Two Men Were Found Dead Wearing Lead Masks And Suits, And They Had A Cryptic Note With Them
One summer day in 1966, a young man named Jorge da Costa Alves stumbled upon two bodies in the hills of Rio de Janeiro. He immediately notified the police.
When they arrived, they found two dead men wearing raincoats over their formal suits. They also wore homemade lead masks over their eyes.
Next to them, there was an empty water bottle, towels, and some cash. One of the dead men had a note in his pocket that read, “16:30 be at agreed place, 18:30 swallow capsules, after effect protect metals wait for mask signal.”
In the following days, the police were able to gather more information about the dead men, but they only ran into more questions. And so began the mystery of the Lead Masks Case.
The men were identified as 32-year-old Manoel Pereira da Cruz and 34-year-old Miguel José Viana. They were both married, worked as electronics repairmen, and were from Campos dos Goytacazes.
On the morning of August 17, 1966, they had told their families that they needed to go to Sao Paulo to purchase equipment and a car.
Instead, they boarded a bus to Niterói and arrived at around 2 p.m. Once they were in Niterói, they went to a local store to buy identical raincoats and a bar to buy a bottle of mineral water. They kept the receipt, indicating that they had planned to return the empty bottle later on for the refund.
According to eyewitness accounts, the two men appeared to have been behaving strangely. The bartender who sold the water bottle to Pereira da Cruz and Viana recalled that Viana seemed nervous and kept checking his watch.
They were last seen heading into the hills at around 3:15 p.m. They were found dead three days later. To this day, no one really knows what happened in the hills that led to their deaths. Pereira da Cruz and Viana’s bodies had also decomposed too much to conduct a proper toxicology report.
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Over the years, several theories have surfaced. Pereira da Cruz’s wife told police that both men were interested in contacting alien spirits and that they practiced “scientific spiritism,” along with their friend Elcio Gomes.
At one point, the men had built an electronic device together in Pereira da Cruz’s backyard, and it had blown up.
Apparently, they tried the device again on a beach and claimed to have observed an explosion in the sky. Gomes was briefly considered a suspect since he had argued with Pereira da Cruz and told the police stories that did not line up.
Another man, Hamilton Bezani, told the authorities that he met Pereira da Cruz and Viana at a spiritualism center, lured them to Niterói, and robbed and killed them. However, neither of these leads went anywhere.
In the end, it is unclear exactly why Pereira da Cruz and Viana went into the hills and what those lead masks were for.
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