Cassimiro was born in 1965. By 1995 he was serving eleven years and ten months in Juiz de Fora, in Minas Gerais, on six convictions for robbery. The prison director described him as a model prisoner, and on that basis he was granted judicial permission to spend the Corpus Christi holiday at home.
He killed Zilda Araujo Barbuth, seventy-six, on June 19, 1995, less than five hours after walking out. By his own account she woke when he knocked over a clock radio, and he tied and gagged her to the bed, raped her, and strangled her. Before leaving he went to the kitchen and ate a piece of guava paste. He then returned to the prison, and two months later was released. Brazilian reporting called him o Estrangulador de Juiz de Fora, the Strangler of Juiz de Fora.
Four more women died: five in all, aged between fifty-eight and seventy-seven, every one of them living alone. He posed as a car washer and spent days watching a woman's routine before going in. He tied them to their beds and gagged them, strangled them with flex pulled from household appliances, and raped them; acts of necrophilia were also established.
He was arrested on May 29, 1996, aged thirty-one. He was caught by a bank card: he had left one belonging to a victim under his bed, his sister found it, she mentioned it to a friend, and the friend told the civil police.
He said afterwards that he had gone in to rob the houses and ended up killing, that at the time he had felt hatred towards the old women, and that he now felt nothing.
The sentence needs care. The accessible sources say life imprisonment, and Brazilian law does not allow it: the constitution prohibits perpetual sentences, and although terms are cumulative, the time that can actually be served was capped at thirty years when he was sentenced. So a life sentence is a foreign gloss on a long cumulative term, and what has happened since is not recorded anywhere accessible. This entry keeps its re-check flag for that reason.
The prison leave is the fact to carry. A man serving twelve years for robbery was assessed as safe enough to go home for a religious holiday and killed a woman the same afternoon; the assessment that let him out was the same one that released him permanently two months later.