They Killed Their Daughter and Pretended She Was Missing
They spent days looking for the 8-year-old-girl
On Christmas Eve 2008, 28-year-old Joseli de Castro and 25-year-old Joel Marques went to the police station of Jandira, São Paulo, to testify about their missing 8-year-old daughter, Polyana Cristina de Castro. They spent three days relentlessly looking for Polyana and even went on TV to cry for help — even though her whereabouts were never a mystery to them. In front of the camera, a sobbing Joel claimed “I don’t know where she is. I am desperate.”
Joseli and Joel had been pasting posters with Polyana’s picture and talking to neighbors in search of information. However, the couple’s version of events did not match up from the start.
Joel said he was getting his hair cut at the time Polyana vanished, however, he hadn’t gotten a haircut. Joseli, on the other hand, said that Joel went out to buy a pizza around 9 pm on December 20 while Polyana was outside her house with other children just before she went missing.
But the couple didn’t continue to lie for a long time. As they were giving a statement to the police on December 24, they were told that Polyana’s body had been found by a retired man in an empty lot. Without a way out, Joel confessed to the murder.
Polyana was found without her underwear and the medical examiner later revealed that she died of blunt force trauma to the head.
In contradiction to the autopsy, Joel said his wife ordered him to kill Polyana and gave him two knives, which he used to stab the girl twice in the neck.
The main motivation for killing Polyana was because the girl, who was Joel’s stepdaughter, was bothering them. They had a baby who was brought in to live in the care of his grandfather days before the crime.
Joseli de Castro and Joel Marques Muniz were arrested and charged with aggravated murder. There is no further information online.
