José Augusto do Amaral was arrested in São Paulo on January 5, 1927, and was accused by police of being responsible for the deaths of several young people in the city over the preceding weeks. Reports differ on the number: one historian writes that he confessed to four killings, another speaks of three. He was held at a São Paulo prison and died there on June 2, 1927, before any court had heard the case. No judge ever ruled on the accusations, and in law he was never convicted of anything. The case survives in the police inquiry, in the newspapers of 1927, in a medical examination carried out in January of that year, and in the surviving criminal file.
The case is cited in Brazil as the earliest well-known example of a person said to have killed in series. Several scholars question that label and the evidence behind it, and a mock trial held in 2012 ended in an acquittal.
The name that appears in the records and in the historical studies is José Augusto do Amaral. Newspapers of the time and many later writers used a descriptor built on his skin color together with his surname. The case is still usually indexed under that form.
The studies give his age at the time of his arrest as 56, which places his birth about 1870 or 1871; one article gives 55. The historian Claudio Bertolli Filho writes that he was born in Conquista, in the state of Minas Gerais. According to the same account, he told the police that his father had been brought from the Congo and his mother from Mozambique, both as enslaved people, and that he lost his parents young. Another study places him among those born free under the Law of the Free Womb of 1871.
He had no settled family life and no fixed address. He lived in boarding houses and rented rooms. Bertolli Filho records that he served in the army and then in the Força Pública, the state military police of São Paulo, and deserted from both. He worked as a cornetist in a police brigade in Porto Alegre in 1906 and later for a boundary commission near Corumbá. Police records quoted in the same study show earlier arrests for vagrancy, drinking and gambling in São Paulo, Bauru and Santos. The article notes episodes of mental disturbance during his years in the service, and a history of heavy drinking.
A São Paulo newspaper, A Gazeta, described him on January 6, 1927, as a vagrant living on small thefts. The historian Paulo Fernando de Souza Campos, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the case, points out that the surviving records show him working as a soldier and in small jobs, which does not match that description.
The cases fall within about three weeks. Campos, in a 2023 article, sets out four cases in order.
The first, on or about December 13, 1926, concerned a boy of about nine. He survived and later identified Amaral to police. He is counted among the cases, but he is not among the dead.
The second, on the evening of December 24, 1926, was the death of a 27-year-old man. The third was the death of a boy in the Christmas period; no exact date is on record. The fourth was the death of a boy of about 15, on January 1, 1927 or soon after. Bertolli Filho names the districts Pinheiros, Santana and Brás for the December cases as Amaral later described them, and places the fourth in the eastern zone of the city.
Another account, in CartaCapital in 2012, says the dead were three boys and one more case involving another young person.
The inquiry was run by the Delegacia de Segurança Pessoal of São Paulo under the police commissioner Juvenal Pizza, according to Campos. It began after the death at the start of January 1927. A worker who had read the press reports went to the police with information, and the police began looking for a suspect. Bertolli Filho records that police detained several men for questioning in the days that followed.
On January 5, 1927, at four in the afternoon, a police agent located Amaral and took him to the Chefatura de Investigações e Capturas. Campos records that the boy of about nine then identified Amaral. No other detail of the arrest is on record.
Campos writes that in the first arrest records Amaral denied any part in the crimes, and that he then declared himself the author.
According to Bertolli Filho, Amaral confessed to the death of the 15-year-old and then, unprompted, described three more cases from December 1926, in Pinheiros, Santana and Brás, which makes four in all. The press interviewed him the same night. A Gazeta, on January 6, 1927, quoted him as saying that he could now sleep better and wanted the full rigor of the law.
A second newspaper report cited by Campos, in a footnote, says that he confessed to all the crimes committed in about fifteen days and suggests that there might be others. O Estado de S. Paulo published a report on January 6, 1927, and A Gazeta a further one on January 7, which discussed the public reaction and the confessed crimes.
These statements are what the record shows he said. They were taken in police custody and written down by a police clerk, as Bertolli Filho notes. They were never tested in a courtroom.
In January 1927 the psychiatrist Antônio Carlos Pacheco e Silva, then director of the Juqueri asylum, and José Rebello, a police physician and head of the technical laboratory, examined Amaral over a series of sessions. They produced a medical-legal report and later published it in the proceedings of the São Paulo society of legal medicine and criminology; Bertolli Filho and Campos date that article to 1928 and 1927 respectively. The doctors concluded that he had a "moral atrophy" and classed him as a degenerate, a category of the period's psychiatry that treated certain offenders as unfit to be held responsible. They also found advanced tuberculosis of both lungs.
