The Cannibals of Garanhuns

In 2008, Jessica Camila da Silva was a young woman who had a daughter at the age of 22 and had not had an easy life. She had been living with her daughter on the street for a long time and desperation took hold of her. His two guardian angels seem to arrive out of nowhere, but in reality, they would become his executioners.

The couple were Jorge Beltrão Negromonte da Silveira and Isabel Cristina Torreão Pires.

Both convinced the young woman to work as a domestic worker in their house and convinced the young woman by telling her that she and her daughter could live with them in the house. Jessica accepted thinking that things were finally going to go a little better for her and her daughter, but at the same time, she did not know that she was getting into the lion’s den.

Jessica’s father reported that his daughter had been kidnapped by Jorge and that she could only be freed if she left her daughter with them, which Jessica flatly refused.

Years later, on February 25, 2012, Giselly Helena da Silva, 31, was murdered by the trio of Garanhuns.

Same modus operandi. Elizabeth approached the victim and this time she enticed her by promising that she would help her learn more about the word of God. Later, she would be killed in the married couple’s house with the help of her lover.

They bled the body and then removed parts of the meat and liver, then buried the remains in the backyard in a mass grave where the remains of the first victim, Jessica, already lay. Isabel took these parts and made filled cupcakes. The married couple, the mistress, and the daughter of the first victim ate these cupcakes as a purification ritual.

Isabel took advantage and sold the remaining cakes to her neighbourhood saying that they were light cakes since they were stuffed with chicken. The neighbours of the neighbourhood bought these cakes out of pity for the marriage.

A month later, on March 12, they found their new victim, 20-year-old Alexandra Falcão da Silva. This time the couple used the same tricks they used with their first victim.

Alexandra was new to Garanhuns and was looking for work when the couple offered her a job as a domestic worker. They carried out the same purification ritual by killing, bleeding, and removing pieces of meat plus the liver from the corpse. Isabel cooked it and used it as a filling for the same cupcakes.

They ate them between the 4 and the rest they sold back to the neighbourhood.

The police began to pull the blanket. They started by looking at all the store security camera footage to find out who was using Giselly’s credit card. To their surprise, they found the images of an older couple that was unknown to Giselly’s family.

They continued to investigate and found the whereabouts of the couple in Garanhuns, a municipality in the Pernambuco region surrounded by mountains. The municipality is also known as the Pernambuco Switzerland since it has mild temperatures in the summer and low temperatures in the winter, atypical for the rest of the region. Other nicknames for this town are City of Flowers or City of Drizzle.

The police arrived at the home and there they found Jorge, Isabel, Bruna, and the daughter of the first victim (I have not been able to find any name or reference to the daughter of the first victim). At first, Bruna pretended to be Jessica, although later, at the police station, she already declared herself as Bruna.

The police collected as much evidence at the home and among them found a book that Jorge wrote, ‘Diary of a Schizophrenic’. The 34-chapter, 50-page book tells the story of Jorge’s life with schizophrenia. There he would tell his reality and delusions with said disease. When he was very young, Jorge began to awaken symptoms of this disease, although his family was not aware of it.

He began by imagining a pair of friends, one black and one white. The pair of friends waited for Jorge on the patio of his house to play with him when he returned from school.

At puberty, he wanted to leave these friends aside, but since they did not leave there, Jorge asked his father for help, who told him that those people did not exist and that there was no one on the patio of his house. There Jorge realized that he saw things that no one else could see.

After finishing his physical education studies, Jorge married his long-time girlfriend, Isabel. One day Jorge had a very strong crisis, and Isabel fled with the neighbours for fear of being hurt. The only ones who could reassure Jorge were his father and his two childhood friends, who were still children – he recounts in his book.

Jorge tells Isabel that he sees her more as a mother than as a wife. Soon after, the trio begins to live together and it was at the same time that Isabel began to prepare cakes and sell them to get some money since Jorge could not work due to his mental state.

Once the trio was arrested, the daughter of the first victim recounted how Jorge was a cannibal and how they forced her to watch her mother’s death and eat her flesh. Today the young woman lives with her great-aunt, away from all this hell she had to endure for five years.

In 2014, the Cannibals of Garanhuns appeared before the judge for the first time and were sentenced for the murder, rape, and occultism of the body of the first victim Jessica Camila. Jorge is sentenced to 23 years while Isabel and Bruna to 19 years each.

In 2018, they were sentenced to the deaths of Giselly and Alexandra. The judge added 71 years to their sentences for Jorge, 68 years for Isabel, and 71 years and 10 months for Bruna.

Not much else is known about this peculiar trio. In Jorge’s book, although well written, is a bit confusing and feeds on an invented reality. So much so that in the last chapter of the book Jorge says goodbye in the following way:

All that I revealed, it’s not me, nor anyone, it’s just my mind.

— Jorge Beltrão Negromonte da Silveira