Classification: Documented

The Evandro case: the crime, the tapes, and judicial review

The disappearance and death of Evandro Ramos Caetano in Guaratuba produced one of Brazil's most consequential investigations. Decades later, recordings that supported convictions helped reveal how weak the case against the accused had been.

Guaratuba, Paraná, Brasil — See stories from this place

On 6 April 1992, six-year-old Evandro Ramos Caetano disappeared in Guaratuba, on the coast of Paraná. Days later, his body was found. The violence of the crime and the political climate of an election year heightened pressure for a rapid answer. The investigation moved from searches and early hypotheses to an accusation of a satanic ritual that dominated headlines, shaped the public image of the accused, and caused the case to be remembered for decades as the “witches case.”

What led to charges and convictions were chiefly confessions obtained outside court. Police recorded them in audio and video, and for years they appeared as the narrative center of a story already surrounded by moral panic, religious prejudice, and sensational coverage. The less familiar question is not only who killed Evandro; it is how an investigation came to depend on statements produced in custody rather than evidence capable of independently confirming authorship.

The turning point came when complete versions of the recordings, different from those that had circulated in the case, became public and led to a criminal review. In 2025, the Sixth Panel of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice unanimously upheld the acquittal of four people. The court found that the convictions rested on unlawful evidence obtained through torture and that, once those confessions and their derivatives were excluded, no evidence remained to sustain the verdict. A decisive legal detail is that the STJ treated the tapes not as newly invented evidence, but as the original version of material already present in the police inquiry whose authenticity had been recognized.

That decision does not identify another perpetrator or bring an end to a family's grief. It establishes something equally important: the acquitted people could not remain convicted on the basis of that evidence. The case is therefore not a license to fill gaps with theories. It is a documented record of a crime whose authorship was not established against those accused, and of a process that exposed the human cost of confessions extracted through violence.

There is a second story about memory. The Projeto Humanos podcast reopened access to case files, tapes, and press material, turning a nearly inaccessible proceeding into an object of listening and public debate. Research at PUCRS analyzed the season as a radio documentary. For Nocturna, that is the starting point: sometimes the most unsettling part of a case is not the mystery left unresolved, but what the documents themselves reveal about how people tried to resolve it.