In December 2014 a woman named Elena grew worried that she had not seen her friend Fátima Miranda, sixty-two, and asked her husband to go with her to Fátima's house on the Rua Eduardo Pacheco in Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense outside Rio de Janeiro. They found her dead. As Elena came out, frightened, she saw a couple she knew from the neighborhood riding up on bicycles, and when they saw her they left in a hurry. "I knew it was them," she said. "I ran to tell the police." The man was Sailson José das Graças. Police found him at home with his bags packed to run, on December 9 or 10, 2014.
At the station he told the interrogators he had killed more than forty people since 2005, most of them women; he put the total at forty-two, thirty-eight women, three men and a boy. The first, he said, was a woman he killed at seventeen whose body was never found. The claims were broadcast across Brazil, and investigators, criminologists and psychiatrists warned at once that confessions of this kind need physical evidence, because serial offenders exaggerate and distort. None of the larger number has ever been proven. The police attributed five killings to him.
His family said he turned violent at eleven, a few months after his father was electrocuted in an accident at work, and that he began by stabbing cats and chickens. "He was always quiet, but very agitated, complicated," his mother said. "He fought a lot with his sisters, beat them a lot." As a young man he was involved in robberies and was arrested for carrying an illegal weapon. In Jardim Corumbá, the neighborhood where he lived, he was known for riding his bicycle, sometimes with his partner, Cleusa Balbina de Paula, and for sitting silently for hours in the corner bar. His neighbors said afterward that they finally understood why: he was watching.
The five known victims were all killed in the Santa Rita and Corumbá districts of Nova Iguaçu. Marilene de Oliveira Silva de Brito, forty-four, was killed on January 23, 2014, and Francisco Carlos Chagas in October. Paulo Vasconcelos, fifty-two, Cleusa's former boyfriend, was lured into an ambush by her and killed because he owed her forty reais. Raimundo Basílio da Silva was killed on November 30 because, Cleusa said, he had tried to rape her. Fátima Miranda, whose house was near the bar he frequented, was killed at Cleusa's request after an argument. He strangled or stabbed them and hid the bodies. "I waited a month, sometimes a week, depending on the place," he said; once, by his own account, he got into a woman's house through a second-floor window. Delegado Marcelo Machado said all the women he killed were white, and he said himself that he liked to kill women he considered beautiful.
Four other people survived. One, a sixteen-year-old girl, said he tried to strangle her three times. "I think he gave up because I talked to him a lot," she said, and she said he had told her he had been watching her for a long time. People who knew him and the police who questioned him described him as silent, obsessive and calculating. "I don't regret it, no," he said. "For me, what I did is done."
He was convicted in 2017 of Marilene de Oliveira Silva's murder and sentenced to seventeen years and four months. In January 2021 he was convicted of killing Francisco Carlos Chagas, sentenced first to sixteen years and then, on the prosecution's appeal, to thirty. In February 2023 he received thirty years for Paulo Vasconcelos, and in March 2023 twenty-one years for Raimundo Basílio da Silva. He is serving more than seventy years in all. Cleusa Balbina de Paula was sentenced to thirty years as his accomplice in the killings of Paulo and Raimundo. A friend of the couple was arrested with them in December 2014.