Bruna Gleycielle de Sousa Gonçalves had just finished work at a gym in the Jardim América district of Goiânia on the night of May 8, 2014, and was waiting at a bus stop on Avenida T-9 with a colleague at about half past ten. A man pulled up on a motorcycle, parked, and announced a robbery with a gun already in his hand. As she took out her phone to hand it over he shot her in the chest. He took nothing from her or from her colleague. She left a son who was seven. On September 20, 2018, a jury in Goiânia convicted Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha of her murder and Judge Eduardo Pio Mascarenhas sentenced him to twenty-one years. He had asked to be excused from the hearing and was not in court. With that verdict, the court announced, the sentences imposed on him added up to 684 years and ten months, for twenty-nine murders, a robbery and illegal possession of a firearm.
He was a private security guard, born in Goiânia, the capital of Goiás state in central Brazil, on February 4, 1988, and he lived with his mother. For more than two years he rode around the city at night, and sometimes by day, with a .38 revolver. He would stop beside someone, shout that it was a robbery, fire at close range, and ride away with nothing. The robbery was a line, not a motive, and the fact that nothing was ever taken is what eventually made the shootings readable as the work of one man.
The first killings for which he was convicted were of men sleeping in the street. Paulo Sérgio Xavier de Bastos was shot at about four in the morning of November 5, 2012, at a bus stop on the Praça Cívica near Avenida Araguaia; two hours earlier Marcos Aurélio Nunes da Cruz had been killed where he lay under the awning of a supermarket in Setor Coimbra. Thiago Fernandes de Carvalho Machado was shot twice in the head on December 11, 2012, asleep under a commercial building at the corner of Avenida Independência and Rua 44. Michel Luiz Ferreira da Silva was killed at about two the next morning on Avenida Minas Gerais in Campinas. Rafael Carvalho Gonçalves was killed near the Praça A bus terminal in Campinas at about one in the morning of February 16, 2013, and Wesley Alves Guimarães was shot in the head while he slept under a shop awning on Avenida C-4 on February 3, 2013.
From late 2013 his victims were mostly women and girls, shot in the chest in the street. Ana Rita de Lima was walking alone in Vila Santa Tereza on December 13, 2013, when a man on a black motorcycle announced a robbery and shot her before she could react. Ana Karla Lemes da Silva, fifteen, was killed two days later in Jardim Planalto. Bárbara Luíza Ribeiro Costa was sitting on a bench in a square in Lorena Park on January 18, 2014, waiting for her grandmother. Arlete dos Anjos Carvalho was talking on her phone on Rua Potengui in Bairro Goiá on January 28. Lilian Sissi Mesquita e Silva was walking to her children's school to collect them on the afternoon of February 3 when he stopped his motorcycle, got off and shot her.
The shootings came closer together through 2014. On February 28 he walked into the Eskema Imagens shop on Avenida Neder Meyer and shot Mauro Ferreira Nunes, who had made no move to resist, and at about half past one the same afternoon Denílson Ferreira de Freitas was shot inside a restaurant in the city center as he turned to get money. Taís Pereira de Almeida, twenty, was shot in the head on March 10 on Avenida Nossa Senhora de Lourdes in neighboring Aparecida de Goiânia. Ana Maria Victor Duarte, a legislative aide, was killed at about half past eleven on the night of March 14 at a sandwich shop in Setor Bela Vista. Wanessa Oliveira Felipe was killed in a pharmacy in Bairro Goiá, where she lived, in April. On May 8, the night Bruna Gleycielle was killed, Janaína Nicácio de Souza was shot inside a bar in the same district. Carla Barbosa de Araújo, fifteen, was walking with her sister in Setor Sudoeste on May 23 when a man on a motorcycle demanded her phone; she did not have one, and he shot her.
On June 15, 2014, Taynara Rodrigues da Cruz was talking with a friend in the square outside her school in Bairro Goiá when he rode up, shot her, and told the other girl to run if she did not want to be shot too. That evening Thamara da Conceição Silva was shot in the chest at about half past seven in the city center on her way to the church her family attended. Pedro Henrique de Paula Souza, nineteen, was shot outside the Faculdade Cambury on June 20. Rosirene Gualberto da Silva was killed on Avenida Anhanguera on July 19. Juliana Neubia Dias, twenty-two, was shot in the neck and chest on July 26 in her boyfriend's car as it waited at a traffic light in Setor Oeste, by a man in a helmet on a motorcycle. The next evening he walked into a snack bar on Avenida Anhanguera in Setor Leste Universitário and shot Mateus Henrique de Morais, thirteen, and Karina dos Santos Farias, fifteen, in the back. Ana Lídia Gomes was shot in the chest at a bus stop in Cidade Jardim on August 2. Isadora Aparecida Cândida dos Reis was shot in the back beside her boyfriend on Avenida São Geraldo in Setor São José. He was also convicted of killing Adailton dos Santos Farias, twenty-three, and Aleandro Santos Miranda, thirty-five, who was stabbed.
He was caught through a traffic matter rather than a murder inquiry. The police already knew he was facing trial over a number plate stolen from a motorcycle at a Goiânia supermarket in January 2014, and on October 14, 2014, he was stopped riding a motorcycle with a false plate. A search of the house he shared with his mother turned up the motorcycle, the stolen plates and the revolver, and ballistics tied the gun to unsolved shootings across the city. He confessed to thirty-nine killings and then, on legal advice, brought the figure down to about twenty-nine; by then the police had confirmed around twenty-one through ballistics, witnesses and details in his account. He said the urge began after he was sexually abused as a child and grew worse when women rejected him. Two days after his arrest he tried to kill himself in his cell with a broken light bulb.
Brazilian procedure required a separate jury trial for each killing, and the trials ran for more than two years. The first, for Ana Karla Lemes da Silva, ended on February 16, 2016, with twenty years. The court's own record dates the Juliana Neubia Dias verdict to March 2, 2015, while press reports place it on March 2, 2016. By June 2016 he had been convicted in eleven homicide cases, for two robberies of the same lottery agency in the city center and for illegal possession of a gun, and the sentences stood at 269 years. The terms for single murders ran from thirteen years and four months, for Wesley Alves Guimarães, to thirty years, for Rafael Carvalho Gonçalves; the double killing of Mateus and Karina brought forty-six years and eight months, the longest single sentence he received.
His public defender argued at trial after trial that he was only partly responsible for his actions and asked for a reduced sentence on that ground. The juries rejected it. A court-ordered mental examination described him as emotionally cold and inclined to manipulation, and Judge Jesseir Coelho de Alcântara, sentencing him for the killing of Ana Maria Victor Duarte, found him fully responsible, with an antisocial personality disorder, and a habitual criminal. In two cases the judge took six months off for his spontaneous confession to the police. One jury acquitted him: he had been charged with strangling Diego Martins Mendes, fifteen, in a thicket in Setor Negrão de Lima at about noon on November 9, 2011, and was found not guilty.
The numbers attached to him have never agreed. He claimed thirty-nine, then about twenty-nine; twenty-nine convictions for murder had been handed down by September 2018; and reports of how many of his victims were women range from sixteen to twenty-two. However large the total of his sentences, Brazilian law allowed thirty years to be served for crimes of that period. In 2017 he was reported held at the Núcleo de Custódia, the maximum-security unit of the state prison administration.