The Work of The Devil
After Mark Kilroy disappeared in Matamoros during spring break, authorities feared the worst. But they had no idea how bad the worst could be.
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It was less than a mile from Rancho Santa Elena to the Rio Grande. Periodically, the Hernandez gang gave thanks to the Palo Mayombe gods, then smuggled hundreds of pounds of marijuana into Texas. The Cuban apparently made up the gang’s religion as he went along, using various aspects of Santeria, Palo Mayombe, and voodoo as the mood struck him. Members of the cult smoked ritual cigars, drank ritual rum, slaughtered ritual chickens and goats, and prayed to various deities including Oshun, the god of money and sex. Constanzo insisted that his followers call him El Padrino — the Godfather — and introduced various forms of mind control in the guise of religious mumbo jumbo. As Charles Manson had used the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” the Cuban used a movie called The Believers, in which a father and his son are caught in a web of black magic.
The tie that bound members of the Hernandez gang was drugs, not religion, but as the ceremony got stranger and their involvement got deeper, that changed. The Cuban was probably the first to suggest using human sacrifices, but it also may have been Elio or even Sara Aldrete. Of all the converts, Aldrete was the most zealous and the most mysterious.
An exceptionally tall woman with long brown hair and an athletic build, Aldrete lived an uncanny double life — honor student at Texas Southmost College by day and witch by night. Those who knew her as a cheerleader for the soccer team and a nominee for TSC’s who’s who found her courteous, friendly, and always eager to please. There was nothing to suggest her dark side. Antonio Zavaleta, who knew Aldrete well, said: “She sat in my anthropology class all semester, an A student, always present, always friendly. I never saw her wear an emblem, an amulet, a talisman, any sign of black magic — and I’m trained to watch for such things; never heard her ask a weird question, even when we talked about weird religions.” And yet Aldrete drove across the international bridge every night in her new Ford Taurus, went to her private room at her parents’ home in a middle-class Matamoros neighborhood, and prayed before a blood-splattered altar. The police believe she took part in at least one human sacrifice, that she personally selected the victim (a man who had insulted her), lured him to the ranch, and supervised a slow death that included cutting off his nipples with scissors and boiling him alive.
At first the victims were selected from the ranks of enemies — rival drug dealers or dirty cops who had gone back on an agreement — strictly business to Elio’s way of thinking. The Cuban made Elio, and later El Duby, executioner priests, branding their arms, chests, and backs with a red-hot knife. Elio was a real sweetheart of a priest. He was said to have cut out one rival’s heart while the man was still alive. The planned execution of a Matamoros cop named Sauceda produced fireworks when Sauceda pulled out a gun, and Elio had to shoot him before the ceremony began. The cop’s sudden and untimely death left the gang without a victim to sacrifice. Elio sent three of his men out to grab the first person they could find, who happened to be a fourteen-year-old boy looking for his lost goat. They threw a gunnysack over the boy’s head and took him to Elio, who promptly decapitated the boy with a machete, never bothering to look at his face. As the headless body flopped across the floor, Elio was struck by something familiar. It was the boy’s gray-and-green football jersey. Terror flooded Elio’s dark eyes as he reached for the gunnysack: He had just executed his own nephew.
Though Mark Kilroy was selected at random, there may have been something about him that attracted Serafin Junior and his three companions. The Cuban had told them to find a typical gringo, and Kilroy’s blond good looks and wholesome manner must have been irresistible. They grabbed Kilroy and wrestled him into the pickup between Serafin and another gang member named Torres. A few blocks down the avenue, Serafin stopped to relieve himself and Kilroy escaped, but a second carload of gangsters caught the student and handcuffed him in the back seat.
They drove through the back streets of Matamoros and past an industrial district. After a while the number of small bars and vendor’s huts began to thin out and newly planted fields stretched off into the distance. The country air smelled musty and overused. There was a quarter moon, and by its light Kilroy might have had a chance to see that his kidnappers were his own age. Serafin had graduated from Nimitz in 1986, the same year Mark graduated from Santa Fe. Both of them had played baseball. They could have been on the same field, playing by the same rules.
Around a long, sloping curve, the car turned onto a narrow dirt road that snaked between two corn fields. Presently, the car’s headlights caught a barn with some farm equipment on one side and an irrigation levee on the other. The gangsters left Mark Kilroy handcuffed in the back seat of a Suburban. He didn’t see them again all night. An aging caretaker came around after dawn and gave him something to eat — some eggs, bread, and water.
Roughly twelve hours after Kilroy’s abduction, the Cuban and his disciples came for him. They wrapped duct tape over his eyes and mouth and took him across a field, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Then they guided him through the door of a shed, where the air smelled like rotting meat. It was early afternoon, the time of day when the boys would have been drifting down the beach to watch the Miss Tanline contest. Whatever was going through Mark Kilroy’s mind, whatever he imagined would be his fate, it wasn’t nearly as terrible as what was about to happen.
