Pastor hired a hitman to kill her own husband/adoptive child | True Crime
The Flordelis case: a pastor, singer, congresswoman, mother to 55 children, and now, a criminal. Not the girl power we needed.
A little morbid joke concerning this Brazilian case runs around: Flordelis got everything Joe Exotic wanted: a music career, a political career, and to carry out a murder.
“A music career, to be elected in politics, a homicide. She did everything he tried.”
Little is known about the childhood and adolescence of Flordelis dos Santos de Souza. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, February 5, 1961, and raised as an evangelical Christian.
At 15 years old Flordelis was a singer at her local church’s choir and became involved in social causes, specifically, she wanted to help children and teenagers who were victims of crime, drug abuse, sexual exploitation, or abuse. At the time, her home was used as a sort of daycare and hosted over 100 children in need.
In 1979, Flordelis became an elementary school teacher. By 1994 she had given birth to three biological children and had adopted five teenagers, one of whom would later become her husband.
Anderson do Carmo began to live in Flordelis’ place, in the 1990s, as one of her adoptive children. He then started to have a relationship with one of Flordelis’ biological children: Simone dos Santos Rodrigues. So, Flordelis became his “mother-in-law”, whereas Simone went from being his “sister” to be his “girlfriend”. However, Simone and Anderson eventually broke up… and Anderson started dating Flordelis herself.
The exact dates of each relationship are unknown, but by 1998 Anderson was already married to Flordelis.
In 1994, just four years before marrying Anderson, Flordelis adopted 37 children (of which, 14 were babies) at once.
Allegedly, these children would have been survivors from the Candelária’s Massacre, which took place in July 1993, in Rio de Janeiro, where two cars parked in front of the Candelária’s church during the night and opened fire against children and teenagers sleeping outside of the church. The Candelária’s Massacre left eight teenagers dead, between ages 13 and 19.
At that point, Flordelis was a teacher who was simply taking vulnerable children in and claiming them as her own.
Eventually, Flordelis had to prove to local authorities that most of the kids were at a state of vulnerability before they met her, involved with drugs and sexual exploitation (by that logic, she was saving the children).
Naturally, mainstream media started to take notice of her.
How could not they? Flordelis was such a well-rounded, kind, Christian woman.
In total, Flordelis was a mother to 55 children.
Since then, Flordelis began to be featured and interviewed in numerous TV shows. The detail of her and her husband’s story being ignored, naturally. The times she was on TV focused on her supposed altruism and good nature.
Eventually, she gained enough notoriety to become a public figure.
In 2009, a movie about her life was produced by Anderson and released (“Flordelis — Basta Uma Palavra Para Mudar”), featuring big names from the Brazilian entertainment scene, such as Bruna Marquezine, Pedro Bial, and Reynaldo Gianecchini. The movie itself was a blatant act of altruism, as the actors were not paid for their work, and all of the movies’ profits were used to create and maintain a rehab center for the young and children.
In 2010, a year after the movie, Flordelis’ career as a gospel singer took off and she signed a record deal, having released a total of five gospel albums since then.
Flordelis started her political career in 2004, running as a political candidate, but was only elected in 2018, as a federal congresswoman for Rio de Janeiro; being the most-voted woman in the state during the said election.
But what went on behind the scenes was much different from what Flordelis presented the public.
As expected, she wasn’t raising children, she was collecting them. There were no worries with whatever education these children got or even their specific needs, her goal was to present herself as a woman who was helping children in need.
It sounds weird how this case went undetected for so many years, but Flordelis preyed on the young and vulnerable. Who would want to take a child away from the guard of a religious, kind woman, when this same child was previously involved in the world of drugs and/or sexual exploitation?
Besides the obvious, expected parenting flaws of adopting over 50 kids, it is now being publicized how Flordelis’ family ran like a cult.
For example, children from the “first generation” (her biological children, and the other four adoptive children) were treated with certain privileges, such as having access to different kinds of items the other children did not have. Food and clothes were different between the “first generation” and the other children.
More than that, in 2020 a witness claimed Flordelis had gone as far as “sexually offering” one of her adoptive daughters to foreign Pentecostal pastors, as a welcome; that Anderson and Flordelis had sexual relations with the adoptive children.
Basically: there was no form of family dynamics whatsoever, except that some children received privileges, Flordelis ran everything and Anderson managed it.
The plan
Flordelis’ façade began to crumble in 2019, when Anderson do Carmo (now, a pastor), was shot and killed during what seemed to be an armed robbery.
