On December 16, 1991, two brothers from the poor district of Santa Isabel, in Sao Goncalo, set out to have lunch at a neighbor's house. Altair Medeiros de Abreu was ten; Ivan was younger. They were two of the seven children of Zelia de Abreu, a maid. At the central station in Niteroi a man stopped them and offered about four thousand cruzeiros if they would help him with a Catholic religious ritual. The three took a bus to a deserted beach near the Barreto viaduct. There the man tried to kiss Ivan, caught him when he ran, knocked him down, sexually assaulted him and strangled him, and then told Altair that his brother was asleep.
Terrified, Altair did everything he was told. The man took him to a gas station to wash, they slept in the scrub, and in the morning they rode into Rio de Janeiro, where the man offered to live with him and Altair agreed. The man worked handing out leaflets and had to call at his job to collect them; while he was distracted, Altair got away. He said nothing about his brother at first, and only days later told one of his older sisters. The killer did not hide the body. He went back to the scene to move it, and when the police found it the boy's hands were inside his shorts, which ruled out drowning; the medical examiner confirmed the sexual assault. Once Ivan's mother had identified him, Altair led the police to the man's workplace. Marcelo Costa de Andrade confessed at once and showed no surprise.
At the police station he confessed to more killings of boys, going back to April 1991, when on his way home from work he saw a boy selling sweets on the avenue, told him the same story about money and a ritual, took him into the scrub, beat him with stones, smothered him and raped him. After that, he said, he could not stop. His second victim, Anderson Gomes Goulart, eleven, he killed by smashing his head with a stone, and he drank the boy's blood and kept some of it in a bowl, which is where the name the Vampire of Niteroi came from. In June he found Odair Jose Muniz dos Santos, eleven, begging, lured him to a soccer field with a promise of 3,000 cruzeiros from an aunt, and strangled him. "I squeezed his throat once more to make sure his soul went to heaven," he said. He went home for dinner and came back afterward to cut off the boy's head, which he said was revenge for what had been done to him at boarding school.
Fourteen killings between April and December 1991 are attributed to him, most around Niteroi and Itaborai, across the bay from Rio. He confessed to thirteen of them, and the police confirmed eight.
He was born in Rio de Janeiro on January 2, 1967, and spent part of his childhood in the Rocinha favela, where his mother, a maid, was beaten by her husband. He was sent to his grandparents in Ceara, where he said he was beaten too, and back in Rio he was mistreated by the new partners of his separated parents and sexually abused by an older man. At a boys' boarding school he did badly and was called retarded; at fourteen he aged out and began selling himself on the street. He tried to kill himself, ran away from the state juvenile institution, and at sixteen moved in with a doorman, Antonio Batista Freire, who supported him and took him to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. He later left prostitution, went back to his family and took regular work.
He attended the church's services for about ten years and watched its broadcasts every day. It was there, he said, that he heard that children who die go to heaven, and by that logic he killed no adults, since he might be sending them to hell. When he was not reading Bishop Edir Macedo's sermons he read pornographic magazines. He liked the songs of Xuxa and other children's stars, and his mother said he had a strange habit of listening to a tape of his little brother crying.
He was declared not criminally responsible by reason of mental illness and has been held in forensic psychiatric hospitals since 1993. He once escaped from the asylum and was caught again. By 2017 he was at the Henrique Roxo custodial psychiatric hospital in Niteroi, where the medical team described an incurable mental illness with no basis for a treatment plan. That October his defense asked for temporary leave, and the prosecutor, Danielle de Souza Caputi Kalache de Paiva, opposed it: he spoke with pride of his crimes, she said, and did not understand that they were wrong.
The question returned when the National Council of Justice ordered Brazil's forensic asylums closed. By early 2024 he was the last patient left at Henrique Roxo, which was due to shut by May, and a court ordered him moved to the Jurujuba psychiatric hospital. Residents of the Preventorio community around Jurujuba protested, and his own lawyer, Luiz Mantovani, objected that the hospital was not secure and argued that, like a prison term, his confinement should not exceed thirty years. On March 5, 2024, the Niteroi court reversed the transfer and kept him at Henrique Roxo for the time being.