The Matamoros Murders
By Jason Kovar
"I think the suspects must be possessed by the
devil. That would be the only explanation for such bizarre actions."
So voiced the mother of slain victim Mark Kilroy,
found murdered in Matamoros Mexico in April of 1989. Kilroy had been
spending time over the Mexican-American border during spring break,
when he suddenly disappeared. Missing for weeks, Kilroy's parents
turned up the heat on the Mexican government, causing an all out
search for the missing boy. Eventually, he was found murdered, along
with another grisly discovery. The investigation into the
disappearance of Kilroy had accidentally led authorities to a
graveyard of people who were all recently missing as well.
The bodies of dozens of people were found mutilated
and sacrificed in occult rituals used for blessings over drug
manufacturing. Carlos Tapia, Chief Deputy of Cameron County, Texas,
remembers his shocking investigation. He stated:
"I thought in my twenty two years of law
enforcement I had seen everything. I hadn't. As we drew near, you
could smell the stench...blood and decomposing organs. In a big, cast
iron pot there were pieces of human bodies and a goat's head with
horns."
Authorities also discovered an assortment of
"voodoo paraphernalia," a blood splattered altar of sacrifice, cheap
rum, human body parts, animal bones, chicken and goat heads, as well
as the witch's cauldron filled with the foul mixture of blood and
flesh.
The human sacrifices offered to Satan were people
who were abducted off of the streets, locals and otherwise. Tapia
sheds some light on those who performed homage by human sacrifice to
their god:
"In their wicked, distorted minds there was no
seriousness. They thought they had performed some kind of heroic deed
for the Devil. They believed that by sacrificing innocent human
beings, their loads of marijuana would have an invisible shield of
protection from law enforcement officers. They were moving an average
of one thousand pounds a week across the border."
The ringleaders of the group, Adolfo Constanzo and
Sara Aldrete, were both immersed in the occult and sold out to its
application in order to gain prosperity. Carl Raschke, considered a
leading authority on the occult, sets forth:
"Constanzo, like his American counterparts who had
steeped themselves in the fashionable black arts as dictated over the
years by such magical luminaries as Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey,
founder of the Church of Satan, could only be called a Satanist."
Constanzo's group was wound up in a voodoo type
religion known as Santeria. Santeria encapsulates a ritualistic magic
that slowly evolved to become a major religion in the Central
America's. Its foundation is the occult and it's basic tenure
parallels Satanism as defined by the chief Satanist of the twentieth
century, Aleister Crowley. Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, author of
Santeria: African Magic in Latin America, and devout follower as well
defines Santeria through comparison:
"The English magician Aleister Crowley defined
magic as the ability to effect changes in consciousness in accordance
with the will of the magician. This definition agrees with the magical
principles of Santeria."
Constanzos and Aldrete's actions resulted from
obedience to occult powers. Santeria's all encompassing philosophy of
Crowley's motto, "Do What Thou Wilt," allowed them the liberty to
snuff out the lives of innocents. In the occult and Satanism there is
no overall value system, no universal rules concerning sex, drinking,
drugs, lying, etc. Professor Mercedes Sandoval, of Miami-Dade
Community College underlines this very point. She says, "Santeria has
no moral stance. It doesn't make judgements in your life. It doesn't
say no to anything."
What led to the gruesome mass sacrifice of so many
people in Matamoros? The motivations for the deranged killers sprouted
not only from the Crowley-like Santeria, but also the big screens of
Crowley-like Hollywood. Constanzo was known for giving psychic
readings to many musicians and famous Hollywood celebrities. But aside
from this, the greatest factor that most influenced him was a movie
called The Believers. This film was actually a major contributor for
inspiring Constanzo and his cronies to recapitulate what they viewed.
In 1987, director John Schlesinger made The
Believers, starring Martin Sheen and Jimmy Smits. The film was about a
New York City cult that sacrifices children to gain money and power
and clearly bases much of its ritualism on Santeria. According to the
confessions of the accused, their distinct style of religion had been
based on the supernatural Hollywood movie. Occult researcher Carl
Racshke confirms:
"It is not at all surprising that Constanzo and
Sara Aldrete were infatuated with the movie The Believers. The magical
practitioners in the film are portrayed as insuperable and almost all
knowing."