Pacheco e Silva later republished the case in his textbook of clinical and forensic psychiatry, using it as an example, and argued that people of this kind should be held for life in an asylum and not in a penitentiary. Bertolli Filho's study is mainly concerned with that framework of degeneration and does not dispute Amaral's guilt.
The criminal file is numbered 1.670 and dates from January 1927. No formal indictment, committal for trial or hearing is on record, and Campos states that the procedural stage cannot be identified. All sources agree that no trial took place.
Bertolli Filho writes that Amaral was sent to the Penitenciária do Carandiru and that his lung disease was not treated there. Campos, who names the Cadeia Central de São Paulo as the place where he died, gives a different institution; the two studies agree that he was held in São Paulo.
Amaral died in custody on June 2, 1927, according to Bertolli Filho, who attributes the death to the untreated lung disease and says he lived only a few months after his arrest. Campos gives the cause on the death certificate as pulmonary tuberculosis. He was therefore never tried or convicted, and the accusations remained untested.
Whether Amaral was responsible for the deaths attributed to him is not settled by any court, and historians disagree about how much weight the evidence bears.
The confession. It was made in police custody. Campos suggests that Amaral may have declared himself the author in order to escape the mistreatment that suspects in custody could expect, but states that this is his inference and that no mistreatment is documented. A commentator in Consultor Jurídico in 2012 raised the same possibility without evidence. The author, Thiago Anastácio, also says that no judge ever ruled on the case and that Amaral is legally innocent.
The number of victims. The reports give three or four; Campos, in his 2003 symposium paper, questions whether Amaral was responsible for the deaths attributed to him, pointing to other cases involving young people with whom he had no known connection.
The "first" label. Bertolli Filho writes that two commercial books wrongly presented him as the first serial killer in Brazil.
The press. The newspapers of 1927 gave the case wide and sensational coverage. CartaCapital describes that coverage as racist and says Amaral was made a scapegoat; Bertolli Filho says the press sensationalized the case.
On September 20, 2012, the Instituto de Defesa do Direito de Defesa held a simulated jury trial of Amaral in the main hall of the Faculdade de Direito of the University of São Paulo, at Largo São Francisco. The judge was José Henrique Rodrigues Torres. Antônio Claudio Mariz de Oliveira and the public defender Renato Campos Pinto de Vitto acted for the defense. Prosecutor Carlos Roberto Marangoni Talarico and the lawyer Augusto de Arruda Botelho Neto acted for the prosecution. An actor played the defendant.
CartaCapital reported on October 14, 2012, that the exercise was built from the case records, medical reports, police expert findings, testimony and period newspapers. The defense argued that a racist society and fabricated evidence shaped the case, that the confession may have been coerced, and that witnesses were questioned outside court on the last day of the inquiry. The prosecution argued that the evidence showed he was capable of the crimes. The audience jury voted 257 to 75 to acquit, according to that report. A symbolic vote of this kind has no legal force.
Consultor Jurídico reported that the case records had been taken from the crime museum of the Academia da Polícia de São Paulo before the event. CartaCapital reported that a bust of Amaral stands in the Museu do Crime and that activists gathered more than 3,000 signatures to have it removed; it stayed. The criminal file itself is kept at the Museu da Polícia de São Paulo, according to Bertolli Filho. Campos wrote a doctoral thesis on the case in 2003.
About 1870 or 1871: José Augusto do Amaral is born, reportedly in Conquista, Minas Gerais.
1906: works as a cornetist in a police brigade in Porto Alegre.
About December 13, 1926: first of the cases later attributed to him, involving a boy of about nine who survived.
December 24, 1926: the death of a 27-year-old man, attributed to him.
Christmas period, 1926: the death of a boy, attributed to him (no exact date reported).
January 1, 1927, or soon after: the death of a boy of about 15, which starts the police inquiry.
January 5, 1927: Amaral is located by a police agent and taken into custody.
January 6, 1927: A Gazeta and O Estado de S. Paulo report the arrest.
January 1927: criminal case no. 1.670 is opened; Pacheco e Silva and Rebello examine him.
June 2, 1927: Amaral dies in custody in São Paulo without having been tried.
2003: Campos completes a doctoral thesis on the case.
September 20, 2012: mock trial at the University of São Paulo law school; the audience jury votes to acquit.