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The World's Most Bizarre Murders. James Marrison
Читать онлайн.Название The World's Most Bizarre Murders
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586982
Автор произведения James Marrison
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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 believed 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.
Thankfully, there were no reports of children found dead and drained of their blood during the time of his escape and frantic police finally managed to track him down to the town of Guaraciaba do Norte in the north-eastern state of Ceara. When he was picked up, De Andrade was carrying a Bible, having managed to hitchhike his way for more than 3,000km to visit his father. He was on his way to the Holy Land, he told police. Still clearly deranged, he also told police that by killing the children he was now purified and so had not felt the urge to kill again.
De Andrade now resides in the high-security wing of Henrique Roxo hospital. He still claims to be an evangelist and expresses his hope that one day he will be back on the streets. All he needs, he says, is the love of a good woman to keep him on the straight and narrow. He asks God to light the way. But, according to Casoy, his so-called religious convictions are a lie and always have been. ‘De Andrade is not a religious guy and he never was,’ she told me vehemently. ‘He just heard a priest who said that a child under 13 years old goes straight to paradise if he dies without sins. He chose to believe it literally.’
As one of Brazil’s sickest criminals, De Andrade relishes his moments in the spotlight and has been known to demand Hollywood-level fees for interviews. ‘The Vampire of Rio even phoned up Dr Morrison in her hotel room in Sao Paulo in 2001 and demanded $10,000 for an interview, a request Morrison flatly refused.’
According to Casoy, now that De Andrade’s fame is fading, and his exploits have been outdone, he loves talking with anyone who simply pays him attention. His mother is the only relative who visits him, and that’s only once a year. He shows absolutely no remorse for his sickening crimes. ‘His mind is more or less the same as that of a 12-year-old,’ says Casoy. ‘He dreams of going to Disneyland or Moscow, winning a million dollars and having plastic surgery on his face so he would never be recognised by anyone. He never feels bad about what did, just worried that it screwed up his life. He wasn’t happy telling me what he did, but he wasn’t exactly all that sad about it either. It’s something that doesn’t make any difference to him either way.
‘He believes he was utterly tender to the children he killed and saved them from hell. He doesn’t know it was really wrong or awful. He told me all of it as if he was talking about simple everyday things, but with specific and cruel details, and the tone in his voice never changed – it never changed for a single moment.’
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