In 1839, the Spanish-born carriage driver Diogo Alves was convicted of killing a total of five people in Portugal, and he was executed for those homicides less than two years later. After his death, he’d be given the nickname “the Aqueduct Murderer,” a reference to a series of dozens of deaths that occurred at Lisbon’s Águas Livres Aqueduct, all around the same time. But Alves was never actually suspected of those deaths at the aqueduct during his lifetime. Recent historical investigations show that Alves’ unrelated murders were probably used as a scapegoat for the moral panic that ensued after the string of deaths, which are now widely believed to have been suicides and which continued for a few years after Alves’ execution. A head preserved in formaldehyde on display at the University of Lisbon was, for decades, believed to have belonged to Alves. Today, researchers think the skull — much like his reputation oft-referenced in Portuguese media — shouldn’t be attributed to him after all.
