Ep. 138 | The HORRIFYING Murder of Eliza Samudio

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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  She came to the city with big dreams and nothing to her name. Just a belief that the city would be kinder to her than the home she left. And she built herself a life from scratch. And when she was promised more, the life she dreamed of, she trusted that promise, only for it to turn dangerous. This is the story of Eliza Samudio. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers and murder. All things that I love to consume and I know you do too. You're sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded freak. Today, we are talking about a lesser known case. I heard about this randomly in passing and I was deep diving into it. And it is disturbing on a lot of different levels and just incredibly sad.

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  So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go back down the highway, slam on the brakes and bust through the windshield into this case together.

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• 3:53Speaker 02

  Elisa Silva Samudio was born on February 22nd, 1985, in the city of Foz do Iguaçu. Now it sits out on the western edge of the Piranha state at the mouth of the Iguaçu River. And it is named from the waterfalls that made it famous. It's a city of tourists and border crossings where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. And her father, Luiz Carlos Samudio, was an architect while her mother, Sonia Fatima Silvamora, tended the land as a farmer. So they were working people. And yet, from the very beginning, there was a problem inside the home. Now Luiz had wanted Sonia to terminate her pregnancy with Eliza, pushing for it when she was four months along.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  She refused though, and the marriage only lasted a year. Money was tight and she was a young mother with nowhere safe to go. So when Eliza was just six months old, Sonia made a decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She left her baby daughter behind with the very man who had been hurting her. Because Luiz was a very abusive man. Now Sonia explained, quote, "He said that I could come get my daughter, but I would take her in pieces because he would not hand her over whole. People asked me why I gave her up. I would rather have her alive," unquote. So it was a forced bargain. Leave the child behind, whole and breathing, or try to take her and lose her forever.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Now Sonia eventually moved to the state Matu Grosso do So, where she found a new husband. And together, they had a son and a small pepper farm. The two of them worked together. It was a quieter life, but her daughter was hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, Eliza grew up inside her father's house and she saw her mother only occasionally. And there was a brief window around Eliza's 10th birthday, where she moved in with Sonia in Campo Grande. However, it lasted roughly a year and then she was back at her father's. So their relationship existed almost entirely on the phone. And there are things about that childhood home that did not come out publicly until much later.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Things that sat under judicial secrecy for years. And on December 6th, 2003, Luiz was accused of raping a 10-year-old girl in Piranha. And he was convicted and after exhausting his appeals, he ran. Consequently, a Piranha court issued a preventative detention warrant for him on May 12th, 2011. But there was more. Luiz Carlos had sold access to his own daughter. Men had been permitted to hurt Eliza as a child in exchange for money. And Eliza, by her father's own account, had grown up in his house and kept visiting him roughly once a year after she left home. And that was the home she grew up in. And that was the man who raised her.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And somewhere inside all of that, a young girl started dreaming of a completely different life. From the age of 13, Eliza had one goal. She wanted to be a model. The real thing too, in the big cities where Brazilian fashion actually happened. By the time she reached her late teens, the dream had only grown louder. She was slender with light skin and black hair. She had the look for it and she knew it. So Jose Artero Cavalcanti, the family's lawyer, said simply, quote, "A girl who wants to be a model, to be an artist, does not want to stay in the middle of the woods," unquote. Now her mother was out in the countryside with the peppers and her father's house was something she needed to get away from.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And Foz do Iguaçu, for all its beauty, was not where a modeling career would be built. So Eliza started making plans to leave, to start over and to become someone. She was a girl with a dream. And like so many girls with dreams, she believed the big city would be kinder to her than the home she was running from. So the year she turned 18, Eliza packed up and left Iguaçu for good. And she headed for Sao Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil and all of South America and the beating heart of the country's fashion industry. And for a girl who had been dreaming of runaways since she was 13, there was no other option. Now Sao Paulo was half of the axes and Rio was the other. Because that's where modeling careers were made.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And while she was chasing her dream, she was also running from her past. Now Sao Paulo, where she arrived, was a city of 20 million people and zero friends. Eliza didn't know a soul. She had no agency, no family money and no fallback. What she had was a suitcase, a face and a dream. Now unfortunately, in Sao Paulo, that combination doesn't really pay rent. And the financial difficulties came fast. So Eliza made a decision that a lot of young women in her situation have quietly made before her. And call girl work became the way she paid her bills. And the phrase in Portuguese is garota g programa. A sex worker who took private appointments.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  And it was basically just survival money. Because Eliza never had a single former job registered in her Brazilian work card in the government booklet that records your official employment history. So hers was completely empty. And when her mother was asked about the work her daughter had done to survive, she did not apologize for it. Quote, "I say, who are you to condemn? You don't know the condition she was living in. You don't know why she did that. Maybe it was the way she found to survive," unquote. And slowly, while she was doing that work, the modeling started to happen. She posed for editorials and she was actually starting to do the thing she had come to Sao Paulo to do. However, fashion money was not steady money.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And so from 2005 onward, Eliza picked up another track alongside the runway. She began acting in adult films. Now the production company was Brasileirinhas, one of the biggest names in Brazilian erotica at the time. She worked under the artistic name Fernanda Faria, filming at least four productions between 2005 and 2009. But none of these jobs were enough to build a life on their own. The runways came and went. Films paid, but they didn't pay forever. And the appointments kept the lights on between everything else. So Eliza was carrying all of it on her own and had been since she was only 18 years old.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  But what her work history doesn't tell you is who she actually was. And before she ever walked a runway, she had been a goalkeeper in indoor soccer back in Foz do Iguaçu. And she was passionate about sports and she loved the game. In her mother's words, quote, "Eliza lived intensely. She loved to live." And somewhere along the way, the sport she had grown up playing pulled her toward the world of men who played it professionally. And a friend named Rita described that Eliza frequented training camps, practice fields and parties. She stayed in touch with athletes by phone and online, and those connections sometimes carried her as far away as Portugal and Germany.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  And Rita said Eliza wanted to get close to football players, and she did. Quote, "She wanted a stable relationship and fantasized that she would marry every player with whom she got involved, even if for one night." And that was Eliza in her early twenties. A person who underneath everything wanted something just that was steady and something real, something that looked like a life she could stop running through. And more and more, her work was taking her to Rio. And then, in May of 2009, one of those trips put her inside a house full of footballers. So while Eliza was in Sao Paulo, learning how to survive a big city, another life was rising on the other side of Brazil.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And his name was Bruno Fernandes de Dorsa. And in Brazil, the fans simply called him Golero Bruno, or Goalkeeper Bruno. Also, I am doing my very best to pronounce these, and I apologize if I'm pronouncing them wrong, but I'm trying. Now, he was born December 23rd, 1984, just a few months before Eliza, in Hibejão das Neves, a working-class city in southeast Brazil. And shortly after he was born, his parents handed him over to his paternal grandmother. And then, they left, moving thousands of miles away up to the north of Brazil. His father only met him up close when Bruno turned 18,

