Unraveling the São Paulo Child Murders

On a Monday morning in July 1991, workers in São Paulo’s Barra Funda neighborhood opened a small, abandoned shed behind a railway depot to find something they would never forget: the decomposing bodies of two boys, laid side by side on a stained patch of earth. Both were missing shoelaces. Both had deep wounds around the neck. Nearby, a crumpled note read only, “I did what I had to do.” It was the work of someone the city’s tabloids had already given a name: O Monstro do Morumbi, The Monster of Morumbi.

From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, a string of brutal murders terrorized São Paulo’s marginalized communities. The victims—always young boys, almost always poor, many street children or runaways—were found in vacant lots, train yards, or under highway overpasses. Over a four-year period, at least 13 boys between the ages of 8 and 14 were killed. The actual number could be higher. Each was strangled, often using their own shoelaces. Most had suffered abuse and neglect long before they crossed paths with their killer.

The first child whose disappearance was formally linked to the case was Paulo Roberto da Silva, age 13, last seen alive in January 1987. Paulo had lived on the streets for two years, surviving by begging near the bustling Luz train station. He had dropped out of school after his mother was hospitalized for tuberculosis. Paulo’s younger sister later told police that he’d befriended a stranger who offered to buy him snacks and let him shower in a nearby abandoned building. When Paulo failed to come home, his sister filed a missing person’s report. Three days later, his body was found in a drainage culvert behind a textile factory, his shoelaces missing and his neck marked by deep bruises.

Within months, two more boys—Luis Fernando, age 10, and João Carlos, age 12—were found dead under similar circumstances. Both had been missing for days. Both were discovered in areas frequented by the city’s numerous homeless children. The killer’s method was consistent: victims were strangled with a ligature, and investigators noted a lack of defensive wounds, suggesting they were incapacitated before being murdered. No valuables were ever stolen, and in most cases, food wrappers and empty soda bottles were left near the bodies.

The crimes steadily escalated. In May 1988, a group of municipal garbage collectors stumbled upon the bodies of three boys together in a vacant lot in the Morumbi district. They had been killed within hours of each other, suggesting the killer was either growing bolder or acting in a frenzy. Witnesses recalled seeing a tall man with a limp speaking to the children near a nearby bus stop the night before the murders.

As the body count rose, São Paulo’s homicide division created a special task force, led by Inspector Celso Salles. The team included three detectives from the child protection division and two forensic pathologists from the city morgue. The task force’s first challenge was the lack of physical evidence. All crime scenes were outdoors, and heavy rains often washed away traces. By early 1989, the task force had compiled a list of 47 missing boys from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, unsure how many were connected to the same killer.

A break in the case came in July 1989, when a street vendor named Tânia witnessed a man leading a barefoot boy into an abandoned railway shed at dusk in the Santa Cecilia district. The man matched previous witness descriptions: tall, limping, with a faded green army jacket and carrying a battered blue backpack. Tânia told police the man spoke softly and offered the boy a sandwich. Moments later, she heard screams and ran for help. By the time police arrived, the man was gone, but the boy—André, age 11—was alive, though badly bruised and terrified. He repeated one phrase over and over: “He said he’d take me to see my mother. He said he knew where she was.”

For the first time, police had a living witness. André described the man’s face: pale, thin, with a heavy beard and a large scar above his left eyebrow. He said the man approached him near a soup kitchen, offered food, and promised to reunite him with his mother, who had disappeared months earlier. When they entered the shed, the man tried to tie André’s hands with shoelaces. André struggled, bit the man’s hand, and managed to escape.

Inspector Salles ordered sketches based on André’s description and distributed them to shelters, soup kitchens, and train stations across the city. Over the next months, police received dozens of tips—some genuine, others wild rumors. Multiple boys reported being approached by a man offering food and shelter in exchange for “help with chores.” Some described the same limp and scar. Police began compiling a list of known offenders and transients matching the description.

