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Tiago Gomes da Rocha: The Goiânia Serial Killer

Jun 5
5 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

For almost three years, the people of Goiânia could not work out what was happening to them. Women, homeless men, and people sleeping rough were dying on the streets at night, shot at close range by someone who arrived on a motorcycle and was gone before anyone could react. There was no obvious link between the victims. Nothing was stolen. And then, in October 2014, a quiet former security guard named Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha sat down with investigators and calmly began to describe 39 killings — referring to the dead, chillingly, by number.

He was 26 years old. He still lived with his mother. To almost everyone who knew him, he was the last person you would suspect.

The man nobody noticed

Gomes da Rocha was born on 4 February 1988 in Goiânia, the capital of the central Brazilian state of Goiás. He drifted through ordinary jobs and ended up working as a security guard — a role built on the idea of protecting people. Neighbours and acquaintances later described him in the way that so often follows these cases: polite, unremarkable, easy to overlook. There was no menace on the surface.

When he eventually spoke to psychologists, he traced his violence back to abuse he said he had suffered as a child, and to a rage that, in his telling, grew sharper whenever he felt rejected. None of that explains what he did, and he himself was judged capable of understanding that his actions were criminal. But it helps make sense of a detail that unsettled investigators: this was not a man killing for money or in a single burst of fury. It was something colder, and it went on for years.

A weapon, a motorcycle, and the word "robbery"

His method rarely changed. After dark, he would ride out on a motorcycle, pick a target who happened to be alone or vulnerable, pull up close, and shoot. Witnesses and survivors reported that he sometimes shouted "robbery" before firing — yet he almost never took anything. The shout seems to have been cover, or theatre, rather than motive. The gun was a .38 revolver. The randomness was the point.

Because the attacks looked scattered — different neighbourhoods, different kinds of victims, no robbery to tie them together — the police were slow to see a single hand behind them. A killer who steals leaves a trail of stolen goods. A killer who simply shoots and rides away leaves almost nothing. For a long time, the murders were treated as separate tragedies rather than a pattern.

Dark true-crime poster of Tiago Gomes da Rocha, Brazil serial killer, with mugshots, case file, and headlines about 39+ murders.

Who he hunted

The victims were among the most exposed people in the city. He targeted women — sixteen of those linked to him were female — along with homeless people and men he believed to be gay. These were people whose movements were unpredictable, whose absences were sometimes slow to be reported, and whose deaths, in a busy city, did not always trigger the urgency they deserved. His youngest known victim was a 14-year-old girl, killed in early 2014.

There is a grim logic running through the choice of targets. Gomes da Rocha went after people he seems to have regarded as disposable, and in doing so he exploited the same social blind spots that let him operate for so long. The prejudice that shaped who he killed is inseparable from how he got away with it.

A traffic stop, of all things

The break, when it finally came, had nothing to do with the murders themselves. Police stopped Gomes da Rocha while he was riding a motorcycle fitted with a fake licence plate. He was already on their radar for a minor matter — a charge connected to a plate stolen from a motorcycle at a Goiânia supermarket earlier that year. It was the kind of small, almost bureaucratic thread that unravels a much larger horror.

When officers searched the home he shared with his mother, they found the motorcycle, the false plates, and a .38 revolver that investigators believed was the weapon used in the killings. Confronted with the evidence, he did not bluster or deny. He confessed — and kept confessing, eventually claiming 39 lives and recounting them with a flatness that disturbed the investigators in the room.

Confession versus proof

There is an important gap in this case, and it matters. Gomes da Rocha confessed to 39 murders, which is the number that made international headlines and earned him a place among the most prolific killers of his era. But a confession is not the same as a conviction. Over a long series of jury trials beginning in 2015, prosecutors secured convictions in the cases they could prove with hard evidence — at least eleven murders established in court — while other claimed killings remained exactly that: claims.

Brazilian courts handed down cumulative sentences running to hundreds of years, a symbolic reflection of the gravity of the crimes. In practice, Brazilian law caps the time actually served at a few decades, which means the arithmetic of those enormous sentences is more statement than reality. Either way, he is not getting out soon.

Why the case still matters in Brazil

It would be easy to file Gomes da Rocha away as another inexplicable monster, and move on. The more uncomfortable reading is that his spree was made possible by ordinary failures — by how little attention the disappearances and deaths of marginalised people attracted, and by how long it took to connect murders that, to a watchful eye, shared a clear signature. A killer who strikes the vulnerable is, in part, betting on indifference.

His case sits alongside others in Brazil that forced hard conversations about violence against women, against the homeless, and against LGBT people. The fact that sixteen of his victims were women, and that he singled out gay men, is not incidental colour; it is central to understanding both his crimes and why they went unchecked for so long.

Remember the people he killed, then — not the tidy, terrible number he recited in that interrogation room. A 14-year-old girl. Women walking home. Men with nowhere safe to sleep. Behind the figure of 39 are individual lives, most of them already overlooked once, and it is those lives, not the killer's notoriety, that deserve the last word.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people did Tiago Gomes da Rocha kill?

He confessed to 39 murders in Goiânia between 2011 and 2014; he has so far been convicted of at least 11 in court.

How did he carry out the killings?

Riding a motorcycle at night, he approached victims and shot them at close range with a .38 revolver, often shouting 'robbery' though he took nothing.