The Matamoros group used the principles outlined in
the movie as a springboard for executing their occult beliefs. Serafin
Garcia, close participant with Constanzo and Aldrete totally succumbed
to the message in the film. After being arrested, Garcia confessed to
George Gavito the gravity of the situation. Gavito recalls:
"I remember I didn't understand what he was telling
me. I said, 'Is it Santeria?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Santeria,
voodoo, man.' And then he kept on saying, 'The Believers, The
Believers, The Believers.'"
Although unfamiliar with the ins and outs of
Santeria, The Believers programmed Garcia and provided a mind-altering
influence for his torturous slayings. Gavito adds:
"Elio made [Serafin] Garcia a priest, but Garcia
didn't really know what he was practicing because all he had on his
mind was the movie."
Sarah Aldrete, called the most "wickedly depraved"
of the bunch by an interviewing officer, used the movie to recruit
members into avenues of the occult. Rolling Stone magazine wrote:
"[There is]...a story making the rounds that tells
of the night Aldrete persuaded three male friends to screen a video of
The Believers. After the film, say the students, Aldrete stood up and
began to preach in strange tones about the occult. 'They had been
drinking and they just thought she was trying to be spooky,' says one
student who knows the boys, 'but they look back on it now and think
she must have been serious.'"
Satan's messages are without a doubt absorbed by
the world and used as elusive tools for reconditioning. Incidents such
as this proves that even movies that are not blockbuster types with
full blown special effects have incredible potency to muster the
sinful nature within man. Chief Deputy Carlos Tapia warns: "Don't get
caught unawares like we did... Do yourself a favor. Save your kids!"
Sadly, when the news of the sacrifices broke, instead of people
avoiding evil and saving their kids, they jeopardized them and
gravitated to it. Gary Provost, in his documentary The True Story of
the Satanic Cult Killings, wrote:
"In video rental shops everywhere, clerks noticed a
run on the film The Believers. When news stories reported that the
movie had been used as a recruiting film by Constanzo's youth cult
members, the stores had thousands of calls for the film."
If Hollywood says human sacrifices are acceptable,
then acceptable they must be! Sadly, Mark Kilroy and a host of others
had to lose their lives as a result. Don't allow your brain to be
twisted and programmed by what the world defines as acceptable and
innocent shows. Spend time with the Lord, learn of Him and let each
day of your life be a devotion to Him.
Goodfight.org
Adolfo Constanzo
By Michael Newton
Spring Break
Matamoros, Mexico—an easy drive or stroll across
the Rio Grande River from Brownsville, Texas—has been a popular
hangout for vacationing college students since the 1930s. It is a
typical border town, with all that implies: prostitution and sex
shows, abundant alcohol and drugs, rampant poverty and crime. Each
spring, some 250,000 students descend on Brownsville and Matamoros en
masse, cutting loose after finals, relishing the extra kick of sowing
wild oats on foreign soil. Those who came to celebrate in March 1989
didn’t know that Matamoros had logged 60 unsolved disappearances since
New Year’s Day. If they had known, few would have cared.
One who made the scene that spring was Mark Kilroy, a pre-med junior
from the University of Texas. Friends lost track of him in Matamoros,
in the predawn hours of March 14, 1989, and reported his disappearance
to police the next day. Unlike the others who had disappeared over the
past 10 weeks, Kilroy was an Anglo with connections, including an
uncle employed by the U.S. Customs Service. His disappearance conjured
memories of the Enrique Camarena murder four years earlier, involving
Mexico’s sinister “narcotrafficantes.” The heat was immediate and
intense, spurred by a $15,000 reward for information leading to
Kilroy’s safe recovery or the arrest of his abductors. American
officials kept a close eye on the case, while Matamoros police
interrogated 127 known criminals—a process frequently involving clubs
and carbonated water laced with hot sauce, sprayed into a suspect’s
nostrils.
It was all in vain.
Some of those held for questioning were fugitives,
and so remained in jail, but none of them had seen Mark Kilroy. None
could solve the mystery.
