Diogo Alves was executed in Lisbon in February 1841 for a crime committed in a house in Rua das Flores, where four members of one family were killed in a single night by a gang of which he was the leader. That is the part of his story that a court established. The part that made him famous, and that still carries his name in Portugal nearly two centuries later, rests on no verdict at all. Between 1836 and 1839 a run of deaths at the Águas Livres aqueduct, the great stone water channel that crosses the Alcântara valley on the western side of the city, was first taken for a wave of suicides and then, as the count rose, for the work of a criminal. The authorities closed the path across the aqueduct. Popular memory, the pamphlets printed in the year of his execution and the newspapers and writers who came after them laid those deaths at Alves's door. No investigation was opened into them, the Diário de Notícias wrote in 2018, and he was never charged with any of them.
The gap between those two stories is the heart of the case. Accounts of how many people died at the aqueduct range from about twenty to more than a hundred, and the scholars who have looked hardest at the record say the true figure cannot be known. What can be set out is how a servant from a Galician village came to lead a gang in Lisbon, what the courts did with him, and how his name passed from the court record into legend.
Alves was born in 1810 in Santa Gertrudes de Samos, a parish in the municipality of Samos in Lugo province, in the interior of Galicia, according to the Galician edition of the Spanish newspaper Público and the Spanish site Xataka. His parents were peasants of modest means. He left home at about thirteen to look for work in Portugal, Público and the Brazilian scholar Nilce Camila de Carvalho both report.
In Lisbon he found work in wealthy houses. Xataka, drawing on the Portuguese writer José Viale Moutinho and the historian and novelist Anabela Natário, names among his employers the households of the marquises of Penalva and of Castelo Melhor, where he worked first as a stable hand and later as a coachman. Público describes the same course, from the stables to the coachman's seat. The popular works that Carvalho studied describe him as a boleeiro, a coachman, who was in demand in his trade and who was, before his decline, an honest and good employee. He was known by a nickname, o Pancada, that all of these accounts repeat.
The decline, as the same sources tell it, came through drink and the gaming tables. Carvalho writes that the popular works blame his taverns and his gambling for the dismissal by his last employer, after which he could not find work again. Público adds that he cut his ties with his family and that an aggressive episode with that last employer closed the doors of the city's wealthy families and merchants to him. Xataka gives the date and the name: in 1836, at the age of 26, he was dismissed by Dr. João Tomás de Carvalho. From that point, by every account, he lived by theft.
The Aqueduto das Águas Livres was the most ambitious public work of eighteenth-century Lisbon. Built under King João V to bring water into the city, it was in operation from 1748, Carvalho writes. Where it crosses the Alcântara valley its arches rise to about 65 metres, by the figure Público and Correio da Manhã give. A public path ran along the top of the structure, and for people living on the western side of the valley it was the shortest way home from the markets of the city.
The people who used it in the evening were, in the accounts Carvalho studied, mostly small traders and farmers returning from Lisbon with the day's takings. Atlas Obscura, summarizing the same tradition, describes farmers coming back from the city at night. Correio da Manhã reported in 2017 that Alves had obtained a false key to the aqueduct's doors.
From 1836, the deaths began. Carvalho dates the crimes attributed to Alves at the aqueduct to the years 1836 to 1839; Público and Xataka give the same span. The authorities at first took the deaths for suicides, Carvalho writes, and Correio da Manhã reported that it took many deaths before they were recognized as the work of one criminal. The Diário de Notícias wrote that deaths in the Alcântara valley rose alarmingly in 1837. As suspicion grew, the authorities closed the path across the aqueduct to the public. The Diário de Notícias puts the closing in 1837 and says the path stayed shut for several decades; Público says the closing ended the gang's activity there.
The popular works also give the aqueduct deaths a much shorter span than the historians do. In those works, Carvalho notes, the killings lasted about six months, and the number of victims could not be established because there was no real police investigation. Two stories that circulate with the case, an anecdote about a man called the Carioca and an attack on a servant of the Infanta, she treats as folklore; it is not known, she writes, whether the second ever happened.
No figure for the aqueduct deaths comes from a court, an inquest or any official count. The figures that circulate come from tradition and from the press.
