There Are No Answers When a Poor Girl Dies — Complete Story
In 2016, a corpse was found tied up, gagged and hanged in a mangrove tree, on a beach in São José, located in the brazilian state of Santa Catarina. It was Maiara Felisbino dos Anjos, a 22-year-old girl from Gaspar (SC). Despite the brutality, the case was never taken seriously by the police, which led us to a investigative work, that lasted more than a year and a half.
By Gabriel Daros and Matheus de Moura
Chapter I — Last night the dogs did not bark
November 17th, 2016
Marcus Vinicius Amaral Pereira went for a morning walk around 10 am, as usual when he visited his parents in a beachfront located in the Ponta de Baixo neighbourhood, in the municipality of São José, which belongs to the brazilian south state of Santa Catarina. On those days when he trying to keep in shape, fighting the advance of the 34 years, he made a route that basically consisted of walking through the area known as Prainha (or Lil’ Beach, in english), which received its name because it is a large collective garden where the sea flows into a strip of sand of less than one metro, next to a wide lawn.
He expected to find there the usual: the company of the mutts that survived eating the leftovers, the excitement of the akitas and the beagles behind the gates, one or another seagull on the rocks in the distance. Birds singing on top of the roof of two-story mansions, mangrove trees and two-meter walls. In the sand of the beach, dragged sea gravels pulling cigarette butts and marijuana remains from previous nights of the young, who usually stemmed from the surrounding neighborhoods. And on the lawn, the decadent little yellow boat with a white stripe and the number #44 marked on the side, almost always filled with debris, such as pieces of wood and a fisherman rope roll.
The one thing Marcus did not expect to find in that immaculate environment of the middle-upper class blasé was a corpse.
Barely crossing alongside the small concrete wall, he found a girl tied with what it seemed to be scotch tape and a red fabric, her neck hanging by a fisherman’s rope wrapped high over the branches of one of the mangrove trees. Her mouth was gagged, by twists and turns of brown tape. Her body was sitting down, its spine erect, over the spindly roots of the mangrove wamp, flooded by the tides that were about to rise.
The police arrived five minutes after the notification. Ademar and João Otávio were the officers responsible for patrolling in that morning. They soon isolated the scene and tried to hold away the morbid curiosity of the passersby. Except for her mouth, which the layers of tape overlapped about one and a half times, firmly at the same place, her bandages wrapped her whole body, irregularly, like a plastic serpent unable to untie the knot made by her own body. Started from the hand, together with the red elastic fabric. Not too tight, just barely enough to keep the wrists together over the legs, also wrapped in tape. From there, it climbed up towards her waist, to circle her three times and head back towards the arms, over her clothing, until it connected again to the wrists’ skin, to then return to the waist, and follow back to the left thigh. The knot on the neck, with the knotholes on the left, hung her head to the opposite side. Sand was all over the sides of her lycra leggings.
The girl was partly indigenous and partly german; her big eyes were downturned shaped; her ching was square, marked by two muscular lines that crossed over until half her cheeks; her nose resembled a small potato; while her hair, barely below the shoulders, was peroxide blonde, the color neglected by the lack of retouching, letting the black root slowly regain its space.
The two officers notified the Civil Police (officially responsible for all state-related investigations), that took about an hour to arrive at the crime scene.
And sixty minutes was more than enough to spread the news that Prainha dawned with the body of a young blonde in her twenties. First the locals arrived, one or another had seen the girl before, usually by day, smoking a joint or taking selfies. As is the case of lawyer Paulo Santana Júnior, who even without getting close to the body, assumed to be a suicide. Then came the residents of Fazenda Santo Antônio — the “Fazenda Max” -, Ponte do Imaruim, and the adjacent neighbourhoods as a whole. Among this crowd of curious people, Angélica Rosa and Juliana Passos Costa, two girls from Fazenda Max, came together to recognize the body as their friend Maiara Felisbino dos Anjos. They wanted to get closer to be sure, because it seemed some kind of fiction, but they couldn’t, so to not compromise the scene.
The police did not give much attention to their story, perhaps because they thought that in the face of a crime everyone wants to be useful, or they did not find them credible enough because of their black skin. They preferred to listen to a colleague at the Fazenda Max police station, known as Silveira. He could have sworn that it was Mayara Kammer, whom he had met when the girl was still a child, and had chosen for herself a future in the police.
But she didn’t even physically resembled the corpse. At the time, her short, shoulder-length hair was brown. She was already corpulent, and the four-month pregnancy was evident. She wore glasses, had a septum piercing, a tattoo on her back and thighs.
Silveira was not even intimate of the girl, who barely remembered him. If he was, he would have known that Mayara had already changed her ambitions for her career; she dreamed of being a doctor. Or that she was bisexual, liked to attend LGBT parties such as 1007 and Conka, and that she had a boyfriend, Tiago Grizulfi, the father of her son, with whom she had been together since January 2016.
And it was in a doctor’s office, with her boyfriend, that she received the breaking news. Not by the old magazines on the counter, but by her mother, through messages:
– They recognized your body in the Legal Medical Institute (criminalistic medical expertise). They want me to go there to confirm.
– How can it be me, if I just left home now? I’m in the hospital.
She found it funny in the first few minutes. But around 2 p.m., her cousin exhausted her with print screens of the news of her death. Friends from the neighbour state of Rio Grande do Sul sent messages, filled with grief. The neighborhood welcomed her back, their eyes brimmed with tears. Disavowing that would take a whole month.
Mayara Kammer did not understand what the hell was happening around her.
When questioned by the newspaper Hora de SC about the misunderstanding that disturbed the wrong girl and her family, police deputy Manoel Galeno, responsible for the investigation, could only state that: “We worked the entire afternoon with the name of Mayara Kammer, but that information does not proceed because this Mayara is alive. I saw her in person.”
The news goes on reporting that the mistake had cost the police deputy an entire day of testimonials with no usefulness. “The case is being investigated by the São José Criminal Investigation Division. According to Galeno, the inquiry returned to a point zero, since the witnesses heard on Thursday were due to the wrong name. He chose not to report his suspicions if it was a homicide or suicide.”
They then followed the most obvious decision: to listen to the early witnesses, Ju and Angélica. Finally recognized that it was the body of Maiara Felisbino dos Anjos, a 22-years old inhabitant of the Fazenda Max district, just another young person that attended the place, a girl so common that she had in her pockets a box of Dunhill cigarettes, a blue lighter, keys, a two-reais bill and one real coin. The only thing similar between the two girls was the name, which still differed in spelling.
It was left to the Police the efforts of figuring out practically everything about this girl. They had as clue, in addition to the witnesses of the two girls, the security camera recordings from the manor of Edio Schmitt Sales, owner of a german shepherd who barks only for those who never stepped in those streets. At 10 pm on November 16th, 2016, the camera captured Maiara walking on the sea shore, kicking the water while holding the shoes in her hand, childish, like a kid who rarely goes to the beach. Her route was filmed until the small mangrove, where the light dissipated in that pitch so deep that united the neighborhood and the badges in a same cause of complaining with the city hall on the insecurity that the environment brought. Curiously, Edio’s german shepherd did not bark that dawn.
The police did not keep the recordings.
Chapter II — The aroma that only relationships reduced to dust have
November 18th, 2016
“According to the police deputy, although the Medical Legal Institute initially ruled out the suicide case, a farewell letter was found in the victim’s apartment. In the text, addressed to her mother, Maiara reports that she was very sad about the end of a relationship. (…) ‘We took testimony from relatives who said that she was depressed. We can not rule out murder, but there are several indications that lead us to suspect suicide’, explains the officer.”
It was 24 hours after the news that the police had mistook the victim’s name and Galeno changed his mind about pronouncing to the newspaper’s Hora de SC about his suspicions. The truth is that the police deputy called it out suicide as soon as he learned about the death. It seemed obvious to him that a girl of 1,59m in height and about 50 kg would have gagged herself, tied her own body and hanged herself, while still sitting on sharp and uncomfortable roots of mangrove. His statement to the newspaper came out at the end of the day, in which they gathered evidence in the apartment and testimony from relatives.
Born in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, the police deputy has a somewhat imposing appearance, with a broad, rounded face, whose seriousness is emphasized by the shaven hair, his sturdy while lean muscles, and a skeptical tone in the way he talks about the cases he investigates. And at some level, this set of features impressed the victim’s family; the mother of Maiara, Ilcilei dos Anjos, her most intimate cousin, Márcia dos Anjos and her stepfather, Celso Besen, came from Santa Catarinas’ cities of Gaspar and Tubarão, the birthplace of Maiara. From all of them, Celso was the most carried away by the incipient police narrative, putting himself at the disposal to guide them through Maiara’s life.
