The Aqueduct Murderer: A Serial Killer Whose Head Lives In A Jar Even Today!
By: Mehek Kapoor
Tags: History, True Crime, Crime, Murder, Culture

When the days are short and nights begin early, people gather in groups to narrate scary stories and frightening tales to each other, to keep the adrenaline rush high and to stay alert during the dark-times.

But this story does not need such a setting, because it is scary enough to be read even during the bright lights of summer. This is a story about Diogo Alves, also known as ‘Aqueduct Murderer’. He was a serial killer who killed around seventy people just in a span of four years, from 1836 to 1840.

And the most surprising thing about Alves is that, you can visit him even today. He still lives, even though it’s been more than a century to his death. If you are planning to visit Lisbon any soon, you can also add another task to your ‘to-do-list’ — to visit the Faculty of Medicine at University of Lisbon, where the scientists have preserved his head in a near-perfect condition in formaldehyde solution. Too much respect for a serial killer, you might think? But there are reasons why this act was performed.

Birth, Childhood and Early Years of Life

Alves was born in 1810, and he killed his first victim at the age of 26. An age in which most of the people today are wondering whether to continue working from home or go back to office. But for Alves, 26 was an age that brought him immense fame, through murders and serial killings. What shot him to fame even more, was the fact that he was Lisbon’s (and even Portugal’s) first serial killer.

Born in Galicia (Spain) in a poor peasant family, Alves stayed in the same city till the age of 19, before his parents sent him to work in Lisbon. He had a difficult childhood, as every run-of-the-mill serial killer and murderer has. In his childhood, Alves once fell from a horse and hit his head, that earned him a nickname of ‘Pancada’, which means ‘blow’ in Spanish. His mother’s death added to the hollowness in his soul, that he tried to fill-in by killing people later.

When his parents sent him to work in Lisbon, he was nineteen years old. His young age made him a perfect match for wealthy families who needed a helper in the house. Alves started his career the same way, but soon after his mother’s death, his life was derailed and he found himself deeply involved in gambling and drinking. After changing a couple of jobs, Alves fell in love with a woman, who was an innkeeper at Palhava Maria Gertrudes. The woman would ask him to get her big money, and the only way to get rich quick was by robbing people, and that is why it is widely believed that his love affair with this innkeeper is what pushed him to kill people and start his murder-spree.

The Aqueduct of Lisbon

The Murders

The very first murder that Alves committed was in 1836, when he was only 26 years of age. His targets were not wealthy or powerful people, but poor, despicable peasants, who came to Lisbon from near and far to sell their harvest and earn some money. He was smart enough to choose victims who would not become a trouble for him, and their families would never come after him either.

Alves would start by robbing them first, and then killing them to get rid of them permanently. He didn’t want the people of the city or the police to know that there was a thief robbing the peasants, so he chose to kill them later, to silence his victims forever.

To make his job easier and to draw less suspicion upon himself, Alves falsified keys of Reservatorio de Agua Aguas das Amoreiras (a famous Water Museum in Lisbon) that acts as an entrance to Aquedato das Águas Livres, also known as the Aqueduct of the free waters, which is a famous water-channel in Lisbon that provides fresh water to the city, and is considered a marvel of Portuguese engineering. But soon enough, the site was criticised for the deaths instead.

This became the preferred murder-site for Alves. This also gained him the nickname of ‘The Aqueduct Killer’. Alves would rob his victims, and throw them from a height of sixty-metres that resulted in an instant death. But no one suspected Alves for a long time.

Why, you might think?

Well, Portugal had just entered into a major economic, political and financial crisis, as in 1820 there occurred the great Liberal Revolution, the aftermaths of which were so severe, that the country was still dealing with it. Many people had lost their jobs and were on the verge of dying. Poverty was rampant, and committing suicide could be considered as a fair option. For a long time the police considered the murders to be suicides by desperate poor people who could not survive the financial crunch.

The similarity of the murders was so eerie that it drew suspicion towards existence of a serial killer roaming around in the city, but soon this thought was negated and rather any public entry to the Aqueduct was banned. The police and authorities thought that suicides will never stop if people were allowed a free pass to go there, and since around 70 people had died in just one year, the authorities took the decision of prohibiting the public from visiting the Aqueduct.

This pushed Alves to choose another site for his murders, and that is when he formed a gang and started murdering people right in their houses. They would first attack and rob the families, and later kill them.

But his gang-attacks and open-murders did not remain hidden for long, and finally in the year 1840, he was caught and imprisoned. He became the last killer, or the last criminal, to be sentenced to death in Portugal.

After his hanging, the scientists were fascinated by his drive of crime and murders, and wanted to study his brain to know more about serial killers. That is why they got the permission to detach his head from his body, and preserve it for scientific research purposes. Till date, his head stays intact in the formaldehyde solution in the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica (or the Faculty of Medicine) at the University of Lisbon.

Some people say that his face looks unusually calm, locked up in that glass jar, and some people say that he does not look like a serial killer at all. Well, who are serial killers anyway? They are the people among us…

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