Heloísa Gonçalves Duque Soares Ribeiro

Heloísa Gonçalves Duque Soares Ribeiro (née Heloísa Borba Gonçalves; born March 13, 1950), known as The Black Widow , is a Brazilian–American criminal, murderer and accused serial killer. Convicted for the murder of one husband and bigamy/fraud charges in absentia, Gonçalves has been accused in at least three other murders and multiple other violent crimes dating back to 1971, but has so far evaded capture. As of January 2024, she is one of Brazil's most wanted criminals and has a red notice issued for her arrest from Interpol.

Early life Due to her tendency to use aliases and not talk about her life, little can be verified about Gonçalves' past. She was born on March 13, 1950, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, as Heloísa Borba Gonçalves, and had her first child at age 19 with then-boyfriend Carlos Pinto da Silva. She then began a simultaneous relationship with a German doctor named Guenther Joerg Wolff, and became pregnant with his child as well.

On December 27, 1971, the 4-months-pregnant Gonçalves and Wolff decided to go on a trip from Porto Alegre to Taquara in the latter's Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

In 1980 Gonçalves was arrested on fraud charges for signing a document under the name "Matilde Irene Gomes da Silva".

In the late 1980s Gonçalves bigamously married two different men: military policeman Roberto de Souza Lopes and Colonel Jorge Ribeiro, having a child with the latter born in 1987. On May 8, 1990, she married yet another man, an elderly Syrian businessman named Nicolau Saad – both Saad and Ribeiro would then claim to be the fathers of a child born in that same year, but was known under two different names. Ribeiro's skull was fractured, killing him almost instantly.

Sometime circa 2010 Gonçalves went into hiding and has been on the run ever since.

Prosecutors following her case have indicated that she may be hiding somewhere within Brazil, with possible locations being her home state of Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, the Barra da Tijuca and Jardim Botânico neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. Information posted from Interpol indicates that she likely fled to the United States in 1994, gaining dual citizenship and continuing to marry and divorce husbands. Her last reported sighting was in May 2010 in Boca Raton, Florida, with her then-husband, Peruvian national Vicente Lopez Huaman, and it is said that Gonçalves has family members living in the states of California, Virginia and New York. The current reward for her arrest stands at more than R$11,000.