• 12:34Speaker 02

  and he would not reunite with his mother until 2006, when he was 21 years old. So he was a baby, essentially left behind, raised by an elderly woman in a city that didn't have a lot to offer. But football was the escape route. For poor kids across Brazil, it was often the only one, a door out of poverty, if you will. So Venda Nova took him in at 12. And it's a feeder club based in Belo Horizonte, and that's where his training began in earnest. And before his professional contracts, he worked with his hands on manual labor jobs. Eventually, he grew into a goalkeeper, agile and with plenty of potential.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  So in 2002, he signed with Atletico Mineiro, a club in the Brazilian top flight. And it took a few years to break through, but his debut came in 2005, when he was 21, and 24 appearances followed that season. However, that following year, he managed only two. And in 2006, a rescue came from an unexpected direction. And a London-based investment fund called Media Sports Investments bankrolled a transfer to Corinthians for around $2 million. But at Corinthians, Bruno couldn't force his way into the starting 11. And the manager, Emerson Leong, kept picking other keepers ahead of him. So frustration built for Bruno and for the investors funding him.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Bruno wanted out, and Corinthians accepted his request for a loan to Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, with Bruno playing for Flamengo. Then Flamengo's first-choice goalkeeper, Diego, got hurt. So Bruno's debut in September 2006 was actually a 2-1 loss to Internacional at Maracanã, and both goals came from penalties. Nevertheless, he held the starting spot through the rest of the year on the strength of the performances that followed. So in 2007, he became a hero. And the Rio de Janeiro State Championship put them against Botafogo, and the match went to a penalty shootout. Bruno saved the penalties that mattered, and Flamengo lifted the cup,

• 14:42Speaker 02

  and the fans fell in love. And in 2008, Flamengo made the loan permanent, paying €3 million for him. Barcelona had wanted him too, but Flamengo got there first. And he kept delivering, and he won the Rio State League three seasons in a row from 2007 to 2009. Goalkeepers don't usually score, but Bruno actually did, four times in his career, and most of them came from free kicks. His first was on April 23rd, 2008, a set piece against Coronel Boloniazzi in the Copa Libertadores. And Flamengo won 2 to 0. And in May of 2009, the veteran defender Fabio Luciano

• 15:27Speaker 02

  retired after Flamengo's karaoke final win over Botafogo, and he handed the armband to Bruno. And two months later, on July 12th, 2009, Bruno played his 100th Series A match for Flamengo, a 2-2 draw against Sao Paulo. Now, to note, Flamengo is not just any club. It's the most popular football team in Brazil with tens of millions of fans. And Bruno was its captain, its goalkeeper, its current idol. He was a big deal. And the press was putting him in the top tier of young Brazilian talents, and European clubs started circling. Scouts from top sides in Italy and Portugal were making their interests known.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, Flamengo was paying him somewhere between €150,000 to €200,000 a month, roughly €80,000 to €110,000 US dollars to keep him in Rio. But outside of the game, his life had its own complicated shape. Now, back in 2004, when he was still a teenager, Bruno had married his childhood girlfriend, Diany Rodriguez. And together, they had two daughters. And by 2009, even with a wife and two kids at home, he was also dating a young dentist named Ingrid Calheros. And around him was an entire subculture. The parties, the women, the money,

• 16:49Speaker 02

  and the sense that nothing could touch you because the fans loved you and the club protected you. Just classic bullshit athlete stuff. Because it was a world that rewarded appetite and punished almost nothing. And that world soon put him in the same room as a young woman from Foz do Iguaçu. So Bruno's teammate, a fellow Flamengo goalkeeper named Paulo Vitor, was hosting a barbecue at his house. And players, friends of players, and women were invited. The kind of behind-the-scenes gathering the fans never saw. And some say the two had been in each other's orbit as far back as 2008. But Bruno's account starts that night at Paulo Victor's house.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And he describes a party much different than a typical backyard grill-out with beer and music. He called it an "orgy." And Bruno claimed that gatherings like this were standard fare for Brazilian athletes. It was just what life looked like at the top of the game. So there they were, 24-year-old goalkeeper at the height of his career, and 24-year-old model traveling to Rio for work in a house full of footballers on a wild night. The party didn't wind down until the next day, and he said he had sex with Eliza there. Now, it could have ended there, as most of those nights do, but this one didn't. The two of them kept showing up in each other's lives after that night,

• 18:15Speaker 02

  frequently in the weeks that followed. And Eliza was still based in Sao Paulo, still staying with her friend Rita in the Zaguare neighborhood on the west side of the city. However, she was making the trip to Rio more and more often, and the trips were no longer about work. Now, at some point, fairly quickly, the conversation between them stopped being about parties and started being about the future. Eliza knew Bruno was married, he's still married at this point, and she knew there was a wife at home, and she knew there was a whole other life he was supposed to be leading. But she kept with him anyway. And he, for his part, made her a promise. He told her he was going to leave his marriage, and he told her he wanted to be with her.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Now, the full picture of Bruno's romantic life at that moment was something Eliza almost certainly did not see. He was legally married, but they had already been separated for two years. And the real entanglement was with Ingrid, that dentist he had been dating since 2008 and was now engaged to. So he's not only married, but he's engaged to another, to a different woman. This guy's messy as fuck. So the promise to leave his wife was being made by a man who had already left her technically for someone else and got engaged to them. But from where Eliza was sitting, the promise was the promise. And he asked her for something in return, that Eliza would step away from the life she had been living in Sao Paulo.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  And at his asking, she stepped out of that world entirely. A young woman who had been carrying her own rent, her own food, her own future on her back since she was 18 years old, let go of the one income stream she could control because a famous man had asked her to promising her a different life and because she believed him now Eliza had always wanted a stable relationship as we talked about before and she had always imagined one of these players would be the one and now finally one of them was talking the way she had always dreamed one would now somewhere in the weeks after that first night at Paulo Victor's barbecue something happened that