Galeno accompanied the family to the kitchenette where the victim lived: a set of little homes that were extensions from the original structure of a two-story house over time. The landlady, Marta Regina Felisberto, lived on the ground floor with her family while her tenants lived in the apartments above. Access to the second floor was made by a concrete staircase that, according to the owner, allows anyone to transit without attracting attention. The police broke into the apartment and, with family and Marta, they came across a chaotic room. Remains of marijuana cigarettes sprawled on the floor, others filling a plastic bag, while the refrigerator emanated smell of rotting food from past days. The mess increased in the hand of the police officers, who searched through her belongings randomly, without much care or apparent methodology, as emphasized by the relatives. And this lack of organization made them almost let pass a detail well noticed by the owner: a cutted sheet, next to a pair of scissors. The color of the cloth — to her mother’s despair — was identical to that found in Maiara’s wrists.
The cousin Márcia, 32 years old, was the most unsettled person with the police activity. Blonde hair, about 1,60m tall, sporting a fit, triangular body, with a square-shaped face and thin features, Márcia had the looks and posture of a stern woman. She tried to hold her ground without drawing the spotlights to herself. She wasn’t crying like her auntie neither trying to prove herself resourceful as her auntie’s partner, which couldn’t stop putting his nose in everything he saw. She kept her critiques, however, to when she deemed more relevant, discussing it later on with police deputy Galeno.
Besides the marijuana cigarettes leftovers, which it was duly collected, and the perforated red sheet recognized by Marta, the police found a Bible, marked with a calendar page, with a poem written in it. Ilcilei had recognized her daughter’s hand writing. She had written like this:
That was more than enough to rectify Manoel Galeno’s opinion of being a suicide case.
Márcia had already read that same writing, years before, more than once, actually. She used to see her cousin writing melancholic poems in calendars and notebooks. That was just another one, from a long time ago, and its fatalistic interpretation could only make sense to those who didn’t knew her will to live. For these reasons she, as well as her family, didn’t received Galeno’s press statement of a suicide note very well, let alone that it was based on the ending of a relationship, in matter of fact that the writing does not even quote third parties.
It has then begun the collecting of the relatives’ testimonials. Entered in Galeno’s room the matriarch, Ilcilei Felisbino dos Anjos, a white-skinned blonde woman, about 1,50m high, the back arched and retracted in a melancholy that preys on her way before her daughter’s death. A visible melancholy in her winding-marked features next to her downed eyes. Though the marks are deep, its looks are attenuated by her heavy makeup use and the sunglasses that she so much insists in wearing, even indoors. Her voice is trembling, aloof, and it is far from uncommon that her sentences are chopped by stutterings and searches for complex words to use, whose she seldom finds. All this insecurity is disguised in her efforts of building an emotional distance and in her expensive clothing. Ilcilei is the kind of person that, according to her relatives, won’t go down her heels even in a jogging session by the shore sidewalks.
Along with her and the police deputy there was also the scrivener Felipe Marisquirena Duarte. She started by saying she maintained a good relationship with her daughter until mid May, 2016. Back then, Maiara had become a girl more and more withdrawn — and sometimes even aggressive –, because she had recently started a relationship with a guy that Ilcilei had come to meet only once. According to the mother, still in her testimony, the daughter lived alone in Florianópolis’ metropolitan region for about three or four years. However, in different periods of her life, Maiara had briefly returned to Gaspar, to unwind with her family. In fact, last time she done that was in the second half of 2016, few months before her death, when she was disturbed by reasons she hasn’t disclosed to anyone. In the end, Maiara had returned to São José, with her two first months of rent covered by her mother. The last meeting that Ilcilei had with her daughter was in November 5th, in that same year, some time after learning out, through her partner, Celso, that her daughter smoked marijuana.
Celso Besen also gave his testimony. He is a tall and thin man, with albinism, which gave him a deep white skin and yolk-yellow hair, and is 60-years old, 18 more years than Ilcilei, which makes itself visible in his deep wrinkles. In this relationship, he is the most proactive person and, in certain moments, aggressive, especially when it comes to exert his paternalism.
He, just like Ilcilei, had evaluated his relationship with Maiara as good. Still in confluence with his partner’s testimony, he stated that what had shaken his relationship with his stepdaughter was this new relationship she began. Celso said he was startled by the feverishness of her passion for this new lad. In his testimonial, it becomes quite frequent his verdict that Maiara used to be sad frequently — a fact that which, as revealed later in interview to this article, also served as a sign for him to believe in the suicide thesis.
November 23th and 24th, 2016
At Premiatto Restaurant, in Continente Shopping, located in São José, Maiara’s colleague Cassiana Soares and the owner of the establishment, Jaqueline Andersen, remembered her as being an increasingly melancholic employee, yes, but not always. However, this did not mean that she was irresponsible or without dedication, at least not in the beginning. As her depression advanced, the once prestigious worker, as told by them in the police testimony, started to lose commitment and, in a matter of months, declined to an increasingly rebellious behavior. She clashed food trays in front of customers, spared no swearing aloud, and was swept away by unexplained crises of sobbing. Her emotional outbursts had concrete reasons, which were partially explained to colleagues in times of venting at intervals. Maiara spoke of her turbulent past, of a tormented present moment, and especially of how she ran away from it — by the abuse of illicit substances.
According to their testimony, Pituquinha, as the staff at the mall called her — because of her hair tied sideways –, sounded more and more like someone else, strange, unknown. They remarked: Maiara smoked marijuana every day and, on bad days, smoked even more. “You’re using too much drugs,” they said, when in face of one of her erratic behaviors. To which she once would have responded, “I have always worked high, you have never noticed.”
However, if it was only marijuana that Maiara used in excess this would be less of a problem. She told the two of them that when she went to the rave parties on days off, she stuffed herself with ecstasy and puffed up her Lança-perfume (brazilian drug), just for fun. And that she even got to use crack for two months, but she would have managed to leave the addiction alone. She even went so far as to use this involvement with drugs to scare her boss and colleagues. “You know who I walk with, don’t you?” she said when she resigned.
But the truth is that for Maiara, this abuse did not originate in the desire to feel detached, as it is with the majority of young people, but in the need for support to bear the weight of the denials of her own life: one of abandonment and sorrow.
It started back in 1994, in her first year of life, when her father, Darci Adriani De Pieri, met Ilcilei at his door, with the child on her lap, and he then refused to go all the way into this paternity thing, and did not recognize her as his daughter. He took the two of them back to Gaspar immediately, so that Maiara would never appear before him again, let alone call him father. He bought his “right” of abandoning by paying that woman roughly $ 3,000 so that she would never go after him in court — an agreement that proved her impossible to maintain when she learned the extended difficulties of being a single mother. After that, he saw Maiara three times at most in life, as told by maternal relatives of the girl.
When sought by this article, Darci, who did not attend the funeral, said:
“I mean, I didn’t like it [her death], right? After all, it is kind of my daughter, right? But I cannot talk much about her, no, I barely saw the girl.”
To move on with her life, Ilcilei used this money to give input in the construction of a house. She also opened a snack bar in Laguna with her sister. If managing a business was difficult, being a first-time mother (and father) was not helping. When Maiara was two years old, she had to send her to the care of her grandmother. She used to say that keeping her child around was a nuisance to her business. Some relatives pinpoint another origin to the problem, not in the daughter, but in herself: Ilcilei did not like Maiara to call her mother in public, because, in her head, it would reduce the interest of other men.
Back at Gaspar, she had to deal with the duality of her grandmother, a kind but rigid woman in the way she expressed her Christian conservatism, as, being a devout Catholic, she imposed on Maiara the obligation to attend church and follow the traditions in a tied up matter.
In this small town, she was raised until she was 12 years old, only to be sent back to live with her mother. The reason: she was caught getting high on sniffing shoemaker’s glue with some school friends. If the conduct is controversial enough to give someone a reputation, imagine it in a city of 66 thousand inhabitants.
At age 14, Maiara smoked her first joint, in front of her grandmother’s house. This caused too much stress for the matriarch, who then asked Ilcilei to take care of her daughter again. Mother and daughter would live together again. But Maiara had already engraved in her heart a distance far greater than the 229 km that always separated her from the one who saw her once a month and preferred not to be called a mother.
She called her Leide, and when wanted to be cold with her, Ilcilei, because that was how everyone called her.
