Beatriz Mota

In December of 2015, a graduation ceremony was being held at the Colégio Nossa Senhora Maria Auxiliadora in Petrolina. As the ceremony began to wind down just after 10:00 PM, Sandro and Lúcia Mota would notice that they hadn't seen their youngest daughter, Beatriz, in several minutes. A search of the school grounds would ensue, leading to a grisly discovery a short time later...

Beatriz Angélica Mota was the second of two daughters born to her parents, Sandro and Lúcia. Born on February 11th, 2008, Beatriz would live with her family on a farm in rural Juazeiro, a municipality that shares a metropolitan area with a larger city nearby.

Petrolina was the city where Beatriz and her family spent a lot of their time. Located in southern Pernambuco - a state known for its agricultural output - Petrolina is a relatively large city in northeastern Brazil, with a population of roughly 350,000, and is located several hundred kilometers inland.

While northeastern Brazil has a reputation for being full of crime, corruption, and poverty, the area around Petrolina is a rather rural region with lots of open space and farmland. For Sandro and Lúcia Mota, this was a perfect place to raise their family; especially since they could live on a farm in the middle of the country, but commute to the city every day for work and school.

Beatriz and her older sister attended the Colegio Nossa Senhora Maria Auxiliadora, a private Catholic school located in the middle of Petrolina's city center. One of the most prestigious schools in the region, this happened to be where their father, Sandro, worked as a teacher; so the entire Mota family would become intimately familiar with the school and the grounds over several years.

Unfortunately, the school also happened to be the location where the life of 7-year-old Beatriz would come to a violent end, in an event that is still surrounded by mystery half-a-decade later.

This is the story of Beatriz Mota.

On the evening of Thursday, December 10th, 2015 - right at the onset of summer in the southern hemisphere - a graduation ceremony was being held at the school.

While the family regularly would have attended the ceremony, due to family patriarch Sandro being an educator there, the family was celebrating Beatriz's older sister, who was essentially graduating high school. This was a graduation ceremony for older teens that were finishing up their primary school education and would either be advancing to university or moving into the workforce the following year.

The entire Mota family would be present for the ceremony, and were all wearing white T-shirts with the face of Beatriz's older sister (in a move that you would expect cheesy families to do during a graduation ceremony). Beatriz and her parents, Sandro and Lúcia, were all wearing the same matching shirts and showed up early at the ceremony that evening to help set things up in the school's auditorium.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors would fall upon the school that evening, to watch their young loved ones graduate from this prestigious school - in the hopes of them moving on to bigger and better things the following year. If you look up footage of this event, you'll see that there were a lot of people present. With so many people engaged in the festive attitude and live music, it almost had the feel of a concert, and you can see the entire Mota family throughout the ceremony; especially Sandro, Beatriz's father, who was a teacher at the school and actively participated in the ceremony, giving speeches and posing for photographs with excited students.

During the ceremony itself, Beatriz was left in the care of her mother, Lúcia, but was moving around quite a bit. In some of the footage, you can see her sitting with her father and the other staff members up-front; and in other footage, you can see her sitting next to her mother in the auditorium seats or running around with a younger friend of hers. She appears to be a jittery child, having to sit through an hours-long graduation ceremony... as you'd expect from any seven-year-old.

Beatriz was last seen by her mother at around 10:00 PM, while the ceremony was still in the swing of things. A few minutes later, Beatriz told her mother that she was going to get a drink from a nearby water fountain - out in the school's courtyard - and then left to do so. However, minutes would pass without Beatriz returning, and Lúcia would begin to look for her daughter. Footage shows the mother looking throughout the auditorium and surrounding area, looking for her now-missing 7-year-old to no avail.

By the time that Sandro broke free from his participation in the graduation ceremony - at around 10:25 PM - he learns that Beatriz has not been seen in several minutes. Since this was a private school, with security guards and only one way in or out (for non-staff members), the parents don't start to panic quite yet but do begin to seriously search for their missing daughter.

At around 10:43, Sandro takes to the stage, pausing the band that's playing to call for his missing daughter. He says to the audience while pointing to the shirt he is wearing, which bears the face of his oldest daughter:

"Beatriz, my daughter, where are you? Hey Bia. Everyone is looking for you, my love. She is dressed like me here, with her sister's face."

