Sailson Jose das Gracas was twenty-six when he was arrested on December 10, 2014, in Nova Iguacu, in the Baixada Fluminense, the poor and heavily populated district on the edge of Rio de Janeiro. He had been caught after stabbing a woman to death in her house.
He then confessed, calmly and at length and on camera, to forty-one further killings committed since he was seventeen. The breakdown the police gave was thirty-seven women, three men and a two-year-old child, the child the son of one of the women, killed so that his crying would not bring the neighbours. Accounts of the totals vary in the reporting, between forty-one and forty-three, and the split between women and men varies with them. Brazilian reporting called him the Monster of Corumba.
He described the method without prompting. He would choose a woman, watch her house for a week or a month, learn who lived there and how to get in, and enter in the middle of the night. He strangled by preference and stabbed when he had to. He said he pulled out his victims' fingernails so that a struggle would leave no marks on him. He said his wife knew.
He gave two motives. One was the killing itself, which he described as an addiction and as an adrenaline rush, and said he would grow agitated when he had not done it and would then go hunting. The other was money: some of the killings were contract work for a couple, since arrested, who kept him on retainer, and one was ordered over a debt of about fifteen dollars. Police also stated that he selected white women specifically.
Investigators believed him, on the grounds of the detail. Inspector Pedro Henrique Medina of the Baixada Fluminense homicide division said the accounts contained "details that only a person who was at the crime scene could know". Four cases had been matched against old reports within days. Others outside the investigation warned that a man plainly enjoying the attention of a televised press conference should be checked rather than taken at his word.
He said he had no remorse and that if he were ever released he would kill again. The figure of forty-one or forty-three is his own; the number formally established against him in the Rio courts is considerably smaller.