Her new home, in Tubarão, was filled with conflicts. Living with her mother and stepfather was too tempestuous. Mainly, by the constant bickering with Celso, who created for himself a narrative of victim of a gratuitous hate from his stepdaughter. Failing to obey them, in 2009, Maiara decided to live with the person who most understood her, the cousin Márcia, in Sombrio, also Santa Catarina. She confided to her that her displeasure for Celso had originated in events that have today been obscured, which she could only say “I have my reasons, cousin, he is not what he seems.”
It was with Márcia whom she used to share her doubts about life: what is menstruation, how to choose my clothing, how to walk, talk and become a woman. It was also she who tried to keep her away from addictions. One day, she heard that Maiara was dating the second biggest drug dealer of the town, years older than her. Márcia found her out of her mind, by his side. The guy said that there was no need worrying about her cousin, “the girl’s fine”. But, by how numbed Maiara looked, it clearly wasn’t. And Márcia was willing to make things worse than her cousin’s state — she threatened to call the police if her cousin didn’t left the place immediately.
The girl, who was just 15 years old and had barely started a relationship with cocaine, was being dragged through the street. Maiara did protested, calling her cousin names, and then she got beaten. A single slap, straight in the face, like the child she was. A slap strong enough to silence the girl and to carve in her cousin’s mind the pain of beating on someone who was almost like a daughter to her.
“Don’t you ever make me go through this again,” Márcia thundered.
But Maiara had a pain way deeper than a slap could reach. She never managed to abandon her drug use.
A year later, in 2010, the young girl had moved to the metropolitan region of Florianópolis. Away from her family, she would share her temporary houses with other girls, with whom, little by little, she built friendship ties. Still underage, she used to freelance in restaurants, shoe stores and wherever else it was possible, sustaining her independence of her family, free to take her own decisions. And she decided that she would smoke a joint, yes, either alone or with these neighbourhood dudes on bike that just wanted to talk and chill out, just as friends, of course. She also decided that she owed nothing to any of them and that Tiago, that guy whom she had dated for a week, already seemed decent enough to live together with in that same year. Their relationship was good, filled with care, but not any less conflicted, and when he disagreed on her, it sounded logical for Maiara to cry and kick and throw herself in a tantrum. They broke up one year later and she had moved on, alone, as she always was.
Until December 2012, an ex-boyfriend named Luiz Eduardo Domingues appeared in her life, and everything went south, in a way that she never managed to forget. The relationship had been troubled, with many abuses — which you will understand in the next chapter. Thus, its end, which occurred in early 2013, coincided with her unemployment and a need for escape to Gaspar. This town is a piece of land crossed by a stream and remarked by its gray and dense air, just a typical small town in which its heart is the church located at the highest point. And as such, it could not meet Maiara’s expectations for substances that she had been nursing for years, as her cousin Géssica explained, from whom she got close in that period. It’s difficult to buy drugs in a province. “Normally we did not even go out much on Gaspar, there was no party, nothing.”
During this period, Maiara worked with a manual faction for her uncle, who paid a merely symbolic value, without regulated work time, until she went to a company in which she was finally registered. The little money she earned had a very clear end: to take her driver’s license and buy a motorcycle — an old desire, which accompanied her throughout life, never to be fulfilled. Unfortunately, the money didn’t spend much time in the savings, getting comfortable in the vaults of nightclubs like El Fortin, more than 70 km away from Gaspar. The thirst for freedom scratched Maiara’s throat, still bewildered by the past relationship. MDMA, and its variables, as much as the brazilian drug Lança Perfume, used in the nightclub did not satisfy her as a whole, and the need for white powder was rising up. There were nights when Maiara called friends from the Florianópolis’s neighbour city Palhoça on Facebook, begging for cocaine. She even offered to buy ten grams, but she did not have enough money, and even if she got a good price, which she eventually found after talking to an ex-lover who was touched by their sexual memories, there was no way out of Gaspar to finish the purchase.
Her conversations on Facebook suggest that this need for powder did not come only from the nostalgia of the drug effects, while living in the even smaller town of Sombrio, but the need for cash. Part of it would go to her nose and the rest would turn into paper in her pockets. In mid-2013, she tried to buy 20 grams with a colleague, Felipe, who charged 20 reais a gram. She found it very expensive and difficult to resell it, gave up the transaction and went on with the search, which ended fruitless. She needed to return to her old habitat, she needed to return to Florianopolis.
Gaspar was pretty much like a straightjacket and Maiara had gone mad in this solitary. According to Géssica, the relationship between the cousin and her mother wasn’t helping much, for the distance between them was an aggravating factor in the disgust that she kept for the town. To the cousin, Maiara used to confess the longing that she had for the capital city region: “Florianópolis is a big city, parties aplenty, lots of different places, many beaches to wander around.”
Finally she quenched that thirst and went back to the Magical Island, as the city is known, and this time, she brought Géssica along, with whom she would live together in the future. She made a new Facebook account and had installed herself in the neighbourhood that would come to be scenery of the rest of her life and death: Fazenda Max.
Chapter III — Far away every face resembles the hangman
November 23th, 2016
A third and final Maiara co-worker testified to the police, Ivaneusa das Graças Soares. In addition to the reports of the victim’s sudden mood changes, which got in a increasingly aggressive mood, she recalled episodes in which Maiara spoke alone and laughed randomly, all starting shortly before a revelation that surprised everyone in the restaurant where they were working: she was pregnant. On April 27th, 2016, Maiara published in her Facebook a photo in front of the mirror, in which she holds her belly with her hand over a gray sweater, with the hashtag #OursonWeloveyoualreadyPedro❤. Thus, not only did it reveal to the world that she carried a child, but it already exposed the name of what would come to be a human being, at some point. Co-workers did not know how to react, trying to extract more information from Maiara, who remained elusive, serene and numb, sometimes in a trance. Shortly afterwards, the matter faded into oblivion.
Her sanity, however, remained in check before her co-workers. Because, with the obliviousness of the pregnancy, a new question emerged: why the hell was Maiara walking with a doll through the mall? For a few days, she was seen walking, buzzing, as she smoothed out the synthetic tresses of the doll she was carrying on her lap, reaching bedtime to the toy in front of the Ri Happy store. It was as if she had got stuck in a fantasy in which she was already a mother.
Then, in a very sudden manner, Pituquinha had turned against the restaurant’s boss and resigned. About a month before, she had sold her 20 days of vacation, amounting a sum of about R$3500, her salary included. Therefore, when she had signed her termination in the union office, she didn’t gained anything else, leading her to a nervous breakdown, as she thought herself to be wronged, considering that that money had already gone — to a destination that nobody really knows.
Truth is, Maiara’s mental unstableness wasn’t a particular condition of her workplace. It was more than a year that she had been acting in ways at least strange. It is dated that her psychological imbalance starts with the news of the violent death of her ex-boyfriend, almost husband and eternal torturer, Luiz Eduardo Domingues. He died after taking five gunshots to the chest, in front of his house, in April 11th, 2015, in the city of Biguaçu, a town by the metropolitan region of Florianópolis. Maiara had just learned about his death four days later, through Messenger, by a friend in common.
Their relationship had ended two years before that, but the memories had never left her. She felt more relief than pain with these news. Aside that, it was because of him, to whom she referred as “garbage”, that she had moved out to Gaspar in 2013, dived deep in heavy drugs and made a completely new Facebook account, which she had used only during 2014. Only with five gunshots through his chest, she could finally calm down. But who said she managed it to keep like that?
Maiara and her cousin Gésica lived together when the turmoil began. They had a good relationship, one cooked for the other, they went to the parties together, they were like sisters, and their greater divergence was in the proportion in which each one was able to party hard, since Maiara was not only daughter of the night, but a good part of its palette of friendships was born at small farm parties, raves and nightclubs.
Maiara’s peace and satisfaction from the death of Dudu, as he was known, leasted as little as she could count. In the months that followed, Maiara feeled the sensation of being constantly persecuted. She wondered who was the stalker, maybe someone sent by Dudu or even himself, pretending to be dead. And not even the electronic music and flashing lights that always served as her exile from the world of labor and doom could save her from the ghost of the abusive ex-boyfriend who pulled her by the foot wherever she stepped.
One night in the fall of 2015, Maiara decided to go to the club, but wanted company. Then, she called Géssica, who in turn took her at the time boyfriend, Rodrigo. Maiara was uneasy, pacing back and forth, beyond the usual of a party goer, while the couple stayed quiet. Géssica found it extra-hard to keep up with her cousin.
“Maiara, stay here, closer to us,” Géssica complained, unsuccessful.
