Marcelo Costa de Andrade confessed to killing 14 boys in and around Niteroi, the city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, between April and December 1991. The boys were between about 5 and 13 years old, according to Correio Braziliense. He justified the killings in religious terms, believing that children who died went to heaven, and he showed no remorse, Folha do Leste reported.
He never stood trial. Brazilian courts found him inimputavel, the legal term for a person who cannot be held criminally responsible because of mental illness or impaired mental development. Instead of a prison sentence he received a medida de seguranca, a security measure that commits a person to a forensic psychiatric hospital for treatment and custody. By press accounts he has been held under that measure since 1993. In 2024, when Brazil's National Council of Justice moved to close the country's forensic asylums, he was the only patient left in the Niteroi custodial hospital where he had spent years, and a court had to decide where he could be sent.
Brazilian newspapers call him by a nickname, the Vampiro de Niteroi, a name taken from what he told police about one of the killings. His name also appears as Marcelo da Costa Andrade.
Little is known of his early life. Folha do Leste, a regional paper covering Niteroi and the towns east of Guanabara Bay, wrote in February 2024 that he grew up with separated parents and with violence at home. At about 5 he was sent to live with his grandparents in Ceara, in the northeast of Brazil, and he came back to Rio de Janeiro at about 10. He then spent much of his time on the streets.
At 14, the paper reported, he was taken into a shelter for boys, the Casa dos Meninos, but he returned to the streets afterward. Correio Braziliense, the Brasilia daily, wrote in 2021 that he was judged to have an intellectual disability, the finding that later shaped the legal outcome of his case.
His date of birth, his schooling and any work before 1991 are not on record.
The killings attributed to him took place over about eight months of 1991. Correio Braziliense put them between April and December of that year, in Niteroi. Folha do Leste wrote that a run of child killings in 1991 caused fear across Niteroi and the Leste Fluminense, the eastern part of Rio de Janeiro state, and that the victims came from Niteroi and Itaborai. The regional press describes them as boys and gives their ages as about 5 to 13.
He approached the boys with promises of a reward, according to Folha do Leste, and he explained the killings in religious terms: he believed that children who died went to heaven.
Few of the boys have ever been named publicly. Cidade de Niteroi, a local news site, named one of them in October 2024 as Anderson Gomes, who was 11. Of their families, schools and neighborhoods, almost nothing has been made public.
The total of 14 comes from his own confession. Correio Braziliense wrote in 2021 that he killed 14 boys aged between 5 and 13; Folha do Leste in 2024 described him as having confessed to killing 14 boys. Because he was never tried, none of the 14 deaths has been the subject of a criminal verdict against him. The deaths are his by his own confession and by the attribution of the police and the press, not by the judgment of a court.
The date of his arrest and the steps that led police to him have never been made public. What is clear is that he confessed, and that his confession covered the full series. Folha do Leste wrote that he justified the killings on religious grounds and showed no remorse.
The nickname by which the Brazilian press has known him since then came from statements he made to police about one of the killings, Correio Braziliense reported. Cidade de Niteroi linked the name to the case of Anderson Gomes.
Under Brazilian law a person found inimputavel is not given a prison term; the court instead imposes a medida de seguranca, which in his case meant internment in a Hospital de Custodia e Tratamento Psiquiatrico, a custodial psychiatric hospital.
Enfoco, a Niteroi news site, wrote in March 2024 that he was found inimputavel, meaning that because of his mental illness he could not be tried. Correio Braziliense wrote in 2021 that he was judged to have an intellectual disability, was considered not responsible for his crimes and was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he remained.
AIB News reported in April 2023 that the finding of inimputabilidade came in 1992 and that the security measure imposed on him had no fixed end, with periodic examinations to decide whether he had recovered. Folha do Leste and Enfoco both date his internment under the measure from 1993.
The distinction matters for how the case is described. Several regional reports have written that he was "convicted" or that he is "serving his sentence". The legal record described in the same reports is different: he was not tried, there was no conviction, and the internment is a measure of treatment and custody, not a criminal sentence.