The Diário de Notícias, in 2018, wrote of more than seventy killings. Ripley's, in a 2018 piece by Colton Kruse, and Atlas Obscura give seventy over three years. Público reports that popular accounts put the total at between seventy and a hundred, and adds that the authorities never proved the number. Correio da Manhã, in 2017, wrote of more than a hundred deaths over three years.
The writers who have worked from the sources are far more cautious. Anabela Natário, whose novel O Assassino do Aqueduto appeared in 2014, considers the figure of seventy exaggerated and puts the number at about twenty, Xataka reports. José Viale Moutinho, who wrote the preface to an edition of Os Crimes de Diogo Alves, says the exact number will never be known. Carvalho, writing in the Brazilian folklore journal Boitatá in 2014, describes the figure of "at least seventy victims," which she found in a 2012 issue of Time Out, as "very probably false and imprecise." Público's own conclusion is blunt: it is impossible to know how many crimes he was truly responsible for.
The pamphlets of the nineteenth century give Alves a companion and, in their telling, an instigator: Gertrudes Maria, known as a Parreirinha, who kept a tavern. Carvalho writes that he met her in Águas Boas; Xataka places her tavern in Palhavã, in Lisbon. The pamphlets blame her for his fall, and the public and the press of the day did the same, Público reports, though it is unclear how much of that is true. Carvalho reads the blame as a product of the prejudices of the period about women; the same pamphlets that call her the instigator describe her with the words monstro and fera.
By the late 1830s, when the aqueduct path was closed, Alves was at the head of a gang. Carvalho lists its members as the popular works name them: Manuel Joaquim da Silva, a soldier, known as Beiço Rachado; João das Pedras, a Galician, known as o Enterrador; José Cândido Coelho, a Galician, known as Pé de Dança; António Palhares, a soldier; António Martins, a shop assistant and a Galician; José Manuel Lopes, a Galician who worked as a toll guard; Cosme de Araújo, a Galician; and Gertrudes Maria herself. The Diário de Notícias says the gang was his own and that he had formed it by 1836; Público and Xataka say he formed it after his dismissal from service and turned it, after the aqueduct was closed, against the kind of wealthy houses in which he had once worked.
The crime that ended the gang was a raid on a house in Rua das Flores, in the centre of Lisbon. The popular works place it at the house of a Dr. Andrade, Carvalho writes, after the path across the aqueduct had been closed. Público describes it as an assault on the home of a Lisbon doctor in which the doctor's family was killed; Xataka calls the victims a prominent Lisbon physician and his family.
Carvalho, working from the pamphlets, gives the victims as a widow, her two daughters and her son, José Elias Correia Mourão, a student at Coimbra who was visiting the house. The pamphlets never give the names of the women, she notes. The gang, by the same account, had the help of a servant of the house, Manuel Alves, who later repented and was himself killed. That death, like the aqueduct deaths, comes to us only from the pamphlets; no court finding on it is reported in the sources.
The pamphlets also place a child at the house that night: a daughter of Gertrudes Maria, a girl of ten or eleven. Her testimony, Xataka reports, proved decisive at the trial.
Alves was arrested in 1839, according to Xataka. The Diário de Notícias says he was handed over to the authorities by a member of his own group. A few months after the aqueduct was closed, Público writes, several members of the gang, Alves among them, were arrested after the Rua das Flores killings.
One document from the case survives in the public catalogue of the archive of Portugal's Procuradoria-Geral da República, the office of the attorney general. It is a single-page letter dated June 22, 1840, from Fernando de Magalhães e Avelar, assistant to the Procurador-Geral da Coroa, to the Minister of Justice. It forwards a report from the interim royal prosecutor at the Relação de Lisboa that the agents of the public prosecution had shown all due diligence in moving forward the "processo crime de Diogo Alves e seus cúmplices," the criminal case against Diogo Alves and his accomplices, and it records a renewed instruction, under a ministry order of June 16, that the diligence continue. The letter does not name the accomplices or the victims. It shows the case was pressing enough by the summer of 1840 for the minister himself to be asking about its pace.