Meanwhile, the killer’s pattern continued. In March 1990, two more boys—Márcio, age 12, and Ronaldo, age 9—were found behind a bus depot in Lapa, bound and strangled with their own shoelaces. Both had attended the same community center a few blocks away. Staff recalled seeing a stranger loitering outside, talking to the children. Surveillance cameras had not yet become common in São Paulo’s public spaces, and the killer left no fingerprints.

The special task force enlisted the help of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Alcides Prado, who analyzed the pattern of killings. Dr. Prado noted the absence of sexual assault in most cases and the ritualistic use of shoelaces as a murder weapon. He suggested the killer was someone with deep resentment toward children—possibly stemming from personal trauma. He also noted that the killer targeted only boys, all from families marked by poverty and instability.

A crucial moment arrived in September 1990, when a shoeshine boy named Gilmar survived an attack near the Júlio Prestes train station. Gilmar told police he was lured by a promise of work cleaning abandoned railway cars. Inside one car, the man tried to tie Gilmar’s hands behind his back. Gilmar fought back, kicking and biting. The attacker fled, dropping his blue backpack, which Gilmar later retrieved and handed to police. Inside, they found a coil of shoelaces, a rusty penknife, and a faded photograph of a young boy standing in front of a church.

Fingerprints from the backpack matched those of Francisco de Assis Pereira, a 33-year-old former janitor with a history of psychiatric hospitalization and petty theft. Pereira had been fired from his job at a nearby train yard after accusations of inappropriate behavior toward minors. Neighbors remembered him as withdrawn, prone to violent outbursts, and obsessed with stray animals. Records showed he had spent time in a state mental hospital after a violent incident involving neighborhood children, but had been released after six months due to overcrowding.

Police launched a city-wide search for Pereira, distributing his photograph to every police station, shelter, and hospital in São Paulo. Over the next weeks, tips poured in from across the city. Some said Pereira had been seen begging for food near the Pinheiros River. Others claimed to have spotted him sleeping in bus stations or rummaging through trash bins. By November 1990, the task force narrowed their search to the western suburbs, where most recent attacks had occurred.

In December 1990, Pereira was arrested by military police after attempting to steal food from a market in Butantã. When questioned, he at first denied any involvement in the murders. But in the course of a 12-hour interrogation, Pereira confessed to the killings of at least 10 boys. He claimed he “couldn’t stop” and described how he lured his victims with promises of food and work, then strangled them with their own shoelaces after they fell asleep or let their guard down. He admitted to keeping “souvenirs”—shoelaces and small trinkets—from several victims.

Pereira led police to three more burial sites in vacant lots, where the remains of missing boys were recovered. Forensic examination confirmed the same method of killing: ligature strangulation, no evidence of sexual assault, and use of shoelaces as both bait and weapon. Pereira’s confession matched details of unsolved cases stretching back at least four years.

The trial of Francisco de Assis Pereira began in June 1991, drawing massive crowds and wall-to-wall coverage from Brazil’s newspapers and television stations. The prosecution presented evidence of Pereira’s mental illness, but argued he understood the nature of his crimes and acted with deliberate intent. Over the course of four weeks, 32 witnesses testified, including survivors, relatives of the victims, and psychiatric experts. The jury found Pereira guilty on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. He was sentenced to more than 200 years in prison, the maximum allowed under Brazilian law at the time.

After the verdict, police reviewed more than 70 unsolved cases of missing children in São Paulo from the late 1980s through 1991. Some investigators believed Pereira may have been responsible for additional murders that could never be conclusively linked to him. Others speculated that copycat killers or criminal gangs might have committed similar crimes during the same period. To this day, the full extent of Pereira’s crimes remains unknown.

The case exposed serious failings in São Paulo’s social services and criminal justice system. Many of the victims were street children, never reported missing by family or social workers. In some cases, it took weeks or months for police to identify the bodies. Community organizations criticized authorities for failing to protect vulnerable children and for slow, uncoordinated investigations. A 1992 report by the Municipal Council for Child Protection concluded that more than 4,000 children lived on the streets of São Paulo at the height of the murders, with little access to shelter or medical care.