For most of the time since 1993 he has been held in Niteroi. In April 2010 Correio Braziliense, in a feature on how Brazilian law handles serial offenders, listed him as interned in the Niteroi asylum. The same feature quoted Ilana Casoy, an author on serial crime, who argued that Brazilian law did not recognize serial offenders as a category and called for a specific legal provision, while noting that the law already allowed penalties to be multiplied by the number of victims. Folha do Leste wrote in February 2024 that he had been held for more than 30 years at the Hospital de Custodia e Tratamento Psiquiatrico Henrique Roxo in Niteroi.
Specialists and prosecutors have described his condition as incurable. Folha do Leste quoted a prosecutor's description of his mental illness as "incuravel" and reported in February 2024 that specialists had concluded he could not live in freedom or be returned to society.
In 2023 his lawyer, Luiz Mantovani, asked the Rio de Janeiro state criminal enforcement court to release him, AIB News reported in April of that year. The petition rested on the Brazilian Constitution's ban on life sentences. Brazilian law does not classify a security measure as a penalty, but Mantovani argued that the constitutional ban should apply to an internment with no end. Keeping a person confined indefinitely, he argued, violated the Constitution and human dignity, and setting aside constitutional principles to remove people from society for good would be a dangerous precedent.
AIB News reported that the prosecutor at the court, Danielle Caputi, had expressed support for release, and that the decision rested with Judge Roberta Barrouin. The outcome of that petition has never been made public.
The argument about time limits came up again in 2024. Folha do Leste wrote that the law in force when he was committed capped confinement at 30 years, a limit raised to 40 years in 2019. Under the principle that a harsher criminal law cannot be applied to past acts, the paper wrote, only the older limit could be used against him, and by that measure he had already served the maximum. It added that higher courts had generally favored release in comparable cases.
The question of where he could be held came to a head through a national change in policy. Brazil's National Council of Justice, the body that oversees the courts, adopted an anti-asylum policy for the judiciary that limited psychiatric internment to cases of clinical need and barred institutions of an asylum type, including the custodial psychiatric hospitals. Folha do Leste reported in February 2024 that the council had ordered the closure of Henrique Roxo and of the Hospital Penal Psiquiatrico Roberto Medeiros, in the Gericino prison complex in Rio de Janeiro's West Zone, by about the middle of 2024. The paper said 71 patients held in the two institutions were to be released.
By early 2024 he was the only patient left at Henrique Roxo, which was due to be shut down by May, according to Folha do Leste, Enfoco and O Sao Goncalo.
In 2023 a judge of the Vara de Execucoes Penais, the court that supervises the execution of criminal sentences and measures, ordered him moved to the Jurujuba psychiatric hospital, in Niteroi's South Zone, by March 18, 2024. The State Health Secretariat had suggested the hospital, Enfoco reported. Enfoco gave the judge's name as Roberta Barrouin Carvalho de Souza.
The order met resistance from the city of Niteroi. The Municipal Health Secretariat told Enfoco in February 2024 that Jurujuba no longer offered long-term inpatient care and now concentrated on emergencies, and that the hospital could not meet the needs of the patient in question. Under the anti-asylum model, the city said, a patient once stabilized would be treated through outpatient services such as psychosocial care centers, therapeutic residences and clinics. The city said no one had contacted it before the ruling; once it learned of the order, it met the state's technical team and asked for the decision to be reconsidered. The city's attorney's office filed a legal challenge, Folha do Leste reported.
There were other objections. Folha do Leste reported that Jurujuba lies near schools. Residents of Preventorio, the community around the hospital, spoke out publicly against the transfer in late February, according to a report published on Terra. On Friday, February 23, 2024, a patient who had escaped from a psychiatric unit killed a school doorman in the Icarai district of Niteroi. O Sao Goncalo and Terra reported that the patient had escaped from the Jurujuba unit, and Terra reported that the escape weighed in the court's thinking.