Anderson managed not only the money but the family’s relationship as well; since Flordelis did not treat her children equally, He worked to balance out the relationship between all children. At some point, Flordelis and the first generation of children were not satisfied with the way Anderson managed the money she had as a congresswoman, pastor, and gospel singer.
This situation would have caused Flordelis and her children to plan Anderson’s murder. Reportedly, Flordelis even shut down the option of divorcing her husband during a conversation with one of her closest sons (a pastor):
“what can I do? I can’t divorce him, because it’d dishonor the name of God”.
Authorities report that the original plan was to slowly poison Anderson, who had been taken to the ER at least six times between May 2018 and June 2019, due to intoxication caused by poisoning, but since he had quick and efficient access to medical care, Anderson was promptly taken to the hospital and taken care of every time. This report matches Flordelis’ and two of her daughters’ internet searches during the period, for effective poison and cyanide.
The plan was carried out in a way that Flordelis and the daughters would poison Anderson’s food and drinks, while Flordelis’ son (yes, the pastor) would make sure that only Anderson would eat or drink the poisoned items.
According to the police investigation, Anderson took doses that were considered lethal, with the last poisoning attempt happening only days before he was murdered.
In 2019, the plan was to hire a hitman to kill Anderson and make it look like it was an armed robbery. This matches one of Flordelis’ daughters, Marzi Teixeira da Silva, online searches: she’d looked up terms such as “shady business online”, “someone from shady business” and “murderer where to find” in her cellphone (no, not a joke).
Anderson was killed on June 16, 2019, with over 30 gunshots.
The plan to “make it seem like a robbery” went down the hill right away, as on June 17 the police were already working the possibility of execution, due to the excessive amount of shots… and that is when they started to speak to the family.
Hours after the murder, Flordelis claimed right away it was an attempted robbery. She said she felt like they were being followed before arriving home. Flordelis claimed that after both of them arrived home, Anderson had to “retrieve something” he’d forgotten in the car, right after, gunshots would’ve been heard.
During an interview, Flordelis was asked, how many shots she heard, and she said she heard “Something like… Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow!”.
Which is… not thirty gunshots.
In addition to that, Flordelis claimed the couple was in the neighborhood of Copacabana, but the police reported that the couple’s car was last seen 500 meters away from a Swing house, in a very different neighborhood.
After Anderson’s murder, witnesses came forward saying Flordelis and her husband often went to the Swing house, as well as her daughter’s Simone and Simone’s husband, a staff member of the evangelical church. This would have been a quirky, funny detail if it did not prove that Flordelis lied.
On June 17, the investigation had suspicions that one of Flordelis’ children was involved to some degree since the family’s dogs did not have any reaction throughout the whole thing, after examining the security surveillance cameras. The forensic team also had proof the pastor was shot while he changed in a closet, next to the house garage; on the same day, one of Flordelis’ biological son was arrested, while attending Anderson’s funeral, as a suspect of firing the shots.
At the event, Flordelis stated it was “outrageous to arrest somebody like that, without any concrete proof”.
On June 18, police found a gun in Flávio’s room, which they believed was the gun used to kill Anderson. It’s also worth noting the gun was not hidden, it was on the top of a drawer.
Three days after his arrest, and with the evidence piling up, on June 20, Flávio dos Santos admitted to shooting his step-dad six times. Not only that he also admitted one of his younger brothers (Lucas dos Santos, an 18-year-old) helped him to buy a gun.
What the police know so far, and why Flordelis has not been arrested.
So far, a police task force arrested 11 people for involvement in Anderson’s murder (directly or indirectly), including seven of Flordelis children and a granddaughter; the task force also believes Flordelis to be the “head” of the whole operation.
Surprisingly, she has not been arrested so far.
Flordelis is a Brazilian congressman- she has immunity and could only be arrested if she was caught redhanded.
As an elected politician she cannot be taken away from her duty or “fired”. It’s up to Brazil’s congress house to vote for Flordelis’ removal, where she’ll have her legal privileges stripped away, despite still holding the title of “congresswoman of Rio de Janeiro”.
In case the Brazilian congress house positively votes for Flordelis’ removal, she’ll face charges of trebly aggravated murder (for a vile reason, in a cruel manner and against a defenseless victim), criminal association, fraudulent misrepresentation, and use of a fake document, besides attempted murder (for the poisoning attempts).