Jorlan Alves da Silva was wearing a black wig, a striped dress, sandals, and painted fingernails when police intercepted him in Mulungu, Paraíba, on Sunday, September 13. He was carrying a two-year-old child in his arms who was not his own. What gave him away was a minor oversight: the dress shifted and revealed a tattoo that the officers had already identified.
The operation lasted 48 hours and came after a failed capture attempt twenty days earlier. Once detained, 33-year-old Da Silva confessed to police that he had committed 80 murders over the course of 20 years, one of them his own father’s, when he was just 13. So far, investigators have only been able to definitively link him to 16 murders committed over the last three months, and thanks to his own directions, they have already found at least one buried body.
If the figure of 80 victims is confirmed, he would surpass Pedro Rodrigues Filho, the ‘Brazilian Dexter,’ and become the most prolific serial killer in Brazil’s history. The child he was carrying was examined by doctors and was unharmed. His relationship with Da Silva remains unclear.
