In the early hours of June 9, 2021, four members of one family were killed at their smallholding in Incra 9, a rural settlement in Ceilândia on the western edge of Brazil's Federal District. Cláudio Vidal de Oliveira, 48, and his sons Gustavo Marques Vidal, 21, and Carlos Eduardo Marques Vidal, 15, died at the house. Cleonice Marques de Andrade, 43, Cláudio's wife and the boys' mother, was taken away alive. Her body was found three days later.
The Civil Police of the Federal District named the man they held responsible: Lázaro Barbosa de Sousa, 32, a fugitive from Bahia with a record of arrests and escapes going back well over a decade. Over the next 20 days a task force that grew to about 270 officers from Goiás, the Federal District and the federal police forces searched the scrubland and farms west of Brasília for him, while a stream of break-ins, hostage-takings and shootings attributed to him kept rural families in fear. On the morning of June 28, 2021, Goiás police shot him dead in a wooded area at Águas Lindas de Goiás.
He was never tried for any killing. The Incra 9 deaths, a double homicide in his home town in Bahia and the shooting of a farm worker in Goiás were attributed to him by police and prosecutors, or investigated as his, but no court ever ruled on them. The one conviction the press reported was for robbery and rape in the Federal District, over a home invasion in 2009.
Lázaro Barbosa de Sousa was born in Barra do Mendes, a small municipality in the interior of Bahia, in Brazil's northeast. Bahia Notícias, which sent a reporter there in June 2021, said he grew up in Melancia, a rural village of about 15 houses some 8 kilometers from the town. Neighbors described a quiet, withdrawn boy who played with the other children. One woman, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was afraid, recalled that he had once told her he took pleasure in killing, a remark she said she did not take seriously at the time. A farmer who knew him and his mother described him as rough but quiet, with a strong personality and a humble upbringing. The same report mentioned a history of disagreements with his parents, without details.
A psychological report written in prison in 2013, which Correio Braziliense obtained in 2021, recorded more of his background: alcohol and drug abuse, psychiatric disturbances, unstable work, interrupted schooling, periods spent in orphanages and running away from home. Police in 2021 described him as a man raised in the countryside, a hunter who knew the region and its people well, some of whom he had worked for, according to SBT News.
His first known serious case came in his home town. SBT News reported that he was first charged there at 18. The Bahia public security secretariat told Correio Braziliense in June 2021 that he was accused of a double homicide in Barra do Mendes in 2007, that he was arrested after turning himself in at a police station, and that he escaped about ten days later. Other reports place the killings in November 2008. Bahia Notícias gave that date and said they took place in Melancia, naming the dead men as José Carlos Benício de Oliveira and Manoel Desidério Silva.
A report by Estadão Conteúdo, printed by IstoÉ in June 2021, gathered the memories of people in the village. According to Barra do Mendes's municipal agriculture secretary, Roberto Willian Alves Gabrielli, the killings took place early one morning and both victims were shot. The secretary said the suspect then hid in the area for about 15 days, sleeping in treetops while police searched below him. "He himself said that the police passed underneath and did not see him," Gabrielli said. Eventually, the report said, he returned a shotgun he had taken from a farm, asked for food and coffee, and asked to be taken to the police station because he wanted to give himself up. He was held for about ten days and then escaped.
The brother of one of the dead men told the same reporters that the Barbosa family still owned some land in the area and that there had been talk of his return. A school janitor said he had left the village long before and that people there now lived in peace.
The criminal court of Barra do Mendes issued an arrest warrant for him in April 2018, according to Brazil's national arrest-warrant database as reported by Metrópoles. Metrópoles also wrote in June 2021 that he had a prior homicide conviction in Bahia. Other reports describe the Bahia case only as an accusation from which he escaped, and no report gave a date, court or sentence for a conviction.
By 2009 he had moved to the outskirts of Brasília. At about 2 a.m. on November 15, 2009, according to the Federal District's sentence-enforcement court as reported by Correio Braziliense, he broke into a smallholding in Sol Nascente, a district of Ceilândia. He held the family at gunpoint and raped a woman.