During the same time period Mexican authorities
were busy with one of their periodic anti-drug campaigns, erecting
roadblocks at random and sweeping border districts for unwary
smugglers. The operations were designed to leave the wealthy druglords
unscathed and to target their henchmen and runners
One of those people lower on the totem pole, and
well known in Matamoros, was Serafin Hernandez Garcia. The 20-year-old
was the nephew, and lackey, of local drug baron Elio Hernandez Rivera.
On April 1, 1989, Serafin drove past a police checkpoint outside
Matamoros, seemingly oblivious to uniformed officers guarding the
highway. They pursued him, their quarry still seeming to ignore, until
he led them to a rundown ranch nearby. A quick search of the property
revealed occult paraphernalia and traces of marijuana. Eight days
later, returning in force, police arrested Serafin Hernandez and
another drug dealer, David Serna Valdez. In custody, the pair seemed
relaxed, even defiant. Police could not hold them, the prisoners
insisted; they were “protected” by a power over and above man’s law.
Still, the two remained in jail while detectives
quizzed a caretaker at the ranch. The caretaker readily named other
members of the Hernandez drug syndicate as frequent visitors what was
known as Rancho Santa Elena. Another one-time visitor was none other
than Mark Kilroy, identified from a school photograph. In custody,
Serafin Hernandez freely admitted participating in Kilroy’s abduction
and murder—one of many committed over the past year or so at Rancho
Santa Elena. The slayings were human sacrifices, he explained,
executed to secure occult protection for various drug deals. “It’s our
religion,” Hernandez explained. “Our voodoo.”
Hernandez identified the leader of his cult—El
Padrino, the Godfather—as Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a master
practitioner of the African magic called “palo mayombe.” It was
Constanzo who ordered the slayings, Hernandez explained, and El
Padrino who tortured and sodomized the victims prior to killing them
and harvesting their organs for his ritual cauldron.
Police returned to the ranch with Hernandez in tow.
He readily pointed out the cult’s private graveyard and then when
asked, used a shovel to unearth the first of 12 bodies buried in a
tidy row. All the victims were men. Some had been shot at close range
and others hacked to death with a machete. One of the bodies was Mark
Kilroy, his skull split open, his brain missing. Detectives entering a
nearby shed found the cult’s cast-iron kettle called a nganga brimming
with blood, animal remains and 28 sticks—the “palos” of palo
mayombe—which Constanzo’s disciples said they used to communicate with
spirits in the afterlife. Floating in the pot with spiders, scorpions
and other items that could scarcely be identified, they found Mark
Kilroy’s brain.
Police knew they were looking for a madman now—a
wealthy one at that, surrounded by disciples who were cunning and well
armed. The only thing they didn’t know about Adolfo Constanzo, was
where in the world they could find him.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Born in Miami on November 1, 1962, Adolfo de Jesus
Constanzo was the son of a 15-year-old Cuban immigrant, the first of
her eventual three children by three different fathers. When he was
six months old, Delia Aurora Gonzalez del Valle had her son blessed by
a Haitian priest of “palo mayombe,” accepting the father’s judgment
that her son was “a chosen one” and “destined for great power.” Adolfo
was still an infant when his mother moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico,
and while he was reputedly baptized a Catholic, serving briefly as an
altar boy, the family’s true faith remained a dark secret. Gonzalez
immersed herself in palo mayombe and taught her son likewise, trusting
his magic education to practitioners in San Juan and nearby Haiti. In
1972 the family returned to Miami for good, Adolfo starting his
full-time apprenticeship with a Haitian priest in Little Havana.
His mother, for her part, was a habitual criminal,
arrested 30 times on various charges ranging from trespassing to
shoplifting, convicted of check fraud, grand theft and child neglect.
But the charges never seemed to stick, and she always escaped with
probation, crediting the law’s failure to her mystical religion. She
left a string of rented houses in Miami vandalized, bloodstained and
littered with the remains of sacrificial animals. Neighbors whispered
that Delia was a witch, and those who angered her were likely to find
headless goats or chickens on their doorsteps.
Constanzo followed in his mother’s footsteps,
cruising Miami gay bars in his teens, indulging in petty crime. A poor
student of anything but black magic, he graduated near the bottom of
his high school class and dropped out of junior college after one
embarrassing semester.
