How a Middle-Aged Woman Convinced People She Was an Autistic 12-Year-Old

From the earliest days of what became an astonishing criminal history, Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira appeared to understand precisely whom to approach. In Brazil, she targeted people with reputations for compassion, including churchgoers, social workers and charity volunteers.

Her story was delivered in a childlike voice and framed as a tragedy. At first, those who encountered her saw the Minnie Mouse T-shirt, the hair bow and the matching backpack, rather than the deception behind them.

Some later told Our News Outlet exclusively that although she appeared older than the 12-year-old girl she claimed to be, they believed her explanation: that she had fled a father who injected her with hormones to trigger puberty and forced her into childhood prostitution.

One compassionate couple, unaware that the vulnerable “girl” they welcomed into their home — and who claimed to have severe autism — was actually a 38-year-old woman, decorated a spare room in pink and even organized a 12th birthday party for her.

Others went along with requests for dolls, stuffed animals, pacifiers and milk served in a baby bottle, believing they were helping a traumatized child.

Last week, after a remarkable 16-year pattern of scams, Oliveira was sentenced to 18 months in prison following her conviction for defrauding a couple who had allowed her to live with them for more than a year.

Now, as dozens of past victims come forward and additional prosecutions remain pending, the strange “cuckoo in the nest” case has ignited an intense debate across Brazilian media — and the controversy shows little sign of fading.

How on earth did a frumpy middle-aged woman manage to pose as a child and live off the kindness of strangers for so long? And what were her true motives given that she rarely demanded much more than a loving home and the undivided attention of whichever kind-hearted victim she attached herself to?

Amid ongoing questions about Oliveira’s fraudulent life, Our News Outlet has spoken to three of her victims, one of whom was so caught in her spell that she even had her (fake) name, Emily, tattooed on her wrist.

Others told the Mail how they were left utterly humiliated by the heartless con artist, who demanded 100 per cent of their attention, excluding them from their friends and family and berating them if they dared to let her down.

As one of them put it: ‘Internet scammers usually go after people’s money, but this woman goes after their hearts.’

More in a moment of their jaw-dropping stories, including an account by one charity director, which might have come straight from a horror movie, of how Oliveira vomited needles in front of her, apparently backing up her claim to have been a victim of voodooistic rituals which saw foreign objects inserted into her body.

Fears she might really be mentally ill were dismissed by a judge after police found evidence on her phone that she had been researching ‘how an autistic person behaves’ and how to draw pictures suggestive of child sex abuse.

Oliveira’s life of deception has been traced back to 2010, but it was a case from last year, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, which finally saw her brought to justice this month.

She began attending an evangelical church in the city of Joinville where a middle-aged couple took pity on her and provided her with a home for the next 14 months. Oliveira even managed to persuade them to pay for a course of weight-loss drugs.

It was a suspicious relative who blew her cover after finding online reports of a similar case in Rio de Janeiro two years earlier and realising it was the same woman.

That case involved social project director Viviane Henriques and her friend, paediatric nutritionist and autism specialist Renata Magalhaes, who both spoke to the Mail this week about the month they spent with Oliveira – who called herself ‘Duda’ – after she contacted Viviane’s project for abused women via its Facebook page in June 2023.

At first she claimed to be 18 and said she had fled home after her father forced her into under-age prostitution. ‘Naturally my heart went out to her,’ says Viviane, who initially communicated with Oliveira via WhatsApp messages.

‘I asked her a lot of questions. Her answers were very detailed, not vague. Then she suddenly said: “I don’t want to lie to you. I’m actually only 12 years old.’ That worried me even more.’

Viviane and Renata drove for an hour to collect Oliveira from the home of an elderly woman who told them she had found her on the street but couldn’t keep her.

Oliveira, she says, spoke ‘every single moment in a babyish little voice’. ‘She had her head down, she was wearing jeans and a grey hoodie and she wouldn’t look me in the eye,’ she says.

Viviane took at face value Oliveira’s claim to be a minor. But when she suggested getting child protection services involved, ‘Duda’ became distressed and said her father, who she claimed was part of a paedophile ring, would find out, putting other girls in danger.

The two women rented her a small studio apartment, bought her food and took turns to babysit her. When Viviane asked questions about her past, Oliveira tried to turn the friends against each other by telling Renata she was scared of the other woman.

According to mother-of-two Viviane: ‘Renata told me that my questions were forcing Duda to relive all the suffering she went through. She put it in Renata’s head that I was a problem. I kept telling Renata that something wasn’t right but she thought it was all in my head.’

Renata, seen as a softer target by Oliveira, agreed to her request for a baby bottle, a pacifier and even baby food. If she didn’t, ‘Duda’ would fake a seizure or have what she describes as an ‘autistic breakdown’, banging her head against the wall or threatening to hang herself with her phone charger cable.

‘She wanted all of my attention,’ says Renata. ‘If I didn’t do what she wanted right away, she would cry and say that I didn’t love her. I neglected my own family to spend time with her.’

Her behaviour became increasingly bizarre. A bandage appeared on Oliveira’s arm and when they removed it they found an inflamed wound in which heavy-duty staples from a staple gun were embedded. ‘Renata and I were shocked,’ says Viviane. ‘When I asked how the staples ended up there, she said her father had forced her to take part in black magic rituals and jammed them into her body.

‘I was horrified. I didn’t know what to believe.’