While this announcement would fail to have the necessary effect - Beatriz would remain missing for several minutes - it would galvanize a lot of the staff members of the school to begin looking for the girl.

Minutes later, a distraught-looking Sandro returns to the stage, telling the crowd that Beatriz is a seven-year-old, who was playing with a classmate when she was last seen.

"I've already looked everywhere I can think of in this school and I still haven't found my daughter. I'm desperate."

At this point, staff members and other worried parents had begun scouring through the school, looking for Beatriz, as Sandro gave his second address over the PA system. As Sandro pleaded for help to find his missing daughter, a commotion could be heard outside of the school's auditorium: a mix of anguished screams and cries.

The body of Beatriz Mota had been found by a security guard, inside of a mostly-empty closet next to an abandoned gymnasium at the school. A fire caused by students just months prior (October 2015) had led to this part of the school being closed off, but a security guard had wandered into this part of the school in search of the missing girl. He had found her in the back corner of this burned-out closet, amidst some excess junk left behind (rags, cleaning supplies, and a half-filled cabinet).

Police would be called to the scene just moments later, as families began to leave the graduation ceremony amidst this tragedy. Several people would remain behind at the scene, however, to console the family of the girl and give statements to investigators, who began to arrive just after 11:00 PM.

A collection of authorities would begin to arrive at the scene that evening, including members of both the military and civil police. Throughout Brazil, the military police traditionally uphold the law, while the civil police conduct investigations; so, in essence, they would work in tandem to close off the crime scene, collect statements, and then begin the investigation.

Over the next day or so, they would be joined by authorities from the state police headquarters in Recife, as well as members of the institutes of legal medicine and criminalistics, who would weigh in on specific matters regarding the crime scene and evidence.

Early on, it was decided that the crime would be overseen by delegate Sara Machado, who - as a delegado - would act in a role similar to that as a magistrate or prosecutor while overseeing these numerous law enforcement agencies. Over time, however, Machado would prove to be just one of many delegates to oversee this investigation and would be replaced by Marceone Ferreira Jacinto by the end of December.

The discovery of 7-year-old Beatriz Mota's body, in the burned-out closet next to the abandoned gymnasium, was particularly haunting for those that made the discovery, having never seen a crime scene like this before in their lives. After police arrived at the school, the scene was roped off, and the child's body was taken to Juazeiro - the city adjacent to Petrolina - where the autopsy was performed.

There, it was determined that Beatriz had been stabbed dozens of times in the chest, stomach, and along her arms and legs. Her autopsy would later note a total of 42 stab wounds, which then-delegate Sara Machado claimed, had come at the hands of a killer that was "full of rage." Originally, it was speculated that the motive for killing Beatriz had been personal, because of this overkill, which seemed to have been caused by some kind of emotional motive.

The murder weapon, a knife, was found at the crime scene, having been left half-buried in the abdomen of the young victim. While reports in the local media would describe this as a filet/fishing knife, photos of it appear to look like a regular butcher knife, which appeared slightly old with a wooden handle.

Surprisingly, there was no sign of any sexual assault having taken place. According to police, there was no proof that the killer had pursued Beatriz for sexual motives, having just killed her and disposing of her body in this closet; but that made the crime even more bizarre, as it gave no apparent motive for this killer to have targeted an innocent child.

While investigators would state early on that Beatriz had been killed where her body was found, due to there being no sign of blood outside of the closet - indicating that she had not been carried or dragged to the closet postmortem - but this would come into dispute months later when investigators began speculating about the killer(s).

During the autopsy of Beatriz's body and the examination of the crime scene, multiple samples would be taken by authorities. This included fingerprint, hair, and blood samples from the body and the murder weapon, as well as skin samples taken from the child's fingernails, which authorities hoped would lead to a potential suspect in the future.

As all of this information was documented, police would begin a total canvas of the area; not only attempting to speak to everyone that had been at the graduation - which, by some accounts, had been upwards of 2,000 people - but also people that had been in the surrounding area that night. Since the school was in the middle of a relatively busy city center, this was a decent amount of people.

Because Beatriz had been one of the few younger children at this event, many of the witnesses were able to recall having seen her. Some were even able to recall seeing her in the area of the water fountain, near the school's courtyard; where, if you recall, she had been heading right before she originally went missing. Her body was later found nearby the abandoned gymnasium, close to the water fountain, and it was believed that the killer was an opportunist that grabbed her near there and then took her to an isolated spot to end her life.