His interests lay elsewhere, learning the secrets
of witchcraft from his mentor. Together they robbed graves to stock
the priest’s caldron and spilled blood over voodoo dolls to curse
their enemies. palo mayombe is an amoral religion, drawing no line
between “black” and “white” magic, leaving each practitioner to choose
his own path without prejudice. Drug dealers frequently trusted its
tenets to protect their outlaw enterprise, but Constanzo’s godfather
had stern words of advice for his protégé. “Let the nonbelievers kill
themselves with drugs,” he counseled. “We will profit from their
foolishness."
By 1976, his mother later claimed, Constanzo had
begun to display psychic powers, predicting future events with amazing
accuracy. Months before the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan
by John Hinckley, Constanzo reportedly predicted the event and
proclaimed that Reagan would survive his wounds. Constanzo didn’t have
as much luck foretelling his own future, which included two arrests
for shoplifting in 1981, one case involving the theft of a chainsaw.
By early 1983, Constanzo had chosen his patron
saint, pledging himself to Kadiempembe, his religion’s version of
Satan. With his padrino’s blessing, he devoted himself to the worship
of evil for profit. His final initiation included ritual scarring, his
mentor wielding the knife to carve mystic symbols into Constanzo’s
flesh. “My soul is dead,” he proclaimed, at the climax of that
ceremony. “I have no god."
The apprentice was ready to lead.
Blood Rites
A modeling assignment took Constanzo to Mexico City
in 1983, and he spent his free time telling fortunes with tarot cards
in the city’s infamous Zona Rosa, a popular hangout for prostitutes.
Before returning to Miami, Constanzo recruited his first Mexican
disciples, including Martin Quintana Rodriguez, homosexual “psychic”
Jorge Montes, and Omar Orea Ochoa, who had been obsessed with the
occult from the age of 15. In short order, Constanzo seduced both
Quintana and Orea, claiming one as his “man” and the other as his
“woman,” depending on Adolfo’s romantic whim of the moment.
In mid-1984 Constanzo moved to Mexico City
full-time, seeking what his mother referred to as “new horizons.” He
shared quarters with Quintana and Orea, in a strange ménage à trois,
collecting other followers as his “magic” reputation spread throughout
the city. It was said that Constanzo could read the future, and he
also offered limpias—ritual “cleansings”—for those who felt enemies
had cursed them. Of course, it all cost money, and Constanzo’s
journals, recovered after his death, document 31 regular customers,
some paying up to $4,500 for a single ceremony. Constanzo established
a menu for sacrificial beasts, with roosters going for $6 a head,
goats for $30, boa constrictors for $450, adult zebras for $1,100, and
African lion cubs listed at $3,100 each.
True to the teachings of his Florida mentor,
Constanzo charmed wealthy drug dealers, helping them schedule
shipments and meetings on the basis of his predictions. For a price,
he also offered magic that would make gangsters and their bodyguards
invisible to police, bulletproof against their enemies. It was all
nonsense, but smugglers drawn from Mexican peasant stock and a
background of brujeria (witchcraft) were strongly inclined to believe.
According to Constanzo’s ledgers, one dealer in Mexico City paid him
$40,000 for magical services over three years’ time.
At those rates, the customers demanded a show, and
Constanzo recognized the folly of disappointing men who carried Uzis
in their armor-plated limousines. Constanzo was well established by
mid-1985, when he and three of his disciples raided a Mexico City
graveyard for human bones to start his own bloody caldron. The rituals
and air of mystery surrounding Constanzo were powerful enough to lure
a cross-section of Mexican society, with his clique of followers
including a physician, a real estate speculator, fashion models, and
several transvestite nightclub performers.
Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of Constanzo’s new
career was the appeal he seemed to have for high-ranking law
enforcement officers. At least four members of the Federal Judicial
Police joined Constanzo’s cult in Mexico City: one of them, Salvador
Garcia Alarcon, was a commander in charge of narcotics investigations;
another, Florentino Ventura Gutierrez, retired from the federales to
head the Mexican branch of Interpol. In a country where bribery
permeates all levels of law enforcement and federal agents sometimes
serve as triggermen for drug lords, corruption is not unusual, but the
devotion of Constanzo’s disciples seemed to run deeper than simple
greed. In or out of uniform, they worshiped Constanzo as a minor god,
their living conduit to the spirit world and ambassador to Hell
itself.