The next day police arrested him in Corumbá de Goiás, about 100 kilometers from the Federal District, in the act of carrying illegal firearms. He gave his name as Gabriel Barbosa de Sousa. Observador, the Portuguese daily, summarized the 2009 arrest as one on charges that included rape and illegal firearm possession. Diário do Nordeste, citing police, said that he was transferred to Brasília and held at the Papuda penitentiary complex. Metrópoles reported that he was convicted in the Federal District of robbery and rape. The length of the sentence was not reported. The national warrant database listed a warrant against him from the Federal District's sentence-enforcement court dated October 2010.
Inside the prison system he took part in the programs the Federal District offered to inmates seeking to move to a lighter regime. In 2012, while held at the Federal District Penitentiary 2, he and three other prisoners beat another inmate in the exercise yard, Correio Braziliense reported.
In 2013 the psychologists assigned to his criminological evaluation at Papuda wrote the report that was later quoted across Brazil. Their tests found aggressiveness, impulsiveness, emotional instability, emotional dependence and what they called sexual preoccupations. They tied his crimes to chemical dependence and wrote that if he returned to the social setting he came from he "will probably return to offending." They recommended regular psychological follow-up and group support before he received any benefit, and they ruled out a move to the semi-open regime at that time.
In 2014 the Federal District public prosecutor's office supported his progression to the semi-open regime, but without external benefits such as temporary release. The prosecutor wrote that his "degree of dangerousness is high" and that he was not yet ready to return to society. He attended every group session he was assigned, on topics including the Maria da Penha domestic-violence law, the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and empathy for victims. A court approved the move to the semi-open regime in 2014, Diário do Nordeste reported.
In 2016 he was let out of the Centro de Progressão Penitenciária, the Federal District's semi-open unit, for the Easter holiday furlough and did not come back, Correio Braziliense reported. The sentence-enforcement court issued a warrant for him in April 2016. After that, police said, he dropped out of the security forces' sight.
In March 2018 the homicide investigation group of the civil police in Águas Lindas de Goiás arrested him. Metrópoles gave the date as March 8 and said he was held on suspicion of the Bahia killings and over the rape, robbery and illegal firearm possession in the Federal District, with three warrants outstanding. Other reports date the start of that custody to March 7.
He was held at the jail in Águas Lindas, in the ring of Goiás towns around the Federal District known as the Entorno. At about 2 a.m. on July 23, 2018, according to the Goiás prison administration, he got out through a hole in the ceiling of his cell. Metrópoles reported that five other inmates tried to follow him but were stopped when military police, alerted by prison staff, arrived in time; an internal inquiry later found that they had committed disciplinary offenses and damaged property. Observador put the number who escaped with him at three and said he was the only one still at large. The prison administration said the escape was his only violation of the rules in that jail.
Police later linked him to a series of crimes in the farm country of the Entorno and the Federal District after the 2018 escape. On April 8, 2020, Goiás civil police indicted him over a robbery at a farm in Santo Antônio do Descoberto in which four elderly people were restrained and one man was seriously injured; the indictment described it as robbery with restriction of liberty and attempted robbery-homicide, Diário do Nordeste reported.
In 2021 the pattern came closer to Brasília. On April 26, police said, he broke into a house in Sol Nascente at about 2 a.m. and raped a woman, in a manner Correio Braziliense compared with the 2009 case. On May 17, police said, he threatened the people in another Sol Nascente house with a gun and a knife and held them captive for hours.
On June 5, four days before the Incra 9 killings, a farm worker was shot dead at a farm in Girassol, a district of Cocalzinho de Goiás. After his death, the Goiás public security secretariat listed that killing among the cases in which he was suspected, Metrópoles reported. The worker's name was not published in the reports.
The Vidal family lived on a rural property in Incra 9, a settlement in the north of Ceilândia. Relatives and neighbors described them to Correio Braziliense as a simple, close and religious family who worked the land and had no quarrel with anyone. They were friends of the Cristo Redentor parish, where some of Cláudio's relatives went to Mass. "It was a simple, happy family; they had no enmity with anyone," Cleonice's brother said at the wake. A neighbor who knew them called them hard workers devoted to the land. Correio Braziliense described Cláudio as a businessman and Cleonice as a businesswoman.