In addition to collecting witness statements from the region, police would also begin the lengthy process of compiling video footage from the school and neighboring businesses. The school itself had some security cameras, along with motion sensors, but would prove to be useless during the investigation itself. Footage from the school, stored on a hard drive, would become corrupted early on; but regardless, the area around the gymnasium - where the body of Beatriz had been found - had no working cameras. The cameras there had been damaged by the fire from months earlier and were no longer working. This meant that investigators would have to mostly rely upon external footage, as well as footage shot at the graduation ceremony.

In addition to parents and other relatives of the graduating students, who might have been recording throughout the ceremony, a professional film crew had been hired to record the graduation. Everyone was asked to forward their footage or photographs to the police so that they could begin to reconstruct the specific series-of-events that had led to the death of Beatriz Mota and (hopefully) build a cohesive timeline. This would unfold over the next several weeks, as investigators hoped to identify a person-of-interest from the footage.

Through the vast amount of photos taken and footage recorded at the school's graduation ceremony, investigators were able to trace the whereabouts of 7-year-old Beatriz Mota and her family members pretty cohesively throughout the night.

Throughout the ceremony, Beatriz could be seen sitting next to her family for large portions of the proceedings. At 8:10 PM, she was recorded sitting next to her father Sandro, among the staff members. At 9:55, students are continuing to receive their diplomas, and Sandro is called to the stage. When the camera pans to him, you can see Beatriz sitting next to him. At around 10:02, Beatriz gets up and moves to sit closer to her mother, Lúcia, and remains in that area for the next few minutes.

The last footage investigators could find of Beatriz came from 10:09 PM, which shows the girl walking away from her mother, heading towards the water fountain in the school's courtyard. This is where she would last be seen alive by any witnesses moments later, and fits in with the timeline investigators had established, with Beatriz disappearing at around this time. From here, there exists no additional footage of the girl, with her death likely coming over the next few minutes.

At around 10:25, family members can be seen in the auditorium looking for Beatriz. At 10:43, Sandro goes up on stage to address the audience, and almost all of the footage cuts out just minutes later, with the discovery of the girl's body at around 10:50.

Because of the location that the body was found, in the burned-out closet near the abandoned gymnasium, it was speculated that the killer likely had some kind of familiarity with the school. He likely knew that this area would be dark and abandoned, and maybe even knew that there were no working security cameras in the area; making it a blind spot for authorities, and the perfect place for him to commit this vile act.

While additional footage, discovered later on, would reveal how this individual had entered the school, there exists no footage whatsoever of him having left; which indicates that he had managed to get out without being noticed by anyone. To some, this again indicates some familiarity with the school. However, it is believed that multiple witnesses had seen this killer inside of the school, in the moments before and after the crime, but had not known anything was afoul at the time. Among these witnesses were none other than Beatriz's mother, Lúcia, who was desperately focused on finding her daughter.

In February of 2016 - roughly two months after the murder of Beatriz Mota - police would release a digital sketch of a potential suspect; which, they claimed, they had developed after speaking to multiple eyewitnesses. All of these witnesses claimed to have seen this individual near the water fountain, where Beatriz had last been seen alive - and included the victim's own mother, who had been frantically searching for her at the time.

One of these witnesses had seen this man sitting on a bench near the water fountain, taking a drink just as this person approached. In retrospect, this witness says that this individual had likely just been sitting and waiting there, but feigned taking a drink to avoid suspicion at the time.

At least one witness would claim to have seen this man in the woman's bathroom, although I cannot find any more information about this (which, I think, should have raised alarms at the time). Another witness - who police described as their most important yet - saw this man emerge from the area where the body of Beatriz was later found: near the abandoned gymnasium, which was shrouded in darkness at the time. A witness would then see this man in the men's bathroom a short time later, washing his hands and face, but thought nothing of it at the time.

According to Sandro, the father of Beatriz, this individual had approached at least two other children that evening, asking them to help him carry a table into the auditorium where the graduation ceremony was being held. However, while this scheme to lure children into the dark corridor near the gymnasium hadn't worked on two other kids, it had eventually worked on 7-year-old Beatriz, whose kind and innocent nature turned her into a victim. She had likely gone along with this individual willingly, ultimately being stabbed 42 times and then abandoned in a burned-out closet. However, the fact that this individual had attempted to lure two other children into the dark corridor indicated that Beatriz had not been targeted, but rather, fell prey to an opportunistic predator.

