Sometimes you run into a story so full of heartless evil that it’s a struggle to capture the darkness in a headline. Sometimes you read a story that just gets worse with every passing word. The murder of Shirley Souza in Brazil is such a story.
Souza was strangled by her boyfriend, 23-year-old Jose Ramos dos Santos, in a fit of jealous rage after she admitted to cheating on him with a mutual friend.
Shirley Souza was only 16 years old, and she was seven months pregnant.
After choking her, Santos decided to grab a shower, no doubt sweaty after the strangling plus the two hours of sex preceding it. He says he didn’t realize she was dead until he got out of the shower.
Flummoxed by his discovery of the connection between strangulation and death, he sawed her head off with a bread knife and stashed her body in a storage cupboard. When his brother came home to the house they shared and complained about the smell, Santos relocated her body to a convenient alleyway.
The killer’s conscience apparently sparked back to life after two days of contemplation, and he became so overcome with regret that he decided to turn himself in. Note that he felt regret, not remorse—a distinction made clear in the Latin Times account of the crime. “She deserved to die, yes, but later I realized that her family didn’t deserve this,” Santos explained. Fox News Latino adds that he was worried about getting lynched by his neighbors.
He therefore popped off a quick Facebook post featuring a photo of Shirley Souza’s head, which he had kept for some reason, and shot a nasty note to her alleged lover. His Facebook profile, incidentally, used a photo of the evil puppet from the “Saw” torture-porn films.
Santos then stuffed Souza’s head into a plastic bag and hopped on a series of buses for a two-hour ride to the police station in Sao Paulo.
He was midway through his formal statement to the police when he decided to show them what was in the bag. “They were aghast – they hadn’t expected that,” a spokesman told the UK Daily Mail.
That’s an understandable reaction.
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