Pedro Rodrigues Filho was born in Santa Rita do Sapucai, Minas Gerais on June 17, 1954. His father, a school caretaker, beat his pregnant mother, and Pedro was born with an injury to the skull.
At thirteen he pushed a cousin into a sugar cane press. At fourteen he killed the deputy mayor of Alfenas, who had dismissed his father over a theft, and then the man he believed to be the real thief. He was known in Brazil as Pedrinho Matador, Little Pete the Killer.
He went to Sao Paulo at fourteen and lived on the street. Almost everyone he killed after that was inside the criminal world: drug dealers, robbers, men he believed had informed.
He killed his own father in prison in 1973 with fourteen stab wounds, after his father had murdered his mother. He killed his girlfriend Maria Aparecida Olympia, who was involved with a gang.
Once inside the prison system he killed steadily there, over forty men by his own count, including a rapist he was transported with in a police van.
He was arrested on May 24, 1973 and spent forty-two of the next forty-five years in custody, accumulating sentences of more than 120 years. Brazilian law then capped time actually served at thirty years, and his own killings inside kept extending it.
He was released in April 2018. He set up a YouTube channel, gave interviews, and presented himself as a reformed man who had only ever killed bad people, which was largely though not entirely true.
On March 5, 2023 he was shot dead outside a house in Mococa, Sao Paulo, aged sixty-eight, by men who arrived and left on foot.
His claimed total is over a hundred and around seventy-one is the figure usually accepted, but almost none of it was ever tried as murder. Most of the deaths happened inside a prison system that recorded them and did not prosecute them, which is why the number rests on his own account.