The digital sketch of this individual came in the form of an E-FIT, which investigators had spent more than a month crafting with the assistance of these numerous witnesses. According to their statements, this man stood between 1.65 and 1.7 meters tall (about 5 1/2 feet), weighed around 70 kilograms (about 155 pounds), and had moderately dark skin. As far as facial features are concerned, this man had deep-set eyes, severe/stern-looking features, as well as a prominent brow.

At the time of the crime, he was wearing dark-blue pants (likely jeans), and a green shirt with a collar. Because of this, he would eventually become known as "the green shirt man" or "the man with the green shirt" in the press, after being seen by multiple witnesses around the crime scene at the time of the murder. None of the witnesses had seen this man leave the school that evening, leading to a theory that he might have lingered around the school for some time. For that reason, police continued to look through the available footage, in the hopes of creating an airtight window for this mysterious individual.

Just days after releasing the E-FIT digital sketch of this unknown person, investigators floated the idea of there being multiple suspects.

This seemed to be due to there being two unidentified DNA samples recovered from the crime scene - one of which came from the murder weapon (knife), as well as another found underneath Beatriz's fingernails (on her right/dominant hand). Both samples seemed to come from different males, who were not related, and the existence of two prominent DNA samples on the victim's body indicated more than one killer.

Because of this, authorities would begin to publicly speculate that more than one person had been involved in the murder of 7-year-old Beatriz Mota, having murdered her in a separate location and then transporting her body to the closet that she was later found in. In the years since, investigators have not clarified about where they think Beatriz was murdered, but have insisted that she was not killed inside of the closet (seemingly refuting what they had said early on, about there being no sign that she was carried or dragged into the closet).

The following month (March 2016), police announced that as many as five people might have acted in-tandem to carry out this murder, which included school officials. Authorities publicly alleged that these five persons had allowed three sets of keys to disappear, which allowed access to the school's internal and external doors and gates. These three sets of keys had been reported missing on November 25th, roughly two weeks before the murder, and authorities speculated that this was due to the premeditated nature of the crime.

Police would also allege that the lights were turned off in the corridor leading to the old gymnasium, nearby where the body of Beatriz had been found. They speculated that this was intentional, and was similarly involved in the careful planning and execution of this murder; as it neutered the effect of security cameras in that area of the school, rendering them useless to authorities.

Adding onto all of this, authorities publicly floated the idea of this crime containing such a tight window of opportunity - 20 minutes at the most, from when Beatriz had disappeared to when her parents had started to search for her - that the killer had likely received help in the commission of the crime. Possibly even from school officials.

While authorities would withhold the names and ages of these five individuals, they would float details about them to the press. All but one were male school employees, who had seemed to lie or mislead investigators about certain details during their official interviews. One was described as being "nervous" around the time of the crime, at least three had denied being in the area of the crime scene (which, investigators believed, was refuted by video evidence), and another - a security guard - was seen on video abdicating his duties on the evening of the graduation ceremony.

Despite these five individuals being publicly suspected of involvement - or, at the least, attempting to obfuscate their role in the case - there was no evidence specifically linking them to the crime. Almost all of the information released by authorities appeared to be incredibly circumstantial, and some in the media picked up on that, claiming that the police were just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck; in essence, conducting the modern-day equivalent of a witch-hunt in the hopes it would catapult their case into something greater.

While none of these five school staff members would ever be charged with any crime related to this case, they would be fired from their positions in the ensuing weeks. Regardless of their intentions or not, police had successfully incepted the idea of a murderous conspiracy in the Brazilian zeitgeist, and that would be hard to shake in the coming months as the murder investigation continued.

Meanwhile, within that time, a prosecutor attached to the case began publicly speculating that Beatriz had been killed inside of the private Catholic school for some kind of bizarre religious motivation, hinting at there being some kind of underlying motive tied to Satanic or black magic rituals. As you can imagine, he could offer up no insights to prove that, making this just the second unfounded allegation in as many months, which did an untold amount of damage to the integrity of the case moving forward.

