A taste for religious retribution and a desire to punish evil led three people to kill female victims and use their flesh in pastries, a Brazilian court heard. So on Friday,

A jury in northeastern Brazil … delivered sentences of 20-23 years in prison for three people convicted of killing two women, eating parts of their bodies and using some of their flesh to make and sell stuffed pastries. Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira was sentenced to 23 years in prison while his wife, Isabel Cristina Pires, and his mistress Bruna Cristina Oliveira da Silva received 20-year sentences. Police said the three lured women to their house by promising them a job as a nanny.

But see, your honor, these weren’t murders at all — they were purifications!

Prior to each killing, “arrows came into my head, images, millions of images,” compelling him “to deliver these people to God,” [Negromonte] told a reporter for a local broadcaster, TV Jornal Caruaru. The victims, all women, were selected, he claimed, according to some eccentric numerology, whereby anyone carrying personal ID bearing a combination of “bad numbers,” such as 66 or 666, was deemed “evil” and in need of “cleansing.”

I wonder where he got that idea.

Negromonte said he acted on instructions from two supernatural beings — not demons but “a cherubim and an archangel,” one white and one black, who instructed him to carry out a “mission of mercy,” killing to purify what he claimed were tainted souls.

He killed women because they

… though not born evil, have “cursed wombs,” he told police inspector Wesley Fernandes.

And he’s neither crazy nor any guiltier than most people, Negromonte insists.

When asked by a reporter if he believed he was innocent, he shot back, “Is anyone innocent in a war?”

Some years ago, he wrote, illustrated and self-published a 50-page booklet called Revelations of a Schizophrenic. In it, Negromonte noted he felt “relief” after killing “evil adolescents” and before he set about skinning his victims with a razor blade in order to “share” them.