On another occasion, Oliveira appeared to vomit up three sewing needles in front of Viviane.

‘When I looked, I said: “My God, what’s this?” I thought she must be bleeding but there wasn’t a drop of blood. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.’

The women would also notice needles sticking out of Oliveira’s trousers. ‘When we checked, it would be a needle coming out of her leg,’ says Viviane who eventually spoke to a friend who was a police officer. The officer arranged for a hospital check-up at which Oliveira was given an X-ray.

In what must be one of the most baffling twists to this extraordinary saga, the X-ray appeared to reveal more than 200 needles inside Oliveira’s body – something which Viviane still cannot explain.

‘The technician told us he had never seen anything like it in his career,’ she says. ‘He showed me the monitor. And it wasn’t just needles, there were several key rings as well.’

Police who probed her case uncovered the scams she had committed in other states as well as the searches she’d carried out on her phone about how to behave in order to appear mentally ill.

‘I was completely floored when the officer told us we had been tricked,’ says Viviane. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We felt so foolish, so betrayed and crushed. Renata was in shock. We had struggled so hard to get this girl support and it was all for nothing.’

When police confronted Oliveira, she banged her head against the wall and tried to fake a seizure before going quiet.

Viviane says: ‘I grabbed her arms and said: “Why did you do this to us?” And she wouldn’t answer me. That was when the anger hit me.’

Oliveira was initially taken into custody but was released on bail after an initial hearing and disappeared without trace.

As news spread of her arrest in June, several more of her victims got in touch with Viviane via social media after she posted an account of her own experiences.

Among them was Tatiane da Silva, a teacher from the state of Parana in southern Brazil. She crossed paths with Oliveira in 2021 during lockdown after setting up an online prayer circle while grieving the death of her pregnant sister. Oliveira took part in livestreams as ‘Emily’, a hospitalised teenager with incurable leukaemia and an amputated arm. Wearing a cap and mask, and using different mobile numbers, she also at various times pretended to be Emily’s mother and Emily’s aunt.

Later she announced that her mother had been killed in a car crash, that her father had killed himself and that she had been raped in hospital.

‘She started reaching out in private to people in the prayer group,’ says Tatiane. ‘She manipulated us as if we were little dolls. We felt like hostages.’

The two women never actually met but over the ten months that followed Tatiane fell so deeply under Oliveira’s spell that she had ‘Emily’ tattooed on her wrist alongside the names of her own children. ‘I believed she was dying and I wanted to show her that she mattered,’ says Tatiane. ‘I became very emotionally involved with her. She wanted to be loved and wanted exclusivity.’

Eventually, another member of the prayer circle noticed ‘Emily’ using her supposedly amputated arm during a livestream.

After contacting the hospital and discovering that Emily wasn’t a patient, Tatiane confronted her by text message and then blocked her number. ‘I said: “You and I know that Emily doesn’t exist.” ’

Tatiane filed a police report and, although the case was not investigated at the time, it has now been reopened.

Oliveira, who is said to have dropped her baby voice immediately after her arrest in June, admitted to investigators that lying had become a ‘way of life’ but said she only did it to experience the affection she was denied as a child.

According to police reports, she told them: ‘There was a certain voice in me, a need to have that kind of care, so I always sought it out.’

Her lawyer, who also spoke to the Mail this week, says she denies trying to scam anyone for financial gain. ‘She has absolutely nothing,’ says Sarita de Paiva. ‘She doesn’t have a single cent.’

Unravelling her true past is no easy matter. Court documents from 2012 show she was born in May 1988 and adopted when she was 25 days old by a security guard and a nurse in the state of Ceara, one of Brazil’s most impoverished regions.

Oliveira claims that after her adoptive father began abusing her, she started self-harming, dropped out of school and then left home at 18.

Her family deny all allegations of abuse and claim she began to display disturbing behavioural changes from the age of seven, becoming obsessed with a teacher at school, and threatening other children who went near her. They say she also ran away from home, self-harmed and made baseless allegations about people if she bore them any grudge.

For a while she lived with a boyfriend and became pregnant, but the baby died after being born prematurely at six months.

Afterwards she infiltrated evangelical church communities, posing as a child despite already being in her twenties.

While the judge who sentenced Oliveira last week rejected her defence of mental illness and found her to be of sound mind and responsible for her actions, a psychiatrist who has worked on her case told the Mail he believes she has a ‘borderline personality disorder’ and that if she doesn’t receive appropriate treatment, there is a risk she will deceive others.

According to her lawyer, a previous psychiatric report hints at Munchausen syndrome as the underlying cause of her fraudulent, attention-seeking behaviour. Oliveira’s victims, however, question why, if she had genuine mental health problems, she needed to research how to behave as an abused, autistic child.

According to investigator Rodrigo Gusso: ‘We believe that there may be new victims. It is a crime this woman has been committing for many years. Therefore the investigation continues.’

More worrying for her victims is the fact that, according to her lawyer, Oliveira, who started her 18-month jail sentence last week, could be free as soon as next month thanks to Brazil’s over-crowded prison system and the fact this is her first conviction.

Such a prospect is horrifying to those who have suffered at her hands. ‘She is an extremely needy person, she will do anything to get attention,’ says Tatiane da Silva who has had her ‘Emily’ tattoo re-inked to now read ‘Family’.

‘She is evil, right? She turns other people’s lives into hell.’