top. These white bags are then placed in the larger grey bags. Each grey bin liner has been tied tightly in the same fashion, and the top of the knot then snipped off with scissors—“very neatly, very precisely, the work of an obsessive,” said Van Reusel.
One man was questioned, but was released. He has since left Mons, and is no longer a suspect. All the authorities could do was await the next piece of the puzzle and keep Rue des Sinistres, or Sentier des Morts under surveillance.
The Butcher of Belize
In May 2006, Channel Five, a local television network in Belize, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a paedophile serial killer who abused and killed at least five schoolgirls during a 16-month binge.
The first victim was 13-year-old Sherilee Nicholas, who disappeared in September 1998. A month later authorities found a body partially submerged in a ditch of water beside a feeder road near Mile 13 on the Western Highway. The body suffered more than 40 knife wounds and showed signs of rape. Investigators believe the girl tried to fight off her attacker. The child’s mother identified the body, but no clues could be found to identify the killer.
Soon after, 9-year-old Jay Blades disappeared. Then, in the northern town of Corozal, 13-year-old Rebecca Gilharry was found raped and strangled. Another child’s body was found in northern Belize and another girl was raped, beaten with a rock and left to die in the southern town of Dangriga. She lived to tell her tale to the police.
Fears grew in Belize City when 12-year-old Jackie Fern Malic vanished on 22 March 1999. Jackie’s sister told police that a family friend, 40-year-old mechanic Mike Williams, had offered to take the two girls for a ride before school, but they turned him down. Police questioned Williams and released him, only to arrest him later. Two days after she had disappeared, Jackie Malic’s body was found on a side road, a few miles away from where Sherilee Nicholas’s body was found. She had multiple stab wounds to the face, buttock, knee and upper left arm, and one of her arms had been severed. The coroner drew attention to the many similarities between the two deaths.
On the day of Jackie’s funeral, children lined the streets with signs demanding that the killer be caught. A Children’s Summit was convened and, in a phone-in programme on the radio, a little boy asked Prime Minister Said Musa: “Why are there special police to protect the tourists, but not the children?”
A week later, the curfew was imposed. No one under 17 was allowed out between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Wardens were stationed at all schools to monitor children and watch for suspicious characters. Parents began walking their children to school. This was quite a readjustment for the citizens of Belize. With a population of just 200,000, the quiet central American country had long been relatively free of sex crimes and murder. But with Williams now in jail charged in Jackie Malic’s death everyone thought the nightmare was over.
In June, a child’s skull and a few bone fragments were found along the Western Highway, near where the other victims had been located. It was assumed that Jay Blades been found at last. But next to the body was Sherilee Nicholas’s school bags. Fearing an error in identification, authorities exhumed Sherilee’s body against her mother’s wishes.
Meanwhile, in June, 10-year-old Karen Cruz disappeared from her home in Orange Walk, just north of Belize City, while her mother was on the front veranda. Her body was found the next day near her home. Newspapers reported suspicions regarding her uncle 38-year-old Antonio Baeza, who lived next door, and suggested he had been stalking the child. Baeza was arrested and charged with murder. But still the killings did not stop.
At the end of the month, nine-year-old Erica Wills went missing. Her body was found three weeks later. She too had been butchered. Found behind a quarry near Gracie Rock, a village 20 miles west of Belize City, her bones had been picked clean by vultures, but her mother recognized her daughter’s hair band and her Tweety Bird ring, and was able to identify the body. A thousand people turned out in Belize City late Monday for a candlelight vigil in memory of the victims and Williams was then released.
Then on 15 February 14-year-old Noemi Hernandez disappeared after her grandmother sent her to collect rent money from a tenant. Nine days later her mutilated remains were fished out of the water near the mouth of the Belize River by a Belize Defence Force Maritime Wing patrol boat. She was found headless and her entire left arm was missing. Like the other victims, she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed repeatedly. The similarities between the murders were very striking and lead police to believe it may have been the work of a serial killer, now dubbed Jack the Butcher. As this is the first case of serial killing to hit Belize, the police lacked the experience to deal with the situation and called on Scotland Yard and the FBI for help. It was hoped that Channel 5’s reward might help bring the culprit to justice.
The Boy Killers of Brazil
A Brazilian man accused of killing 42 boys in a series of macabre Satanic murders was sentenced to 20 years and eight months in jail on 25 October 2006 for one of the killings. Forty-one-year-old Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito was found guilty of killing 15-year-old Jonathan Silva Vieira who disappeared in northern Brazil in December 2003. The bicycle mechanic still faces numerous other charges of murder killings and sexual abuse. The police in the Amazonian states of Maranhao and Para maintain that Chagas has confessed.
However, human rights groups following the case were reluctant to accept the police’s version of events and expressed reservations over the tactics used to secure Chagas’ confession. They also questioned previous police work and the future of three people already jailed or awaiting trial for carrying out some of the killings.
“We’ve been questioning the police’s work on this for 13 years, so we are naturally still a little suspicious,” said Nelma Pereira da Silva, head of a local children’s rights group who took the case to the Organization of American States in Washington. “We need to wait and see if this is for real.”
The police believe that Chagas performed black magic rituals before killing some of the boys. He sexually abused his victims and, in some cases cut off their genitals, before decapitating them and burying the bodies.
During the trial, Jonathan’s mother, Rita de Silva, told the court her son had said he was going to pick fruit with Chagas on the day he went missing.
“The monster tried to help out the mothers of the children he killed because he was looking for victims,” she said.
She said she had shown Chagas a photograph of her son after he disappeared, and the killer laughed and told her he had not seen him.
“It seemed like he was laughing at my suffering,” she said.
The trial was held in the auditorium of a club in Sao Jose de Ribamar, 1,400 miles north-east of Rio de Janeiro, because the courtroom was not big enough to hold the hundreds of victims’ relatives.
Prosecutors say they charged Chagas with Jonathan Silva Vieira’s murder first because it was the case in which they had the most evidence.
Chagas was arrested in April 2004 after neighbours complained of a stench coming from his ramshackle house on the outskirts of the Maranhao state capital of Sao Luis. Officers secured a search warrant and dug up a dirt floor to find two skeletons. One was identified as a four-year-old boy named Daniel and the other of a child Chagas said was called Diego. Daniel’s father recognized scraps of clothing as a T-shirt he was wearing when he disappeared in February 2003.
According to police, Chagas quickly confessed to the killings and those of at least 18 other young boys. The methods he used were similar to those used in the spate of murders that ravaged Maranhao and the neighbouring state of Para between 1989 and 2003. The police said that Chagas lived in both states at the times the killings took place.
The series of killings shocked even Brazil, where violence is common and the murder rate is one of the world’s highest. Reports that Chagas sexually assaulted the boys and then castrated them added to the outrage, as did allegations that some of the earlier killings that took place in Para between 1989 and 1993 were related to a