The night passed by, the couple started to become increasingly worried, cause they had to work in the next morning, therefore staying until late was not an option. The hard part was convincing Maiara to leave together. So arduous was the mission they just gave up and sat back in some bean bags, watching her footsteps, trying to ensure that she was safe.
Géssica then got up to go to the bathroom. Inside, while washing her hands, a dark-haired girl asked “aren’t you with that blondie there?”, To which she replied yes.
The brunette said back, “Look, she’s out there fighting”.
Géssica ran out toward the stage and saw her cousin all dirty with blood, and scratched in the face. In fact, most of the blood came from a bruise that Maiara had acquired the day before, cutting her thumb during her work in the kitchen of the Premiatto restaurant. But such a mess it was that it stained even the gold-tipped black sneaker she’d borrowed from her cousin.
“My God, Maiara, what happened?” Asked Géssica.
“It was him, Géssica, it was the ‘Garbage’ who told them girls to hit me. Two girls came over me. He sent them to beat me up!”
“Who? What ‘Garbage?’”
“Dudu!”, answered Maiara, in a ludacris state of mind. “Let’s go home right now, I don’t wanna stay here anymore”, continued.”
Before going home, Géssica had brought her to the toilet and wrapped her wounded finger in toilet paper. On the way back, Maiara didn’t uttered a single sound. “When we arrived at home, she just changed her clothes, dressed herself in pajamas and went sleeping,” the cousin says.
On the next day, already at work, Géssica’s cellphone beeped with a text message from Maiara. “Look, Géssica, look at this video right here!”. On the images, a tall man in white cap danced in the last night’s party along, with one of two girls which whom Maiara had fought. The cousin thought it to be too strange and asked what was in there to be noticed, being surprised with her answer, “it’s Dudu”. Being sure of whom she saw in her video recording, Maiara viralized the message throughout her circle of friends and relatives, but no one bought her story that he had faked his own death.
This episode was central in Maiara’s mental sanity getting a 180-degree turn. From there onwards, she started to report to all her different circles of friends that she still had the feeling of being followed by her ex-boyfriend, something that had never stopped, not even in her last days. In this final stage, in 2016, neighbors have seen her crying over on the cellphone, or complaining against the wind, or arguing with the dust; friends found it to be difficult to start a conversation with her without getting up in an argument and her long list of dating prospects shortened to a point that, for a certain time, Maiara, who always had an active sexual life, had become celibatar-ish. People had a hard time in understanding how a relationship could left someone so broken, as it wasn’t the first one, nor the most emotionally intense one, for this title already belonged to Tiago, her boyfriend when she was sixteen, referred as the love of her life. Dudu was simply the most traumatic one.
From June to December, 2013, he controlled all Maiara’s steps. He didn’t let her use short clothing, or to go out with her friends. He believed that his woman should be kept locked, in the safety of their home, not keeping any secrets from him. If she disobeyed him, would get beaten. Luiz Eduardo, with 33-years old, a professional robber, gave the kind of attention that she, still nineteen, realized that didn’t wanted to have. He had five arrest warrants in flagrante delicto, an inquiry, a parole warrant — and very little tolerance with the woman he claimed to love.
Dudu’s friends understood that it was only a way to protect her. In his shoes, they would also be afraid that something happened to his mate. They believed that it was better to surround her completely than to let the wild animals that were men attack her — or even worse, let her run away. One of them, Jean Silva, once accompanied Dudu to fetch the girl at work at the end of the day, when his friend was still without driver’s license. He wanted to make sure that she would go home right after the work at the restaurant. Jean saw no problem in that attitude. After all, how not to worry? Imagine a hottie like that in the bus stop, all by herself, in a world full of predators, he’d say. Remembering the scene, Jean saw true love in there. If he had not loved her, he would not have worked so hard for her safeness. And if it wasn’t reciprocate, she would not have stayed in their house for so long — actually, Maiara broke up with Dudu and left for Gaspar in February, 2013.
Her friends, on the other hand, worried about the man’s uncontrolled jealousy. As is the case of Ana Paula Dantas, who says that Luiz Eduardo knocked at her mother’s door, Deborah, in pursuit of his beloved, who “had disappeared.” Ana Paula’s stepfather answered that he did not see her, and Dudu went looking for all her friends, since Maiara had left without telling him. Ana Paula remembered him as a big, tattooed guy that Maiara met at El Fortin Club, in another one of their many nights together. But it was only on that day that she finally understood what big of a problem that this relationship was.
Talking on the Internet was a privilege that Maiara could not enjoy. Dudu controlled her cellphone and was always suspicious of the next unnecessary, unfair and incomprehensible escape of his beloved woman. On one occasion, he added a guy on her Facebook account. Impersonating her, he tried to tease the man, flirting with the same grace and charm of a rock. All of it to prove real the fear that only existed in his head.
Maiara decided that this would be just a bend in her long road of hushed relationships. Eduardo’s ghost terrified her in the streets, where she could swore seeing it, which could just as well be the fear of having to relive that nightmare all over again. She hoped that the next partner to come would be at least a decent man. And it took a long time before someone like that showed up.
Till in the beginning of March 2016, he appeared. Tairone França dos Santos was his name. They met at one of those raves parties in farms and it was love by the first electronic beat. They went out together three times more, she at his house, he at her house, and finally together in open air, at a “Posto Ale” gas station, by the side of the highway BR-101. On this occasion Ilcilei was present by a short time. Tairone found himself trapped. He was in between comings and goings with his longtime girlfriend, Andréia, and suddenly he already knew the mother of this new lover. Time to finish it. It was good while it lasted, which was not more than three weeks.
March ended and took with it their relationship. As always, Maiara did not take it well.
November 16th, 2016
Tairone was reluctant on meeting Maiara. She was insisting for some time, message after message on Whatsapp and Facebook. He thought it to be enough telling her he got back with his ex-girlfriend, that they wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, and life goes on. For some time, it kinda worked. Until one day, his inbox received a message notification. Maiara herself, but in another Facebook profile — one that had no friends added, but 116 pictures of herself, published between October 27th, when it was created, and November 15th. She didn’t looked like the same person anymore.
He agreed on meeting with her because that was another one of the low points in his relationship with Andréia. Moreover, he also wanted some answers. At the end of his shift, in that afternoon, 6p.m, at the Bela Obra building supply store, in Palhoça, he took a bus to Fazenda Max.
They met each other in the agreed place, one hour later, at the Posto Ale gas station’s convenience store. Tairone has 1,65m tall, short brown hair that molds itself in a quiff, its side bangs completely shaven. He had a thin moustache and a bush of beard on his chin, drawing a small edge on his round face. He wasn’t exactly fat, but neither exactly beefy, — bulky would be more precise. He didn’t look that different from the guy that Maiara had got to know in the beginning of the year. Maybe the only difference was that she had never seen him like that: straight after the end of his shift, his blue-collar body of a metallurgic worker sticky with sweat and iron dust.
Maiara, however, looked like almost as usual: with makeup, perfume and — to Tairone’s surprise — skinny as she wasn’t supposed to be. They greeted each other, and she leaned in for a kiss, that hitted right on the cheek, and soon became another kind of proposition:
“I got some grass for us right here. Why don’t we go over there, on the corner? Chill out a little bit…”
They followed the street upwards, 100 meters away from there. The road curve led to a shed by the side of Gerdau factory, which by that time blackened the lights that came from the gas station and the highway. And a stone wall, between the courtyard and the road’s continuity, blocked any light that came from the street ahead. For Maiara, that dark corner was proper to smoke a blunt. For him, maybe it wouldn’t be possible to clear things up and sit in there without taking bad decisions along the way.
“So, what’s up?”
“All good. What about you?”
“Smooth. Looking for a job, last one I couldn’t stand it anymore. Hard as rocks.”
“I see. Haven’t you got some stuff to talk about with me?”
“No. I just wanted to see you.”
“What about that pregnancy story you’ve told me?”
“I ain’t.”
Silence.
Tairone remembered the impact of the news: she had published tons of pictures of her apparent pregnancy on Facebook. In one of those, in May 2nd, 2016, her hand was over her belly, slightly salient, curvilinear. In the comments, her friends called her “Mom of the Year”. The daddy, only the two of them knew who was, and that information unveiled through inbox messaging. He doubted of it, unbelieving. Still through messages, Maiara had asked him if needed any “help for remembering how”.
In that moment, face to face with him, she had lost the daringness she had behind the screen. In there, was a crying girl, that wanted back the care of the guy who had best treated her since Dudu’s trauma.
“I’ve missed a period, that was it.”