By Friday, the fourth day after the discovery of the bodies, the story had lost steam and dropped off page one. The Kilroys had gone home, and so had the politicians and most of the media. Nobody had claimed the $15,000 reward, though an extortionist in the Galveston County jail had tried to hit on the Kilroys for ransom. Few noticed and fewer stopped to record the activities of the peasants and campesinos who had come down from mountain villages or traveled, sometimes hundreds of miles, from their ejidos, looking for lost loved ones among the rows of mutilated corpses. They stood on the sidewalks in front of funeral homes, not sure what to do next, or in small groups at the ranch, where the search for more bodies continued.
In the shadows of the sacrificial shed, while bulldozers and backhoes excavated the putrid black soil that had been the devil’s graveyard, a priest prayed. Nearby a woman from Ejido Ramireno waited with her two sons, watching and wondering if a sixteen-year-old friend from her ejido would be among the victims. Seventy-six-year-old Hidalgo Castillo wondered the same thing about his 52-year-old son, Moises Castillo. Moises lived in Houston, but once a year he went to Ejido Morelos to work his corn fields. He had disappeared in May 1988, and in light of all that had happened, the old man feared the worst. He was right. Two days later Mexican authorities found the bodies of Moises Castillo and another man in shallow graves across the highway — victims number 14 and 15.
In the lobby on a Matamoros funeral home, Isidoro and Ericada Garcia waited while one of their daughters slipped behind a curtain to view the remains of a boy who had been decapitated and whose lungs and brain had been cut out. Devout evangelicals, the Garcias worked a farm two miles from Rancho Santa Elena. Their fourteen-year-old-son, Jose Luis, had vanished on February 25 — three weeks before Mark Kilroy had disappeared. There had been no press conferences for Jose Luis, no rewards, no attorneys general or network TV. The Garcias didn’t even have enough money to buy a body bag to bury their son, if the body behind the curtain proved to be their son.
It was Jose Luis, all right. “He had no head,” his sister reported. “It was chopped off on the side. But I knew it was him by the shirt he was wearing. It was gray and green, his favorite football shirt.”
The Garcia’s seemed almost relieved, which, strangely enough, was the same reaction the Kilroy’s had when they finally learned their sons fate. The waiting had seemed eternal. Now they were at peace. Now the white magic could do its work.
When Ericada Garcia spoke with Tom Ragan of the Brownsville Herald, it was without a trace of bitterness or irony. “If it weren’t for the Kilroy boy,” she said, “none of the other men, including my son, would ever have been found.”
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo may have been more twisted and evil than anyone suspected. While promising to protect the Hernandez gang, he was using their connections to steal from other drug dealers. The police weren’t the only ones looking for the ill-fated gang. Constanzo had a group of followers separate and apart from the Hernandezes. It included an inner circle of Mexico City friends who may have been involved in the ritual killings of at least eight additional victims.
When Serafin Hernandez blundered past that roadblock and doomed the Matamoros sect, Constanzo suggested a vacation to Mexico City. He flew out of Brownsville the day the bodies were discovered, accompanied by Sara Aldrete, El Duby, and four or five others. When police discovered some of Aldrete’s clothing in the abandoned safe house, they assumed that she had become the newest victim of the Cuban’s murderous ritual; the so-called witch was the most expendable member of the cult. But the final twist was more demonic than even the Hernandez gang had imagined.
Three weeks later, when Mexico City police surrounded the building where the gang was hiding, the Cuban went berserk. He began firing his machine gun and tossing bundles of money out of the fourth-floor window. Constanzo had taken the precaution of ordaining El Duby and transferring to him the power to make human sacrifices; now he commanded El Duby to perform the ultimate ritual — Constanzo wanted to die with his lover and bodyguard, Martin Quintana Rodriquez. El Duby hesitated, but the Cuban slapped him and warned him that failure to carry out this last assignment would make it hard on him in hell. Constanzo sat on a stool in the closet and positioned his lover beside him, then he nodded, and El Duby squeezed the trigger of his machine gun. When police stormed the apartment a few minutes later, El Duby, Aldrete, and three others surrendered quietly.
As for the devil’s ranch where Kilroy and others were sacrificed, it remained a citadel of black magic until there was a proper purification ceremony. One quiet Sunday afternoon, when no one was looking, the federales slipped out there with a curandero. He went inside the shed, mumbled incantations, sprinkled salt on the floor, and made the sign of the cross. Then federales sloshed gasoline over the shed and burned it to the ground.
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