• 20:25Speaker 02

  neither of them had planned for Eliza found out she was pregnant and Bruno was the father she told him and whatever part of Bruno had been promising her a future a separation from his wife a life together a new beginning shut off completely and Bruno denied the baby was his and he told her to get an abortion but Eliza said no from that refusal forward the relationship stopped being a relationship and the threats started the same man who had asked her to give up everything was now telling her to get rid of the child and turning on her when she wouldn't Bruno's version of the events tried to rewrite the whole thing

• 21:08Speaker 02

  he said the condom had broken that first night and according to him once the pregnancy came out he learned that quote the whole Sao Paulo team knew her and that she had already done a porn film unquote and he said he was so worried by what he'd heard that he went and got an HIV test now all of it was a ploy just to gain sympathy essentially saying the baby might not be mine she's not who I thought she was I'm the one who should be scared here just pathetic so in August of 2009 a column in the Brazilian press reported that Bruno was involved with another woman a young dentist in Rio and Eliza upon learning the truth decided she was done being quiet and she went to the press herself

• 21:52Speaker 02

  and told the country she was pregnant with Bruno's child and Bruno's response was harsh quote unquote this woman is crazy she's not pregnant by me it's not the first time she's made up this bunch of lies to try to harm me and him being the famous athlete that he was that worked what he said worked because Bruno was the captain of Flamengo while Eliza was a woman with an empty work card and a past in adult films the public believed they had every reason to believe him over her so by the end of August 2009 Eliza was three months into a pregnancy she had been pressured to end and she was looking

• 22:33Speaker 02

  for somewhere safer somewhere away from Bruno and the world he controlled but Bruno was not done trying to make that baby disappear and Eliza said she was brought to Bruno's apartment where he was waiting with two other men one was an ex-military police officer named Marco Antonio Figareto known as Russo and the other was Luis Enrique Ramal and everybody called him Macau or macaroni in English and Macau was Bruno's best friend and he was also effectively Bruno's employee his right hand if you will the one who ran errands and handled problems and made things go away and somewhere around this time Macau

• 23:17Speaker 02

  had a phrase tattooed across his back and the phrase read in English Bruno and Macca a friendship not even the force of time will destroy true love so that was the man standing next to Eliza inside Bruno's apartment on October 12th a man who had literally tattooed his loyalty to Bruno onto his own body and in other words she was locked in and could not leave and she said she was beaten and slapped and she said at one point Bruno pointed a gun at her head and then with a pistol to her skull she said they forced her to swallow pills pills designed to terminate the pregnancy and at some point they would

• 23:59Speaker 02

  let her go the next day Eliza walked into a police station in Rio specifically Dean which is a specialized police unit that handles crime against women and the officer on duty was delegado mele now delegado was the chief of police the commanding officer of the precinct and Eliza just laid everything out from the captivity to the pills to the people involved and the police ordered a forensic exam and Eliza was sent to the medical institute or the IML which is Brazil's equivalent of a medical examiner's office now the IML's report came back with signs of aggression they also took a urine sample which was a simple test to confirm whether she had actually been drugged with a substance to terminate

• 24:41Speaker 02

  pregnancy so the sample was sent to a lab and delegada moved fast on what she had she ordered Bruno to stay at least 300 meters away from Eliza at all times but that was a police level order for real legal protection the case had to go to a judge therefore the Dean submitted a formal request for a protective measures under Brazil's Maria de Pena law passed in 2006 and it exists to protect women from domestic and family violence with enforceable restraining orders and specialized courts built to move fast when a woman's life is on the line so Eliza's request landed on the desk of Judge Anna Freitas of the Third Domestic Violence Court of Rio de Janeiro the exact kind of court the law was built

• 25:25Speaker 02

  for so on October 19th 2009 the same day she received the request Judge Anna denied it and her written reasoning became one of the most heavily criticized rulings in modern Brazilian legal memory quote considering that the victim informs that she only was with the aggressor not maintaining with him any kind of effective family or domestic relationship the woman cannot under penalty of trivializing the purpose of the Maria de Pena law resort to protective measures and try to punish the aggressor with aggravation of the penalty so basically the judge ruled the relationship was only sexual and occasional

• 26:08Speaker 02

  and the law she wrote was not meant for that quote the law however cannot be regarded as a way of paternalizing the female sex in any circumstance unquote but the ruling did not mention anywhere that Eliza was five months pregnant with the aggressor's child instead the case was forwarded to a regular criminal court out of the specialized domestic violence system and into the general docket so a woman who had walked in asking for a shield walked out with a filing transfer and the federal women's policy office publicly rebuked the decision the women's rights organization sepia wrote that the Brazilian state had once again failed to do its job however the Tribunal de Justia do Rio de

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Janeiro the state's highest court backed Judge Anna Paula completely and in the days after the ruling Bruno released a public note denying every piece of Eliza's account for Eliza five months pregnant with a denied protective order and a famous ex who called her a liar in the press Rio had become a place she could not stay and the hearings that did get scheduled in the regular criminal track Eliza would not attend because she was terrified of reprisal so the process sat on the shelf and that urine sample from October 13th the results didn't come back until early July of 2010 and when they came

• 27:33Speaker 02

  they confirmed exactly what Eliza had told the police a chemical grouping associated with pregnancy terminating effects had been found in her system so a basic urine test had sat on the shelf for several months so her proof was real and her cry for help had been documented it had been filed examined and ruled on and then it had just been ignored let's take a quick break to talk about something I use literally every single day and that is Hexclad thank you to Hexclad for sponsoring this video now holiday cooking is about to fully take over my kitchen I should say my husband's kitchen he does a lot more cooking than me to be honest but I try sometimes now like I said I'm not much of a cook but

