Edson Izidoro Guimarães was a nursing assistant at the Salgado Filho municipal hospital in Rio de Janeiro. He was arrested at the hospital before dawn on May 7, 1999, after the city's health department told police that deaths in his unit were rising on the shifts he worked. He was 42. The same day he told reporters that he was responsible for the deaths of five patients.
Juries of the III Tribunal do Júri of Rio de Janeiro twice convicted him of four counts of qualified homicide. The first jury, in February 2000, led to a sentence of 76 years. The state's Court of Justice cut it to 31 years and 8 months, a second jury raised it to 69 years, and the same appeals chamber cut it again to 31 years and 8 months, a ruling reported on August 14, 2002. The much larger figures attached to his name, from more than 100 deaths to 153, come from hospital statistics and police suspicion; no court ruled on any death beyond the four.
The Diário do Grande ABC described Guimarães in May 1999 as a former military police officer who had worked at the hospital for seven years. His early life and family are not on record.
He worked night shifts. When the Superior Court of Justice heard his first habeas corpus request in September 1999, the legal news service Consultor Jurídico summarized the accusation as the killing of patients during his night duty at the hospital.
The case began with a worker who was not a nurse. A cleaning worker in the unit told the hospital's management that she was worried about the number of deaths among the patients, the Diário do Grande ABC reported. In 2026 the Brasília news site Metrópoles recalled that colleagues as well as the cleaning worker had reported him, and that she said she had seen patients die soon after he treated them. The Municipal Health Secretariat took the matter to the police on the night of Thursday, May 6, 1999.
The figures the paper published that week were stark. From the start of January to May 4, 1999, the unit recorded 225 deaths, and 153 of them occurred during shifts worked by Guimarães. The municipal health secretary, Ronaldo Gazzola, said the unit averaged two deaths a day, and that on certain shifts, mainly his, the figure rose to eight.
Plainclothes police officers were placed among the staff of the unit. Guimarães was arrested in the early hours of Friday, May 7, without resistance. Prosecutors later told the Superior Court of Justice that the police had done no more than keep watch to test the suspicion that he was responsible for the deaths on his shift.
Guimarães spoke to reporters at the state's Public Security Secretariat after his arrest. He admitted that he was responsible for the deaths of five patients, the Diário do Grande ABC reported. At first he said he felt calm; later he said he regretted the five deaths. "I am rightly in prison," he said, in the paper's report. "I regret it, because I should not have taken anyone's life."
Marta Cavaliere, the police delegate in charge of the inquiry, said he had confessed, and that on the statistics the number of deaths was over one hundred. The state secretary for public security, Colonel Josias Quintal, said the case would be hard to prove.
By December 1999, reports said he had confessed to six killings in interviews with the press. He later told police that he had been pressured into confessing, and his lawyers said the same to the courts.
The question of money arose at once. Guimarães told reporters that it was common for hospital staff to tell funeral homes when a patient had died, though he denied having done so in the five cases he described. He said he had received between 80 and 100 reais for a natural death and between 800 and 1,000 reais when the dead person was a traffic accident victim. The police began to investigate whether he had been paid commissions for steering bereaved families to particular funeral homes.
Quintal joined the two explanations. "He may have started doing this to earn money and then lost control," he said. Gazzola denied that his department had been slow to notice the rise in deaths. "The act of a madman is unpredictable," he said.
The funeral-home motive stayed in the record. A 2001 report on his appeal said he had confessed at the time to causing the deaths of patients in order to receive commissions from funeral homes. In January 2026, when deaths in an intensive care unit in the Federal District brought his case back into the news, Metrópoles described the payments as part of a wider scheme involving funeral homes, with sums of roughly 100 to 1,000 reais per death, and said the case had led to administrative changes, inquiries in other states and compensation for victims' families.
Guimarães was held from the day of his arrest. His defense went to the Superior Court of Justice in Brasília with a habeas corpus petition, numbered HC 10.385. It argued that the arrest in flagrante had been staged, since it followed a meeting with police officials the day before; that his confession had been extracted by fear that he would "disappear forever" and by beatings at the hands of the police; and that the evidence of the witness who had first accused him was void, because the trial judge had read her police statement aloud at the first hearing so that she could confirm or deny it.
The rapporteur, Minister Edson Vidigal, followed the opinion of the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and refused the petition, Consultor Jurídico reported on September 28, 1999. On the witness, the prosecutors and the rapporteur held that the law forbids a witness to bring her testimony in writing, not a judge to read her earlier statement to her. On the arrest, they said the police had only been watching to test the suspicions against him.
His lawyer, Arisnaldo de Oliveira Paiva, then took the case to the Supreme Federal Court. In January 2000 its president, Minister Carlos Velloso, refused an injunction that would have released him while the petition was heard, and asked the Rio de Janeiro courts for information, Consultor Jurídico reported on January 12, 2000. Paiva argued that the case file was flawed, in particular in the testimony of one witness.
On December 22, 1999, the Diário do Grande ABC reported that the Regional Nursing Council of Rio de Janeiro, Coren-RJ, had voted unanimously to cancel his professional registration. The council found that he had broken 17 articles of the nursing profession's 1993 code of ethics. Paiva called the decision premature and said an administrative proceeding should not run ahead of the criminal one.
