Zilda Araujo Barbuth was seventy-six and lived alone in Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, and on June 19, 1995, the man who killed her had been out of prison for less than five hours. André Luiz Cassimiro was serving eleven years and ten months on six robbery convictions. The prison director regarded him as a model prisoner, and on that basis he was granted judicial permission to spend the Corpus Christi holiday at home.
By his own later account, Barbuth woke when he knocked over a clock radio. He tied and gagged her to her bed, raped her and strangled her, then went to her kitchen and ate a piece of guava paste before he left. He went back to the prison when his leave ended. Two months later he was released.
Four more women died over the next eleven months, every one of them between fifty-eight and seventy-seven and living alone. Brazilian accounts name them as Odete Barbosa da Silva, sixty-two; Aldenira Mello, fifty-eight; Malvina Maria de Oliveira, seventy-seven; and Célia Nicolini de Farias, seventy-four, a widow. The names appear in those popular accounts rather than in any published court record.
Some of them knew him. According to the same accounts, Odete Barbosa da Silva had been in a relationship with him that ended in the middle of 1995, and she was found strangled in her home about six months later; the same source says elsewhere that she died a year and a half after Zilda Barbuth, which cannot be squared with his arrest eleven months after the first killing. He had never met Aldenira Mello. He met Malvina de Oliveira at a dance for older people, a baile da terceira idade, where they danced all night before she let him see her home. Her body was found three days later, her head crushed. Célia Nicolini de Farias was killed on May 13, 1996, and investigators believed she was raped after death.
He chose his victims by watching them. Posing as a man who washed cars, he spent days learning a woman's routine before he went in. "Until he got into the house he behaved like a petty thief," the police chief, José Márcio Carneiro, said. "Once inside, he turned into a psychopath." The women were tied to their beds and gagged, strangled with cords pulled from household appliances, and raped. Brazilian reporting called him o Estrangulador de Juiz de Fora, the Strangler of Juiz de Fora, and the city was afraid until the spring of 1996.
A bank card caught him. He had left one belonging to a victim under his bed; his sister found it and mentioned it to a friend, and the friend went to the civil police. He was arrested on May 29, 1996, at thirty-one.
"I went into their houses to rob them," he said afterward, "but I ended up killing them." In those moments, he said, he had felt hatred toward the women, and now he felt nothing.
He was convicted of the five murders, and the sentence is usually reported as life imprisonment. Brazilian law does not allow one: the constitution prohibits perpetual sentences, and while terms for separate crimes are added together, the time a prisoner could actually serve was capped at thirty years when he was sentenced. What happened to him after that is not publicly recorded. Not everyone accepted the case against him. In a 2018 essay in the Brazilian review Quatro Cinco Um, a writer said that the FBI profile of men who kill elderly women had left doubts about his guilt, and that on the principle of in dubio pro reo the writer would have acquitted him.
The prison leave is where the case turns. A man serving nearly twelve years for robbery was judged safe to go home for a religious holiday and killed a woman the same day, and the assessment that let him out for Corpus Christi was the one that released him for good two months later.