At about 2 a.m. on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, according to the police account published by Correio Braziliense, an intruder broke into the house. Cláudio and his sons Gustavo and Carlos Eduardo were killed by gunfire and stabbing, police said. Minutes earlier Cleonice had called her brother for help. She had been taken away.
Her body was found on Saturday, June 12. The four were buried on the morning of Monday, June 14: the two brothers together at 10:30 a.m. and their parents in a second shared grave about twenty minutes later. About 80 people came to say goodbye, and the wake was marked by calls for justice, Correio Braziliense reported. Cleonice's cousin called it a very united family. A friend from church said the pain "doesn't go away; it continues."
The Civil Police of the Federal District identified Lázaro Barbosa de Sousa as the suspect within days. He was never charged in court over the deaths, because he was killed before any case reached a judge. The police and the press described the killings as a chacina, the Brazilian term for a multiple killing, and O Hoje described him as suspected of a quadruple latrocínio, a robbery followed by death.
Correio Braziliense reconstructed the first days of the hunt from police information. On the morning of Thursday, June 10, a man police identified as Barbosa entered a house about 3 kilometers from the Vidal property and held the owner and a caretaker at gunpoint for more than three hours, forcing them to smoke marijuana. He left with more than R$200, a jacket, mobile phones and a charger. On Friday, June 11, he stole a car in Ceilândia and drove into Goiás, to Cocalzinho, where the car was set on fire hours later. Investigators believed at that point that he had help.
On Saturday, June 12, he was reported drinking at a farm near Lagoa Samuel, where he held a caretaker hostage and wrecked the man's car. The farm belonged to the family of a military police soldier, Metrópoles reported, and the suspect left with the caretaker when the soldier opened the gate. About 700 meters away, at a neighboring farm, three men were shot, and two guns were stolen. Witnesses told Metrópoles he had threatened to set that house on fire but did not, because a woman and a child were inside. Late that night a house in Cocalzinho was set alight, and the fugitive exchanged fire with police and escaped.
On Sunday, June 13, three caretakers armed with machetes and hoes came upon him while closing a gate, and he ran into dense forest. That afternoon a car was stolen from a farm in Cocalzinho; it was found about 30 kilometers away with an ammunition magazine inside. By then about 200 police officers and 50 vehicles from the Federal District and Goiás were in the field, with dogs, drones and helicopters, and police had occupied 17 farms in the area.
On Tuesday, June 15, he took a family of three hostage at a farm near Edilândia, a village in Goiás about 80 kilometers from Brasília. A teenage relative who had hidden in the house sent text messages to the police. When officers approached there was an exchange of fire. A Goiás military police officer was grazed in the face and flown to a hospital in Anápolis, from which he was discharged; the family was rescued in the woods, and the fugitive escaped again. Goiás's public security secretary, Rodney Miranda, said that without the police intervention the family would probably have been killed, Metrópoles reported.
The next day, the eighth of the search, a farm about 8 kilometers from Edilândia was broken into and food was taken; the owner said the intruder seemed to be looking for something to eat, O Hoje reported. On June 17 he was seen in woods near Girassol, and no one was hurt.
Fear emptied the area. Police told Metrópoles that seven of every ten smallholdings in Edilândia were empty, as families moved in with relatives until he was caught; one task-force member called the area "a desert." Observador counted 11 farms that he had entered during the hunt, and Correio Braziliense later wrote that he held more than 20 hostages while a fugitive.
The search grew into one of the largest police operations the region had seen. By late June the task force numbered about 270 officers from the military and civil police of Goiás and the Federal District, the Federal Highway Police and the Federal Police, with helicopters and drones fitted with motion sensors, O Hoje reported.
On June 24, police arrested two men accused of sheltering him. One was a 74-year-old farmer with land in the rural area of Girassol. Federal District penal police officers, acting on information that local people were helping the fugitive, signaled him to stop as he drove a pickup; he ignored the order, tried to flee and was intercepted. The other was a 33-year-old man described as his caretaker, detained at the farm by a task force led by Miranda. Miranda said that a .22 shotgun found there, with 50 rounds, had been stolen by the fugitive in the Cocalzinho area. "We suspect there are other people helping him, and we will get to them," he said, according to Metrópoles.
