In 2003 a fifteen-year-old boy in Sao Luis, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Maranhao, told people before he disappeared that he was going to meet the mechanic. The boy was Jonathan Silva Vieira, and the mechanic was Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, who repaired bicycles. Jonathan's murder brought into the open a series of child killings that had gone on around the city for twelve years.
Between 1991 and 2003 poor boys aged between four and fifteen vanished from Sao Luis, Paco do Lumiar, Sao Jose de Ribamar and Codo. He lured them into the scrub with promises of small rewards, sexually abused them, killed them by strangling or stabbing, and afterward cut off their genitals, and in many cases their ears and fingers. The press called them the black magic murders, and the killings are known as the Maranhao child emasculations. For years they were carelessly investigated, and human rights groups said the police did little because the victims were poor; organizations took Brazil before the Inter-American human rights system of the OAS over the failure.
Chagas was born in Caxias, Maranhao, in 1964. He was arrested in Sao Luis in December 2003 on suspicion of killing Jonathan and sixteen other boys, and experts found the bodies, limbs and fragments of missing children at his home, with two bones on the grounds of the house. He confessed, retracted, confessed again, and told one judge he could not remember the details. Investigators traced the killings back through Paco do Lumiar and Sao Jose de Ribamar. A forensic report found a personality disorder, with a tendency to kill again if he were ever released.
He is also accused of twelve killings in Para, where court records say he lived between 1989 and 1993, and the evidence points to him in the Altamira child emasculations, a series with the same method in that municipality. In all he is accused of forty-two deaths, thirty of boys from the island of Sao Luis and twelve in Para. The cases run to at least twenty-five separate prosecutions in the courts of Sao Jose de Ribamar, Paco do Lumiar and Sao Luis.
The Maranhao cases were tried one or a few at a time. At the first, over Jonathan, he received twenty years and eight months, reduced by a third because psychiatric evidence found him only partly responsible for his actions. At the seventh, a jury in Sao Jose de Ribamar convicted him by majority of the November 1991 murder of Ivanildo Povoas Ferreira, ten, on charges of doubly qualified homicide, desecration and concealment of a corpse, and Judge Teresa Cristina de Carvalho Pereira Mendes gave him twenty-six years, bringing his total to 237. In Sao Luis he was sentenced to twenty-nine years for another boy's murder, a verdict the state court upheld on appeal.
The eleventh trial opened in the court at Paco do Lumiar on March 26, 2014, over three boys killed in 1997: Eduardo Rocha da Silva, ten, Raimundo Nonato da Conceicao Filho, eleven, and Edivam Pinto Lobato, twelve. As he was brought into the jury room, a relative of one of the boys shoved him; he lashed out, hitting a television reporter, and swore at the people there, and the trial could not start until military police arrived. Judge Jaqueline Reis Caracas sent him back to the Presidio Sao Luis in the Pedrinhas prison complex and heard ten witnesses without him, among them the detective on the case, two forensic experts and the parents of two of the boys. She sentenced him to more than 108 years.
The totals reported after that trial do not agree, from more than 250 years to 385, and to 580 in later accounts. Whatever the sum, Brazilian law allowed him to serve no more than thirty years. The number proved in court is smaller than the forty-two he is accused of.