Guadalajara killer to uncle after murdering entire family: “You’re next”

He had researched the job before heading out, typing “How to kill someone in three seconds” into a search engine, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Using previously undisclosed material, EL PAÍS has reconstructed the savage quadruple murder that rocked Spanish society last summer.

“To have to cut a body in half again....Stick the organs in a bag… Then clean….” the killer complained in a message to a friend

It was 2pm on August 17. Patrick crossed the threshold of a house with the door number 594, inside La Arboleda de Pioz. It was the home of his uncle Marcos Campos, his aunt Janaina Santos and their children aged two and four, all of them Brazilian nationals.

Janaina was alone with the kids. Patrick had brought two pizzas and the four of them ate lunch together. Then, Patrick offered to help his aunt do the dishes. It was just an excuse to stab her to death in the kitchen.

After that, he went after the little children with his knife.

“It was clear to me that I wanted to kill them, even before entering the house. I was not scared,” the murderer later told the police.

Patrick used bleach to clean the bloodstains before his uncle was due to return from work, at around 10pm. His plan was to bury the three bodies first, using a €60 shovel he had bought for that purpose. But the ground was too hard, so he decided to cut up the bodies and place them in plastic bags instead.

It was 7pm by the time he was done. There were four hours to go before his uncle’s arrival. He spent that time sending selfies and WhatsApp messages to his only friend back in Brazil, 18-year-old Marvin Henriques Correia, who was kept appraised of Patrick’s actions. “When the clock showed 6.45pm I was still cleaning the floor. I am happy,” wrote the killer in one of his messages.

Psychiatrists describe Nogueira as a textbook psychopath: an individual who is not crazy and who can tell the difference between good and evil, and has the same kind of dispassionate attitude displayed by another famous case from 1994. Javier Rosado, dubbed “the role game killer,” wrote about one of his victims: “It’s amazing how long an idiot takes to die.”

In other messages to his friend back in Brazil, Patrick Nogueira complained that his uncle was taking too long to come home.

He had researched the job, typing “How to kill someone in three seconds” into a search engine

“I am hungry. Everything is dry. And to have to get everything dirty again... To have to cut a body in half again... Stick the organs in a bag… Then clean…”, he typed.

Marcos Campos arrived home at 10.15pm, to find his nephew standing defiantly before him.

“Look around you... you’re next,” he told his last victim, this newspaper has learned. Then he stabbed him to death in the hallway.

“At least my uncle is lighter than his wife. Damned fatso. I thought she was a man, ha ha ha,” he wrote to his friend after the deed was done.

Better Spain than Brazil

The young man spent the night inside the house after ruling out an escape in the middle of the night in case he got caught by the estate’s security guard. He was aware of what he had done, and worried about ending up in a Brazilian prison.

“I’d get raped 30 times there. And then they would snuff out a candle in my ass. Ha ha ha. I wouldn’t mind getting arrested here [in Spain]... I’d be watching TV until the age of 80,” he wrote to Henriques.

Nogueira has told investigators that he and Henrique have had a relationship “of love, but not of homosexuality” for the last three years.

The next morning, Patrick Nogueira took a bus back to Alcalá de Henares, in the Madrid region, where he was sharing an apartment with a Brazilian woman and two Spanish men. His bag was filled with blood-stained towels, gloves and masking tape. He threw out the evidence slowly, on separate days, so as not to attract suspicion.

He did not really want to live in an apartment share. But he had had no choice after receiving an ultimatum from his uncle, who had threatened to report him to the authorities if he did not leave their house immediately. Nogueira was living in Spain illegally.

Until then, he had lived with Marcos, Janaina and the children in another house in Torrejón de Ardoz. The suspect’s parents had wanted their son to leave his home town of João Pessoa, in the Brazilian state of Paraíba, where he had attacked one of his teachers, and spend some time with his relatives in Spain.

He was aware of what he had done, and worried about ending up in a Brazilian prison

But life together proved difficult.

“We knew that Patrick had stabbed a teacher in 2013. And that he had odd behavior [with Janaina], like walking around the house naked,” said Janaina’s father, Wilton Diniz, in statements to the Brazilian police.

And Marcos’ boss at a restaurant has told Spanish investigators that “he was unhinged, obsessed that his wife was being unfaithful to him with his own nephew Patrick.” In the end, Patrick was kicked out of the house, and the Campos family eventually moved to Pioz, in Guadalajara province.

The bodies were found a month after the crime. Two days after the discovery, Patrick Nogueira hopped on a flight back to Brazil. By then, the Pioz home was teeming with reporters and TV cameras, and initial reports of a contract killing over drug issues had given way to serious suspicions that the nephew may have played a role.

Back home, he resumed a normal life. His friend Henriques was briefly held and released with no charges.

A month after that, Patrick Nogueira returned to Spain to hand himself in to Spanish authorities following the recommendations of his sister, a lawyer named Hanna Nogueira Gouveia.

Since then, he has remained in preventive prison after having confessed to all four crimes. His defense attorneys will try to use this confession to get their client sentenced to 30 years, rather than life with a review every 25 years.

Nogueira has admitted that his was a premeditated action. “It was not an impulse. I thought about it days before.”

English version by Susana Urra.