In 1986, Ventura introduced Constanzo to the drug
dealing Calzada family, then one of Mexico’s dominant narcotics
cartels. Constanzo won the hard-nosed dealers over with his charm and
mumbo-jumbo, profiting immensely from his contacts with the gang. By
early 1987 he was able to pay $60,000 cash for a condominium in Mexico
City and buy himself a fleet of luxury cars that included an $80,000
Mercedes Benz. When not working magic for the Calzadas or other
clients, Constanzo staged scams of his own, once posing as a DEA agent
to rip off a Guadalajara cocaine dealer and then selling the stash
through his police contacts for a cool $100,000.
At some point in his odyssey from juvenile psychic
to high-society wizard, Constanzo began to feed his nganga, or
caldron, with the offerings of human sacrifice. No final tally for his
victims is available, but 23 ritual murders are well-documented and
Mexican authorities point to a rash of unsolved mutilation-slayings
around Mexico City during the same period, suggesting that Constanzo’s
known victims may be only the tip of a malignant iceberg. In any case,
his willingness to torture and kill total strangers—or even close
friends—duly impressed the ruthless drug dealers who remained his
foremost clients.
In the course of a year’s association, Constanzo
came to believe that his magical powers alone were responsible for the
Calzada family’s continued success and survival. In April 1987 he
demanded a full partnership in the syndicate and was curtly refused.
On the surface, Constanzo seemed to take the rejection in stride, but
his devious mind was plotting revenge.
On April 30, 1987 Guillermo Calzada Sanchez and six
members of his household vanished under mysterious circumstances. They
were reported missing on May 1 and police noted melted candles and
other evidence of a strange religious ceremony at Calzada’s office.
Six more days went by before officers began fishing mutilated remains
from the Zumpango River. Seven corpses were recovered in the course of
a week, all bearing signs of sadistic torture: fingers, toes and ears
removed; hearts and genitals excised; part of the spine ripped from
one body; two other corpses missing their brains.
The vanished parts, as it turned out, had gone to
feed Constanzo’s nganga, building up his strength for greater
conquests yet to come. By July 1987 he already had his next targets in
mind.
'La Madrina'
Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal was born on September
6, 1964, the daughter of a Matamoros electrician. She crossed the
border to attend Porter High School in Brownsville, where teachers
remember her as a model student and a good kid. She maintained her
star-pupil status in secretarial school, instructors urging her to
attend a real college, but romance intervened. On Halloween Day in
1983 Aldrete married Brownsville resident Miguel Zacharias, 11 years
her senior. The relationship quickly soured and five months later they
were separated, moving inexorably toward divorce.
Late in 1985 Aldrete applied for and received
resident alien status in the United States. Her next step was
enrollment at Texas Southmost College, a two-year school in
Brownsville. Admitted on a “work-study” program that deferred part of
her tuition, Sara began classes in January 1986 as a physical
education major, holding down two part-time jobs as an aerobics
teacher and assistant secretary in the school’s athletic department
By the end of her first semester Aldrete stood out
physically and academically. Standing at 6-foot-1, she was unusually
tall for a Mexican woman and her grades were excellent. She was one of
33 students chosen from TSC’s 6,500-member student body for listing in
the school’s Who’s Who directory for 1987-88. Aside from grades that
placed her on the honor roll, Aldrete also organized and led a Booster
Club for TSC’s soccer team, earning the school’s Outstanding Physical
Education Award in her spare time.
With the breakup of her marriage, Aldrete had moved
back home with her parents in Matamoros, constructing a special
outside stairway to her second-floor room in the interest of privacy.
She was home most weekends and during school vacations, looking
forward to completion of her studies and the transfer to a four-year
school that would bring her a P.E. teaching certificate. Attractive
and popular with men, in 1987 she was dating Gilberto Sosa, a drug
dealer associated with the powerful Hernandez family.
Aldrete was driving through Matamoros on July 30,
1987 when a shiny new Mercedes cut her off in traffic, narrowly
avoiding a collision. The driver was apologetic, suave and handsome.
He introduced himself as Adolfo Constanzo, a Cuban-American living in
Mexico City. There was an instant chemistry between them, but
Constanzo made no sexual overtures. He noted with pleasure that
Aldrete’s birthday was the same as his mother’s.