His own lawyer joined the doubts. Mantovani told Enfoco that the defense and the prosecution had at first agreed with the judge's plan, but only because they did not know the hospital. Having seen it, he said, he found that it lacked the structure for the case, and he cited the recent escape. It was, he said, plainly not the place they wanted.
On Tuesday, March 5, 2024, the court in Niteroi reversed course. The judge reconsidered the 2023 order and decided not to go ahead with the transfer, Enfoco reported, because Jurujuba lacked the necessary structure, had had no long-stay beds since December 2023 and stood near public schools. O Sao Goncalo reported that the court had found that the hospital could not hold a patient of such high complexity, and that keeping him where he was preserved security measures suited to the case.
He stayed, at least for the time being, at Henrique Roxo. "The patient with a violent history will not be sent to our city," the city government said, according to Folha do Leste. The reports described the decision as provisional. Henrique Roxo was still due to close, and the final arrangement, Folha do Leste wrote, rested with the judiciary and the National Council of Justice, which had to weigh the closure order against his safety and the safety of any community where he might be placed.
In October 2024 Cidade de Niteroi reported that he was still held at Henrique Roxo.
In October 2024 Cidade de Niteroi reported that a monologue about his life was being prepared in Los Angeles, with the actor Haysam Ali, a former contestant on a Record TV reality show, and the director Giovanni Ortega. The play was to cover his childhood, the killings and his relationship with the church, and its premiere was expected in March 2025. The actor said, in an interview quoted by Cidade de Niteroi, that the team was avoiding contact with him and his family because of the sensitivity of the case. There were no plans to stage it in Brazil.
The number of victims. Correio Braziliense and Folha do Leste give 14 boys, and his confession is the basis for that number. None of the deaths has been tested at a trial, so the count rests on his own statements.
The dates and places. Correio Braziliense, in 2021, put the killings between April and December 1991 in Niteroi. A 2010 Correio Braziliense list gave the period as 1991 to 1992 and the places as Niteroi and Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. Folha do Leste, in 2024, also gave 1991 and 1992, and named Niteroi and Itaborai. Belo Horizonte does not appear in the other reports.
"Convicted" or not. Some regional reports of 2024 described him as convicted of the killings, or as serving a sentence. The same reports, and others, state that he was found not criminally responsible and was never tried. A finding of inimputabilidade with a security measure is not a criminal conviction.
When the measure began. AIB News dated the finding of inimputabilidade to 1992; Folha do Leste and Enfoco date his internment to 1993.
The judge's name. Enfoco gave it as Roberta Barrouin Carvalho de Souza in March 2024 and as Roberta Barroso Carvalho de Souza in February 2024; AIB News gave Roberta Barrouin.
The prosecution's position. AIB News reported in 2023 that the prosecutor supported his release, while Folha do Leste in 2024 quoted a prosecutor describing his illness as incurable. Whether these were the same prosecutor, and how the 2023 petition was decided, has not been made public.
Childhood: Sent to his grandparents in Ceara at about age 5; back in Rio de Janeiro at about 10; later lives on the streets (Folha do Leste).
About age 14: Taken into the Casa dos Meninos shelter, then returns to the streets.
April to December 1991: Killings of 14 boys in and around Niteroi and Itaborai, by his confession.
1992: Declared inimputavel, according to AIB News.
1993: Begins internment under a security measure, according to Folha do Leste and Enfoco.
April 18, 2010: Correio Braziliense lists him as interned in the Niteroi asylum.
2019: The legal maximum for confinement rises from 30 to 40 years (Folha do Leste).
April 2023: His lawyer, Luiz Mantovani, petitions for his release (AIB News).
2023: A judge orders his transfer to the Jurujuba psychiatric hospital by March 18, 2024.
February 23, 2024: A patient who escaped from a Niteroi psychiatric unit kills a school doorman in Icarai.
February 2024: The city of Niteroi objects to the transfer; Preventorio residents protest.
March 5, 2024: The court reconsiders and keeps him at Henrique Roxo for the time being.
May 2024: Henrique Roxo due to be closed.
October 21, 2024: Cidade de Niteroi reports him still held at Henrique Roxo.