Months later, authorities would unveil their largest piece of evidence yet: surveillance footage of a suspect, who could be seen walking around and into the school during the period in which the crime had been committed. This footage was taken from businesses and other buildings in the surrounding area, in the block or so around the school grounds, and spanned a longer time than expected (nearly two hours in total).

This individual - the aforementioned "man in the green shirt" - was seen walking around the school at around 8:30 PM, around when the graduation ceremony was just getting started. He is easy to follow in this footage because of the unique way that he walks, with a noticeable lurch or gait in his step. But instead of walking into the school, he simply skirts around the outer walls and then heads off in the opposite direction, before returning to the area about an hour later.

About one hour and nine minutes after leaving the neighborhood, this green-shirted man returns to the area around the school and seems to pull out a cell phone. In the footage, you can see him engage in a phone conversation with someone for a moment, and then just a short time after the call, he reaches down to the street and pulls a knife out of nowhere from the curb. This knife - which is undoubtedly the murder weapon later recovered from the crime scene - is then tucked inside of his sock, as he continues into the school itself.

The man in the green shirt arrives at the school at around 9:45 PM, roughly 15-20 minutes before Beatriz Mota would first go missing. He then makes his way around a security guard by blending into a crowd of people near the entrance. From here, there exists no additional surveillance footage, but brief glimpses of this man exist from footage of the graduation ceremony itself.

The man walks through the auditorium, where the ceremony was being held, headed towards the school's courtyard (where the water fountain was, which Beatriz would head to just minutes later). In a sad irony, the suspect can be seen in images and footage taken of the ceremony, as the father of Beatriz, Sandro, is seen smiling and posing for photographs with graduating students.

Unfortunately, there exists no footage of this man from this point, but this is where multiple witnesses would recall seeing this man; including Lúcia, Beatriz's mother, who began looking for her daughter just minutes later.

Despite this footage showing how the man gained entry into the school, him taking a phone call before picking up the murder weapon along the street, and him making his way to the courtyard that Beatriz Mota disappeared from, there exists no footage of this man in a green shirt leaving the crime scene. From here, his trail seems to go cold, with him not leaving the crime scene through the main entrance.

As far as investigators could tell, he seems to have disappeared into thin air; or, at least, took another exit that wasn't covered by any cameras... seemingly giving credence to the theory that he knew more about the school than a random killer would. That information - paired with the premeditation of him being in the area hours before the crime, taking a phone call, and then picking up a knife along the street - led investigators to think that this was a fully thought-out crime. But the motive continued to elude them. Why would someone seemingly target children?

Through numerous witness statements, it became clear that Beatriz wasn't the main target of this individual; after all, he had accosted two children before Beatriz and seemingly settled on her as a victim because she had gone with him to a dark and isolated location. But why had he been so prepared to carry out this crime - in a school filled with hundreds of people, to boot - and where had he gone afterward? These questions remain unanswered to this day.

Following up on the release of this surveillance footage, authorities would reveal another startling piece of evidence months later (March 2017). This time, they would release images and footage from the school's security system; footage that authorities had previously claimed to be corrupted, but had been sent out of the country to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to be augmented.

This surveillance provided the clearest image of the suspected killer to-date: the individual known as the man in the green shirt, who had been identified by multiple witnesses early on and then picked out of other surveillance footage as the killer. While this wasn't a definitive image of this individual, it could feasibly be compared to potential suspects in the future to eliminate those that didn't fit the profile.

While this footage provided a good look at the suspect's face and likeness in better detail than ever before - which came along with a lot of fanfare from authorities still investigating this case nearly two years later - it would ultimately prove to not be the smoking gun that investigators hoped it to be.

Over the next couple of years, the turnover at the top of the investigation would continue; with delegate Gleide Angelo taking over the case in December of 2016 and then being replaced by Francisca Neri the following November. She would become the fourth delegate to oversee this case in less than two years - and would remain the longest-tenured among them - but would eventually prove fallible herself.

This frequent turnover came after protests from the parents of Beatriz Mota, who would become increasingly jaded with the investigation over time, viewing the prosecution's lack of clarity on speculative information as a hindrance. After the switch to the fourth delegate, Sandro and Lúcia even began stating in press releases that they'd be better off with a private investigation than one marred by so much public dysfunction and speculation.

