Pedro Rodrigues Filho, known as Pedrinho Matador (or Pedrito the murderer), had a brutal end, at the height of his bloody career.
Considered the biggest serial killer in the history of Brazil, he died this Sunday at the age of 68 at the hands of two unknown persons who approached him while he was with relatives in front of his sister's house, in Mogi das Cruces, in the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo.
They shot him first and to finish it off, they slit his throat, according to the military police.
After a first crime as a teenager, he murdered a hundred people according to his own accounts.
He served 42 years in prison.
And, in tune with current times, after being released from prison he became a
youtuber
.
He commented on high-profile crimes.
The serial killer was killed while visiting relatives.
He had gone to Mogi das Cruces from the São Paulo coast, where they lived, with the intention of spending the weekend with his cousins and nephews.
On Sunday they were going to meet for lunch.
He was with a niece and her daughter shortly before ten in the morning when two guys with masks got out of a black car to fire several shots at it.
They warned the women: "Calm down, it doesn't go with you."
He was with Pedrinho Matador.
The uncles and cousins heard the shots from the house.
Police have not arrested anyone for the crime or named suspects.
Among the many tattoos that decorated Rodrigues' body, there were some typical among prisoners for decades such as crucifixes or daggers.
And one on the forearm that explained his motives: "I kill for pleasure", as the video illustrates an old interview.
He himself told Época
magazine
in 2003 that he had killed more than a hundred people.
He used to say that he had never regretted it "I'm just a murderer, I always was," he explained naturally in 1996 in an interview with
Fantastico
, one of the most watched news programs in Brazil.
By then he had spent almost half his life in prison and a decade in an isolation cell.
Because almost half of his victims were killed in prison, while serving a sentence.
For years, murders were routine in Brazilian prisons until a criminal organization, the First Commandos of the Capital (PCC), imposed its law and regulations for murder in penitentiaries and favelas.
Pedrinho Matador was fourteen years old when he committed his first murder.
He shot to death with a shotgun none other than the deputy mayor of his hometown, Santa Rita do Sapucai, in Minas Gerais, because he had fired his father, who worked as a custodian at a public school, on suspicion of robbery, according to the obituary published by the newspaper
State of Mines
.
From then on he mixed with drug dealers.
But since he was a child he was very familiar with dismemberment, viscera and blood because since he was nine he helped his grandfather in a slaughterhouse.
Pedrinho Matador far exceeded the average age at which his countrymen retire.
But it is unlikely that he expected to die peacefully in bed.
His murder includes other movie details: One of the killers was wearing a Joker mask, a witness told investigators.
If father murdered his mother.
And, at 17, a rival gang member killed his pregnant girlfriend.
He took revenge by killing him.
He was 18 years old when he entered prison for the first time and there he spent more than four decades in two stages, as explained in a farewell video by Pablo Silva, the man who helped him write his biography and accompanied him on the raid on social networks.
Pedrinho exmatador is the title of the YouTube channel where he has 250,000 followers.
He was also on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms because when he got out of prison he saw a way to earn a living in it.
Maybe that's how his killers tracked him down.
His last post was on Saturday.
He appeared playing pool in a bar, according to G1 reports.
The location, Mogi das Cruces, the city where he was executed the next day.
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