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  hexclad.com slash cccm that's H E X C L A D dot com slash cccm so check them out save and let them know that I sent you make this the season of stress-free cooking with Hexclad thank you to Hexclad for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel and for having me and my mostly my husband make delicious meals So let's get back to it. So after a judge denied her protection, Elisa did what a lot of women in her position ended up doing. She disappeared quietly and left Rio. And her first stop was Curitiba, the capital of Piranha, where a friend took her in, giving her a place to stay while her pregnancy progressed. And from there, she moved again, this time to Sao Paulo.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Another friend, another spare room, and another couch that wasn't her own. And she was nearly 25 years old at this point, and she was living out of people's homes, carrying a child whose father was on television every weekend telling the country she was a liar. And on February 10th, 2010, in the city of Sao Paulo, Eliza would give birth to a baby, boy. And she registered him with the name Bruno, the same name as his father. The Brazilian press and the family that would eventually raise him never called him that. And instead, they called him Bruninho, or Little Bruno. But despite everything that Bruno had done to her, she still put his name as the name of her son on the birth certificate.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  She was not trying to disappear. She was telling the world exactly who the father was. And Bruno's response to the birth of his son was not to go and see him, but instead to double down on the public story he had been running since August. And he still refused to recognize paternity, and now he added a specific accusation to it. And he told the press that Eliza was trying to pull the "golpe de bahiga" on him. And that is a Brazilian expression, literally meaning "the belly coup." And it's used to accuse a woman of getting pregnant on the purpose to extort money from a man who hasn't. So Bruno was framing the mother of his child as a gold digger and a schemer, a woman who engineered a pregnancy because he had money and she didn't.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Now, Eliza had only one tool left, and that was the courts. She filed a paternity action, a formal legal request to have Bruno declared the father of her son. And alongside it, she sued him for child support. And the court, working through her filing, ordered something Bruno could not wriggle out of, and that was a DNA test, the kind of answer that does not care about press conferences or who the fuck you are and how famous you are. And while that legal process was grinding forward, Eliza moved back again, and this time back to Rio de Janeiro with her and her baby. She lived in hotels, but Bruno was covering the bills. The man who was publicly telling the country he wasn't the father was quietly covering

• 32:32Speaker 02

  the hotel bills for the woman and the baby he claimed had nothing to do with him. That's not really the behavior of a man being shaken down by a stranger. That's the behavior of a man trying to keep a problem in a location he can see and control. And the timing of Eliza's lawsuit could not have been worse for him, because in the spring of 2010, Bruno was standing on the edge of the biggest payday of his life. A pre-contract had been signed with AC Milan, one of the most storied clubs in European football. And under the deal, Bruno claimed his wages could have hit half a million. And on top of that, signing bonuses for the transfer itself were reported at roughly 4.2 million.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  And that wasn't the only offer on the table. In the days leading up to July 2010, a second club made its move. Zenit, the Russian club, came in at 8 million euros. And in reais, at what the currency was worth then, that came to about 17.5 million dollars. And Milan was the dream, and Zenit was the check. But either way, he was about to become a millionaire. And into the middle of all of that walked a paternity lawsuit, the child support claim, the DNA order, and the criminal complaint from October still sitting in a drawer somewhere, waiting to wake up. And Eliza, with a baby on her hip, was the only thing standing between Bruno and Europe. And he vowed revenge in his own words.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Quote, "I had a pre-contract signed, and I lost everything." Unquote. He believed she had cost him his future, and he was telling people so. In the middle of all of this, the direct line between Bruno and Eliza had gone dark. Bruno admitted, quote, "It got to the point where I no longer had a dialogue with Eliza. Macau was the one who took care of my things. He was the one who resolved everything for me." Unquote. And now, because Bruno refused to speak to her, Macau was the person she had to call. And Macau's number had been passed to her by Bruno himself and his messenger ID as well. And any money for the baby, any request for the pension, had to pass through him.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  And Macau confirmed that Eliza demanded two things: money and for Bruno to finally meet his son. And he said Eliza's trip to Rio was her own idea because she wanted to hash out the pension. And he set up where she'd stay, because the hotel network was somewhere where he actually had connections, so he handled it. So Eliza was in kind of a wild spot. She had a newborn, and she was living in a hotel paid for by the father who publicly denied her. And the only phone number she could reach for help with her son was the number of the men she had accused of holding her down while a gun was pointed to her head. And even through all of that, Eliza was allegedly still clinging to the idea that things could maybe be fixed.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  She wanted her son to have a father, and she wanted the story to end in a way that just made sense. But she did not know what was in store for her. So by the late spring of 2010, the back and forth between Eliza and Macau had built to a number. Eliza wanted 50,000 reais for the pension. And Macau, speaking for Bruno, came back with a counter. And according to him, Bruno had 30,000 in cash waiting at the farm in Esmeraldas, down in Minas Gerais. So it was basically a payout. And he proposed depositing the money into her bank account, but Eliza said no. And her trust in them was completely gone by this point. If she was getting the money, she was getting it in cash, in hand, in person. So a trip got arranged.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Eliza would come to Rio, and then from Rio, she would travel to the farm in Minas to collect what she was owed. And Eliza also believed that Bruno would put her and the baby into an apartment in Belo Horizonte that some version of stability was finally being offered. Now, the hotel Macau booked for her in Rio was Hotel Transamerica, in the neighborhood of Barra da Tezuka. So it was paid for her. And the farm itself sat inside a gated community. And the community was called Condominio Turmalina, in the town of Esmeraldas, located in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte. And the property was surrounded by other properties, and there were neighbors, fences, and staff. So the farm was not going to be empty.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  And Bruno's wife, the wife that he had separated from, Diana Rodriguez, was staying at the property with the couple's two daughters. And Macau's wife was there with their daughter as well. And the caretaker, Jose Roberto, lived on site with his wife, Gilda, and their two kids. And the farm's administrator, a man named Elinilda Silva, was there as well. And two of Bruno's drivers were also there, Cochinha and Flavio, also known as Flavinho. And Bruno's 17-year-old cousin, Jorge Rosa, was part of the circle moving through that house as well. And Fernanda Gomez de Castro, Bruno's girlfriend at the time, was also on her way there.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  So to anyone on the outside, it looked like a family compound, a place where nothing bad could happen, because too many people would see it. So on the evening of June 4th, Eliza left the Hotel Transamerica. Macau came for her, and she took her baby with her. And Bruninho was only four months old at this point. Now, what Eliza did not know was that another person was already inside the vehicle. Jorge Rosa, Bruno's cousin, was hiding in the trunk. And the car pulled out and headed across Rio toward Recreio dos Benterantes neighborhood, where Bruno kept a house. The cousin crawled out of the trunk and dropped into the backseat.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  And suddenly, Eliza was no longer the only passenger, and he drew a gun on her, saying, quote-unquote, "You've lost, Eliza." She fought, slapping the weapon to get it out of his grip. And she got her fingers on it and tried to pull the trigger, but the gun clicked. There was no ammunition loaded. And the teenager took the weapon back, and three times he cracked the butt of the pistol against her head. And her face filled with blood. And then she went quiet, still conscious, but not fighting anymore. And he loaded the pistol after that. So the car did not drive to Minas Gerais that night, and instead, it pulled into Bruno's place in Recreios dos Benterantes.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  And Eliza and the baby were brought inside, and they were held there for roughly two days. Fernanda, Bruno's girlfriend, was already at the Recreio house when they arrived. And she allegedly was the one who looked after the four-month-old Bruninho across those days. And she admitted to speaking with Eliza. And only then, days after the intercept in Rio, did the caravan set out for Minas Gerais. And Eliza was moved into a vehicle with Macau and Jorge Rosa, while Fernanda traveled separately alongside Bruno. So two vehicles, two different passenger lists, and one destination. And by the time the vehicle carrying Eliza rolled into the Esmeraldas farm, it was the