He was tried and sentenced in 1840, Xataka reports. Carvalho, summarizing the popular works, gives the outcome for the gang: Alves, António Martins, António Palhares and Beiço Rachado were sentenced to death, and the other members, with Gertrudes Maria, were sentenced to perpetual exile in Portugal's African colonies. The sources consulted give no date for the verdict and no record of an appeal.
None of the accounts says that the aqueduct deaths formed part of the case. Carvalho states it plainly: Alves became famous for those crimes, but he was tried and sentenced for a different one.
Diogo Alves was executed in February 1841, on the same day as António Martins, Carvalho writes. The Diário de Notícias and Público place the execution at the Cais do Tojo; Público reports that crowds came to watch. The sources consulted do not agree on the exact day, and none of them reports what became of António Palhares and Beiço Rachado, the two other men sentenced to death.
After the execution, his head was given to the doctors of the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica, Lisbon's school of medicine and surgery, the Diário de Notícias reports. Xataka writes that the surgeon José Lourenço da Luz Gomes, an advocate of phrenology, had asked the authorities for it and that the request was granted. Ripley's and Atlas Obscura say it was kept so that his criminal tendencies could be studied. Público's expert, the anatomist António José Gonçalves Ferreira, says there is no evidence that any such study was ever carried out.
Alves is often described as the last person executed in Portugal. The Diário de Notícias called him one of the last. Público reports that his head was sent to the medical school to be remembered as the last case of the death penalty in the country, and in the same article notes that official records show other executions followed. Carvalho points to one of them: the historian Leite Bastos records that Francisco de Matos Lobo was executed in Lagos in 1846, and she suggests the claim about Alves came from oral tradition. Matos Lobo appears in the Alves story in another way too: one of the pamphlets printed in 1841 is an imagined conversation in the night between Matos Lobo and Alves's ghost, and Xataka reports that da Luz Gomes kept Matos Lobo's skull as well as Alves's head.
The legend began within weeks of the execution. Carvalho identifies three works printed in 1841. Vida, e Morte de Diogo Alves, by Francisco António Martins Bastos, is a moral tale of a disordered way of life and an unhappy end. O Supplicio de Diogo Alves, by António Manuel Terras, is a funeral song in verse on the death penalty and his last moments. Conversação Nocturna, signed with the initials A. J. P., is the dialogue between Matos Lobo and Alves's ghost, written in a looser and more popular language.
These works, and the pamphlets that followed them into the twentieth century, gave the case its vocabulary. Carvalho finds Alves called a facínora, a villain, in a pamphlet of 1922, and a famigerado assassino, a murderer of ill repute, in another; it is Gertrudes Maria who is called monstro and fera. The pamphlets, Carvalho argues, mostly served a moralizing purpose, and they explain an unsolved run of deaths through the figure of a single bandit. The aqueduct story, in her reading, is a popular legend; the supernatural explanations that once circulated for the deaths were a way of explaining a mystery that no one had solved.
Alves's story was among the first that Portuguese cinema told. Carvalho records an unfinished film by Lino Correia in 1909 and a short film, Os Crimes de Diogo Alves, by João Tavares in 1911, which shows the gang at work and Alves celebrating afterwards. Público describes the 1911 short as the second Portuguese fiction film, premiered with live voice actors and an orchestra. Xataka dates the film to 1909. The film includes a scene, repeated in later retellings, in which Alves is moved by a child at the aqueduct and regrets her death; Carvalho finds no trace of it in the pamphlets and describes it as oral tradition, a device that humanizes the bandit. Público calls the same story an unconfirmed legend.
The novels and popular histories kept coming. Natário's O Assassino do Aqueduto appeared in 2014, and the Viale Moutinho edition of Os Crimes de Diogo Alves kept the pamphlet tradition in print. Público's conclusion about the whole body of work is that it is difficult to separate reality from fiction in Alves's life.
The head that the medical school received in 1841 passed from the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica to the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, where it is held today, the Diário de Notícias and Xataka report. Atlas Obscura says it is kept in the faculty's anatomical theatre, in a part of the university that is open only to students and not usually to the public. The label, Xataka reports, says that it is "possibly" Diogo Alves; Viale Moutinho is convinced of the identification, and Natário is less certain. Público adds that several skulls at the faculty's Institute of Anatomy probably belonged to members of the gang, but that the records that would identify them have been lost.