Over the next year or so, this wedge between the family of Beatriz and authorities would continue to widen, with Sandro and Lúcia seeming to take an antagonistic tone towards the investigators overseeing the case; claiming that investigators had sought to enrich themselves due to their work on the case, and permanently sullied their work as a result. In at least one instance, an investigator for the police had left the force to become a security contractor, and used his knowledge from the case to provide security information to the school where Beatriz had been murdered. They claimed that the case was rife with these kinds of conflicts-of-interest, and that police had not sought to solve the crime as they should have.

It wasn't until the final half of 2018 - three years after the murder - that the story began to gain some momentum in the press yet again. That was when police identified an individual as having potential involvement in the crime: a man named Alisson Henrique de Carvalho Cunha, who had been one of two outsourced IT workers employed by the school at the time of the crime. While Henrique wasn't suspected of being the killer, the police publicly accused him of having lied to them during questioning, as well as intentionally erasing security footage from the school's servers in January of 2016 (less than a month after the murder). Authorities alleged that this contained footage of the killer, which - it was assumed - was ultimately released the following year (the footage from March 2017 which had been augmented by the FBI).

In December of 2018, authorities issued an arrest warrant for Henrique, but he would manage to avoid captivity and decided not to turn himself in to authorities. Search warrants would be carried out at his home - where his wife and children continued to live - but was unable to find anything that incriminated Henrique in the crime. He would remain wanted over the next several months, becoming a fugitive in the process.

Lawyers for Alisson Henrique claim that this was nothing more than a bullying tactic by police, who wanted to peg him as a scapegoat to make up for their own failures. Henrique's attorneys allege that it was the police who had mishandled those hard drives, resulting in the footage from the school becoming corrupted and that this had nothing to do with Henrique or his work in IT. After all, he had owned and operated his own business for over a decade and had no kind of prior criminal record, and his lawyers stated that any attempts to vilify him for their own failures was akin to corruption.

It's worth pointing out that Alisson Henrique is not suspected of being the killer in this case. After all, he didn't work at the school itself, but at a separate location where he managed his IT company, which just-so-happened to handle tech matters and server management for the school. Despite authorities alleging that he had lied during questioning and erased surveillance footage, a judge would revoke Henrique's arrest warrant in 2019 due to a lack of evidence. An investigation into his potential involvement continues to this day but seems to be based more on hearsay and conspiratorial gossip than anything.

To-date, the murder of Beatriz Mota remains unsolved, with the motive for the crime being perhaps the largest unexplained facet of it.

The security footage compiled by authorities revealed a man walking around the school hours before the murder and then returning just minutes before Beatriz went missing. This man seemed to arrive at the school, speak to someone over the phone, and then pick up a knife - which had been hidden outside of the school, for some reason. Hiding the knife in his sock, this man then snuck into the school through a public entrance and then lingered around in the area of the water fountain for 10-15 minutes. During that time, he attempted to lure at least two other children into an isolated area and seems to have found success with 7 -year-old Beatriz, whose naive nature made her an easy victim.

To me, this indicates that this wasn't a planned crime; at least, not one with a predetermined victim. Because this unknown individual seems to have attempted to lure at least two other children into the corridor where the body of Beatriz Mota was ultimately found less than an hour later, it indicates to me that she was not the intended target. There likely wasn't an intended target, no matter how staged this crime might have seemed. Plus, how could this individual have foreseen Beatriz leaving her parents behind to fetch a drink of water? That just seems very unlikely to me.

While this doesn't explain why this unknown individual picked up a knife along the street - which seems to have been hidden away for this specific crime - or why he had spoken on the phone just moments before entering the school, these could very easily be red herrings. Perhaps he had placed the knife there just hours earlier, when contemplating committing this crime, and had spoken to a spouse that was expecting him home at any moment. It's very possible that this crime was planned out, but only by a sick individual looking to kill someone.

With that being said, this individual does seem to have expressed intimate knowledge of the school itself, knowing where to go during the graduation ceremony and seeming to know which areas of the school would be abandoned. I find it highly unlikely that someone would be able to enter a school and find an empty corridor like this one, with the abandoned gymnasium and the burned-out closet, without knowing the inner-workings of the school. After all, this took place during a graduation ceremony with hundreds, if not thousands, of people inside of the school. The sheer audacity to carry out this crime then implies some knowledge of the school, as does the killer's ability to exit the school without being caught by any security cameras nearby.

