Photo: De Agostini Picture Library

A man, his wife, and his live-in mistress are on trial for murdering and eating two women in the northeast Brazilian city of Garanhuns. Prosecutors say they lured the unsuspecting victims into their house by advertising a nanny job and, once they were dead, made pastries using the women’s flesh. As if that weren’t gruesome enough on its own, they later sold these “treats.”

The trio didn’t clean up too well after their culinary experiments in April 2012, however, and authorities found the women’s remains at the house, along with a 50-page manifesto by the husband entitled “Revelations of a Schizophrenic.” During the trial, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira referred to the murders as “a horrible monstrous mistake.”

But that, of course, was plan B. The suspects initially told police that their religious sect valued “the purification of the world and the reduction of its population.” Fortunately, religious freedom doesn’t go that far in court.