Marcelo Costa de Andrade, "The Vampire of Niterói", is a Brazilian serial killer convicted of raping and killing 14 boys. This mama’s boy and religious psychopath of inoffensive appearance is Brazil’s most notorious serial killer. The son of poor migrants from the Northeast, Marcelo grew up in the Rocinha slum in Rio de Janeiro. He lived without running water and was beaten with regularity by his grandfather, his stepfather and his stepmother. When he was 10 he was sexually abused. At 14 he began to prostitute himself for a living. He was sent to a reform school, but escaped. Still hustling at 16, he began a long lasting homosexual relationship with an older man. By 17 he tried to rape his 10-year-old brother. When he was 23 his lover left him and he moved in with his mother and brothers in Itaborai, another slum on the other side of the polluted Guanabara Bay. There he found a low-paying job distributing flyers for a shop in the district of Copacabana. He also joined the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and started going to church four times a week. Despite some idiosyncrasies and his odd and incoherent laughter, his life seemed normal. That is, until April 1991, when he started to kill.
Over a nine-month period Marcelo tallied 14 deaths. His victims of choice were poor street urchins whom he attracted to deserted areas, to rape and strangle. He also practiced necrophilia, decapitated one of the boys, crushed the head of another, and, on two occasions, drank the victim’s blood. Later he confessed his vampiric thirst was merely an attempt “to become as beautiful as them.” Violence in Rio is common and the daily body count is so high that authorities never suspected the growing number of disappearing street urchins were the handywork of a serial killer. Usually street children are the victims of choice for warped vigilante groups trying to clean up the streets. Quite the humanitarian Andrade later confessed, “I preferred young boys because they are better looking and have soft skin. And the priest said that children automatically go to heaven if they die before they’re thirteen. So I know I did them a favor by sending them to heaven.” In December of 1991 his killing spree came to an end when he “fell in love” with ten-year-old Altair de Abreu and spared his life. Marcello met the young beggar and his six-year-old brother Ivan in the Niteroi bus terminal. He offered them money if they helped him light candles for a saint in Saint George’s church. The lucky survivor later told police, “We were heading for a church, but as we crossed a vacant lot, Marcelo suddenly turned on Ivan and started strangling him. I was so paralyzed by fear I could not run away. I watched in horror, tears streaming down my cheeks, as he killed and then raped my brother. When he was finished with Ivan, he turned to me, hugged me, and said he loved me.” Then he asked Altair to live with him. Scared to death, the boy agreed to spend the night with Marcelo in the bushes.
The next morning, the lovestruck killer took Altair to work with him. When they arrived the office was closed. While they waited for it to open, the terrified youngster was able to escape. He hitchhiked his way back home and told his mother that he had lost his brother. A few days later, pressed by his sister, the boy told the truth. In the meantime Marcelo, a truly considerate killer, had returned to the crime scene to tuck the hands of his victim inside his shorts, “so that the rats couldn’t gnaw the fingers.” When young Ivan’s family went to the police, Marcelo, who had maintained his daily routine, was calmly arrested in the Rio shop where he worked. “I thought you would come yesterday,” he told the arresting officers. At first, police thought Ivan’s murder was an isolated case. However, two months later Marcelo’s dotting mother was called to testify about her son’s strange behavior. One night, she said, he left home with a machete “to cut bananas.” He returned the next morning with no bananas and the machete covered in blood. Eventually Marcelo did confess to 14 killings and led police to the remains of his other victims. As Brazil’s star killer, he asked police if anywhere in the world there was a case like his, and stated he killed because: “I liked the boys and I didn’t want them to go to hell.”
On January 24, 1997, Marcelo escaped from the Heitor Carrilho Psychiatric Hospital Rio de Janeiro when a guard accidentaly left a door open while sunbathing. He then hitchhikked and begged his way to the town of Guaraciaba do Norte to see his father on his way to the Holy Land. He was rearrested on February 5 carrying a bag with toiletries, a piece of cheese and a bible under his arm. According to the arresting officer, Andrade told him that he “was going to the Holy Land because he was purified by killing and raping children and drinking their blood.”
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