The Lisbon Ripper

The victims

Three women were killed in and around northern Lisbon between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1993. Maria Valentina Pereira Lopes, 22, was found on the morning of 31 July 1992 in a wooden shed in Póvoa de Santo Adrião, in the Odivelas area. Maria Fernanda Matos, 24, was killed on the night of 1 January 1993, and workers on a railway bridge construction site found her the next day in a disused shed near Entrecampos, in central Lisbon. Maria João Rodrigues Vieira André dos Santos, 27, was killed on the night of 14 to 15 March 1993 in Póvoa de Santo Adrião, very close to the place where Maria Valentina had been found. Press coverage at the time described the women as sex workers, and at least one of them was reported to be struggling with drug addiction.

The similar circumstances of the three deaths led investigators to treat them as the work of a single offender. After the third killing, the Portuguese press began calling him o Estripador de Lisboa, the Lisbon Ripper, the name the case still carries.

The investigation

The Polícia Judiciária (PJ), Portugal's criminal investigation police, first looked at the people closest to the victims; the first woman's boyfriend was questioned early on and was not charged. Once the second killing was linked to the first, it became clear that the police were facing a serial offender, something Portuguese detectives had little experience with. DNA analysis was not yet available to them, fingerprint records were still kept on paper, and the inquiry depended largely on interviews and deduction.

When the usual approach produced no result, the PJ set up a special task force inspired by British and American practice. Parallel teams processed tips, trainee agents went door to door, and the psychologist Cristina Soeiro joined the effort. Hundreds of people were interviewed, phones of several suspects were tapped, and more than a dozen people were considered as possible suspects at different stages, without any of them being charged.

International help

The PJ also turned to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had far more experience with serial murder. FBI agents travelled to Lisbon in 1993, reviewed the case files, trained Portuguese officers and helped build a profile of the likely offender. Correio da Manhã reported that the visiting agents brought material on a series of killings of women around New Bedford, Massachusetts, but no link between the two cases was ever established. Interpol was also involved. After March 1993 no further killings were attributed to the Lisbon Ripper, and the inquiry slowly lost momentum.

A claim of responsibility and a trial

Under Portugal's 15-year limitation period, the killings became time-barred one by one: the first in July 2007 and the last in March 2008. In late 2011 the case returned to the headlines when José Pedro Guedes, then 46, said in an interview with a journalist that he was the Lisbon Ripper. Sábado reported that his son had earlier named him while trying to get onto a television reality show. Because the Lisbon killings could no longer be prosecuted, Guedes was instead held in pre-trial detention from November 2011 over the 2000 killing of an 18-year-old woman in Cacia, in the Aveiro district, which was not yet time-barred. He did not repeat his claims before the investigating judge, and his lawyers said the interview was the only real evidence against him. They asked for his palm print and DNA to be compared with traces from the Lisbon cases; no published result of such a comparison was found for this article.

His jury trial in Aveiro began in October 2012. On 16 January 2013 the court, made up of three judges and four jurors, acquitted him, ruling that the charges of homicide and arson had not been proven. Guedes is therefore legally innocent of the Cacia killing, and no court has ever found that he or anyone else committed the Lisbon murders.

Renewed public interest

In mid-December 2024 Observador released a six-part investigative podcast, A Caça ao Estripador de Lisboa, written by journalist Tânia Pereirinha and built on interviews with people involved in the original inquiry. In October 2026 the outlet returned to the story with a special episode in which two former investigators discussed unresolved questions. An immersive theatre production based on that reporting opened in Lisbon on 28 October 2026, with performances scheduled until 26 December. None of this has led to an official reopening, and the authorities have never named a perpetrator.

Why the case matters in Portugal

The Lisbon Ripper is widely regarded as one of Portugal's best-known unsolved murder series. It showed how poorly equipped investigators were, in the early 1990s, to deal with a serial offender targeting marginalised women, and it pushed the PJ toward task-force methods, psychological profiling and cooperation with foreign agencies such as the FBI. The case also became a reference point in public discussion of limitation periods: because the killings expired in 2007 and 2008, even a confirmed identification could no longer lead to a trial for them. For the families of Maria Valentina, Maria Fernanda and Maria João, that means there is little prospect of legal answers.