8:30 p.m. and his cell phone buzzed. It was Andréia, saying she was leaving the gym. Time to go. Maiara had insisted for him to stay. Tairone thought it to be because “she felt good and comfortable with me”. But it wasn’t just because that that she wanted his company. “She was afraid of something”. To calm her down, he walked her over to the crossing between Embaúbas Street with Viviana Guanabara Street, in which, not knowing, was her actual place.
“You can go on, I’ll be staying.”
“No,” he insisted. “I’ll get you home.”
“No, no. You will go on. I’ll be staying.”
In there they said their goodbyes, wishing the best to each other. After that, then, Tairone headed up to the bus stop in the BR-101 highway margins, while Maiara waved at him. He had not seen if she entered her home, neither told anyone what happened in that night. Let alone that, “I ain’t gonna lie, we did some kissing.”
Officially, Tairone was the last person that talked with Maiara.
November 18th, 2016
After hearing Ilcilei’s statement about Maiara’s lover whom she had met months earlier at an brief meeting at a gas station, the police deputy summoned Tairone to a conversation the following Monday. Galeno’s 10 years in the corporation have taught him that if there’s a boyfriend, he is usually the prime suspect.
The locksmith got nervous when he realized that he was probably the last person to talk to Maiara, and so he thought to explain it as soon as possible. He answered the operator of the police station that he was already leaving work and that they didn’t need to wait till monday, cause he’d be there in a matter of minutes. He ran the streets of São José to sit face to face with Galeno and his police troupe. But rather, he waited, waited, and waited for long minutes while, according to him, an older policeman started playing bad cop. “The guy was pure poison, man, pure poison! He was scratching himself with the pistol and all”, he told.
“Tell me the truth, come on! Tell me the truth”, the officer kept saying.
“I’m telling you, I ain’t do anything!”, repeated him, as a mantra.
“Tell me the truth, young man!”
“I assure to you, I’ve done nothing.”
Slowly, Tairone thought back over what he would say when the police deputy would, in fact, call him; he felt incriminated by his own existence as a former affair of Maiara. Perhaps that is why, at the beginning of the interrogation, facing Galeno and his scrivener, Felipe Marisquirena Duarte, he lied:
“I haven’t seen her in three months.” In his mind, he’d ask himself how to explain that a pig snout is not a plug switch.
“We know that this is not true”, Galeno answered.
“I’m telling ya the truth, man.”
But Galeno did not need much to break Tairone and make him admit that he had seen her hours before the crime. And as much as he shouldn’t, he feared — and trembled. At that point, the pig’s snout could very well conduct electricity, as the boy became the prime suspect of the police, who counted primarily on the contradiction as the evidence of suspicious behavior. And who did not like this testimony at all was his lawyer, which had already been constituted in another case — that of the custody of his son — , Miryan Deyse Zacchi, who confronted him about not having called her as soon as he was summoned to the police station.
“But, doctor Miryan, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!”, the client answered.
And in this story, for the five months that followed, the police stopped answering the family, more specifically Márcia, who followed the case on behalf of Maiara’s mother, Ilcilei.
It was the start of a new phase in the family: the agonizing wait.
Chapter IV: Two years on the beach that always dawns the same
May, 2017
Five months had passed and Maiara’s case had become a pile of dust, a police debt, which remained static. In this period, they hardly answered the questions of Márcia dos Anjos, who began to act as official family collector. The protraction by the authorities was due to a dispensation that Galeno got to take care of his own family issues.
Thus, when Manoel Galeno returned on leave, little had changed in relation to what he had before: the testimony of the victim’s next of kin and not so close friends; the last images of her alive, by the security camera of the Military Police, entering Prainha. Perhaps the biggest change has been in the fact that the city hall has lit up that pitch of Prainha that has generated so much complaints — being responsible for providing an environment for homicide makes bad publicity.
Most of the reports came more or less during this period, and the only one to have been released before was the cadaverous report, dated November 17th, 2016, the day of her death. It contained few details beyond the visible: she had a small tattoo of three crosses on her back, written “maiara 1”; painted nails; necklace of imitation jewelry. The rope caused a groove in the neck, deeper in the right side and the back. Small red spots on the face. The tips of the mangrove roots marked her thighs.
Was there death? Yes;
What’s the cause? Asphyxiation by hanging. The brown tape over the mouth contributed partially to block her breathing.
What’s the tool of the cause of the death? Physicochemical energy.
If it was produced by fire, poison, explosive, asphyxiation, torture or other insidious or cruel means? Yes. Asphyxiation.
The report for psychotropic drugs, requested on May 16th, 2017, responded on June 13th of that year, that yes, the 65,4g of handmade cigarettes partially charred found at her home matched marijuana.
For the toxicological examination, four test tubes were sent to the Legal Medical Institute — three of blood, one of gastric content. They returned on March 29th, 2017. They gave negative for alcohol and, to no one’s surprise, positive for THC in the victim’s body.
The legal expert also evaluated four swabs of other body fluids. Two of them, anals, came with blank results. The other two, vaginal, gave positive for semen.
The piece of rope, the adhesive tapes and the elasticated fabric were retained for analysis at the Forensic Institute. Further information about them was not included in the inquiry until then. However, most likely the rope belongs to Evelton, a professional security guard, who fishes in Prainha weekly, on his days off. He said that his boat №44 is usually docked in Prainha, without supervision, and that, a few days after the crime, on a visit to the place, he realized that the rope he kept on the boat had been cut and stolen. Only after talking to the neighbors that he found out about the crime. He connected the dots and realized that the rope, which served to keep the boat moored, was the instrument of Maiara’s death. The police never searched for him, nor the origin of the rope, but if they had, they would know that the perpetrator had knowledge of the environment.
Time goes by and takes with it the details of the evidence. The crime scene expertise, also requested on May 16th, 2017 — six months after the incident — did not point to much more than the cadaver report had already said or what the police have already seen. It recalled the contents in Maiara’s pockets. And it specified that the height of the branch where the rope was tied was 2,60 meters from the ground. And that the other two branches just beneath it were 94 cm and 1,13 m from the ground, implying that anyone could climb to the top and prepare the rope if it wanted to.
All the examinations only proved that the deputy still had a lot to do. His conclusion? “Everything is possible,” he said. And in his “everything” suicide stood as a solid possibility
July 7th, 2017
The arrival of the exams happened alongside the renegotiation of the police’s debt to the family, that had been desperate with the lack of information. Always upfront, Márcia went to the police station, in São José, to meet with Galeno, along with Ilcilei and Marli dos Anjos, Maiara’s aunt. They entered once more in that boresome government department room, with a single MDF table, varnished wooden archives and stained glass cups always filled with coffee. He signalled with his hands for them to sit down. Ilcilei entered trembling, her cheeks wet by the past tears, and had deep, dark circles, but as usual, she tried to hide them behind her sunglasses.
“So, here’s the thing. The exams on the drugs found in her apartment have arrived”, Galeno said.
“Yes, but that one hasn’t…” Márcia tried to answer.
“The toxicological exam? Nope, not the toxicological one, not yet”, he said, contradicting himself with the inquiry. “We also received the… I don’t want to talk about it in front of her mother, this stuff, yeah…” Galeno tried not to look at Ilcilei too much, who was crying a loud weep.
“You want auntie to go out? That’s it?” Marcia made it explicit.
“I think it’s better just for us to talk about it, you know? After that…”
Márcia looked to her aunt, who had understood the message and agreed on leaving the office room.
Galeno resumed: “I know it’s kind of a complicated situation. We received two finished exams, the one about the drugs found in her apartment and the spermogram. The spermogram exam has concluded that there was semen inside her vagina, in Maiara.”
Cross-checking all the exams so far presented, Galeno had a single certainty: the sex was consensual. This made his suspects to funnel down on Tairone — in spite of, in other conversations, admitting to maintain himself a believer of the suicide thesis.
“I’ll be honest with you, what I believe is that Tairone may have his participation on this crime. That in the interrogation, way back when we started, he lied. We pressed him just a bit, we barely started it, and then he told us that, hours before, her body was found by the morning, at the start of the morning… He said that in the past night, he used drugs with her, said that the last person that saw her was him, that they met in a gas station there in Fazenda Max, they used marijuana together, and after that happened some kind of parting. He said she was kinda depressed, and then he hasn’t seen her anymore. After that the body was found in the beach, completely tied up. The thing is, for him to say all of this, he lied all the time, only after that he revealed everything. Then, with the exam’s results, with the spermogram, pointing to this, right…”, the chief officer tried to explain.
“Right, but hasn’t anyone made an exam crossing up with it to figure out who is the person?”, questioned Márcia, enraged.