• 39:49Speaker 02

  dead of early morning. And Eliza was taken inside, and she and the baby were locked in a room. And the next day, a relative arrived, Sergio Rosa Sales, another cousin- of Brunos, and he took over the job of watching her. And at some point during her captivity, Sergio handed Eliza a phone. With a death threat hanging over her, he scripted the call word for word. And the instructions were to phone a girlfriend down in Sao Paulo and say things were good, that Bruno was going to give her money, and that she was going to get an apartment in Bello Horizonte, and that the story she had been waiting for was finally happening. So Eliza made the call, and it was June 9th.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  And on the line, Eliza told her friend she and the baby were at the goalkeeper's farm, and she said things were good. And it was the last sentence of hers that anyone outside that property would ever hear. Because Eliza would be killed roughly 24 hours after the phone call to her friend on June 10th. And back in Rio, Bruno had his tearful story ready. His version was that on Friday, the 11th, Eliza had said goodbye and walked out of the farm, and she had left of her own free will, taking her son with her. And she just climbed into the EcoSport alongside Macau and Jorge and disappeared down the road. And he claimed that he figured the guys were dropping her at a taxi point, and whatever

• 41:17Speaker 02

  came after that, he swore, was news to him. And in other versions he gave to the public, he went even further. Eliza had just abandoned her child. She dumped the baby on one of Bruno's guys on her way out. And Eliza, he said, was the kind of woman who did that kind of thing. And for a few weeks, nobody on the outside was sure enough of anything to contradict him. But the four-month-old in all of this was still alive, and he was still at the farm. So the baby was safe, but the mother was still missing. And the story Bruno Fernandes had been telling everyone was about to come apart at the seams. And it actually started two days before the police ever laid hands on Bruninho.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  And on June 24th, the civil police of Minas Gerais began receiving anonymous tips, and the tips were pretty specific. According to the callers, Bruno and two of his friends had beaten Eliza to death. And the location given was Bruno's farm out in Esmeraldas. And on the next night, June 25th, police officers set up surveillance on the Esmeraldas property, and they were sitting tight for the duty judge to issue a search and seizure warrant. And through the fence line, officers spotted the baby inside the property. And the one holding him was Diana Rodriguez, Bruno's wife. And by then, Eliza had been dead for more than two weeks. So before the warrant came through, Bruno learned that the police were at his gate,

• 42:45Speaker 02

  and he gave the order to clear out. Everybody had to leave. And a phone call went out to his wife slash ex-wife that he separated from, from Macau, and he told her to hand the baby over. The pitch was simple: surrender the kid or watch Bruno get hit with a kidnapping charge. And he told her Eliza was up to something. So the baby was handed to Coxina, and Coxina handed him to Flavino. And the two of them drove him out to Esmeraldas and delivered him to a woman in Libertadji, the same city where it all happened, where Bruno had been born. And Bruninho's mother was dead, and he was being moved through the hands of the men who worked for the man who had arranged it.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, police continued searching, and at roughly 4:00 in the morning on June 26, 2010, a police chief named Alessandra found him. And she has described it since as the single most emotional moment across her 13 years wearing a badge. She was sure that any longer, and they wouldn't have been pulling a living child out of that house. But Bruninho was recovered, and Eliza was not. But the tips kept coming in, and on July 6th, one of them appeared on the radio. A bus driver called into the local station, and on the air, he told the host that his nephew had taken part in a crime. And he walked through details of how Eliza had been killed. And he said his nephew was a minor, and he said the boy was, at that very moment, staying at Bruno's house in Rio.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  And the police moved within hours. And that same day, officers went to Bruno's residence in Barra de Tahuca, and inside, they found Jorge Rosa. The boy was apprehended. In Brazil, a minor isn't arrested in the adult sense, but apprehension carries the same weight. So he was taken in, and almost immediately, he began to talk. And now, sitting in front of investigators, he told them what happened after the convoy reached Esmeraldas. And the name at the center of what he said was a name the public didn't know yet: Bola. Marcos Aparecido dos Santos went by a few different street names over the years. Nenem, Polista, and Bola. Bola was the one that stuck.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  And he had once carried a badge as a former civil police officer. And he had joined in March of 1991, and had been exonerated from the force in July of 1999 due to the charges of lacking moral fitness and discipline. And he had also been linked to the 2008 disappearance of two men. And according to Jorge, Eliza had been held in captivity after she reached the farm. And at some point, she was moved again, and this time to Bola's house in a town called Vespaiano, in the metropolitan region of Bello Horizonte. And that's where, he said, the killing happened. Jorge described her final moments, and he said Eliza had spoken to Bola directly, telling him she could not take being beaten anymore.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  And Bola said that the beatings were over, it was her time to die. Jorge said Bola tied Eliza up, got an arm around her throat, and choked her to death. And then the former officer dismembered her body. And once Eliza was dead, Bola told the rest of them to clear out, and he carried a sack toward a kennel on the property. And Jorge said the pieces were fed to Bola's rottweilers. And he said he personally saw Eliza's hand thrown to the dogs. And in a different version of his story, Jorge said whatever the dogs did not consume had been entombed in concrete. And in yet another version, he said the body had been buried near Coffins International

