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At that point, the Stammers asked Gerhard to find another home for his friend. He promised to do so, but nothing happened. Weeks turned into months, months into years. Pedro stayed. Why did the Stammers not report their guest to the police? Because, said Gitta, Gerhard told them their lives would be in danger if they talked. Even after Gerhard had left Brazil, and died in Austria in 1978, said Stammer, she feared retribution from his "friends" if ever she went to the authorities. Throughout, Pedro never once threatened her family; he even went so far as to chide Gerhard for his show of force. "He didn't get angry or violent," Stammer recalled. "He didn't seem like a fanatic Nazi. I think he was a cold scientist." Still, the Stammers did find that their guest was imperious with servants, and he often urged the couple to be stricter with their two sons.
On the subject of his past, the Stammers' lodger was reticent. "He always denied that he had committed any crimes," Stammer said. He did, however, tell her once that the Germans had wanted to eliminate the Jews because they were like a disease on the national body politic.
Pedro had the rough, callused hands of a seasoned laborer, Stammer remembered, but he was also a person of some refinement. He enjoyed having her play the piano for him, and he liked reading books on history and philosophy, metaphysics and chemistry. Among his favorites was The Decline of the West, written by Oswald Spengler. For the most part, Stammer reported, her guest remained quiet. "Sometimes," she recalled, "he went out of the house for six, seven hours at a time. I think he just went walking." The Stammers finally separated themselves from their increasingly unwanted guest in 1974. Moving to a small house in Santana, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, they left Pedro in their former home in nearby Caieiras. After they sold the Caieiras property in 1975, they bought a home in the suburb of Eldorado Paulista and permitted the old man to stay there. By then he had grown close to the Bosserts, whom he had met through Gerhard in 1970. In Pedro's final years, said Stammer, she saw him only rarely, including one chance encounter with his son Rolf. "I don't feel I was really guilty," said Stammer. "I feel I was a donkey."
As others who claimed to have known Pedro talked to the police and to the press, a vivid picture began to emerge of the strange, solitary life of the man who may have been Mengele. Ernesto Glawe, an Argentine-born engineer with a German father, described in a deposition how he had been drawn into the expatriate circles of Gerhard and the Bosserts. Only one year after that initial meeting, said Glawe, Gerhard asked him if he would help an old Austrian friend. Somewhat taken aback at this request, Glawe eventually acquiesced and began paying monthly visits to the aging Pedro, bringing him biscuits and chocolate. Surprisingly, said Glawe, Pedro spoke little about his life in Europe, though he said he had served as a doctor in the German army. Glawe at last began to suspect that Pedro might be the doctor of Auschwitz when he spotted in the old man's house a copy of a Mengele firm brochure.