Mark Kilroy was a nice, normal kid who, in March 1989, headed south to Mexico for spring break.
Hundreds of thousands make the same kind of pilgrimage each year. Most
return to school suffering from nothing more than the wages of too much
merrymaking sunburns, bad hangovers, or romances gone sour.
Kilroy was not so lucky. He stumbled into a world of drug cartels and
nightmare religion, a mishmash of superstitions derived from Santeria,
African voodoo, and ancient Aztec rites of human sacrifice.
Kilroy, 21, who was pre-med at the University of Texas, and three
friends parked their car in Brownsville, on the U.S. side, and walked
across the bridge over the Rio Grande to the Mexican border town of
Matamoros, a top spring break hangout.
For a few days, the boys lolled on the beach, drinking and flirting
with Miss Tanline contestants. In the early morning of March 14,
Kilroy’s three buddies decided they had had enough and were ready to
stroll back across the bridge. They found Kilroy and started to walk.
Crowds of young revelers had the same idea, so the streets were packed.
Somehow on the way back to the car, Kilroy got separated from the
group. His friends waited at the border, then they searched, and then
they headed back to the car and waited some more. By morning, when
Kilroy had not arrived, they contacted police.
There was no trail to follow until April Fools Day, when Serafin
Hernandez Garcia, 20, a narcotics gang lackey known as “Little Serafin,”
busted through a drug checkpoint. He led police to a place called
Rancho Santa Elena, a collection of worn-down filthy shacks owned by his
druglord uncle.
Police at the time did not suspect that Little Serafin had anything to
do with Kilroy’s disappearance. They began to watch the ranch, hoping
for a big pot bust, and they closed in, snatching family members and
workers.
One of the workers said that he recalled seeing a “young gringo” tied
up in the back of a truck, but did not know what had happened to him.
Presented with this bit of evidence, Little Serafin calmly admitted
that he had helped kidnap the American student and that the boy had been
killed.
“It was our religion, our voodoo,” Serafin told police. “We did it for success. We did it for protection.”
During a five-hour interrogation, Little Serafin described how gang
members had lured the drunken college student into their truck. After a
night of torture and sodomy, they lopped the top of his head off with a
machete and boiled his brains. It was all part of the rituals of a
religion known as palo mayombe, a violent voodoo cult that originated in
Africa.
Police found this horrific bit of evidence in a kettle that had all the
earmarks of being a cauldron for black magic potions in a shack filled
with bloody relics of ritual slayings.
The rest of Kilroy’s body turned up in a shallow grave. His heart had been ripped out.
Remains of a dozen other lost souls eventually turned up in graves all around the ranch.
The high priest of this bloody cult, Little Serafin said, was “El
Padrino,” Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a man with his bloody fingers in
the dark worlds of drugs and voodoo. Constanzo grew up in Miami, the son
of a woman who had a reputation as a practitioner of witchcraft — if
tossing headless poultry and goats on your neighbor’s doorsteps can be
considered a form of magic.
Looks good enough for modeling work brought Constanzo to Mexico City,
where he plunged deeper into the dark arts. He opened an occult
protection business. Mexican businessmen, including members of drug
cartels, paid steep fees to have the young conjurer sacrifice animals to
keep them safe from evil spirits. Soon, Constanzo moved on to more
powerful magic, the kind you could get only from human blood.
His little band of ritual murderers grew. A priestess joined, a
stunning Mexican woman, Sara Aldrete. She possessed all the outward
appearances of a wholesome up-and-comer, a physical education student at
a Texas college and an aerobics instructor.
But she also had deep ties with the drug cartels and a fascination with
strange religions. The couple’s favorite movie was “The Believers,” a
1987 film about voodoo.
A year after that movie, Constanzo’s crew was snatching all kinds of
people from the streets and fields around Mexico and subjecting these
strangers to the most horrific torture. Some were skinned alive.
In a short period before Kilroy’s kidnapping, 60 missing persons were reported in the region.
Mark Kilroy happened to stumble across their path just when Constanzo
decided he needed more power, the blood of a gringo who had to die
screaming.
Constanzo fled as the investigation turned up the bodies and his
connection to them. He holed up in Mexico City until May, when police
were called to an apartment building with reports that a man was
throwing money out the window and shooting at people who tried to grab
the bills.
After a 45-minute gun battle, Constanzo and a male companion were dead.
As to the other gang members involved with the murders at the ranch,
five were given sentences of 30 to 60 years. Investigators believe,
however, that the actual number of El Padrino’s disciples was 10 to 15
times higher, and that they are still out there.
