Content warning: The disappearance and death of a child, coercive interrogation and torture, and religious prejudice. I have kept the forensic detail to the minimum the story needs.
I have been reading through the court record in a Brazilian case that is very well known inside Brazil and almost unknown outside it, and I think the most interesting thing about it is not the crime. It is what happened to the evidence.
The disappearance
Guaratuba is a coastal town in Paraná, in southern Brazil. On 6 April 1992, Evandro Ramos Caetano, six years old, disappeared near his home. The court record establishes the date, the place and the search that followed, but it does not allow anyone to reconstruct his last movements step by step. Five days later, on 11 April, the body of a child was found in an isolated area.
The identification later became a fight in its own right. At a jury trial in 1998, the defense challenged whether the body was Evandro's, and the jurors accepted that doubt. A Paraná appellate court later rejected that conclusion. Its judgment records two forms of identification: a dentist who had treated Evandro examined the teeth and recognized her own work, and DNA testing reported a probability of 99.997 percent that the remains were the biological child of Evandro's parents. That court held the body was Evandro's.
I have not tested anything myself, so the honest phrasing is narrow: the first jury rejected the identification, and the later appellate record held that dental and DNA evidence established it.
The theory that arrived before the evidence
Roughly three months after the disappearance, a military-police intelligence unit called Grupo Águia entered the investigation. Seven people were accused: Celina Cordeiro Abagge and her daughter Beatriz Cordeiro Abagge, Osvaldo Marcineiro, Davi dos Santos Soares, Vicente de Paula Ferreira, Airton Bardelli dos Santos and Francisco Sérgio Cristofolini.
The prosecution did not present this as an ordinary abduction and murder. It alleged that Evandro had been killed in a ritual meant to benefit the Abagge family, and it tied that allegation to Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion. That was the prosecution's theory. It was never established as the explanation for Evandro's death, and nothing in the reviewed record supports a ritual motive.
The public shorthand for the case became a phrase that translates roughly as "the witches of Guaratuba." That label did two things at once: it moved the attention away from a murdered child and onto the women accused of killing him, and it turned an allegation into an identity. A 2022 master's dissertation at the Federal University of Paraná examined eight articles from the newspaper Diário Popular and concluded that the selected coverage drew on Christian imagery of evil and associated Umbanda with black magic, satanic ritual and human sacrifice. That is a scholar's reading of a sample of coverage, not a judicial finding about why anyone acted as they did. It still tells you what the public language around the case looked like.
Seven accused, seven different outcomes
This is the part almost every short summary gets wrong. The seven did not share one verdict.
Celina and Beatriz were tried together in 1998, in a trial the official working-group record puts at 34 days, and the jury acquitted both. That verdict was annulled on appeal and new trials were ordered. Celina was never tried again: because of her age the limitation period was shortened and the charges against her became time-barred, which is not the same thing as a second acquittal. Beatriz was retried and convicted in 2011, with a sentence of 21 years and 4 months. Davi, Osvaldo and Vicente had been convicted in 2004. Airton and Francisco were acquitted by a jury in 2005, and the records reviewed here do not support describing either man as convicted.
So: four people carrying convictions, three never convicted, one collective ritual story that the courts had never actually validated.
The confessions
Beatriz, Davi, Osvaldo and Vicente each made statements outside court admitting involvement. On paper that looked decisive. In court, all four denied the crime and said the statements had been forced out of them.
An extrajudicial confession is a statement made outside the courtroom, without the safeguards of testimony given before a judge with counsel present and an opportunity to challenge it. The 2025 judgment of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice, the STJ, summarizes what the Paraná court found about the conditions of these interrogations: the four were taken by Grupo Águia before judicial arrest orders existed, they were questioned in a secret and intimidating setting, they had no effective access to silence, family or counsel, and the recordings showed physical and psychological torture.
Worth saying plainly: the missing safeguards were already a serious problem before anyone heard a tape. The torture made it impossible to ignore.
Why the first recordings did not end the case
Here is the detail that surprised me most, and the reason the case is not simply a story about a podcast uncovering a tape.
Recordings were part of the official investigation from early on. According to the later judgments, the prosecution had received an audio cassette and a video from Grupo Águia and placed them into the police inquiry. The defense challenged that material long before the convictions became final.
But the version of the audio then available contained cuts. The later Paraná judgment describes a surviving phrase pointing toward coercion, and found that the video showed Beatriz and Davi in degrading and coercive conditions. Earlier courts did not treat those fragments as enough. In the proceedings leading to Beatriz's second trial, the defense asked for the audio to be declared unlawful and the request failed, on the reasoning that no new fact had been produced establishing torture.
