Five-year-old Abducted From Her Home and Set On Fire After Crying
The negotiation lasted 17 days, but she had been murdered and reduced to ashes 24 hours after the abduction.
In December of 1992, five-year-old Miriam Oppenheimer Leão Brandão, the daughter of Jocélia and Volney Brandão, was abducted from her home by two men. They demanded a huge ransom and the negotiation lasted 17 days, but Miriam had already been asphyxiated, cut into pieces, and reduced to ashes hours after the abduction.
December 22, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. It was around 7 a.m. when twenty-six-year-old Jocélia Brandão kissed her daughter while she slept and whispered “My daughter, may God stay with you”. She didn’t know, but that would be her last contact with Miriam. Then, she went to work.
Volney and their eight-year-old son Pedro were also sleeping.
Half an hour later, when Jocélia arrived at work, the phone rang. Her employee, Rosemaire, answered it. On the other line was Volney, informing that Miriam had been abducted. She told Jocélia what had happened, and passed the phone to her.
Although the girl’s parents owned a drugstore, they weren’t rich, so Jocélia couldn’t comprehend it.
Two men had passed themselves off as employees of a telephone company and therefore were given permission to get in the house.
Besides Volney, who had a bad case of the flu, and his children, their maid was also in the house. She was tied up by the criminals before they headed for the girl’s bedroom.
The men told Miriam that she would be taken to a Christmas party at her parents’ drugstore.
Officers headed to the drugstore and drove Jocélia home. Her house was surrounded by the police and the local media outlets. Pedro was crying and asking for his sister back.
She didn’t know what to do and was hoping to get instructions from the police, but instead, they claimed that she shouldn’t do anything. “If they are professionals, they won’t make contact today,” she remembers being told.
The next day, December 23, the kidnappers made contact with the family for the first time.
They demanded a ransom of US $ 150,000, an amount that Miriam’s family couldn’t afford to pay, but would do anything to raise. Volney even started selling his belongings in an attempt to get his daughter back.
While the negotiation was taking place, officers were working to find Miriam. It wasn’t until January 7 -sometimes reported as January 8- that the kidnappers were ultimately arrested and the house where she had been held captive was discovered. It was the residence of twenty-three-year-old William Gontijo Ferreira, and his brother, Wellington.
It’s not possible to know how the police found their identity due to the lack of online information regarding the investigation.
Miriam’s parents expected to see their daughter alive, but the discovery took a bad turn. In fact, they would never see her body again.
Miriam was murdered between 5 and 9 a.m. on December 23.
At a certain moment, while watching the news, she saw her family and said “That’s my house. That’s my dad,” but the kidnappers told her that it was a home for sale, not hers.
She had been sedated hours prior to her death, however, throughout the night she cried wanting her mother, father, and brother.
In a bid to make the girl stop crying, William asphyxiated her with Ether. When he realized that she was lifeless, he decided to get rid of her body.
William then chopped up her body, set it on fire, and buried the ashes beside a dwarf banana tree in the backyard of his house.
It was only possible to recover two charred teeth and two small pieces of bones.
Besides the two men, a third person was also arrested — Rosemaire Figueiredo Silva, William’s girlfriend. She was close to Jocélia and had answered the phone that morning. She was the mastermind behind the kidnapping and sided with the men during the whole investigation.
William and Wellington had gone into debts because of gambling and therefore needed money. According to Wellington, Rosemaire told them details of the house.
Jocélia recalls that during the negotiation Rosemaire acted “as if nothing had happened”. She seemed interested in the investigation, constantly asking questions. As the kidnappers were questioned about the victim’s personal life, they knew all the right answers because she had passed it on to them.
On December 28, six days after Miriam’s abduction, the gruesome murder of twenty-two-year-old actress Daniella Perez shocked the country. She was brutally killed by her co-star in the soap opera ‘De Corpo e Alma’ Guilherme de Pádua and his then-wife Paula Thomáz.
Jocélia Brandão and Glória Perez, mother of Daniella and a famous soap opera writer in Brazil, met and hugged each other tightly. Together they carried out campaigns for peace and justice and managed to raise over half-million signatures supporting the change of the Brazilian Penal Code.
In late 2014, Jocélia was able to get the death certificate of her deceased daughter. Without a body, she had to fight for roughly 23 years for it.
Jocélia is the founder of the Miriam Brandão Institute, created to provide legal and psychological support for victims of violence, especially children and the elderly.
In 1994, the three went on trial. William Gontijo Ferreira was sentenced to 32 years in prison and was granted parole after serving 17 years. Wellington was sentenced to 21 years and was granted parole in 2007; he became a pastor and stated that he would give his life to bring Miriam back if it were possible. Rosemaire was sentenced to 18 years and got released after serving 8 years.
