On March 18, 2005, a 27-year-old tourist from Spain named Núria Fernández Colada crossed the water from São Luís to Alcântara, an old colonial city of stone streets and ruined buildings on the northern coast of Brazil. She was with a long-haired Brazilian wanderer who sold handmade crafts and called himself Kurumba. He seemed like exactly the sort of person a traveler might meet on the road—no uniform, no obvious authority, no reason to assume that getting on a boat with him would be the last decision of her life. The two took photographs among the historic ruins and did some sightseeing.

Then they continued towards the beach, and that is where the trip stopped being a trip. Before Núria was killed, Kurumba made a fire and performed some kind of ritual around it. He danced. Then he attacked her with a piece of wood, striking her in the head until she was completely dead.

Her body was left partially buried in the sand, naked, with massive injuries to her head. And then Kurumba did something that made this case infamous, even in a country with no shortage of horrifying crime stories. During a police reconstruction, he claimed that he drank Núria’s blood. He also claimed that he consumed exposed brain tissue from her injuries.

Núria was not the first woman connected to this man. In fact, she was the sixth. Just two days before Núria was killed, police had found the body of another foreign tourist in a shallow grave on the same general stretch of Brazilian coast. Once investigators realized the same strange traveling artisan had been seen around both women, they started hunting him.

When they finally caught up with José Vicente Matias, better known as Kurumba, they thought they were solving only two murders. Instead, he started talking. There was a teenage girl who had been killed. A young artisan missing in Bahia for five years.

A 16-year-old whose head had been cut from her body. A Russian-Israeli tourist whose skull had been shattered with a rock near a waterfall. And then Kurumba added demons to the story. He told police that the devil had ordered him to kill seven women.

The problem was that he had a habit of changing his story whenever the old one stopped working for him. José Vicente Matias was born in Formoso in the Brazilian state of Goiás in 1966. He made and sold handmade goods and moved around constantly. Newspapers called him an artisan, a hippie, and sometimes a craftsman.

Matias later said he did not even like being called an artisan. He preferred “wanderer. ” That word fits the geography of this case better than almost anything else. Brazil is enormous, and Matias moved through tourist towns, festival areas, beaches, waterfalls, and places where backpackers, craftspeople, and travelers naturally meet strangers.

Then he moved on again. His known victims would eventually be spread across four states: Minas Gerais, Bahia, Goiás, and Maranhão. That mobility gave him something more useful than a brilliant criminal plan. It gave him distance.

A dead teenager in one state did not automatically look connected to a missing artisan hundreds of miles away. A tourist killed near a waterfall did not obviously belong in the same file as a woman buried beside a beach in another region. And before the known killings began, Matias already had a violent record. Contemporary reporting said that he had been arrested in Goiás in 1998 in connection with a rape and another violent sexual offense involving a young couple.

He escaped custody a few months later. So by 1999, the man who would later describe himself as a wanderer was not simply drifting around Brazil selling jewelry and handmade crafts. He was a fugitive. The first known victim was Natália Cano.

She was 15 years old. In September 1999, she was in Três Marias in Minas Gerais during a period of local festivities. Traveling artisans were also in town. Then Natália disappeared.

Her body was not found immediately. Weeks passed before she was located. Police found injuries to her skull, and investigators at the time connected the case to a group of traveling artisans who had been in the area. But that was where the trail went cold.

There was no national manhunt. No database was going to flash a warning that a fugitive craftsman in another state might be responsible. Natália became an unsolved murder, and for more than five years she stayed one. It was not until Matias’s arrest made Brazilian news that an investigator saw his face and remembered Natália.

Then the pieces came together. José had lured Natália away, killed her with a rock, and covered her body with branches and leaves. Natália’s family had to wait almost 26 years for a jury on this case. In July 2025, local reporting said Matias was finally convicted of her murder and received an additional 19-year sentence.

Natália was 15 when she died. The legal resolution arrived more than a decade after she would have turned 40. The next known victim was Simone Lima Pino, and her case is the one that makes Kurumba’s wandering lifestyle feel the most cruel. Simone was 26 and an artisan herself, from Bahia.

In June 2000, she traveled to Lençóis for the festival season. This was before smartphones were normal, before you could casually share a live location with your family. Public telephones were still how a lot of people checked in from the road. Simone brought her pet parakeet with her.

Her mother, Joseane Nilda, expected Simone back in Salvador on June 28, but she did not come home. So her mother went looking for her. She went to Lençóis and later described a search that sounds both incredibly generous and incredibly infuriating. A local inn took her in without charging her.

Guests went into the surrounding wilderness and helped search. But when she went to police, she said an officer dismissed the disappearance and suggested Simone had simply gone off somewhere to use drugs. Joseane Nilda did not accept that. She knew her daughter, and she knew that was not the case.

So she kept searching. Months became years. And while she was still trying to find her own daughter, she started an organization named after Simone to help other families looking for missing people. Five years went by.

Then in 2005, Joseane Nilda saw television coverage of a serial killer who had been arrested in northern Brazil. One of the women he claimed to have killed was in Bahia. A detective then called the prison and asked Matias about her. He did not know Simone’s name, but he remembered the little bird.