It has been shown in public several times: at the University of Coimbra, at the Assembleia da República and at a Ministry of Justice exhibition marking 150 years since Portugal abolished the death penalty, Público reports, and in 2004 at the National Museum of Ancient Art, according to Xataka. In May 2017 an article on Atlas Obscura sent the story around the world again; Correio da Manhã reported that it was shared widely online and picked up by Wired, and described Alves, as the Portuguese press still does, as the first serial killer in Portugal.
The aqueduct deaths. No court tried them, and the Diário de Notícias reports that no investigation was opened. Every attribution of those deaths to Alves rests on tradition, the pamphlets and later writers. The number is unknown; the estimates run from about twenty (Natário) to more than a hundred (Correio da Manhã).
The span. The historians and the newspapers give 1836 to 1839; the popular works, Carvalho notes, give about six months. The Diário de Notícias dates the closing of the path to 1837.
The Rua das Flores victims. The victims' names and number come from the 1841 pamphlets as summarized by Carvalho (a widow, two daughters and a son, José Elias Correia Mourão). Público and Xataka describe the victims only as a doctor's family; Xataka says the doctor himself was among the dead. The sources consulted give no date for the killings beyond placing them after the closing of the aqueduct path and before the arrests of 1839.
The servant. The death of the household servant Manuel Alves, who helped the gang and later repented, is reported only in the pamphlets.
The sentences. The four death sentences and the sentences of exile come from the popular works as Carvalho summarizes them. The June 1840 letter in the attorney general's archive confirms that a criminal case against Alves and his accomplices was before the Relação de Lisboa but does not name them.
The execution. The sources give February 1841 and the Cais do Tojo; none gives a day that the others confirm. The fate of Palhares and Beiço Rachado is not reported.
The film. Carvalho and Público date Os Crimes de Diogo Alves to 1911; Xataka dates it to 1909. Carvalho records a separate, unfinished film by Lino Correia in 1909, which may account for the difference.
The head. The faculty's own label says "possibly"; the identification is accepted by Viale Moutinho and doubted by Natário.
1748: The Águas Livres aqueduct is in operation (Carvalho).
1810: Diogo Alves is born in Santa Gertrudes de Samos, Lugo, Galicia (Público; Xataka).
About 1823: Leaves home at about 13 for Portugal (Público; Carvalho).
1836: Dismissed from service by Dr. João Tomás de Carvalho, at 26 (Xataka). The deaths attributed to him at the aqueduct begin (Carvalho; Público; Xataka).
1837: Deaths in the Alcântara valley rise sharply; the path across the aqueduct is closed (Diário de Notícias).
1836 to 1839: The span of the deaths attributed to him at the aqueduct (Carvalho; Público; Xataka).
1839: Arrested with members of his gang after the Rua das Flores killings (Xataka; Público).
June 16, 1840: A ministry order calls for diligence in the criminal case against Diogo Alves and his accomplices (Procuradoria-Geral da República archive).
June 22, 1840: Letter from the assistant to the Procurador-Geral da Coroa to the Minister of Justice on the progress of the case at the Relação de Lisboa (Procuradoria-Geral da República archive).
1840: Tried and sentenced to death (Xataka).
February 1841: Executed at the Cais do Tojo, Lisbon, on the same day as António Martins (Diário de Notícias; Público; Carvalho).
1841: Three pamphlets on his life and death are printed (Carvalho).
1846: Francisco de Matos Lobo is executed in Lagos, by the account of Leite Bastos (Carvalho).
1909: An unfinished film on the case by Lino Correia (Carvalho).
1911: Os Crimes de Diogo Alves, by João Tavares, is released (Carvalho; Público).
2004: His head is shown at the National Museum of Ancient Art (Xataka).
2014: Anabela Natário publishes O Assassino do Aqueduto (Xataka); Nilce Camila de Carvalho's study appears in Boitatá.
May 2017: Atlas Obscura's article on the head is shared widely (Correio da Manhã).