape. It is not entirely clear where he fled, either to the police or to his mother, whom he told that he had 'lost' his brother and didn't come out with the truth until a few days later because his sister put him under pressure.

Andrade, who had meanwhile returned to his daily routine, was arrested without much resistance for the murder of Ivan de Abreu while he was going about his job. The police initially assumed that the murder of Ivan de Abreu was an isolated incident. Two months after Andrade's arrest, his stepmother was summoned to testify about her stepson's behavior. Andrade's stepmother said that her stepson, for example , left the house with a machete one night to “cut bananas”, but came home the next day without bananas.

Andrade confessed to the murders of 14 boys between the ages of six and 13 and led the police to find the remains of the victims. During his interrogation, he later said that he only killed the boys because he liked them and did not want them to go to hell .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Marrison: The World's Most Bizarre Murders . John Blake, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-84454-667-1 , pp. 20 ff .