Pedrinho Matador was taking the fresh air at the beginning of March sitting in a beach chair in front of his sister’s house in a crowded neighborhood of Sao Paulo when a car stopped at his height. Two armed individuals came down. His niece was told to enter the house with her young daughter. He was riddled with shots immediately afterwards. The chair broke. Then one of the attackers slit his throat as he lay dying on the ground with six bullet holes in his body. He wanted to make sure that Pedrinho didn’t get up again. He was the devil. The hitman was wearing a ‘Joker’ mask. The niece heard the shots from the kitchen. She already knew that her uncle was a dead man since the car stopped on the sidewalk. No one in the Mogi das Cruces neighborhood went out into the street. A revenge. Whose?
The rematch could have been anyone’s. Traffickers, relatives or friends of the multiple victims of Matador – for a reason he was nicknamed that way –, former prison mates… The man had made no friends, but he had made many enemies in the two worst underworlds of Brazil: drug trafficking and prison. . Pedro Rodrigues Filho, as his real name was, was a redeemed serial killer – or so he claimed – who, at 69, had a hundred deaths behind his back. Almost half of his crimes, 42, were carried out in prison. In the prison he incarnated the angel of death. He killed rapists, robbers, pedophiles, and traffickers because “they were bad people.” And, as he said in a television interview, “I am a murderer.”
On one occasion, five inmates ambushed him in the courtyard. He released the dead to three and left two badly wounded. The last thing the former saw was Pedrinho’s prison tattoos and the knife entering his abdomen, Matador’s preferred maneuver to irreversibly blow up his victims. The other was to break their necks. He is considered the greatest multiple murderer in the history of Brazil. He explained in a magazine that he did it “for pleasure” and as a “favor to society.” He had it written on one arm: ‘I kill for pleasure’. They diagnosed him with profound psychopathy. His case has been studied by dozens of doctors and psychiatrists.
Matador’s story is as incredible as its bloody record. Not only because of his criminal past, but because of the present as a ‘youtuber’ that he had developed since his release five years ago. He had his own show from him. The ecstasy of morbid fascination for sordid and atrocious stories commented on by someone with their hands covered in blood.
It could be said of him that he was a successful commentator on murders. A professional in any of the senses that are sought. Since 2018 he dedicated himself to feeding an internet channel where he recounted his misdeeds over and over again, talked about other current homicides and gave advice to young people not to become violent. As has been said, it seems that in the last days of his imprisonment he went through a very particular expiation process. He had between 125,000 and 200,000 followers on YouTube and was very active on Instagram and TikTok. Last week he announced on his networks that he was visiting the Mogi das Cruces neighborhood. Four days later they shot him. Someone among all those who followed him on the internet, wanted him badly, very badly.
The trail of blood that draws his life begins in Santa Rita do Sapucai, in the State of Minas Gerais, where he was born. Some mental health experts have linked his nature, an explosive hate machine devoid of any empathy or emotion, to the beatings his father, Pedro Rodrigues, inflicted on his mother during her pregnancy. In the darkest and deepest horror imaginable, he was born literally badly injured, with head injuries caused by the punches his mother gave his wife in the twenties moments before giving birth.
“There is no remorse”
There are two atrocious episodes in his relationship with his father, extreme and linked as one might imagine with death. The first happened at the age of 11, when Pedro Rodrigues was fired from his job as a janitor at a school in Alfenas, in the south of Minas Gerais, falsely accused of stealing the students’ breakfast, and the boy Pedrinho murdered the deputy mayor who signed the dismissal. . He took his grandfather’s shotgun, went out in front of the president, shot him and later went in search of who he considered the real thief and fired two shots at him.
The second episode takes place many years later. In jail, where he meets his father. There he finds out that he has hacked his mother to death in a fit of rage. Pedrinho manages to visit him and, after a brief conversation, plunges a knife into him 22 times – the same number of stab wounds that ended the woman’s life – and tears out his heart. So brief, so resolute. So devilish.
However, knowing his story requires going back to the moment when he shot the deputy mayor of Alfenas. From there he moved to Sao Paulo fleeing from the Police. In order to survive, he imposed the law of the fittest in the drug jungle. Relentless, he took out several drug dealers and took over his business. A drug killer. At 18 he was already a feared individual. But also persecuted.
It is said that Pedrinho’s mental bankruptcy with any hold on reality occurred when his girlfriend, the widow of one of the traffickers he had killed, was murdered as an act of revenge. Adrift, engulfed in rage, Pedrinho tortured several dealers and hitmen to identify the gunman, a rival drug trafficker nicknamed El Director. He located him at a wedding, took his life and that of six other people and left a trail of sixteen injured among the guests. Killey Peter.
On one occasion he was interviewed in a magazine.
– Do you have any remorse?, asked the journalist.
– No. I only killed the ones that weren’t good.
– When you kill someone, what comes to mind?
– Nothing.
– Nothing?
– Nothing, because a useless person has died. There is no remorse, there is nothing. I have a philosophy: the traitor must die.
– And what about murdering by breaking the neck of the victims?
– That’s when you have to kill by hand. It is easy.
In reality, it will never be known for sure how many people Matador took their lives. The Police counted 71 proven murders (including that of one of his brothers-in-law) for which he was sentenced to 400 years in prison. However, he has always admitted more than a hundred, despite the fact that official investigations have never been able to confirm it, nor have the bodies of these alleged victims been found.
The psychiatrists determined that Pedrinho had an enormous capacity to fabricate and alternate between reality and fiction. It is also possible that police oversights have helped to falsely lower the list of homicides. One morning, Pedrinho threw an inmate down the jail elevator shaft, but the case was not recorded anywhere. The jailers didn’t care too much about the busted prisoner several meters below.
Strangled in the police van
His first admission to prison was in 1973. In the van that took him to the prison he was handcuffed and even so he managed to suffocate another inmate sitting next to him who had been convicted of rape. He went through several prisons. He enjoyed killing other prisoners for thirty years, according to the Brazilian black chronicle. Apparently, some he suffocated, others he stabbed, and there were a handful of them he threw from the top of the stairs. A cellmate paid with his life for his habit of snoring. Tired of being woken up, it seems that Pedrinho crushed his head one night. No one wanted to be destined for his dungeon. Ten years at least he was in isolation.
He obtained his freedom in 2003 in the midst of a strong controversy over the fact that Justice released the worst serial killer in Brazil. However, Brazilian law orders that no one spend more than thirty years in a row behind bars and Pedrinho was a very singular. In the country’s criminal history, only three inmates had survived such a long confinement so far. They all died before. However, he was jailed again in 2011 for some pending cases.
He was finally released in 2018. Once on the street, a large part of society continued to consider him a ruthless criminal, but there were also many who called him a “justiciar” for taking the lives of other criminals. Between one and the other, he began to be on the lips of all of Brazil and he decided to take advantage of his popularity by opening a channel on the internet. He called him Pedrinho ExMatador. Many police officers were surprised that his media exposure did not attract former enemies out for revenge. He lives on borrowed money, they thought. Until last Sunday morning when he went out to get some fresh air in the street and his credit ran out.
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