Vigilante Killer

Pedro Rodrigues Filho was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1954, his skull already misshapen from a beating his father gave his pregnant mother. His father worked nights as a guard at a school in Alfenas and was fired over missing supplies. In 1968, at fourteen, Pedro shot the town’s deputy mayor, whom he blamed for the dismissal, then killed a guard he believed was the actual thief.

He fled to a São Paulo favela and kept killing: traffickers, rivals, and men he decided deserved it. Arrested in 1973, he went on murdering inside Brazil’s prisons for the next three decades. He said he had also killed his own father in prison after his father killed his mother with a machete, though his biographer, Ullisses Campbell, later concluded the older man died of a respiratory illness behind bars. Courts convicted Rodrigues Filho of seventy-one murders. He claimed more than a hundred.

Brazilian law caps the time a prisoner can serve, and he walked out on April 24, 2007, after thirty-four years. He was locked up again in 2011 and released in December 2018. He then built a YouTube following, commenting on Brazil’s latest crimes and warning young viewers off the life he had led. On March 5, 2023, masked men shot him outside a relative’s house in Mogi das Cruzes and cut his throat. No one has been charged.