WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT: A vile religious sex cult that murdered young women across Brazil had s truly sickening method of disposing of their victims’ bodies – even feeding one mum to her young daughter
A five-year-old girl became a crucial witness in one of the most grisly murder inquiries in modern history after discovering her whole lie was a lie.
The little girl was sitting in her family’s garden eating a home-made empanada, when armed police suddenly stormed their home in the city of Garahuns, northeastern Brazil.
What the officers found was truly stomach-churning – especially for those locals who had bought the family’s popular home-made empanadas – a meat pie similar to a Cornish Pasty.
Jorge Beltrão Negromonte da Silveira, who Maria regarded as her father, believed he had been ordered by an angel to “purify” the Earth and prevent the planet from becoming overpopulated. But Negromonte’s method of reducing the population was, to say the least, horrifying.
Podcaster Mr Ballen explains that, because they were so busy making and selling their famous pies, Maria’s family would recruit young women to act as her nanny.
A month before the police raid, one such young woman had turned up at the house and introduced to her, but had apparently already quit. Mr Ballen explained: “In the past there had been other women who had come by to be her nanny and they didn’t seem to last very long.”
Negromonte, and his two accomplices, Isabel Cristina Torreão Pires da Silveira – who Maria thought her mum was – and Bruna Cristina Oliveira da Silva – who she believed was her aunt– had formed their own twisted religious cult that they called The Cartel. Negromonte would routinely sleep with both women. They treated young Maria as their daughter, even though neither Pires or the much younger Oliveira were related to her.
Instead, Maria’s true mother was 17-year-old homeless single mother named Jéssica Camila da Silva Pereira. She was precisely the kind of “impure” woman that Negromonte believed he was ordered by God to remove from the Earth.
“The literal purpose of the cartel sect was to eliminate women they deemed unclean in order to reduce and purify the world’s population,” Mr Ballen explains.
One of the cult members took Maria – then just one year old – out of Jéssica’s arms and, while she was distracted Negromonte clubbed her over the head. The stunned teenage mum was then dragged into a bathroom where her throat was slit and the blood drained from her body.
The three cult members then dismembered Jéssica’s body and skinned her, slicing up the meat and storing it overnight in a refrigerator. The next day, the two women butchered their victim, seasoned the flesh with salt and cumin, and prepared empanadas with the human meat. Some of Jéssica’s body was fed to her own daughter.
The sick trio moved from city to city across Brazil, killing at least two other women and making pies containing meat taken from their buttocks or thighs. Pires sold the little pies to waiting customers in hairdressers and beauty salons for around 25p each.
Cristiane Lima, 29, owned one of the salons where the Pires sold her pies. She told Globe.com: “Most of the customers bought them and didn’t complain, some thought they were just okay. Once, there were two customers who thought they were too salty and didn’t finish them. [Pires] said they were chicken empanadas.”
But as shocking as that may have been, the trio’s most appalling act was to have fed Maria her own mother’s flesh. “She was actually the daughter of the very first victim of the Cartel sect,” Mr Ballen explained. “They had been lured to this very house where her mother was murdered right in front of Maria and then after her mother was killed they cooked her mother and fed pieces of the mother to Maria.
“Ever since they had just kept Maria and treated her like she was a member of the family basically turning her into an unwitting cannibal.”
The sick crimes came to light after the killers used one of their victims’ credit cards. In November 2014, the three were found guilty in a Brazilian court with the two older cult members receiving 71-year sentences and Pires being sentenced to 68 years behind bars.
Negromonte has spent part of his sentence writing a series of books about his experiences, in which he explains that he is now a vegetarian. Maria is now living under a new identity.
