Members of Brazilian cannibal ‘sect’ who fed neighbors human flesh pastries are sentenced

A Brazilian man, his wife and his mistress will have a total of 210 years in prison to chew over their crimes after being found guilty of killing and eating three women, and using the meat in pastries that they sold to neighbors.

Dubbed the “cannibals of Garanhuns” after the city in which they did most of their dirty deeds, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, wife Isabel Cristina Pires da Silveira, and mistress Bruna Cristina Oliveira were convicted of murdering, dismembering, consuming, and selling human flesh.

After luring one victim to their home with a promise to hear the “word of God” and another with an offer of work as a nanny, the happy family stabbed, dismembered, and ate the women – but set some of the meat aside to bake in stuffed pastries called “salgados” which they sold to neighbors, claiming the mystery meat within was tuna or chicken.

The toothsome threesome's sentences – 71 years for da Silveira, 68 for his wife and 71 years and 10 months for Oliveira – will be appended to the existing 20-year prison terms they received in 2014 for killing and eating a homeless woman they'd also lured back to their home with promises of a babysitting job.

Silveira told the court he and his wife were victims of Oliveira's “torture,” a claim he held back during the previous trial – his mistress, he said, was a witch. Silveira claimed to hear voices and obsess over killing women in the pages of a book discovered by police when they first arrested the trio, and his lawyer attempted to paint him as mentally ill, claiming the verdict was “unenforceable,” but a state psychologist testified Silveira was quite sane.

Police only stumbled upon the cannibal family when Oliveira was caught on camera using one of the victims’ credit cards in 2012. Caught red-handed with a garden full of body parts, the trio claimed they had started a sect to preach “the purification of the world and the reduction of its population” and that the killings were part of a “purification ritual” intended to cleanse the victims of their “sins” – they'd give birth to “thieves and lowlives” otherwise, Silveira said. At the time, they denied eating the victims or stuffing them into pastries, but Silveira has since expounded on his taste for the “other” other white meat, telling the Mirror in a jailhouse interview that he enjoyed it sautéed with onions and oregano or made into a vegetable stew.