The remains of actor and journalist Jeff Machado, 44, were found Monday May 22 inside a suitcase belonging to the actor and two meters underground in the garden of a property in Campo Grande, Rio de Janeiro buried and cemented in was Janeiro, region where the man lived. The body had a wire around the neck and the arms were tied together above the head. He was probably strangled. Investigators are working to uncover the identity of the killer (or killers) and other details of the crime. The first rumors are now circulating: the main suspect is Bruno Larrubia, a friend of Machado’s who is now on the run. Days after the actor’s disappearance, he allegedly tried to sell the victim’s belongings, including a car and a house, telling Machado’s family that it was a request from Jeff himself. A statement that immediately made the actor’s family suspicious.
Jeff Machado, born July 1979 in Araranguá, Brazil, was a soap actor, journalist and entrepreneur. The success as an actor was due to the telenovela “Reis” on RecordTv. In 1997, the actor moved to Rio de Janeiro to start working on high-end productions. But it was not until 2008 that Machado returned to his home state, the capital Florianapolis, where he began working as a journalist and radically changed his profession. He finally returned to Rio in 2014, where he worked again in the telenovela Reis between 2021 and 2022. Jeff Machado’s family reported him missing on January 27. The artist was very fond of animals and many became suspicious when his eight dogs, all regularly microchipped, were seen roaming the streets near his home alone. That had never happened before.
After a few days, the actor’s mother, Maria das Dores Machado, received some messages from Jeff on Whatsapp, but she became suspicious because they were strange and didn’t seem to have been written by her son. On February 7, family members of the actor found that his phone’s cloud service password had been changed and GPS location had been disabled. A friend of the Machados said that from the first moment the family thought Larrubia was responsible for their relative’s disappearance: they believe that the man killed their loved one at his home during a work meeting and then went into hiding with an accomplice the body.