In fact, the meeting was no accident. Constanzo had
been watching Gilberto Sosa, weighing his connections. The meeting
with Sara Aldrete was carefully stage-managed, as was their burgeoning
friendship and her gradual introduction into the occult. Two weeks
after their first encounter, Constanzo met Aldrete and Sosa in
Brownsville, pointedly refusing to shake Sosa’s hand. Days later, an
anonymous caller told Sosa that Aldrete was seeing another man.
Jealous, he refused to accept her denials and broke off the
relationship. She turned to Constanzo for solace, surprised when he
told her he had seen the break-up coming in his tarot cards.
Constanzo finally took Aldrete to bed, but their
sexual union was short-lived. He made no secret of his preference for
men, and Aldrete grudgingly accepted it, already hooked on the
religious aspect of their relationship. By summer’s end, Aldrete’s TSC
classmates found her dramatically changed, an overnight expert on
witchcraft and magic, eager to debate the relative powers of darkness
and light. In private, Constanzo called her La Madrina, the
“godmother” of his growing cult. He probed her links to the Hernandez
clan, predicting that leader Elio would soon approach her for advice
about a problem. When Elio did so, in November 1987, Sara introduced
the dealer to El Padrino.
Season of the Witch
As it happened, the Hernandez family was ripe for a
takeover, torn by internal dissension and threatened by outside
competitors. Using every “magic” trick at his disposal, Constanzo
persuaded Elio and the rest that palo mayombe could solve all their
problems. Enemies could be eliminated in the course of sacrificial
rituals; those rituals, in turn, would keep the family and its
employees safe from harm. If they were faithful to Constanzo, his
disciples would become invisible to the authorities and bulletproof in
combat. In return, all he asked was 50 percent of the profits and
effective control of the family.
Constanzo’s rituals became more elaborate and
sadistic after he moved his cult headquarters to Rancho Santa Elena,
20 miles outside Matamoros. There, on May 28, 1988, Constanzo shot
drug dealer Hector de la Fuente and a farmer named Moises Castillo,
but the sacrifices didn’t satisfy him. Back in Mexico City, on July
16, he supervised the torture and dismemberment of Raul Paz Esquivel,
a transvestite and former lover of cult member Jorge Montes. The
gruesome remains were dumped on a public street, found by children who
ran shrieking to summon police.
Mutilation and pain were essential to palo mayombe.
Blood and viscera fed the nganga, manipulated with sticks as Constanzo
tuned in the spirit world. The demons he served were more likely to
smile on a sacrifice that died in agony. “They must die screaming,” El
Padrino told his flock. As for the point in nearly every sacrifice
where Constanzo sodomized his victims, that was simply a fringe
benefit of playing god.
On August 10, 1988, in reprisal for an $800,000
drug rip-off, rival narcotics dealers kidnapped Ovidio Hernandez and
his 2 -year-old sons. Constanzo’s ghoul squad kidnapped a stranger two
days later and tortured him to death at Rancho Santa Elena, chanting
prayers for the safe release of Hernandez and son. When the hostages
were released on August 13, without a peso’s ransom changing hands,
Constanzo claimed full credit for the triumph. His star was rising,
and Constanzo paid little attention to the suicide of his disciple
Florentino Ventura in Mexico City on September 17. (Ventura also
killed his wife and a friend with the same burst of gunfire.)
In November 1988, after 35-year-old ex-cop and cult
member Jorge Valente de Fierro Gomez violated El Padrino’s ban on
using drugs, Constanzo made him the group’s next offering to
Kadiempembe, a bloody object lesson in obedience. Competing smuggler
Ezequiel Rodriguez Luna was tortured to death at the ranch on
Valentine’s Day 1989; two other dealers, Ruben Vela Garza and Ernesto
Rivas Diaz were added to the grisly list when they wandered into the
ceremony uninvited. Nine days later, the cult kidnapped another
stranger, never identified, but he put up such a fight that Constanzo
ordered Elio Hernandez to shoot him without the customary rituals. On
February 25 the prowling cultists accidentally kidnapped Jose Garcia,
Elio’s 14-year-old cousin, slaying him before they recognized the
error.
