Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha was born in Goiania, the capital of Goias state in central Brazil, on February 4, 1988, and worked as a private security guard, living with his mother.
Between 2011 and 2014 he rode a motorcycle around the city at night with a .38 revolver. He would pull up beside someone, shout that it was a robbery, and shoot them at close range. He never took anything, which is what made the pattern legible: the robbery was a line, not a motive. The victims were women, homeless people and gay men. The youngest was a fourteen-year-old girl, killed in January 2014.
He was caught by a traffic matter rather than a murder investigation. Police had already noted that he was facing trial over a number plate stolen from a motorbike at a Goiania supermarket, and he was stopped in October 2014 riding a bike with a false plate. A search of the house he shared with his mother produced the motorbike, the stolen plates and the revolver, and ballistics tied the weapon to unsolved shootings across the city.
He confessed to thirty-nine killings, then reduced that to about twenty-nine on legal advice. By the time of his arrest police had confirmed around twenty-one through ballistics, witnesses and details in his account. He said the compulsion began after he was sexually abused as a child and sharpened when women rejected him. Two days after his arrest he tried to kill himself in his cell with a broken light bulb.
He was tried not once but in a long series of separate jury trials from 2015 onward, one for each victim, as Brazilian procedure requires. The first widely reported conviction came on March 2, 2016, twenty years for the murder of Juliana Neubia Dias, twenty-two, shot with her boyfriend in a car in the Setor Oeste district in July 2014. Convictions and sentences accumulated across the trials into the hundreds of years, of which Brazilian law allows thirty to be served.
Reports differ on how many of the victims were women, between sixteen and twenty-two, and on the total, between twenty-nine and thirty-nine. The number established in court is smaller than the number he claimed, and both are smaller than the number the weapon has been linked to.