The woman, he said, had been traveling with a small parakeet. Police showed him Simone’s photograph, and he confirmed it was her. According to reports from the time, he said that he had killed Simone with blows and hidden her remains beneath rocks in an isolated area. One contemporary report also said he had told police that he had violated her body after death.

At first, even his confession did not give the family a body. Instead, he drew maps. He gave directions. Search teams went out and came back without Simone numerous times.

And according to Joseane Nilda’s later account, there was another agonizing delay while authorities arranged the money and logistics to physically bring Kurumba back to Bahia. Eventually, in December 2005, he was transported to the area and made to lead police into the wilderness himself. Joseane Nilda went too, although police apparently did not want her near the man who had murdered her daughter. She later joked bitterly that the officer assigned beside her seemed less concerned with protecting her from Kurumba than protecting Kurumba from her.

Out in the brush, officers began digging where Matias indicated, but they could not find the exact spot. He stood there in handcuffs and he kept pointing. According to Joseane Nilda, he finally asked for the shovel. “He knew the place centimeter by centimeter,” she later said.

And then the man who had hidden Simone there five years earlier personally exposed her remains. Joseane Nilda remembered seeing him pull her daughter’s head from the hole. Then she did something most people could not do. She walked up to Matias, put a hand on his shoulder, and told him she hoped God would forgive him, and that for her own part, she forgave him.

She remembered seeing tears on his face. That moment does not redeem Kurumba. It tells you something about Joseane Nilda. For five years, he had controlled whether she even knew where her daughter was.

Standing in that wilderness, she took the final word back. There is a gap in the known murders after Simone. Then in January 2004, Kurumba surfaced again in Goiânia. His victim was Laiane Vieira Dutra.

She was 16 years old. This is where the violence stops looking like a series of impulsive attacks and starts revealing how long Matias could remain inside an act of cruelty. A homicide detective later told a reporter that Matias described keeping Laiane bound for roughly a day and a half. He claimed he drank her blood while she was still restrained.

Laiane was eventually killed, and sources disagree on the exact mechanism because Kurumba himself told different versions over the years. Some reporting says strangulation. Later at his trial, he described a different sequence involving a blow to the head. What is not disputed is what happened afterwards.

Laiane was decapitated. According to prosecutors, her head was placed in a plastic bag. Her body was wrapped in a quilt. Her remains were moved and dumped near a creek on the outskirts of Goiânia.

A lot of people glance right over the word “dismemberment” without stopping to think about what it means. This was a 16-year-old girl. After she was dead, somebody had to stay there and physically separate her body, then package the pieces, then move them, then decide where to leave them. Those are not seconds of rage.

Those are repeated decisions. When Matias went to trial for this murder in 2008, he admitted killing her and admitted the broader series of murders. Laiane’s case was the first major conviction on the board against him: he received 23 years. But by then everyone already knew she had not been the last.

A few months after that murder, Kurumba was in Pirenópolis, another Brazilian tourist destination filled with waterfalls, old streets, and visitors. There he became involved with a then-29-year-old Katrin Rakatov, a Russian-born woman with Israeli nationality. She had been drinking, and Matias attacked her with a rock, striking her head repeatedly and causing numerous skull fractures. He then concealed her body near the Rio das Almas.

That sounds pretty straightforward. Kurumba did his best to make it anything but. At one point, he claimed she had fallen and died accidentally near the waterfall. At another point, he admitted killing her.

And as with the other victims, he claimed he drank her blood after the killing. The court case became almost a miniature version of the man himself: one fact pattern buried under changing explanations. Matias was initially convicted under a robbery-resulting-in-death theory and sentenced to 27 years. But the supposed stolen money could not be cleanly established, and the case was later reclassified as intentional homicide and sent back for another jury.

By the time Katrin’s case finally reached the second verdict, Matias had been changing his story about her for more than a decade. But she could not change hers. Her skull told enough of it. By early 2005, Kurumba had traveled northeast into Maranhão.

He was not alone. A Brazilian woman named Valéria Valverde had been traveling with him. Valéria later told police that his behavior frightened her enough that she left and returned to Goiás. That detail is easy to skim past because nothing happened to her—but knowing what happened next, it is hard not to see the decision as a narrow escape.

Within weeks, two foreign women traveling through the same area would be dead. Maryanne Kaur was a 49-year-old tourist from Germany. She was visiting the Barreirinhas region, one of those places that looks almost unreal in photographs: huge white dunes, blue-green lagoons, open skies, small villages, and miles of coast. Somewhere inside that landscape, she crossed paths with Kurumba.

She had been seen with him around March 11, 2005 in that area. Five days later, on March 16, Maryanne was found in a shallow grave. Her head had suffered severe blunt force trauma. Later summaries described the facial damage as extreme and the scene as absolutely grotesque.

During a reconstruction after his arrest, Kurumba claimed he had consumed Maryanne’s blood as well. He also gave investigators a buffet of possible motives. Maybe she rejected him. Maybe she mocked him.

Maybe she attacked him. Maybe drugs were involved. Different versions appeared at different times, per usual. And while police were still dealing with Maryanne’s body, another tourist was already in danger.