“We have to ask for legal authorization and even with it he might refuse it.” Galeno kept implying to the family that Tairone was a possibly dangerous man, warning them to not talk again with him. “With the crime scene exam we’ll be able to point out if it was homicide or suicide. If it is homicide, then, I’ll be warranting his arrest.”
“But then where’s the fingerprint?” Márcia could not understand how could the Police, in almost an entire year, have so little information.
“That does not mean anything, because if it’s homicide, the person is wearing a glove, surgical glove, there will not really be a fingerprint. We can not rule out anything, but everything is closing, everything is closing in Tairone. If it’s homicide, I ask for his provisional arrest, I question him again, I’ll get him to provide the … he will not provide anything, but sometimes we … how do I say it?” Galeno was looking for a non-compromising way of saying what he really intended to do. “In a secret way, we can get some material from him to do some sperm testing. I ask for patience, because we can get there.”
But by then, the last thing Marcia had was patience. Her own aunt Marli asked it from her, who replied: “But then the police will do their part and the justice system will not make him pay; because the Brazilian court does not make anyone pay anything. Let’s say it’s him; he has no criminal record, no passing by the police, he will have good behavior in jail, and will be forever happy. This is not justice, is it?”
If she the one who had kept her united family until then, Marcia could not stand it any longer, by then she dismantled herself. She almost entered the abyss of disbelief, but clung to the little hope that was left. They left there shortly after. It may sound masochistic, but they went straight to where the crime took place, they needed to relive the scene, to put themselves in the deceased’s place.
Ilcilei cried all the way, stayed in the car. Márcia, accompanied by Marli, walked along the narrow sidewalk, which measures about 50 cm, passing by the fetid sea and the almost black dump. They passed through the beginning of the mangrove, where the trees overlap the same old garbage — bags, bottles, cans and a Snow White sculpture holding a baby, eaten by the time. Finally, reached the point where Maiara might have died.
Márcia crouched among the trees, stepping on the thick sand, trying to find the angle of the photo that circulates on the Internet. She remembers the image well; in it, there was a strange paper attached to Maiara’s back, one that the police never noticed until Marcia caught the attention of the scrivener Felipe, by WhatsApp, and then Galeno himself. Neither of them gave shit about the information, they said it could be a bag, or whatever. Márcia felt helpless when she needed to talk to them, the same can be said about the moment when she had found the exact angle of the photograph. She was able to project the death of her cousin, who at some level had been both sister and daughter.
She cried her remained tears.
They crossed the state of Santa Catarina worse than when they went out to confront the police. There was, however, a trace of energy in Marcia, something that kept her insisting on this story a little bit. She was raining messages on Galeno’s cell phone, which always returned with the same promises and accusations.
September, 2017
In mid-September 2017, the deputy sent an audio to Márcia’s WhatsApp in which he claimed to have filed a temporary arrest warrant against Tairone. However, according to his audio, the forum system would have crashed, unable to compute precautionary measures. But he promised it would not be a technical problem to stop him from getting Tairone behind the bars in a week. This not only did not happen, but also, when asked by us, Galeno stated that he would have filed for an arrest warrant only in April 2018. Meanwhile, Miryan, Tairone’s lawyer, keeps consulting the Santa Catarina justice system, but instead of the alleged request, the F5 only responds with the same blank page.
Over time, Márcia made the transition from a well sustained rock to the sand by the sea, a mere physical and emotional wear. And before it became pure sand, Maiara’s cousin gave up any patriotic sentiment and moved to the United States on March 3rd, 2018, where she lives, working as a domestic for more than 10 hours a day. The physical distance, however, was not enough to make her forget about the crime and the sense of disregard, a word that resounds in her head whenever she remembers the police. The embryo of this abandonment, so common to Brazilians that doesn’t have money in their pocket, first appeared when Galeno told the newspapers that he believed in the suicide thesis — although he did not rule out homicide. To make matters worse, he interpreted words that did not exist on that note found in the bible. No one in the family liked the statement, they were sure Maiara could not have killed herself that way, and that the note found in the bible was not a note, much less a recent writing about a boyfriend, adorned to her mother.
In response to this article, the deputy said that “the family does not have to like anything”.
For Galeno, the homicide and suicide thesis may well go together in parallel. Which is not to say that he can explain what leads him to believe in any of them. Perhaps this is why, before interrupting the interview, he summarized his vision in the following statement: “This case is a bit complicated … very inconclusive.”
One of the factors that hinders the progress of this investigation, besides the lack of will, is the misunderstanding of Maiara’s last days. And this, in turn, can not be interpreted without going back to her last stay in Gaspar.
June to september 2016
Although we are never able to see the wounds that life inflicts us, its scars are always visible — even though we try to cover them. Maiara could not do it anymore. Until her return to Gaspar for the last time, back in 2016, the girl had already gone through a trail of suffering too big to ever be able to mention to others.
People around her said: “You seem different.”
Her cousin Géssica realized it straight on her face. As soon as she heard that Maiara had returned to Gaspar, she decided to pay a visit to the one whom she shared rooms, nights, laughters and pains and glories. She found her out organizing her clothes on the wardrobe — back from Florianópolis she hadn’t brought anything else. Her hair, shoulder-length, wasn’t as blonde and shiny as before. It was washed-out as the clear jeans that she was wearing, her head too far away to worry about anything. Géssica sat on the corner of the bed, looking at the one whom she had missed so much. But instead of catching up for their long time away, they shared an awkward silence.
“Maiara,” had asked Géssica, “what’s with you that you aren’t talking to me?”
“I lost my cell phone,” she had answered, without taking the eyes off the chore.
“Maiara, look at me.”
The cousin hid herself behind the task.
“You’re not even looking at my face!”, Géssica’s patience was wearing thin. “You talk to me but you’re not even looking at me!”
Maiara stood quiet, as if the chit-chattering between the two have never happened.”
“Are you…” Géssica hesitated, “are you really pregnant?”
The cousin still remembered the day she received the news. Through the phone, Maiara confirmed it, perplexed, but also euphorical, saying it was a real punch from life. In there, however, the punch’s effect was visibly different.
“No… I’m not sure”, answered Maiara. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Géssica realized that she stood before a scar that hadn’t stitched very well. And she didn’t knew how to act, or what to do, or even which words to use in order to suture that wound. Maiara took a long time until emerging back to reality.
“Oh, Gê,” she finally answered, in a flash of consciousness. “I was in a rut, but I’ll change now. I’ll look for a job real soon, work really hard , get some money. You know, right? Living up with mom…”, and then she looked down, bittered by the word that just escaped her mouth. It was disgusting for Maiara to think on her return back to a city in where she could see nothing, with a woman she grew without ever calling her mom.
“You’ll see, I’ll raise some money and open a restaurant,” she continued. The conversation had brought an old dream back, a dream of having her own business, and to keep doing one of her best talents. “You’ll see, Gé, a restaurant back there, on the shore line, me and my so…”
Maiara stopped talking and, after that, put her hands over the belly. She fell back on the silence of the abyss inside her, returned to organize her clothes and haven’t said a single thing after that.
Géssica had the same certainty that the family, little by little and through different ways, also came to have.
For Maiara had already, long ago, lost her temper. If back then she made herself sure to listen to her cousin Márcia’s advices, in there she started ignoring completely her calls and did not want to listen to her — to the point that there weren’t any phone calls anymore. If her marijuana cigarettes used to be lit far away from home, hiddenly, this time they were being smoked inside her house, in front of Ilcilei — who needed to wipe away the smell from the air and the leftovers from the ground. Deep down, Ilcilei was always aware that Maiara smoked pot, but that was the first time she had to face that reality — one that was until then unpalatable. Maiara knew that it would hurt her mother, but who cares? She had become impatient, impulsive — to the point she made sure to ignore those who loved her, regardless of whom.
There was something wrong with the Maiara that everyone there knew. And no one knew exactly what it was.
Gradually, some family members were giving up to keep her around while she remained bitter. Others, like Géssica, became more and more afflicted. She was relegated by Maiara to her long list of ignored people, when once, while riding a bike, she passed by Maiara and tried to greet her, in a failed attempt of restating their friendship. Well, this did not happen. In fact, it was difficult to find in her the same Maiara who had written a special letter to her cousin a long time before.
The insistence on visiting her cousin and breaking this intangible barrier wasn’t supported by Rodrigo, Gésica’s boyfriend at the time.
“She doesn’t even responds you anymore, and you’re going to see her? She’s ignoring you…”
She said she would not give up. After all, she was her cousin. But it would not be necessary, Maiara had given up on her some time ago.
