On September 13, 2026, after a two-day pursuit in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba, police arrested a frail thirty-three-year-old man wearing a black dress with white stripes, a wig and painted nails. He was carrying a baby. The child, the authorities confirmed, was not his; they gave no other details. The man was Jorlan Lopes da Silva, whom people around the isolated region of Mulungu called the Mosquito because of his slight build, and the police accuse him of killing sixteen people there in the three months before his capture.
Douglas Garcia, the police investigator who led the pursuit, told the Associated Press that da Silva had hidden in thick bush, in makeshift camps he built himself. "That allowed him to evade capture for years," Garcia said. "Jorlan lived mostly in the woods, that's why it was so hard to find him and link him to crimes that didn't seem to be connected at first." The connection came, by Garcia's account, after da Silva shot an eighteen-year-old dead in a public square.
Da Silva says he attacked only criminals. The evidence collected so far, according to Garcia, shows that was not the case. The investigator said da Silva was also providing evidence that he had committed more crimes than those he is being prosecuted for, but that he could not discuss them, because some investigations were continuing and others were being reopened.
What kind of killer he is remains an open question. When he was arrested, the police described him as a member of a criminal gang that has killed dozens of people in the region. He denies any affiliation with the local gangs and told investigators that he was in "a personal war." The identities of the dead and the details of their deaths are being kept confidential so that the prosecution can do its work, and he has not been tried. Mulungu lies some 1,550 miles north of Rio de Janeiro.