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Airport. Now, the most extreme version of events was never independently confirmed by the police, because no body was ever recovered. In fact, the lead investigators themselves would eventually walk back the dogs and concrete story in later public statements. And what Jorge said is what Jorge said. But the investigation had already found something that didn't rely on Jorge at all. And in early July of 2010, the Institute of Criminalistics in Minas Gerais released a report. And traces of Eliza's blood had been found inside Bruno's Land Rover. And that evidence was now in the file. And the same day the forensic report landed, the Minas Gerais judiciary issued its orders: preventative detention for Bruno and for seven other people.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, the Rio de Janeiro Court already had warrants of its own, standing orders dating back to October of 2009 for the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Eliza. And those orders had been sitting in a drawer for several months now. And now finally, someone was actually taking a look at them. Bruno and Macau saw what was coming and turned themselves in to Rio's police capture unit. And Bruno allegedly turned himself in, and Macau was in police custody. And from there, they were transferred to Complexo Garrasino Penitentiary in Bengu. However, the 38th Criminal Court of Rio did not hold on to them for long. And at the request of the Minas Gerais police, it ordered the two men transferred across state lines.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  So on the night of July 8th, a Bandarantes aircraft operated by the civil police of Minas Gerais touched down at 11:05 PM at Pampulha Airport at Bello Horizonte. And Bruno and Macai were on board. And a police escort took the pair from the runway over to the investigative division in La Goiña. And that same night, in the Minas Gerais capital, civil police officers went to the home of Bola's uncle. And they surrounded the house and arrested Bola. So the man Jorge had named as the executor was now finally in custody. So in the early hours of July 9th, all three men, Bruno, Macai, and Bola, were moved again. And their destination was Nelson Hungria Penitentiary in Cotagem.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  And inside Nelson, they were placed in isolated cells, six square meters each, with no communication allowed between them. And the circle kept widening. Sergio Rosa Salas, the cousin who had guarded Eliza and forced her to make that phone call, was picked up on July 7th. And on July 9th, in the town of Igorape, officers arrested Flavino, Coxina, and El Nilson. Bruno's wife, Diana Rodriguez, was also taken into custody. And as the investigation dug further, one more name came up. Fernanda, Bruno's girlfriend, and the woman who had ridden in the convoy from Rio and spoken to Eliza on the way, was indicted and detained.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  And Jorge, for his part, would one day tell the program Fantastico on TV Global that Macai had wanted the baby killed too. And he said that in the car, he had told him that the only reason Bruninho was still breathing was that Bola had refused to harm a child. Quote, "He said, with the child, no, he didn't want to kill the child," unquote. And the formal indictment came down on July 30th, 2010. And Minas Gerais police charged every one of them with kidnapping Eliza and with her murder. And the report named Bruno as both the mastermind and the executor. of the crime. And the public prosecutor's office agreed, and charges were filed, and the court accepted them.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And everyone named became a defendant. So on August 9th, Jorge was convicted for his part in the crime and sentenced to an intermediate term in juvenile detention facility. And he would later walk back his own story and deny having seen Eliza's death at all. But the words he had given investigators in July were already on the record, and they had already lit the fuse. And Eliza's body was never recovered, but everyone involved with that night was in custody. And in a separate track, a Rio court finally woke the old file. And the kidnapping and bodily injury case from October 2009, the one that a judge had ruled wasn't serious enough for Maria de Penha protection, moved to a first instance conviction.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  And Bruno drew four years and six months, and Macai drew three. And the complaint the system had shelved in 2009 had, in the end, produced a verdict of its own. So the cover story was dead. Bruno was in prison, and the only thing left for any of them now was a trial. All right, let's take another quick break to talk about a blanket that has quite literally changed my life and the people's lives around me, also my pets' lives. As you guys know, I love Lola blankets. Thank you to Lola Blankets for sponsoring this video, and so do my pets, my cats, my dogs. They lay on my Lola blankets all the time, and it is so annoying. So I ended up getting them their own Lola pet beds, and they are obsessed.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  And it turns out, pets everywhere are this obsessed, because Lola made an entire pet collection. Which, thank you Lola Blankets, I very much appreciate it. But yes, they have their Lola pet beds now, with the same ultra-soft faux fur that the blankets have, with an orthopedic foam base for their joints, removable machine washable covers, because sometimes dogs just have accidents or vomit on stuff. But luckily, it's washable, so that's fine. And when you wash them, they are shed-free and also double-stitched, so it actually lasts. I don't know how many times that I've washed, I have two of these beds now, right beside me, with my dogs on them. And yeah, I can't count how many times I've washed it, and it feels the exact same. I sometimes lay on it and nap on it with my dogs. It's really comfortable.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And obviously, the blankets themselves are luxury faux fur that have that signature four-way stretch, they're machine washable with no pilling and no shedding. Every time I gift somebody this blanket, they never stop talking about it. I was literally on a trip with my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law, and they were talking about the Lola blankets I gave them last Christmas. They're like, "God, I love that blanket so much." I was like, "Right?" And not to mention, there's over 20,000 5-star reviews, which is pretty good. But it's been my go-to gift, because the ones who have been by your side all year deserve a Lola blanket. So for a limited time, our listeners are getting 35% off select Lola blanket products with code CCCM at checkout.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  So head to LolaBlankets.com and use code CCCM for 35% off. And when they ask where you heard about them, let them know that I sent you. But wrap yourself in luxury, baby girl and baby boy, with Lola blankets. Thank you so much to Lola Blankets for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. So it took more than two years to get Elisa's last phone call to a jury box. And on November 19th, 2012, the trial opened at the Cndangam Forum in the metropolitan region of Bello Horizonte. And seven defendants were on the docket going in: Bruno, Macairo, Bola, Dayare, Fernanda, Ella Nilson, and Cuxina. However, before proceedings even began, the judge had already served Ella Nilson and