October to November, 2016
Maiara returned to São José, and nothing had changed in Fazenda Max during the short time she was in Gaspar. Until May of that year, she lived in a set of blue kitchenettes of high standard — for the region — with ample yard and a perfect garden. Now, back to her true habitat, she moved to Marta’s already mentioned place. Unemployed and still somewhat unstable, she received from Ilcilei not only a rent aid, advanced in two months, but also a series of furniture used in optimal conditions. Starting over is expensive, and Maiara and her family already knew it well.
This was a very troubled period. Neighbours heard her begging for apologies from someone on her cell phone. “Oh, my love, forgive me, don’t do this to me.” She was completely isolated, without friends, distanced herself from everyone since her exile in Gaspar. The neighbors saw, once, Maiara getting beaten by what appeared to be two men. It was nighttime and they failed to identify them — in fact, no one likes to get too deep into the subject, because, there’s a law of silence imposed by the drug lords, a common experience for many Brazilians who lives in the suburbs and favelas. While still in Gaspar, messages from Maiara’s cell phone rang aggressively from a woman who collected the money from a seemingly large debt left by her before the move, it was related to the purchase of marijuana. Maiara tried her best to never answer the girl again.
The job search was haunted by the outbreaks in which she saw Dudu, her late ex. Where Maiara went, the ghost followed. The money was shortened along with it the number of furniture in her apartment, which ended up being sold to the used furniture stores of the region. No one knows where a girl without friends, family and job spent so much money, the only thing that it can be sure of is that she in fact was making it rain.
The sigh of relief came with the call for a vacancy: Cook at Isa Crepes. It was a creperie on the main avenue of Fazenda Max neighborhood, in São José. Mari, the owner of the establishment, had been excited about the girl’s curriculum, which included several experiences in restaurants in Continente Shopping, the largest in Florianópolis Metropolitan Region.
It was training day and she did not want to risk losing the job she’d been looking for for almost two months. She’d done a lot to keep herself upright, always looking for a job. Besides, she would hate to have to ask her mother for money again, she repudiated the idea of being dependent on her. When she finally found that spot, she was hired right away. Maiara put on the apron, a dress she was already familiar with, and began to learn the different ways of preparing a crepe. But the learning lasted less than a YouTube class.
“Dona Mari, can I take a break to smoke?” Said Maiara, astonished.
The boss looked at the clock; the girl had started working there hadn’t been an hour, but since it was the training day, she preferred not to deny.
“Yes, you can, dear.”
She then dropped the apron and went through the glass door, disappearing in the middle of the daylight.
Maiara never showed up again in the creperie.
In the week after the episode, Maiara, unemployed, was able to get money to treat the locks, which were hardened by frizz and dryness.
It was around four o’clock in the afternoon when she entered the saloon of Getulia, which was close to her house, on a dense day, of those in which the heavy clouds brings forward the night and increase the humidity, but refuse to let the rain fall. Her face was clean, except for a little lipstick, her dark circles stained her white skin, and her shoulders were somewhat withdrawn.
“Hi, girl, how can I help?” Asked Getulia.
“I want to cut my hair.”
“What’s the cut? A chanel would match you.”
Maiara walked across the room with beige walls and pink ornaments, went to the mirror and looked at herself. She was a girl who always wore lots of make-up and was very vain — well-known among her friends for the taste for clothes, usually bought from Facebook group ads — but at that moment she looked sick, pale, with cheeks that never more were to be seen blushed. She turned to Getulia and pointed to shoulder height.
“I want to cut here. I want to look pretty. “
Getúlia, who has long been working on this, understood the message. “She wanted to look beautiful for someone in particular,” she says. Little did Maiara say in the session, it was difficult to get some information from the girl. No neighborhood gossip worked there. After a few minutes of trying to bring up the subject, the hairdresser gave up, understanding that Maiara’s move was silence, or that, perhaps, she might be sad.
The week had ended without bringing up any news in her unemployed status, a fact that hasn’t by any means hindered her routine. It was Wednesday, November 16th, and Maiara did what she always have been doing in that day of the week: she bought weed. At the end of the afternoon, after been seen returning from the depths of the neighborhoods of Ponta de Baixo, she climbed the slippery stairs of the local favela. She passed by the kids that stood along the way, stumbling on the crackheads willing to trade their valuables for crack rocks, and then waved at them. She got to the top and was seen by her two drug dealers: two fat and bald men, installed in a two-story wooden house, on the back of a wasteland where nothing but the trash would grow. Usually, Maiara bought about R$10 in weed, which equals about three grams; in that day, then, she gave them a twenty and received wat it would be six grams.
The drug dealers thought it to be strange, as it didn’t match that client’s habits, but they did not raised a single question. They understood: she wasn’t going to smoke it all by herself.
Chapter V: The hands that pulled the rope
At this point of the story, you, the reader, must have realized that the Civil Police failed to fulfill its duty throughout this process. Being fair, it is natural that some investigations take a little longer, or at the same time follow totally opposite theories. This is not to say that two years of investigation is acceptable to end in 94 pages of inquiry, especially if we consider that of this document at least three pages are repeated. That is, the result of these two years was a inquiry of only 91 pages.
But we wished that this was the only problem.
The crime scene analysis left something to be desired, since the police did not even look for the origin of the rope that raised Maiara to death, perhaps the key object for understanding the fact. Still referring to the scene of the homicide, the images of the security camera of Édio Schmitt, that captured her walking, dreamlike, around 10 p.m. were ignored. In the same way that his account could contribute not only to understanding the time that Maiara arrived, but also that whoever committed the crime knew the place well. After all, he had a notion that there was a boat rope that could be used, and he was not greeted by the dogs of Édio, who always barked at anyone who had never stepped on Prainha before — something we could attest to on the first trip to the place.
Another mistake was to ignore all the place accesses. There are three, to be more precise: the alley where Maiara entered; a larger street, whose small sidewalk on the right side allows access; and a third street, which connects to the largest on the same beach, allowing you to enter without being filmed by any of the cameras, because, at night, all the beaches become one, thanks to the low tide.
In addition, there was disregard by the Military Police with Ju and Angelica, the acquaintances of Maiara who first recognized the body — which could have saved time and effort in the investigation of the death of a Mayara that was not even dead. And when the investigation finally began, with a chaotic analysis of the victim’s room, it had to be paused by a dispensation from the deputy Galeno, who left no procedures, no one who could keep the case lit during this period. Thus, the request for analysis of the harvested material occurred five months after that occurred.
And the results obtained were not significant, frustrating the family. And even without great answers, Galeno had two certainties: either it was suicide or it was Tairone.
Let us focus a bit on the suicide thesis:
The victim was tied with brown tape and elastic fabric, that is, two layers of pressure; her mouth was gagged; the rope was not high enough to allow for a quick death, thus making Maiara reasonably patient on the waiting for her death; besides the fact that her position was uncomfortable because of the mangrove trees, that engraved a set of marks on her thighs. At first glance, it is borderline ridiculous to call it suicide, especially because of the never-registered complex technique applied to her death. But since we’re not specialists, we called a coroner from another city of Santa Catarina’s Legal Medical Institute, to ensure that there is no direct relationship with the case. He preferred not to identify himself in this article, fearing any retaliation from the corporation.
In analysing the inquiry, his answer was emphatical: considering her death’s circumstances and the degree of complexity with whom Maiara was gagged and choked, the possibility of a suicide is unreal, without a doubt. He believes that the Legal Medical Institute’s exams is insufficient, since it does not point if the case is more inclined towards to be a suicide or homicide, and it may have been purposefully so to not create conflict with deputy’s previous thesis. The coroner also reminded that, if Galeno really wanted to rule that doubt off the case, he would have filed a crime scene reconstruction, which would prove the lack of plausibility of a suicide in these conditions.
So far, such diligence was not ordered.
Now, let’s look a little bit at the idea that Tairone might be the killer:
The police thought that “if there is a boyfriend of the victim, he is immediately the prime suspect” is not completely without foundation in a country aggravated by domestic violence. It takes a lot less to put blame on the love of a dead person’s life. Including, the closing of certain inquiries.
The statistic of 4.4 murders per 100,000 women strengthens the premise. But not every answer the inquiry gives is synonymous with truth.
Now, let’s look a little bit at the idea that Tairone might be the killer:
The police thought that “if there is a boyfriend of the victim, he is immediately the prime suspect” is not completely without foundation in a country aggravated by domestic violence. It takes a lot less to put blame on the love of a dead person’s life. Including, the closing of certain inquiries.