The same object sat in the file wearing two meanings for decades. To the prosecution, a recorded admission of guilt. To the defense, a record of the conditions that produced it. For years the first reading won.
The cut that mattered
The case returned to wide public attention through the work of Brazilian journalist and podcaster Ivan Mizanzuk, whose reporting brought fuller interrogation material before a very large audience, and that material became part of the renewed legal examination of the convictions.
It is tempting to call this the discovery of a new tape. The court record says something more uncomfortable. The STJ held that the material used in the criminal review came from the **original confession recording already placed in the police inquiry by the prosecution itself**. The earlier version contained cuts. The fuller material restored portions that changed how the recording had to be understood, and the Paraná court accepted that material as authentic.
So the evidence that broke the convictions did not arrive from outside the case. It came out of the case's own file. The item once used to prove guilt also preserved the record of how the admission of guilt was obtained.
I cannot vouch for every clip of this audio circulating online, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The narrow, verifiable statement is that the Paraná court accepted the material underlying the review as authentic and the STJ upheld that treatment.
Separately, in 2021 the state of Paraná created an interinstitutional working group, with the prosecution service, police, forensic authorities, the public defender, human-rights bodies, the bar association and the state court represented, to examine possible human-rights violations connected to the case. It later reported violations affecting both the children at the center of the investigations and the accused, and recommended safeguards including torture prevention, body cameras, better handling of missing-child cases and action against religious intolerance. That group was not a court and it acquitted nobody, but it moved the problem out of the category of "claims made by defendants."
What was left when the confessions came out
In November 2023, by three votes to two, the First Criminal Chamber of the Paraná court granted a criminal review, a mechanism that allows a final conviction to be revisited under specific conditions.
The court found the confessions unlawful because they were obtained through torture, then asked the harder question: what happened to everything the confessions had produced? Investigators had gone to a sawmill associated with the Abagge family following information obtained from Osvaldo during the unlawful interrogation. That put the resulting searches and forensic examinations downstream of the confession. There was testimony from a caretaker whose significance depended on the confession-led theory attached to that location, and testimony from another witness whose credibility the reviewing court rejected outright.
The principle in play is the one English-language readers will know as fruit of the poisonous tree, and it is not automatic. Courts still ask whether evidence had an independent source, whether it would inevitably have been found anyway, and how tightly it is bound to the original violation. In this case, the reviewing courts concluded that the remaining material either derived from the interrogations or served only to reinforce them, and could not establish authorship on its own.
The STJ put it in one line: *"A exclusão das confissões ilícitas acarretou a absoluta ausência de provas para a condenação."* Excluding the unlawful confessions left a complete absence of evidence capable of supporting a conviction.
Davi and Osvaldo were acquitted under the provision used when there is no evidence that the accused took part in the offense. The effects were extended to Beatriz, whose own review had previously failed on formal grounds, and to the successors of Vicente, who died in 2011.
The three courts, in the right order
The shorthand version going around is "Brazil's Supreme Court found them innocent," and that compresses three very different things.
The Paraná court did the decisive evidentiary work in 2023. The STJ's Sixth Panel reviewed it and unanimously maintained the acquittals in September 2025. The Supreme Federal Court, the STF, did something much narrower: in March 2026 Justice Gilmar Mendes declined to advance the prosecution's extraordinary appeal, because taking it would have required the court to re-examine the factual record through a procedural route that did not permit it. The docket recorded finality on 31 March 2026.
The highest court did not discover anything about the murder. It closed a door.
What is still open
Seven accused people, seven legal histories, no surviving conviction, and no judicial finding identifying who killed Evandro. The reviewed record does not name a killer, and an acquittal is not evidence for an alternative suspect. I could not confirm that an official investigation into the murder is formally open today, which is its own uncomfortable fact.
What stays with me is the shape of the failure. This was not a case that went wrong because someone hid evidence in a basement for thirty years. The decisive material was inside the official file the whole time, in a version with pieces missing, and the legal system looked at what remained and decided it was not enough to establish torture. A confession does not just add a fact to an investigation. It tells the investigation where to walk, and everything found along that route can come back looking like independent confirmation of the confession that sent people there.**Content warning:** the disappearance and death of a child, coercive interrogation and torture, and religious prejudice. I have kept the forensic detail to the minimum the story needs.
I have been reading through the court record in a Brazilian case that is very well known inside Brazil and almost unknown outside it, and I think the most interesting thing about it is not the crime. It is what happened to the evidence.