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Cuxina's cases to a later date. And that left five names at the center of the opening session. And the case file was enormous: 38 volumes and 9,456 pages. More than 50 lawyers had cycled through the case. And the judge presiding over all of it was Marixa Fabian Lopez Rodriguez. She was 42 with three children at home, one of them still a baby. Lawyers who had worked in her courtroom before described her the same way: "Lina dura," or "hard line." She refused to give interviews in the run-up to the trial. The prosecution was led by Henry Wagner of the Minas Gerais Public Ministry, and the jury was drawn from a pool of 25 citizens.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  And each defendant's legal team could strike up to three names, and so could the prosecution. So when the rejections were done, seven names remained: six women and one man. And before a single witness was called, the judge laid down rules that made this trial different from almost any other. Residents of the Cndangam region were barred from the public seats. The seating was held for three groups only: family of the parties, reporters, and law students. The trial would not be broadcast live, and filming inside was capped at five minutes total. The jury box was off-limits for recording, and anyone caught recording after that would be removed from the courtroom. And it took about one day for the courtroom to catch fire.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And on the very first day of trial, the lawyers representing Bola collided head-on with the bench. And they objected to deadlines the judge had set for the defense, and then they walked out. Bola refused the appointment of a public defender to replace them, so the judge severed his case from the others entirely. And one of his attorneys, Aircio, made his position known, saying he refused to be a part of a trial where, quote-unquote, "defense is curdled." And the very next day, Bruno had made his own move. And he wanted Rui Pimenta and Francisco Simim, the two attorneys handling his defense, removed from the case completely. And Judge Marixa denied the request from the bench, calling it, in open court, "a ploy to postpone the judgment."

• 55:54Speaker 02

  And she pointed out that Bruno had already tried to dismiss Simim once before. Now, by day three, she had seen enough, and Bruno's trial was officially postponed to March of 2013. But the jury continued for the two defendants left in the room, so Macairo and Fernanda. So on the fourth day of the trial, deep into a night session of interrogation, Macairo did something he had not done once in two and a half years of legal process. And he spoke about the crime. The man, who had once written on his own back that his friendship with Bruno was "true love," turned and put every ounce of blame on his best friend. Who would've thunk? Quote, "If there's anyone who ended someone's life, it was Bruno who ended my life," unquote.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Actually, he ended the life of an innocent woman, but, uh, way to make yourself the victim, you piece of shit. So in the early hours of Saturday, November 24th, 2012, the verdicts came down. And Macairo was convicted of qualified homicide, kidnapping, and false imprisonment, and he was acquitted of hiding the body. And he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, 12 of them in a closed regime. And as Judge Marixa read the sentence out loud, she described the killing in the language of the law. Quote, "It was a vile crime with asphyxiation and the use of a resource that hindered the victim's defense," unquote. And one of the reasons the sentence was not heavier was that Macairo had, during the trial, confessed his participation.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  And he had also, for the first time in the entire legal process, admitted out loud that Eliza was dead. And after the sentence was read, he was let out. And Fernanda Gomez de Castro was convicted the same night, and she was found guilty of the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Eliza and of Berninho. And she was sentenced to five years. And anything under six years in Brazil can be served in an open regime, and hers was. And that was the first set of verdicts. The friend and the girlfriend were convicted now. And then on March 4th, 2013, Bruno's portion of the trial finally opened. And the prosecutor was the same, and the judge was the same, and the building was also the same. And the shouting started almost immediately.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  From the opening morning, defense lawyers clashed with the prosecution and the bench, and the judge had to interrupt multiple times to restore order. And the defense made one last attempt to stop the trial before it started. And Eliza's death certificate had been issued in January on Judge Marixa's orders, and it recorded the cause of death as asphyxiation and placed it at Bola's address in Vesparciano. And the defense argued that with that document in the file, quote, "three questions have already been answered," unquote, before the jury even walked in. However, both requests to postpone and to remove the certificate were denied, thankfully. So on March 6th, Bruno took the stand, and he was on it for eight hours.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  And in that time, he refused 40 separate questions from the prosecution and from co-defendants' lawyers. But for the first time, he confirmed out loud himself that Eliza had been murdered. And he named Bola as her killer, but contradicted himself multiple times while doing it. And the prosecutor was not buying it. Quote, "Bruno didn't confess. He only said he accepted the death. I will ask for the maximum penalty," unquote. And the next day, on March 7th, Bruno returned to the stand one last time before closing debates. And when he was given one final chance to tell his version of events, he was asked by his own attorney whether he had known Eliza was going to die.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  And his answer was, quote, "Yes, I knew and imagined that she would die," unquote. And then he stopped, quote, "Doctor, please, I don't want to answer any more questions," unquote. And his silence pulled the jury forward, and the questions they still had were not going to be answered by him. So at 2:22 a.m. on Friday, March 8th, 2013, Judge Marixa Fabian Lopez Rodriguez began reading the sentence. Bruno was convicted on Four counts. Triply qualified homicide, viol motive, asphyxiation, and use of a resource that hindered the victim's defense, hiding the body, kidnapping and false imprisonment of Eliza, and kidnapping and false imprisonment of Bruninho.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  And the total sentence only came to 22 years and three months. Seventeen years and six months in a closed regime for the homicide itself. Three years and three months in an open regime for the kidnapping, and one year and six months for hiding the body. The judge wrote her own verdict plainly. The defendant, she said, had acted in a false manner about his real intentions. Quote, "The unfolding of the homicide includes sordid details and a demonstration of absolute mercilessness," unquote. And on that same night, the jury rendered one more verdict. His wife, Diana Rodriguez, had been charged with the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Bruninho. The jurors voted four to three in favor of acquitting her.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  And the jury decided she had been holding the baby under duress, not by her own choice. The trial of Bola came next, and it ran six days. And Bola's defense team, led again by Aircio, made a spectacle of the courtroom. He went after court employees, he blocked photographers, and his witness examinations ran past the 10-hour mark. And the word canela in Portuguese for scoundrel became one of the most frequently thrown insults in the room. But on April 27, 2013, he was convicted of doubly qualified homicide and concealment of Eliza's body. And he was sentenced to 22 years total. Nineteen in a closed regime for the killing and three in an open regime for hiding her. Months later, on August 28, 2013,