Inspector Celso Salles, who led the investigation, later stated in interviews that the case revealed how “poverty and neglect allowed a predator to hide in plain sight.” He pointed out that many boys were lured because they were hungry or looking for a safe place to sleep. Without families to report them missing, weeks might pass before anyone even noticed they were gone.

The media’s obsessive coverage of the case fueled public fear and outrage. Tabloids published lurid headlines and graphic photographs, sometimes blaming parents or social workers for allowing children to live on the streets. Several advocacy groups formed in the aftermath, lobbying for new child protection laws and expanded funding for shelters.

The case also had a profound impact on Brazilian law. In 1993, new federal legislation increased penalties for crimes against children and mandated the creation of a national missing persons database. The São Paulo police department expanded its child protection unit and began routine patrols of known gathering spots for homeless youth.

Forensic psychiatrists and criminologists who studied the case pointed to Pereira’s methods as characteristic of an “organized offender”: he prepared for each attack by bringing shoelaces and food to lure his victims, selected isolated locations, and returned to the crime scenes to remove evidence. Investigators later found that Pereira read newspaper coverage of his own crimes and adjusted his methods to avoid detection, moving from one district to another as police attention increased.

The story of Pereira’s crimes also shaped how the Brazilian public viewed serial killers. Until the late 20th century, serial homicide was often seen as a foreign phenomenon, rarely discussed in the context of local crime. The Monster of Morumbi case forced both authorities and the public to confront the reality that such offenders operated in their midst—often targeting the city’s most vulnerable residents.

During the trial, a forensic psychiatrist testified that Pereira showed signs of dissociative episodes and compulsive rituals. Police found a hidden box in his former boarding-house room containing 27 pairs of shoelaces, each tagged with a date and location. Several of the tags matched confirmed murder dates.

The medical examiner who performed most of the autopsies in the case documented a consistent ligature mark: a deep, narrow groove around the neck, consistent with the pressure of tightly wound shoelaces, often double-knotted. In two cases, the examiner noted evidence of shallow cuts on the victims’ wrists, suggesting the killer sometimes toyed with restraints before carrying out the murder.

Pereira’s only surviving immediate family member, an older sister, stated in court that their mother had died in a state asylum and that Pereira had been institutionalized repeatedly as a child for behavioral issues. School records showed he had been expelled at age 12 for attacking a classmate with a broken bottle.

The most chilling evidence presented at trial was Pereira’s own journal, recovered from the blue backpack. In it, he wrote obsessively about the “voices” that told him to punish children who “broke the rules.” One entry read: “They are everywhere. They never listen. I must make them quiet.”

Investigators traced the faded photograph found in Pereira’s backpack to a church in Osasco, a working-class suburb of São Paulo. The boy in the photo was identified as Pereira himself, age 10, standing alone on Christmas Eve. The priest who ran the church’s orphanage recalled Pereira as a withdrawn, troubled child who rarely spoke to anyone and ran away twice before disappearing for good.

Despite the closure provided to families, some unresolved questions remain. Not all missing boys found during the relevant period could be definitively linked to Pereira. Some families maintain that their children vanished after Pereira’s arrest. Police records from the era are incomplete, and forensic evidence was often lost or never collected.

Pereira’s case forced a reckoning in Brazilian society about the treatment and protection of street children. In the decade following his conviction, São Paulo saw the opening of 17 new shelters and the creation of mobile outreach teams to locate and assist at-risk youth. The city also introduced a system of rapid-response child abduction alerts modeled after American practices.

The Monster of Morumbi’s crimes remain a symbol of the dangerous intersection between social neglect and violent crime in Brazil’s largest city. In the years since Pereira’s conviction, the number of reported murders of street children in São Paulo has declined, but advocacy groups warn that vulnerable children still face daily risks.

During a 1995 panel discussion on serial homicide, Dr. Alcides Prado, who advised investigators, cited the case as proof that “a society’s failure to protect its most helpless members creates monsters—not just the ones who kill, but the ones who look away.” In the archives of the São Paulo child protection division, Pereira’s file still holds the original blue backpack, the shoelaces neatly coiled alongside the faded photograph of a lost boy.