Maryanne was found on March 16. Núria Fernández Colada was killed on March 18—two days later. The time between killings was getting shorter and shorter. It appears that José was reaching the berserker state that often appears towards the end of somebody’s killing spree.

Núria met Kurumba at a guest house in São Luís. According to the later prosecution case, he gained her trust and they boarded a boat together and traveled to Alcântara. They walked through the historic area and took photographs among old ruins. Photographs are supposed to become proof that you were somewhere beautiful—a little time capsule you look at and later say, “Remember this day?

That was a great day. ” For Núria, there was no later. After Alcântara, they continued towards Itatinga Beach. Witnesses remembered seeing them leave together, but only Kurumba came back.

Prosecutors said that on the beach he made a fire and danced around it as some sort of ritual before killing her again with blows—this time from a piece of wood. Her body was left partially buried in the sand, naked, with massive injuries to her head. During the police reconstruction, Kurumba went further this time. He claimed he drank her blood and then consumed part of her brain tissue that was exposed from the head wounds.

Once Maryanne and Núria were connected, the case moved rather fast. Witnesses helped police build a description of the man who had been seen walking around the women, and investigators traced the traveling companion who had left him—Valéria Valverde, the lucky woman who escaped his clutches—back to Goiânia. She recognized Kurumba and confirmed that she had traveled with him. She said it was around the same time frame that the murders happened.

Police now had a name, a face, and a direction of travel. Matias had gone north into the state of Pará. On March 29, 2005, an anonymous tip led officers to a guest house in Bragança, roughly 200 kilometers from Belém. He was arrested without a movie-style shootout.

And then something strange happened. He would not shut up. A detective told a reporter that Matias repeatedly asked to be interviewed and kept adding new information every time he spoke. At first, police only had him for Maryanne and Núria.

Then he admitted Katrin. Then detectives in other states started calling. What about the 16-year-old in Goiânia? What about the teenager in Três Marias?

What about the missing woman in Bahia? Kurumba supplied details. He knew the town in Natália’s case and he knew what happened to Laiane’s body. He remembered Simone’s bird.

He pointed investigators towards Katrin. Suddenly the shape of the case changed completely. Police were no longer looking at two tourists murdered on the Maranhão coast. They were looking at a man whose known violence stretched back to 1999 and crossed four Brazilian states.

And this is where Kurumba gave the press the explanation that would follow his name forever. He said the devil told him to do it. Police reported that Matias claimed he had encountered the devil when he was 31 years old and had been given a mission: kill seven women. He described being overtaken by a force during the murders.

Police were not buying it. Investigators openly considered whether he was trying to make himself look insane. They requested a mental health evaluation. Years later, Matias undercut his own demon story.

During proceedings in the Laiane case, he reportedly said that at least one version of the demonic command claim was false. He said people had told him to say it, and that it might help to act crazy as the case closed in around him. That leaves a much less supernatural pattern. One person would die because it was an accident.

Another woman would die and it could be rejection, or drugs, or humiliation, or foreigners disrespecting Brazilians, or the devil. The details changed depending on which version made José look least like a man who simply chose to hurt women. A later psychiatric evaluation cited in legal writing reportedly diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. However, it was still found that Matias understood what he was doing and could be held criminally responsible.

A personality disorder can help explain six murders, but a diagnosis is not a biography, and it is definitely not an excuse. It does answer the legal question that mattered. Brazilian courts did not accept that Kurumba was some helpless passenger driven by a supernatural force. He was a man who murdered and then violated the bodies of his victims in grotesque ways.

The arrest came in 2005, and justice did not arrive as one neat courtroom ending. The cases were spread across states and moved at wildly different speeds. In June 2008, Matias was convicted in Goiânia for murdering Laiane and concealing her body. He received 23 years.

Katrin Rakatov’s case took a stranger route. An initial 27-year conviction under a robbery-resulting-in-death theory was later overturned and reclassified. In August 2016, a new jury convicted Matias of qualified homicide and sentenced him to 24 years. Núria’s case took even longer.

In May 2018—13 years after she had died—a jury in Alcântara convicted Matias and sentenced him to 22 years, 4 months, and 15 days. And Natália’s case was still waiting. In July 2025, almost 26 years after the 15-year-old disappeared, local reporting said Matias was convicted and given another 19 years. The public record is not equally clean for every final procedure outcome, especially for Simone and Maryanne.

Different reports give different accumulated sentence totals depending on the date and which judgments they count. But the important current point is simpler. As of the most recent reporting verified in 2026, José Vicente Matias remains incarcerated. As of January 2026, a report said that his defense had made multiple attempts to move him towards a less restrictive prison regime, and those efforts had been denied through late 2024.

The same report projected that his maximum release point could extend to around 2038 under the rules being applied to his case. That is a projection, not a promise carved into stone. But as of now, Kurumba is still in prison. The image that stays is not Kurumba dancing around the fire, or telling police that the devil whispered in his ears.

It is Joseane Nilda standing in the wilderness, waiting for a grown man to reach into the ground and pull out her daughter’s decapitated head. It was not the devil who knew where to dig. It was José Vicente Matias.