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  the last two defendants faced a jury in Contagem. Ella Nilson and Coxina were convicted of the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Eliza's son. And Ella Nilson received three years in an open regime, while Coxina received two and a half years, also open regime. And the prosecutor pointed the jury at three things. First, the rescue of the baby in Ribeiro das Neves, alive, against every expectation. And second, the forensic report showing Eliza's blood inside the Land Rover used to transport her from Rio. And third, cell tower records. Those records allowed the prosecution to lay out the crime minute by minute. Every phone call Bruno placed in those hours leading up to the killing, through it, and afterwards.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Also, who he called, where they had been, and what each person's role had been. And the pattern on the map matched the pattern in the testimony. And it showed, as one analyst put it, "a position of command, of dominion and of control." And Eliza's death certificate was in the file. And her blood was in Bruno's vehicle. And her baby had been rescued from a home in the very city where Bruno had been born. And her phone had been tracked, and the defendants' phones had been tracked. And the jury had looked at all of it and returned their verdicts. Now, Eliza's body may not have been found, but her case was heard, and those involved were to face justice. Now, when the courtrooms finally went quiet,

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  the question that remained was a really simple one. Who was going to raise the baby? And by the time the verdicts came in, Bruninho was a toddler. And by the time the appeals went through the system, he was a small boy who had just never met his mother that he could remember. And Eliza's father made a move for custody, and he filed to raise the grandson of the daughter he had outlived. And in the process of the custody fight, his past crimes came to light. The 2003 rape conviction of a 10-year-old girl and the allegations of abuse inside his own home when Eliza was a child. And a judge looked at what was in his file and denied, thankfully, the custody appeal. Luis Carlos was not going to be raising anybody. Instead, the boy went to Sonia, Eliza's mother,

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  the mother who had once given up her beloved daughter because she believed it was the only way to keep her alive. She took the grandson she had never held and started over. And on paper, Bruninho's father was a convicted killer serving decades in a Minas Gerais prison. And his mother was deceased. And the man who had raised his mother was a fugitive rapist. So the child's world had just been ruled on and struck through and handed to a woman on a pepper farm. And Sonia raised him in Mato Grosso do Sul, far from the cameras and the courtrooms. And she gave him the childhood his mother never got to see. And somewhere along the way, Bruninho picked up a pair of goalkeeper gloves. And he signed with Botafogo's Youth Academy.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  And he has represented Brazil at the youth level. So the son of a murdered model and a convicted killer standing in the same position his father once made famous, a goalkeeper. But there was still the matter of money. Eliza had died while suing Bruno for child support. And that lawsuit did not die with her. They had rarely reached for in this kind of case. The club. The court ordered Flamengo to withhold 17.5% of Bruno's earnings from the club on the 5th of every month and deposit it for Bruninho as a payroll mechanism, not a separate club obligation. And the club, of course, fought the ruling. And Flamengo argued that Bruno's contract

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  had been suspended the moment he was arrested and that he was no longer drawing a salary from the court to reach. Flamengo appealed, and that fight took years. And it is, in its own way, one of the strangest inheritances in Brazilian football. A boy who never knew his mother drawing a stipend from the club whose captain had ordered her killed. And as for Bruno himself, prison did not mean disappearance. And in 2016, while still serving his sentence, he married Ingrid, the dentist he had been dating since 2008. And over the years that followed, Bruno's case moved in and out of the headlines. And habeas corpus filings, temporary releases, and returns to custody.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  The cycle repeated itself for more than a decade. And in 2017, a habeas corpus ruling briefly put him back on the street. Bruno leaves prison with his wife Ingrid. And within weeks, a club called Boa Esporte in the second division of Minas Gerais football signed him to a contract, which is unfucking believable. But luckily, the public backlash was immediate. And the club's coach quit rather than work with him. Sponsors pulled out, and Boa Esporte eventually let him go. But it would not be the last time. Small clubs in the lower divisions kept signing him to contracts and then, under public pressure, tearing them up. Somehow, he found a way to keep being offered a way back to a goal line.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  And every time, Eliza's name came back with him. And as of 2023, Bruno was on conditional liberty. He has served his time in closed and semi-open regimes. And he walked out and went looking for a goal line again. And in February of 2026, he signed with Vasco AC, a club in the state of Akri. And he played in the first round of Copa do Brasil against Vila Clube. Sixteen years after Eliza's death, he's still fucking playing. It just makes me sick that that is allowed or accepted by anyone. And Jorge Rosa, the teenage cousin, did not live to see his 30s.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  And after serving roughly two years in juvenile detention facility, he had returned to the margins of Rio. And in 2022, in a community in São Gonçalo, in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, he was shot dead. And according to preliminary reports, he had been tortured and killed by drug traffickers in the favela where he lived after committing a theft inside the community. He was only 28 years old. And then, there was what Eliza's case did to the country that failed her. And in October of 2009, a judge had looked at a five-months-pregnant-woman with a gun to the head story and ruled that her relationship didn't qualify for the law built to protect her. And that ruling became a teaching case, a warning, if you will.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  And it became something Brazilian law schools and women's advocacy groups pointed at when they talked about what the Maria de Penha law was actually for. The women's rights organization Sepia wrote that in Eliza's case, the Brazilian state had once again failed to fulfill its role. The Maria de Penha law had been built to curb any manifestation of violence against women swiftly and efficiently. And yet, a judge had taken that law and decided it did not apply to a pregnant woman being beaten by the father of her child just because they weren't totally serious. The gap between the law on the page and the law in the courtroom had a cost of a life. And in March of 2015, Brazil went further. And the country passed the Lei do Feminicidio,

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  the femicide law, which created a specific legal category for the killing of a woman because she is a woman. And it carried a heavier sentence. And it was a recognition written into the penal code that what had happened to Eliza was a category of violence that the country was finally willing to name. And Eliza's case was not the only case that got the country there, but it was one of the loudest. Because Eliza did everything the system asks a woman to do, and the state just sent her home. She was 25 years old when she passed away. And she had been a goalkeeper in indoor soccer as a teenager. And she had walked runways in Sao Paulo. And she had given her son the name of the father who refused to claim him.

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  And she had, against every reason to stop believing it, still been hoping for reconciliation in the weeks before she was killed. She was the girl from Faz do Iguaçu who came to the city with a suitcase and a dream. And she got to be a mother for four months, only four months. And she told her country what was going to happen to her. And they filed the paperwork, and then they waited until it was too late. So my heart goes out to Eliza and Eliza's family. And I hope that Sonia and little Bruno are thriving now. And I hope Bruno rots in hell and is just miserable every single day of his life. But I'm going to choose to just think about Eliza and just hope that the system actually helps other women

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  that experience what she had experienced. But that is it for today's video. Let me know what other videos you would like me to deep dive into. I always read the comments. And until next time, I will see your beautiful face. And please, please, stay safe out there. All right. Bye.