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Francisco de Assis Pereira: The 'Park Maniac'

Jun 5
4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

The pitch was always some version of the same thing: you could be a model. He had the easy patter of a man who believed it himself — a talent scout, a photographer, someone who could open a door. The women who climbed onto the back of Francisco de Assis Pereira's motorcycle in São Paulo in 1998 thought they were riding toward an opportunity. He was taking them into a park to kill them.

By the time he was caught, he had murdered at least eleven women and attacked nine more. Brazil knew him by one name: O Maníaco do Parque, the Park Maniac.

The courier

Pereira was born in 1967 and worked as a motorcycle courier — a motoboy — weaving through São Paulo's traffic, including, with grim irony, around a building that housed a police unit. He was, by every ordinary measure, forgettable, which was precisely the point. He used that ordinariness, and a practised charm, as tools. Accounts of his past mention claimed childhood trauma and a fraught relationship with sex and rejection, but explanations are not excuses, and nothing in his story accounts for what he did.

Poster of Francisco de Assis Pereira, the Park Maniac, over a dark park at night with case-file clippings and arrest details.

The ruse

His method was disarmingly simple. He would approach a young woman in a public place — his first victim, around the end of 1997, was approached at the Jabaquara metro station — and present himself as a scout who could make her a model, offering a photo session or a shortcut to a better life. Then he would invite her onto his bike and ride to Parque do Estado, a vast stretch of forest on the city's southern edge. What unsettled investigators most, after his arrest, was the sheer plausibility of it: how an unarmed man had convinced one woman after another to follow a stranger into the trees.

The park gives up its dead

In 1998, bodies began turning up in Parque do Estado. The park was enormous, the victims were not immediately connected, and for a while the danger went unread. When two bodies were found in early July and the pattern became undeniable, São Paulo realised it had a serial killer, and a major hunt began. As more remains surfaced, the toll climbed past half a dozen and kept rising.

The manhunt

Investigators caught a break from a small, sordid clue: a partially burned identity card belonging to one of his victims, an 18-year-old basketball player named Selma Ferreira Queiroz, was recovered from a clogged toilet where Pereira worked. Survivors came forward with the same story of a motoboy and a modeling promise, and police released a sketch and then a photograph. The case was also dogged by failure — a crucial semen sample was mishandled, and São Paulo lacked the lab capacity to make full use of forensic evidence. Pereira fled, slipping across South America. In the end it was not forensics that ended the chase but a face on a television screen: a fisherman he was staying with near the southern border recognised him and tipped off police. He was arrested in August 1998 after a manhunt of just over three weeks.

Confession and trial

He confessed, and even led investigators to the remains of a victim they had not yet found. He was charged with raping and murdering eleven women and assaulting nine survivors. His mental state was argued over in court; assessed with antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, he was found responsible and handed a sentence of hundreds of years — a figure that, under Brazilian law, translates to a few decades actually served. In a macabre coda, he became a kind of dark celebrity behind bars, receiving fan mail and even marrying an admirer, a marriage that later fell apart.

A case that put the media on trial too

The Park Maniac became a spectacle. Pereira gave interviews; the press fed on him; and in the years since, documentaries have gone back over the case to ask hard questions about that frenzy — how it sensationalised the killings and, at times, treated the survivors with suspicion rather than care. The reexamination has folded into a wider Brazilian reckoning with structural machismo and with how women who report violence are believed, or not.

Strip away the lurid nickname and what remains is plainer and worse: women who wanted, reasonably, to be seen, and a man who weaponised that wish to kill them. The survivors who lived to testify, and the eleven who did not, are the part of this story worth keeping at its centre.