By that time Constanzo was sitting on 800 kilos of
marijuana stolen from another gang, but felt he needed one more
sacrifice to guarantee safe shipment across the Rio Grande. Another
ritual was staged on March 13, 1989, but the victim’s suffering was
insufficient for Constanzo’s taste. “Bring me someone I can use,” he
told his minions. “Someone who will scream."
The next morning, they brought him Mark Kilroy.
Witch Hunt
Constanzo’s psychic powers must have failed him in
March 1989, for he was stunned by the reaction to Mark Kilroy’s
disappearance. Not even the Calzada family slaughter had produced such
an outcry, most observers concluding that drug dealers and their
lackeys were beyond protection of the law, a violent death their just
reward. Some of Constanzo’s victims had never been reported missing;
three of them, later unearthed with the rest at Rancho Santa Elena,
have never been identified.
But Mark Kilroy was different. He came from an
affluent family with political connections. More to the point, he was
an Anglo tourist whose fate threatened to become an international
incident. Local police wanted to solve the case quickly, before their
tarnished reputation suffered any further damage.
Constanzo, for his part, still had 800 kilos of
marijuana to move across the border. To safeguard the shipment, he
staged one final sacrifice at the ranch, choosing Sara Aldrete’s old
lover as the guest of honor. Gilberto Sosa died screaming on March 28,
1989, and the dope was safely transported on April 8, despite Serafin
Hernandez leading police to the ranch one week earlier. Constanzo’s
mules collected $300,000 for the load, while El Padrino congratulated
himself on his magical powers.
The protective shield of magic was lifted the next
day. Four members of the Hernandez family were arrested on April 9,
before they could give Constanzo the cash from his last big deal. The
ranch began surrendering its buried secrets on April 11, the butchered
remains of 15 victims unearthed over the next six days. (Besides the
first 12 buried in the cemetery, three more were found in a nearby
orchard.) Constanzo went on the lam, traveling with Sara Aldrete, male
lovers Martin Quintana and Omar Orea, and a Hernandez family hit man
named Alvaro de Leon Valdez—”El Duby” to his friends. Miami beckoned,
but informers told the DEA Constanzo might run home to mother, and the
heat in Florida persuaded him to remain in Mexico City, shuttling from
the home of one disciple to another.
The discoveries at Matamoros were tailor-made for
tabloid television circa 1989. Geraldo Rivera aired a special
prime-time segment on the case, while TV journalists flew in from the
United States, Europe, and even Japan. Constanzo was “sighted” as far
north as Chicago, where rumors placed him in league with the Windy
City Mafia. Sara Aldrete was “seen” lurking around schools throughout
the Rio Grande Valley, word-of-mouth reports claiming she had
threatened to kidnap and murder 10 Anglo children for each of her
disciples jailed in Mexico. An alternative church at Pharr, Texas, was
burned by nightriders after tales spread that its congregants were
witches in thrall to Constanzo.
Still lawmen scoured the border in vain for El
Padrino and his entourage, barely mollified by the April 17 arrest of
gang patriarch Serafin Hernandez Rivera in Houston. Searching the
house where he had been hiding, they seized weapons and cash, but
found no occult paraphernalia. Constanzo and his closest aides,
meanwhile, had simply disappeared.
Like magic.
'They'll Never Take Me'
Constanzo read betrayal in his tarot cards on April
18, 1989. He knew informers must have sold out Serafin Sr., and now he
eyed his friends more warily. He kept an Uzi close at hand and rarely
slept for more than a few minutes at a time. Increasingly, he
threatened those around him with a power exceeding that of the police.
“They cannot kill you,” he insisted, “but I can.”
On April 22, nocturnal arsonists struck at Rancho
Santa Elena, burning Constanzo’s bloodstained ritual shed to the
ground. The next morning he flew into a rage, watching on television
as police conducted a full-dress exorcism at the ranch, sprinkling
holy water over the graves and smoldering ashes. Constanzo stormed
about the small apartment where he slept with Aldrete and the others,
smashing lamps and overturning furniture, a man possessed.
On April 24 police arrested cultist Jorge Montes,
raiding his home three blocks from the site where the Calzada family
was slaughtered in 1986. Like the others arrested before him, Montes
spilled everything he knew about the cult, naming Constanzo as the
mastermind and chief executioner in a string of grisly homicides.