Unfortunately, this dichotomy - between the crime seeming to appear random yet premeditated at the same time - leaves a lot to the imagination. Either remain possible, and it makes sense why this case, in particular, would inspire a lot of conspiratorial or ritualistic theories; because at the end of the day, those seem like some of the only rational explanations for why this killer acted the way he did.

The body of Beatriz Mota was originally buried in Juazeiro, on a plot on her family's farm, but the body was later transferred back to Petrolina, the city where she had been murdered. The family explained that the reason for this was so her body could be closer to family and friends that wanted to pay their respects, as well as them wanting to build a shrine in her honor. After all, they wanted to remind the city that the crime happened there, right in the middle of Petrolina itself, and nothing that happened in the future could change that.

Authorities have stated that they have attempted to match the DNA from the two samples found at the crime scene to dozens of potential suspects, but none have proven to be a match as of yet. Despite that, though, they continue to hope that forensic analysis can provide a breakthrough in this case.

Just earlier this year, in March of 2020, the fourth delegate in charge of the investigation (Francisca Neri) was removed from the case and replaced with a task force of delegates, who were appointed by the head of the state civil police. It seems like this was a concerted effort, to avoid the political ramifications that a single delegate had caused in the past, but this decision was critiqued by the Mota family as a continued symptom of the systematic dysfunction as opposed to a cure.

Nearly five years after the vicious murder of this 7-year-old, her case remains unsolved, with several details being held close to the vest by investigators. This is much to the chagrin of the parents of Beatriz, Sandro and Lúcia, who continue to call for justice daily. In addition to engaging in protests, sit-ins, and even hunger strikes to raise awareness for this case, they took their disagreement with authorities to another level just last year (2019), when they began a crowdfunding campaign to start their own, separate private investigation.

In the months since, after starting their own parallel investigation, the parents of Beatriz Mota have critiqued the ongoing police investigation, which they claim bungled the case early on, by not only mishandling evidence but potentially compromising the crime scene due to failed standards and procedures. They believe that the case should be handled by federal authorities, and actively petition for the case to be ripped away from state officials. In the meantime, they continue their private investigation, without the frills of a bureaucracy that they have come to despise, as they continue to search for answers in the case of their murdered daughter - who has now been dead for nearly as long as she was alive.

Sadly, Beatriz Mota is not a name that many people in the northern hemisphere are familiar with, due primarily to the language barrier that exists between Brazil and the rest of the world (Brazil is one of the few nations that predominantly speaks Portuguese, while the nations around them primarily speak Spanish). However, throughout the region that this case happened in - northeastern Brazil - this case has become similar to the JonBenet Ramsay murder: a shocking crime that galvanizes the public behind a common cause and highlights inefficiencies in the criminal justice system. However, in doing so, it becomes easy for authorities to point fingers at outsiders - the ever-present "other" - which then allows scapegoats and conspiracies to be created out of thin air.

This was a savage and brutal crime perpetrated against a child, who - at the end of the day - was overshadowed by the mystery that her death became. Her life came to a sudden and violent end in December of 2015, and in the years since, her killer has managed to avoid any culpability for his (or their) actions. However, with recent advances in forensic science, I don't see that lasting much longer.

As recently as this year (2020), investigators have hinted as a possible suspect residing in Piaui, a neighboring state to the northwest of Petrolina. Due to this information, I believe that investigators know who likely committed this crime, but they haven't been able to build a case against them... yet.

Until such a time, the story of Beatriz Mota remains unresolved.

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on July 26th, 2020

Producers: Maggyjames, Roberta Janson, Ben Krokum, Peggy Belarde, Quil Carter, Victoria Reid, Gabriella Bromley, Laura Hannan, Damion Moore, Amy Hampton, Steven Wilson, Scott Meesey, Marie Vanglund, Scott Patzold, Astrid Kneier, Lori Rodriguez, Aimee McGregor, Danny Williams, Sydney Scotton, Sara Moscaritolo, Sue Kirk, Thomas Ahearn, Seth Morgan, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Kelly Jo Hapgood, Alyssa Lawton, Jared Midwood, Travis Scsepko, Meadow Landry, Rebecca Miller, Tatum Bautista, Jo Wong, Erin Pyles, Teunia Elzinga, Consuelo Moreno, Jacinda B., Ryan Green, Stephanie Joyner, and Dawn Kellar