Marcelo Costa de Andrade, a depraved serial killer, murdered 14 boys and consumed their blood, believing it would make him "as beautiful" as his tragic victims. Earning the moniker 'the Vampire of Niteroi', he carried out his devastating eight-month killing spree near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
When questioned following his capture, de Andrade did not claim he consumed their blood due to vampire aspirations. He admitted he did it to "become as beautiful as them".
Twisted Motive Behind the Killings
The murderer selected his victims for a deeply twisted motive. De Andrade attended services at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in his homeland while also viewing celebrations on television. It was there that he apparently encountered the belief that all children would automatically ascend to heaven upon death - so he chose exclusively to kill children, fearing he would be condemning adults to hell if he ended their lives, reports the Irish Mirror.
His murder rampage was brief, spanning only from April to December in 1991. After sexually assaulting his victims, he would smash their skulls open and gather the blood in a bowl to drink which he carried with him constantly.
Capture and Confession
He was apprehended following his final murder, just before Christmas in 1991. He approached Altair Medeiros de Abreu, 10, and his younger brother Ivan, offering them money to assist with a Catholic religious ritual. He enticed them to an isolated beach where he proceeded to murder the younger lad. While his elder brother believed the same destiny awaited him, the killer actually declared he wished to live with Altair.
The schoolboy instantly agreed and managed to escape when de Andrade became distracted. He subsequently guided police to the killer, who immediately confessed and appeared entirely unsurprised. He then shockingly admitted to slaying 13 other lads.
Interviews and Psychiatric Evaluation
Dr Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist and serial-killer profiler, interviewed the murderer at his psychiatric facility in November 2001. She recounted the chilling encounter in her book My Life Among The Serial Killers: Inside the Minds of The World's Most Notorious Murderers.
Through an interpreter, de Andrade repeated his deranged assertion that he was doing his victims a favour. He said: "The children have bad lives here. If they are children when they die they go to heaven. A better place."
Ilana Casoy, an authority on Brazilian serial killers, also encountered de Andrade personally. She said about the experience: "But my meeting with De Andrade was different to my meetings with other killers in many ways, because by meeting him I could really understand what it is to be an insane person."
"De Andrade has this mental illness and you get the feeling he doesn't know the true scale of what he did, the difference between right and wrong. There is no cure. Nobody knows what treatment he should receive, so they give him drugs to keep him under control, and that's about all they can do."
Incarceration
De Andrade was charged and ultimately declared insane. He was committed to Henrique Roxo Psychiatric Hospital and remains in a secure facility today.