Three days later, Constanzo and his four remaining
cohorts settled into their last hideout, an apartment house on Rio
Sena in Mexico City. Aldrete, fearing for her life, penned a note on
May 2 and tossed it from a bedroom window to the street below. It
read:
Please call the judicial police and tell them that
in this building are those that they are seeking. Tell them that a
woman is being held hostage. I beg for this, because what I want most
is to talk—or they’re going to kill the girl.
A passerby found the note moments later, read it,
and kept it to himself, believing it was someone’s lame attempt at
humor. Upstairs, in the crowded flat, Constanzo began laying plans to
flee Mexico with his hard-core disciples, perhaps starting fresh
somewhere else. “They’ll never take me,” he assured his followers.
Those plans unraveled on May 6, 1989, when police
arrived on Rio Sena, going door-to-door and asking questions. As luck
would have it, they were searching for a missing child—a completely
unrelated case—but when Constanzo glimpsed them from a window he
panicked, opening fire with his submachine gun. Within moments, 180
policemen surrounded the apartment house returning fire in a fierce
exchange that lasted some 45 minutes. Miraculously, the only person
wounded was an officer struck by Constanzo’s first shots.
When Constanzo realized that escape was impossible,
he handed his weapon to El Duby and issued new orders. As the hit man
later told police, “He told me to kill him and Martin. I told him I
couldn’t do it, but he hit me in the face and threatened that
everything would go bad for me in hell. Then he hugged Martin, and I
just stood in front of them and shot them with a machine gun."
Constanzo and Quintana were dead when police
stormed the apartment, slumped together in a closet, Constanzo dressed
in shorts as if for a day at the beach. The three survivors—El Duby,
Orea and Sara Aldrete—were promptly arrested and rushed off to jail.
In custody, El Duby admitted shooting Constanzo, but he cheerfully
informed police, “The godfather will not be dead for long."
The Legacy
Mexican authorities were less concerned with
Constanzo’s impending resurrection than with making charges stick
against the surviving cultists. El Duby’s case was open-and-shut, his
confession recorded on two murder counts, but Sara Aldrete first posed
as a victim, betraying herself when she protested too much, revealing
intimate knowledge of the cult’s bloody rituals.
In the wake of the Mexico City shootout, 14 cult
members were indicted on various charges, including multiple murder,
weapons and narcotics violations, conspiracy and obstruction of
justice. In August 1990, El Duby was convicted of killing Constanzo
and Quintana, drawing a 35-year prison term. Cultists Juan Fragosa and
Jorge Montes were both convicted of Raul Esquivel’s murder and
sentenced to 35 years each; Omar Orea, convicted in the same case,
died of AIDS before he could be sentenced. Sara Aldrete was acquitted
of Constanzo’s slaying in 1990 but was sentenced to a six-year term on
conviction of criminal association. La Madrina insisted that she never
practiced any religion but “Christian Santeria”; televised reports of
the murders at Rancho Santa Elena, she said, took her completely by
surprise. Jurors disagreed, and in 1994, when Aldrete and four male
accomplices were convicted of multiple slayings at the ranch. Aldrete
was sentenced to 62 years, while her cohorts—including Elio Hernandez
and Serafin Jr.—drew prison terms of 67 years. American authorities
stand ready to prosecute Aldrete, El Duby and the Hernandez clan for
Mark Kilroy’s murder, should they ever be released from custody.
But is their evil vanquished, even now?
A grisly list of cult-related crimes remains
unsolved in Mexico. From prison, Sara Aldrete told reporters, “I don’t
think the religion will end with us, because it has a lot of people in
it. They have found a temple in Monterrey that isn’t even related to
us. It will continue.” Between 1987 and 1989, police in Mexico City
recorded 74 unsolved ritual murders, 14 of them involving infant
victims. Constanzo’s cult is suspected in at least 16 of those cases,
all involving children or teenagers, but authorities lack sufficient
evidence to press charges.
Referring to those cases, prosecutor Guillermo
Ibarra told reporters, “We would like to say, yes, Constanzo did them
all, and poof, all those cases are solved. And the fact is, we believe
he was responsible for some of them, though we’ll never prove it now.
But he didn’t commit all of those murders. Which means someone else
did. Someone who is still out there."