The statistic of 4.4 murders per 100,000 women strengthens the premise. But not every answer the inquiry gives is synonymous with truth.
There’s a reason the cops want Tairone dos Santos behind the bars. His naiveté put him very vulnerable before a police desperate to close that story. In that, the rush to testify, without a lawyer, to solve it all at once, was not read as honesty, but guilt. A guilt that is implied not by the logical relation of the facts and subjects, but by the mere presence before the subject. And for the lie about the possibility of being arrested — for something that he claims he did not commit.
Closing the investigation surrounding the former partner coincides with both the Brazilian statistics of intimate feminicide and a common narrative. Old police narrative of passionateness, the possessiveness, the I-loved-too-much-to-deal-with-her-lacking. This fate might have been Maiara’s if she had not managed to escape from Luiz Eduardo Domingues. However, assuming this behavior on account of a three dates boyfriend unrelated to the crime scene can be seen in three ways, one worse than the other:
The first is a professional viciousness on the part of the police, which can connote to resource difficulties in research, yes, but also a lack of preparation;
The second is laziness — the fate of a poor girl remaining unanswered for two years is a complete disregard for the existence of the other;
And the third is ignorance, the worst blessing to have in a profession that needs to look deep into the eyes of evil.
Even worse: Tairone has an alibi. After the meeting with Maiara, he spent the rest of the night with his girlfriend, Andreia. And there’s nothing to put him at the crime scene. The police wanted to change that, with a DNA managed in a secret way, to match with the sperm, as Galeno had suggested for Marcia. And thus, to prove that the semen in the body of the victim, the one found without signs of violence, was of Tairone.
If so, the only thing he could prove was that he had consensual sex with her. If not, well, the sperm survive up to 72 hours inside the female body. Both scenarios are not typified as crimes in Brazil.
Nor is it seen as problematic the consequence of pointing Tairone as the murderer of Maiara. This is far from the truth. The subject to this day is synonymous with stress for him. His mother, disgusted, prefers not to touch the subject, nor to believe that her son is a roguish criminal — and not to change her mind, she chose not to see him anymore. The neighborhood remarks wickedly on his back. And for a long time, the victim’s family pressed him crazy. Tairone’s bosses see any outside calls at work with crooked eyes, as if they hoped one day he would end his early shift on a wagon.
Tairone is also afraid that his shift will end like this.
But then, how did Maiara die? Well, as much as everything points to a homicide, there’s some merit on the idea that she was suicidal. It is only possible to attest this fact, however, with a real investigation and a psychological autopsy, which consists of an analysis of the mentality of the deceased in his last days based on the intersection of reports and evidences raised by the police. This technique is usually applied by legal or forensic psychologists. Not everyone is adept of this, since the Brazilian police often have a certain distrust of the psychology field. Thus, it is not surprising that this idea did not enter into the minds of the investigators of Maiara’s death.
Doing what we could, then, we asked for a psychological autopsy with Eliamar Machado, specializing in legal psychology. Responsible for the psychodiagnostics of the prisoners of the Florianópolis City Penitentiary, the expert helped us to observe the last days of Maiara in contrast to the recurrent behaviors of her life between 2013 and 2016.
She analyzes that the victim intentionally puts herself in risky situations by abusing substances and cutting affective relationships abruptly. “If you see, that in itself is also suicidal behavior. All of this is a way to kill yourself a little,” says the psychologist. In other words, she had been killing herself a little bit each day in a form of parasuicide.
One of the catalysts of this behavior, in her analysis, was the series of visions of the dead ex-boyfriend. This would perhaps be the biggest sign that Maiara wasn’t well, being delirious on the streets, and presenting increasingly aggressive behaviors, in what Eliamar calls psychotic outbreaks.
And for her, when it mixes the traumas of Maiara’s youth with the fear of the ghost that did not exist and the aftermath of years of drug abuse, you have a time bomb, a person in need of professional help. Eliamar also notes that in observing that the body did not exhibit pre-death violence characteristics, one may assume some level of cooperation of the victim, who would most likely be in a trance, in the middle of an outbreak.
“Whoever did this had all the planning involved with the victim, is known by her and frequented to the house. And on that day, the victim was going through a phase in which favored the crime, within a psychotic outbreak. Maiara was not taken by force; but the person who took her there [on the beach] intended to kill. He had a plan there: choice of moment, situation, what was going to be done. Even because it was taken a piece of the curtain, a personal object to commit the crime. She was not undressed, she was dressed properly. All that was sexual happened before, in her apartment. That’s an indication that it came from there. She was dressed in leggings; wearing her shoes, that does not seem to have been dragged in the sand or anything. Most likely, she was not taken there by force. I believe that by the person knowing the victim, there was a game, a game of seduction. Because the person did not tie her legs after she pulled the rope. The thigh height is stuck, she could not do it alone. She participated in this, because whoever did this with her treated everything as a game, taking advantage of her fragility.”
And there is a fact not yet unveiled that matches this theory of Eliamar: Maiara was dating a second man. It is a boy* who divides a double journey between gigs that compensate badly, like car wash and mechanics, and to traffic drugs in the neighborhood, more specifically in the name of the head of the region, known as Dico. The young man in question is married and has two children. His wife did not cope well with her husband’s constant exiting to “talk” with Maiara and kept her eyes as open as the hand that beats him up.
Different witnesses from the neighborhood saw him dating Maiara in the neighborhood alleys, and the very mapping of her movements by Facebook shows that he frequented her house and the alleys ahead. It was a troubled relationship, because, like Luiz Eduardo Domingues, he did not like to see her chatting with other men. In a conversation with a young man named Gean, one of the boy’s friends, we found that most of the neighborhood’s young people stopped talking to Maiara for fear of retaliation. Thus, her isolation was intensifying in addition to her fights with friends and family.
The boy stopped responding to us after a few interviews. The last time we had any contact with him was through one of his best friends, who received us very aggressively and said: “I’m not a fucking snitch, I will not say who killed, I will not say who it was. You’d better get out of here.”
Maiara was not very popular when alive and, after she was gone, didn’t became any more loved. Because people around her who were only used to recognize the girl on the passing by, when she was crossing the street towards the grocery store, or from her morbid pictures on the Whatsapp’s neighborhood messages, were quite sure of who she really was.
From an anonymous passerby on the streets of Ponta de Baixo, we heard that the girl died like that because she was involved with a jealous and violent police officer, protected by the corporation. A local from the same neighborhood, son of a civil police officer — and therefore, completely reliable — has alleged that another man, who was her boyfriend and also her killer, was executed at Ponte do Imaruim, in Palhoça (city of Santa Catarina), and his body thrown away somewhere else. From others with so much willing to help came the idea that she was being followed — either by a jealous, criminal and aggressive ex-boyfriend, or by a red Volkswagen Gol that dragged her out of the streets. From such emphasized collaborators, we also heard that Maiara was raped on the beach and found without her pants. Or that her body was brought from Ponte do Imaruim back to Prainha.
From a handful of girls who lived in Fazenda Max, we heard that she died like that, tied and gagged, because that was a message from a drug dealer’s wife to make it clear to everyone what happens with a husband stealer.
That was what we heard in this year and half of investigation and has never been confirmed by any means. It’s quite easy to speak ill of dead people. The hard thing is go after the truth.
And if the neighborhood held no efforts on staining the name of who couldn’t clear the hoaxes, her family was divided in two sides: those who paint her as an angel and those who blame God for her fall. To the older relatives, it’s quite comfortable the belief that Maiara had never used marijuana, that she was a religious girl, on the same track that the past two generations followed — and not a single one of them could understand how such fatality could have happened. The relatives from the same generation as Maiara, however, don’t look at things the same way. They see an effort of love, but also failures, and a certain grudge against matriarchs that crucified the girl for her vices. One who have always seen with horror the pillars of the gargoyles on her feet would never understand that these were the single construction able to be raised in such scenery. And these were the pillars that sustained her.
Therefore, all that remains are the after-effects on a family that even though lived together, was never really close to each other. Ilcilei drowns in depression as each day goes by, to the point people say her instability matches her daughter’s. Márcia still lives in the U.S., forever scarred with the failures of Brazil’s legal system. Géssica is still so sensible to the story that she probably won’t have read this story until the end. The aunties cry without much certainty of who they have lost, clinging to the memory of Maiara and her childhood. And everybody is still without knowing if she was really pregnant or if it was just another outbreak of a girl who, after fearing ghosts so much, ended up becoming one.
* Without evidence that he committed the crime, we chose not to identify him, although it is pertinent to raise this possibility
Originally published at medium.com on December 16, 2018.