The caretaker told investigators that the farmer had concealed the fugitive on the property for at least five days, Correio Braziliense reported. The caretaker was held for one day and released, and on July 6 a judge in the Cocalzinho district archived the investigation against him for lack of minimal evidence. The same judge accepted the prosecutors' charges against the farmer, illegal possession of a firearm and favorecimento pessoal, the Brazilian offense of helping a suspect evade the authorities, and kept him in pretrial detention. His lawyer said a forensic report showed that the guns were air guns that could not fire.
The farmer was released on July 16, 2021, under electronic monitoring; the judge cited his age, his health, his fixed address and his lack of a criminal record. He died of a heart attack on March 27, 2022, after being hospitalized in Águas Lindas de Goiás, without having been tried, according to Correio Braziliense.
On Sunday, June 27, residents of Itamaracá, a neighborhood of Águas Lindas de Goiás, reported seeing him, Correio Braziliense reported. His relatives' phones, and a device he carried, had been tapped, Metrópoles said, and people linked to him had approached a criminal lawyer about negotiating a surrender.
On the morning of Monday, June 28, police closed in on a wooded area near the house of his former mother-in-law in Águas Lindas. According to the police account, he fired at the officers and they returned fire. When he was surrounded, Metrópoles reported, he said: "I am going to die, but I am going to take you with me." He was given first aid, placed in a fire department vehicle and taken to Hospital Municipal Bom Jesus in Águas Lindas, where he was found to be dead. His body was sent to the Goiás forensic medicine institute for an autopsy. Police said he had R$4,400 in cash with him.
The announcement came in two steps. Ronaldo Caiado, the governor of Goiás, was among the first to post that the fugitive had been captured, writing that it had only been a matter of time before "our police, the best prepared in the country," caught him; he added that "Goiás is not a Disneyland for criminals." Shortly afterward officers confirmed that the man was dead. Bohn Gass, leader of the Workers' Party in the Chamber of Deputies, first announced an arrest and corrected himself minutes later: "Lázaro Barbosa was not arrested. He was killed."
At the task-force base in Girassol, officers were applauded, and residents set off fireworks. One woman said the 20 days had been days of anguish. A local shopkeeper said she would have preferred him taken alive, so that he could explain the other crimes.
President Jair Bolsonaro posted on Twitter that day, "LÁZARO: CPF CANCELADO!", using a phrase about a canceled taxpayer number that O Hoje traced to a television presenter who used it to celebrate the deaths of criminals. In a second post he congratulated "the heroes of the PM-GO," the Goiás military police, for putting an end to the terror, and wrote that the victims "did not get a second chance." The governor of the Federal District, Ibaneis Rocha, told Correio Braziliense that the police had acted within the law and that if the fugitive had died, it was because of the confrontation he himself created. The justice minister, Anderson Torres, congratulated the officers.
Miranda said that day that DNA from the body would be compared with samples in the police genetic database, including samples taken from rape victims, and that eight other inquiries attributed to him remained open. The Goiás public security secretariat said he was being investigated for more than 30 crimes in Goiás, Bahia and the Federal District, most of them robberies followed by death, according to Metrópoles.
After the autopsy the family's lawyer arranged with a Brasília funeral home to pay for the wake and burial, Correio Braziliense reported. He was buried on the afternoon of Thursday, July 1, 2021, at the cemetery of Cocalzinho de Goiás, in a ceremony closed to the public. Nine people attended, among them his daughter, his brother-in-law and cousins; his mother, father and stepfather did not. His wife thanked those who came.
On the night of March 14, 2023, his grave at Cocalzinho was disturbed. A gravedigger noticed the next day, and the Goiás civil police opened an investigation. The town's public works secretary said the coffin was intact and that only the soil had been moved, Metrópoles reported.
In October 2023 a Goiás judge ordered the destruction of the last items seized from him, an axe and a pen drive, as worthless. By then, O Hoje reported, the civil police had closed the investigations linked to him and the cases had been archived.
The hunt became a national spectacle. Ilana Casoy, a criminologist, said during the search that he should not be called a serial killer: "He is a robber-killer and rapist on the run," she said on the Jovem Pan program Pânico, adding that he "kills without thinking twice." She said there was no proof that he had any mental illness and described him as a drug user who robbed to fund his addiction.
The Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, a public-security research organization, criticized the handling of the operation in an editorial in its Fonte Segura bulletin. It said daily coverage had turned the hunt into a spectacle that hampered the police, that the scale of the operation created coordination problems and rivalry between forces, and that the main responsibility lay with Miranda, who it said had sought media attention instead of handling the search with discretion. It noted that he was a pre-candidate for federal deputy and that the municipalities of the Entorno had about 600 police officers in total.
In Congress the case was cited in the debate over furloughs and sentence progression. On June 22, 2021, during the hunt, the Chamber of Deputies approved an urgency request for a bill by Deputy Alex Manente to restrict temporary release and require a criminological examination before a prisoner could progress to a lighter regime, Congresso em Foco reported. Manente's justification cited the psychologists' 2013 opinion, the prosecutor's 2014 position, the 2016 failure to return from the Easter furlough and the 2018 escape.
None of the killings attributed to him was tested in court. The police account of the Incra 9 deaths, the Girassol shooting and the attacks during the hunt rests on investigators' findings, witness and hostage accounts and statements by officials, as published in the press; no judge heard a defense against it.
The Bahia case is reported inconsistently. The Bahia public security secretariat and several 2021 reports dated the double homicide to 2007; Bahia Notícias and Estadão Conteúdo placed it in November 2008. Metrópoles called it a conviction, while other reports described an accusation from which he escaped.
During the hunt, claims circulated that the crimes had a ritual or occult motive. Metrópoles reported that Miranda suggested the Edilândia hostages might have been killed in a satanic ritual had police not intervened. Casoy rejected the idea: "There is no evil ritual, there is only the modus operandi of an experienced criminal," she said, warning that such talk fed prejudice against Afro-Brazilian religions.
Officials also said that others had helped him. Miranda said in June 2021 that police suspected more people were sheltering him. The only people arrested on that suspicion were the farmer and his caretaker; the case against the caretaker was archived, and the farmer died untried. By October 2023 the investigations linked to the fugitive had been closed.
Reports also differ on smaller points: the ages of the two Vidal sons were reversed in at least one report, the date of his 2018 arrest is given as March 7 or March 8, and the number of inmates involved in the 2018 escape is given as three or five.
2007 or November 2008: Two men are killed in Melancia, Barra do Mendes, Bahia; he is accused, held for about ten days and escapes.
November 15, 2009: Home invasion and rape in Sol Nascente, Federal District.
November 16, 2009: Arrested in Corumbá de Goiás for illegal firearm possession, giving a false name.
2009 to 2016: Held at the Papuda complex; convicted of robbery and rape.
2012: Takes part, with three other inmates, in a beating of a prisoner at Federal District Penitentiary 2.
2013: Prison psychologists advise against progression.
2014: Moves to the semi-open regime.
Easter 2016: Fails to return from a holiday furlough.
March 2018: Arrested at Águas Lindas de Goiás.
July 23, 2018: Escapes from the Águas Lindas jail through a hole in the cell ceiling.
April 8, 2020: Indicted by Goiás police over a farm robbery at Santo Antônio do Descoberto.
April 26 and May 17, 2021: Home invasions in Sol Nascente attributed to him by police.
June 5, 2021: A farm worker is shot dead at Girassol; he is later named as a suspect.
June 9, 2021: Cláudio Vidal de Oliveira and his sons Gustavo and Carlos Eduardo are killed at Incra 9, Ceilândia; Cleonice Marques de Andrade is taken. Police name him as the suspect.
June 12, 2021: Cleonice's body is found; three men are shot at a farm near Cocalzinho.
June 14, 2021: The Vidal family is buried.
June 15, 2021: Hostage-taking near Edilândia; a military police officer is wounded.
June 22, 2021: The Chamber of Deputies approves urgency for a bill on furloughs and progression.
June 24, 2021: A farmer and his caretaker are arrested at Girassol.
June 28, 2021: He is shot dead by Goiás police at Águas Lindas de Goiás.
July 1, 2021: Buried at Cocalzinho de Goiás.
July 6, 2021: Charges against the farmer are accepted; the investigation of the caretaker is archived.
March 27, 2022: The farmer dies, untried.
March 14, 2023: His grave is disturbed; police investigate.
October 2023: The investigations linked to him are reported closed and archived.