In the Brazilian press he was Pedrinho Matador, Little Pedro the Killer, and on his left arm he carried a tattoo that read mato por prazer, I kill for pleasure. Pedro Rodrigues Filho spent most of the forty-five years after his first arrest behind bars, and most of the men he is known to have killed died there: in cells, in the yard, in the canteen and once in the back of a police van. He has long been called the worst serial killer in Brazil's history. What the courts actually recorded is harder to pin down.
He was born in 1954 on a farm at Santa Rita do Sapucai, in the south of Minas Gerais, with an injury to his skull; his father, Pedro Rodrigues, had kicked his pregnant mother in the belly during a fight. By his own account he first tried to kill at thirteen, when, after an older cousin punched him in a fight, he shoved the young man into a sugar cane press and went at him with a knife. In one telling the family pulled the cousin free; in another Pedro finished him with a machete. No record of it exists.
At fourteen, in the version most often told, he took his grandfather's shotgun and shot the deputy mayor of Santa Rita do Sapucai in front of city hall. The man had fired his father, a school guard, over food stolen from the school kitchen. He then shot the guard he suspected of the real theft. Other accounts put his first killings earlier and farther from home: he said he had run away at nine, reached Sao Paulo, and at eleven killed a drug dealer named Jorge Galvao in Itaquera, then Galvao's brother and brother-in-law.
On the run, he went to Mogi das Cruzes, on the eastern edge of Greater Sao Paulo, where he robbed drug dens and killed the men who ran them, and the papers started using the nickname. He took up with Maria Aparecida Olympia, called Botinha, the widow of a local drug boss, stepped into her dead husband's trade and killed three of the man's former associates. Botinha was pregnant with his child when she was killed, by a rival gang leader in most accounts and by the police in others. Still a minor, he escaped and, by his own telling, hunted down the members of the gang he blamed.
He was arrested on May 24, 1973, at eighteen, and went on killing in custody. Police records describe him being moved handcuffed in a vehicle beside another prisoner; when the doors opened the other man was dead, and Rodrigues said he had done it because the man was a rapist. The men he killed inside were, he said, people who were worth nothing, rapists and traitors above all. He also claimed to have cut the throat of a friend with a dull knife because the man was accused of murdering his sister. The bulk of his convictions came from killings and woundings of fellow prisoners in the first half of the 1980s.
The killing he told about most often is the one most in doubt. He said that at twenty he killed his father inside a jail, where the older man was held for murdering Pedro's mother with a machete. "He stabbed my mother twenty one times, so I stabbed him twenty two," he told the journalist Marcelo Rezende on RecordTV, and he denied that he had eaten his father's heart, saying he had cut it, chewed a piece and thrown it away. The biographer Ullisses Campbell concluded it never happened. The father did kill the mother, but he died years later in prison, of a respiratory illness.
The totals do not agree either. He claimed more than a hundred killings. The figure repeated most often is seventy-one convictions, with the combined sentences reported as 126 years, 128 years, nearly 300 years and more than 400 years. His police file, as described in Mogi das Cruzes on the day he died, listed eleven killings and seven attempted murders. Whatever the true sum, Brazilian law at the time barred anyone from serving more than thirty years, and the killings he committed inside kept extending his stay.
He was due out in 2003 and was released on April 24, 2007, after thirty-four years, reportedly for Fortaleza, in Ceara. On September 15, 2011, police arrested him at a rural property in Balneario Camboriu, in Santa Catarina, where he worked as a caretaker. He was sentenced to eight years for a riot and for false imprisonment, both committed while he was held in Sao Paulo, and was let out for good behavior on December 10, 2018, after seven.
Free, he declared himself finished with killing, took up religion and ran a YouTube channel, Pedrinho EX Matador, where he commented on current crimes and told young viewers there was nothing in any of it to be proud of. The claim that he had only ever killed men who deserved it sat at the center of his celebrity. It did not cover the deputy mayor, whose offense was firing his father, or the guard he merely suspected of a theft.
On the morning of Sunday, March 5, 2023, he was on Rua Jose Rodrigues da Costa, in the Ponte Grande district of Mogi das Cruzes, when a car stopped beside him and two men opened fire; one of them then cut his throat. A witness said he was holding a child at the time, and the child was not hurt. He was sixty-eight and dead before the first police car arrived. The gunmen switched cars as they fled, and police found a black Volkswagen Gol believed to have carried them. In November 2024 the homicide unit in Mogi das Cruzes said he had been killed for trying to stop drug dealing, and that it was still working to identify and arrest the others involved.