Overview
- Three brown-haired sex workers in their twenties, all named Maria and reported as drug users who were HIV-positive, were killed in Lisbon in the 1990s.
- Each victim was strangled and disembowelled with organs removed, the killings occurred about six months and then two months apart, and the third victim was a friend of the first.
- Crime scenes yielded only the victims’ blood with no hair, footprints, gloves or other bodily fluids found, and the killer left the women’s faces untouched.
- Portuguese investigators said leads between Lisbon and Cascais never reached the threshold for arrests or formal interrogations, and no further similar murders followed.
- The FBI examined links to a 1988 New Bedford case and an arrest in the wider probe produced no conclusive evidence, while reports of similar crimes in several European countries spurred unproven theories about a mobile offender; since 2008, Portugal’s statute of limitations has precluded any prosecution.