On June 9, 2021, a man broke into a smallholding at Incra 9, a rural settlement of Ceilandia on the edge of Brazil's Federal District, and killed Claudio Vidal, forty-eight, and his sons Gustavo Marques Vidal, twenty-one, and Carlos Eduardo Marques Vidal, fifteen. He took Vidal's wife, Cleonice Marques, forty-three, away with him alive. Before she was taken she managed to reach her brother on a cellphone, and he went to the house and called the police. The search that followed was meant to find her in time. Her body was found three days later near two of the killer's hiding places.
The man police named was Lazaro Barbosa de Sousa, thirty-two, a farm laborer born at Barra do Mendes, in Bahia, on August 27, 1988, who had been a fugitive since 2018 and who knew the scrub country well; the authorities called him an experienced bushman. Only weeks earlier, police said, he had broken into two properties in the Sol Nascente district: on April 26 he locked a father and son in a room and raped a woman of thirty-nine in the brush, and on May 17 he tied up the people in another house, made them strip and made them cook for him. In April 2020 he was accused of striking a man on the head with an axe at a farm; the man survived with serious injuries.
What followed the Vidal killings was one of the largest manhunts in recent Brazilian memory, and it lasted twenty days. Estimates of its size run from more than two hundred to about three hundred officers of the Goias and Federal District civil and military police, the federal highway police and the federal police, with fire brigade drones, dogs and helicopters, working a cordon of more than ten square kilometers of cerrado. Police occupied and watched thirty-four farms to protect the people living on them. Residents of Cocalzinho de Goias left their homes, and small shops closed.
He moved through the bush, slept in trees and on riverbanks and sheltered in empty sheds. On June 10 he held the owner and caretaker of a farm about two miles from the Vidal house for three hours, made the owner cook for him, made them drink and take drugs with him, and boasted about the killings he had seen reported on television, then left with cellphones, a jacket and two hundred reais. On June 11 he stole a car in Ceilandia, drove it to Cocalzinho and set it alight. On the night of June 12 he broke into another farm where civil police officers were waiting; three were shot, two of them seriously, and he escaped with two guns taken from the property, later burning a house and exchanging fire with police again. He stole another car on June 13 and drove about twenty miles to near a roadblock before running into the scrub on foot, grazed a military police officer with a bullet on June 15, and on June 16 took three people from a house in Cocalzinho into the bush after a teenager among them texted the police, releasing them when he heard the helicopters. Police later said he had made a false Facebook profile under the name Patrik Sousa on a stolen phone, apparently to follow the news about himself.
The Goias public security secretary, Rodney Miranda, said publicly that he believed Barbosa was being sheltered, and on June 24 police arrested a farmer, Elmi Caetano Evangelista, and his caretaker, Alain Reis dos Santos. The caretaker told police that Barbosa had slept five nights on the farmer's land and eaten there, called in from the scrub by shouts. Evangelista denied it, was later convicted and sent to prison, and died there of cancer and other illnesses in 2022. Dos Santos was released after cooperating with the police, who accepted that he had been following his employer's orders to keep the gates locked against them.
It ended on the morning of June 28 at the house of his former mother-in-law at Aguas Lindas de Goias. The governor of Goias, Ronaldo Caiado, first announced that he had been captured; soon afterward it was reported that he had died on the way to the hospital. Miranda said Barbosa had resisted and fired a .380 pistol at the officers who found him, and that they shot back. He was taken to the Hospital Municipal Bom Jesus, and the Goias forensic police confirmed his death. President Jair Bolsonaro marked it on social media the same afternoon with three words in capitals, announcing that Lazaro's taxpayer registration had been canceled.
He had never stood trial for a killing. Police first arrested him at Barra do Mendes in 2007 over the deaths of two people; by one account he was caught after fifteen days on the run and confessed, and he escaped custody about ten days later and left the state. On November 15, 2009, in Sol Nascente, he broke into a smallholding, locked the family in the bathroom, took a woman of nineteen to the Corujas stream and raped her. Accounts differ on when he was caught for it, days later at Pirenopolis in Goias by one version, on August 26, 2010, by the court record of his sentence. He was convicted of robbery and rape and sentenced to twelve years, eight months and nineteen days, and a later three-year sentence for a crime at Corumba de Goias brought the total to fifteen years, eight months and nineteen days, combined by a court on July 19, 2013. Those are the only convictions he ever received.
Before deciding whether he could move to the semi-open regime, the sentencing court in the Federal District ordered a criminological examination. The report, signed by three psychologists on November 22, 2013, described aggressiveness, a lack of self-control, emotional dependence, impulsiveness, instability and sexual preoccupations. The court let him progress anyway. In 2014 he completed the required courses, including a personal relations group on sexual behavior and sessions on empathy and on putting himself in the victims' place, and was certified as well behaved. At Easter 2016, having served about six years, he was released on the holiday furlough with some 1,450 other prisoners and did not return.
He was caught again on March 7, 2018, on outstanding warrants that included the Bahia homicides, and held at the regional prison at Aguas Lindas de Goias. At about two in the morning on July 23 he and other prisoners cut a hole in the ceiling of their cell and got out; accounts put the number with him at three or five. By 2021 he was the only one of them still at large.
Police attributed six killings to him in total across those fourteen years, and injuries to three other people. The press called him the Executioner of Incra 9 and the Killer of Goias, and on social media he became a meme: at least 346 fake Facebook profiles in his name were counted by June 17, and a fake video of his capture circulated the next day. Ilana Casoy, one of Brazil's best-known writers on serial crime, said during the hunt that he was not a serial killer in her sense of the term but a robber and rapist on the run who killed. "I saw no ritual," she said.
What the record therefore holds is a police attribution rather than a verdict. Four of the six deaths have surviving witnesses, hostages who were released and physical evidence, and the case against him was strong enough that few in Brazil doubted it. But he was shot before any of it was put to a court, and the only findings a judge ever made against Lazaro Barbosa de Sousa concern robbery, rape and a lesser crime in Goias.