The same report set out the limits of the prosecution. Although he was suspected of further deaths, he had been charged only over the deaths of the day of his arrest, May 7, and the case concerned four patients. His trial before a jury was set for February 17, 2000.
The III Tribunal do Júri of Rio de Janeiro convicted him in February 2000. Judge Mário Guimarães Neto sentenced him to 76 years of imprisonment, 19 years for each of the four deaths, according to the later appeal ruling as reported by Consultor Jurídico.
The four patients named in the indictment, as Agência Estado reported in 2002, were Márcia Garnier Pereira, Maria Aparecida Pereira, Francisca Teresa Coutinho de Oliveira and Matias Gomes. Their ages and circumstances are not on record.
The charge on each count was homicide qualified three times over. In Brazilian law the qualifying circumstances raise the penalty for murder; those found in this case included a base motive and the victims' lack of any chance to defend themselves.
The defense appealed to the Court of Justice of the State of Rio de Janeiro. It raised three grounds: a nullity in the proceedings after the pretrial committal, a verdict against the weight of the evidence, and an error in setting the sentence. At the hearing it dropped the first two and argued only that the deaths should have been treated as a single continuing crime, "crime continuado", rather than as separate crimes whose penalties are added together, the "concurso material" applied at the trial.
The 3rd Criminal Chamber agreed unanimously. The rapporteur, Desembargador José Lisboa da Gama Malcher, held that the crimes had been committed in "continuidade delitiva" and that the trial judge could not have imposed 19 years for each death. Desembargadores Álvaro José Ferreira Mayrink da Costa and Joaquim Mouzinho joined his vote. The sentence was cut to 31 years and 8 months, Consultor Jurídico reported on March 13, 2001, and the case went to a new jury.
The new trial followed from the sentence first imposed. As Agência Estado explained, the law then gave anyone sentenced to more than 20 years the right to be tried again by a jury.
The second trial took place before the same court, the III Tribunal do Júri. According to Agência Estado, writing in August 2002, the jury sat in September of the previous year and again convicted him on the four counts, and the sentence imposed was 69 years.
The defense appealed once more. It argued that the jurors had been swayed by the "sensationalism of the press", and that the trial was void because the main witness against him had not testified before the jury. The 3rd Criminal Chamber rejected the request to annul the verdict. Writing for the chamber, Desembargador Índio Brasileiro da Rocha said that there was no doubt that Izidoro had committed the crimes. But the chamber reduced the sentence a second time, from 69 years to 31 years and 8 months, Agência Estado reported on August 14, 2002, in a report printed by the Tribuna do Paraná.
The last ruling reported, in August 2002, left his sentence at 31 years and 8 months.
Convicted: the deaths of four patients, Márcia Garnier Pereira, Maria Aparecida Pereira, Francisca Teresa Coutinho de Oliveira and Matias Gomes, for which two juries convicted him of qualified homicide, a finding the appeals court upheld while reducing the sentence.
Confessed: five deaths, by his own account to reporters in May 1999, a figure some later reports gave as five or six. He afterwards said the confession had been pressured, and his lawyers told the higher courts that it had been obtained through fear and beatings. Those courts did not accept the defense's challenge to his custody.
Suspected: further deaths during his shifts. In May 1999 the delegate in charge put the total at over one hundred on the statistics, and figures reported in the press that week counted 153 deaths on his shifts out of 225 in the unit between early January and May 4. A 2001 report on his appeal said he had been accused of 126 other deaths. None of these deaths was brought to trial, and the statistics show when patients died, not how.
Accounts also differ on the funeral homes. Guimarães admitted to reporters that he had taken payments for passing on news of deaths, while denying that he had done so for the five patients he described; the police investigated whether he had been paid commissions, and a 2001 court report said he had confessed to causing deaths for such commissions. A 2026 column said he had been convicted of five killings; the court rulings reported at the time concern four.
May 1999: Guimarães, 42, a former military police officer, has worked for seven years at the Salgado Filho municipal hospital in Rio de Janeiro as a nursing assistant.
Early January to May 4, 1999: the unit records 225 deaths, 153 of them on his shifts, according to figures published in May.
May 6, 1999: after a cleaning worker raises concerns, the Municipal Health Secretariat reports the case to the police.
May 7, 1999: arrested at the hospital before dawn by police who had been placed among the staff; he tells reporters he was responsible for the deaths of five patients.
September 1999: the Superior Court of Justice refuses habeas corpus HC 10.385 (rapporteur Minister Edson Vidigal), as reported on September 28.
December 1999: the Regional Nursing Council of Rio de Janeiro cancels his registration (reported December 22).
January 2000: the president of the Supreme Federal Court, Minister Carlos Velloso, refuses an injunction for his release (reported January 12).
February 2000: the first jury of the III Tribunal do Júri convicts him of four counts of qualified homicide; Judge Mário Guimarães Neto imposes 76 years.
March 2001: the 3rd Criminal Chamber of the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro cuts the sentence to 31 years and 8 months and orders a new jury (reported March 13).
September 2001, as reported in August 2002 ("September of last year"): the second jury convicts him again; sentence of 69 years.
August 14, 2002: the 3rd Criminal Chamber refuses to annul the second verdict and cuts the sentence again to 31 years and 8 months, Agência Estado reports.
January 2026: deaths in an intensive care unit in the Federal District bring the case back into the Brazilian press.