Isabel Cristina de Sousa Isidoro was seventeen. She lived at Cabecinha de Rei with her parents and four brothers and sisters, one of them her twin, had left school, and was working in a restaurant. On the morning of May 24, 2005 a neighbor she had known since she was a child slowed his car beside her and offered her a lift.
He was Antonio Luis Costa, born at Santa Comba Dao in 1953, and for twenty-five years a corporal in the Guarda Nacional Republicana in the town where he was born. He had retired at the end of 2004. He was well regarded there, a man with a house at Cabecinha de Rei and a name for church work and local associations, and everyone called him Cabo Costa, Corporal Costa.
What the court found was that they had sex, that Isabel threatened to report him for rape, and that he beat her. He put her in a sackcloth bag, drove sixty miles to the coast at Figueira da Foz and threw her into the Atlantic. A fisherman found her near Cabedelo beach on May 31, a week later, still in the bag.
The autopsy established that she had been alive when she went into the water. She drowned. It is the reason the court later acquitted him of concealing her body: you cannot conceal a corpse that is not yet one.
Nobody knew who she was. She was buried in the unknown section of the cemetery at Figueira da Foz and was not identified for a year.
Mariana Lourenco was eighteen and the only one of the three in higher education, studying accountancy at the technology and management school at Oliveira do Hospital. Her father was dead and she lived with an aunt and uncle at Catraia, on the edge of Santa Comba Dao. She disappeared on October 14, 2005.
Joana Oliveira was nineteen, and Isabel's cousin and neighbor. On May 8, 2006 he asked her for a kiss, she refused and said she would tell, and she fought him: she threw her school bag into his face, and she scratched his arms and his neck.
Six weeks later the Policia Judiciaria spent three days searching his house, an apartment he owned at Figueira da Foz and his car, where traces of Joana's blood were found in the trunk, and on June 24, 2006 they arrested him.
He confessed to all three killings, to the police and then to the investigating judge, and took investigators to the places he had left the bodies. Mariana was recovered from the Raiva dam in June 2006, mutilated. Joana was found under a bridge at the Aguieira dam, on his directions.
The confession came from a question. The deputy national director of the judicial police, Almeida Rodrigues, asked him whether he wanted to be remembered as a serial killer or as a good man who had committed these crimes during a period of illness. Costa answered at once: as a good man, who at a certain point had a breakdown.
Then he retracted it. By the trial he was pleading not guilty and telling the court, as he had already told reporters, that the real killer was an uncle of Mariana's. The two detectives who had taken the confession, Vitalino Domingues and Manuel Sineiro, denied threatening or coercing him, and Domingues pointed out that he had said nothing of the kind in the telephone calls he made to his family. His telephone had been tapped, and other accounts go further and say he was recorded confessing the killings to his family.
The trial opened on July 4, 2007. He said nothing in court except at the first and last sessions. The charges were three murders, three counts of concealing a body, one of desecration for undressing a body, two of attempted sexual coercion, and calumnious denunciation for accusing Mariana's uncle. The defense ran insanity, and two psychiatric examinations found him fit to stand trial. His lawyers argued that he had been treated as a guilty psychopath from the start, that witnesses had discussed the case among themselves, and that others had not been investigated enough. The prosecution asked for twenty-five years and said it asked for no more only because the law allowed no more. The prosecution put the motive as sexual impulse, and the judicial police added a second element: the preservation of his standing as a religious and respectable man.
On July 31, 2007 the court convicted him of everything charged except the concealment of Isabel Isidoro's body, and imposed terms totalling sixty-four years and six months. That is not a sentence a Portuguese court can give. Portugal abolished life imprisonment in 1884 and caps imprisonment at twenty-five years, so twenty-five years is what he received. His lawyers said they would appeal. The case set off a public argument in Portugal over whether the twenty-five-year cap should stand.
The term has been running since his arrest. Parole was refused on June 18, 2020, and a request for temporary leave was turned down that year. On May 31, 2021, aged sixty-eight, he had his first temporary release, three days at a hostel in the Evora area, well away from Santa Comba Dao. On August 31, 2026 the Diário de Viseu, citing the broadcaster SIC, reported that he could be freed in April 2027, which is the five-sixths point rather than the full term.
That will be a little under twenty-one years served, for three killings, and he will be seventy-three or seventy-four when he walks out.