June 1989
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.
Nobody could make sense out of what happened to Mark Kilroy. It was all mixed up with black magic, white magic, drugs, mestizo superstition, gringo hedonism, coincidence, and random selection. We had warned ourselves about this sort of thing many times and still didn’t believe. It was the curse of el otro lado — the other side. Antonio Zavaleta, an expert on curanderismo who teaches at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, was sometimes called to the other side of the border to supervise ghostbusting. “Look,” said Zavaleta, who had taught sociology and anthropology to two members of the murderous gang responsible for Kilroy’s death, “I’m a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas. But when I went over there, I put a cross around my neck.”
By the time Mark Kilroy’s body was found on April 11 at Rancho Santa Elena, his disappearance had been the subject of fascinated media speculation for a month. The 21-year-old junior at the University of Texas had gone to South Padre Island along with thousands of other students during spring break and had simply vanished one night in the border town of Matamoros. From the beginning his disappearance seemed like an eerie and arbitrary event — a true mystery. When Kilroy’s fate was finally known, the mystery was even greater, because few of us were conditioned to accept the reality of human sacrifice to Satan.
Officials on both sides of the border had begun to suspect black magic a couple of weeks before the bodies of Kilroy and fourteen others were discovered. A psychic had reported a vision in which Kilroy’s body appeared alongside what looked like a witch’s caldron. A satanist in Brownsville had confessed to murdering Kilroy and burying his body on the beach — though under questioning, he recanted. When lawmen finally began to sort things out, the ritual killings seemed almost predestined. A map drawn two years ago by confessed mass-killer Henry Lee Lucas had predicted with inexplicable accuracy that the bodies of victims of satanic rituals would be found about where Kilroy and others were found.
The beginning of the end of the search for Kilroy was suitably bizarre. Serafin Hernandez Garcia, a nephew of the cruel and clever gangster boss Elio Hernandez Rivera, ran a routine roadblock on Sunday afternoon, April 9, and stupidly led federales to the ranch that his family used for its smuggling operations. Serafin was no towering intellect — he displayed none of the savvy that had made his uncle the leader of a gang of smugglers and pistoleros who had terrorized Matamoros and the state of Tamaulipas for years — but he was no dummy either. Yet he went through that roadblock as if he believed himself to be invisible and bulletproof.
Later that same day federales started searching the Hernandez ranch, Rancho Santa Elena. They had turned up thirty kilos of marijuana when one of them made a discovery that chilled his blood. To the unpracticed eye of a norteamericano, it appeared to be an ordinary storage shed with some melted candles, cigar butts, and empty bottles on the floor and some greasy caldrons in the yard. But the Mexican cops saw something else. They saw a devil’s temple, a place where black magic had been practiced. When they reported this astonishing news to their comandante, Juan Benitez Ayala, the investigation came to a screeching halt — much to the distress of American lawmen who believed that the smugglers knew something about the disappearance of Mark Kilroy. But Benitez was adamant: The search could not resume until the black magic had been neutralized.
Mexico has always been a country with a rich legacy of magic, born of the dynamic fusion between Christianity and ancient Indian religions. A visit to any marketplace reveals a tradition tracing back to the Aztecs — an enormous variety of strange and powerful herbs, potions, and amulets. Brujos, or shamans, work the villages, casting spells or relieving them for small fees. Even in cities as large as Matamoros ancient superstitions are a way of life; a maquiladora recently was spared being shut down only because a curandero was able to dehex a piece of expensive machinery with which a worker had been seriously injured. Magic is omnipresent; the plot of a popular mid-eighties prime-time soap opera in Mexico, El Maleficio (“The Evil One”), revolved around the premise that a wealthy businessman in Oaxaca was able to sustain power by praying nightly to Satan. Magic is also double-edged; for every evil there is a counterbalancing good. American lawmen who had visited the office of the comandante in Matamoros had noticed strings of garlic, strings of peppers, and white candles, articles commonly used in Mexico to ward off evil. It was no surprise then that Benitez called off the search until a curandero could be summoned to the ranch to cast out the demons.
After the curandero did his magic, things happened fast. On Monday afternoon a caretaker at the ranch identified a photograph of Mark Kilroy and remembered seeing him handcuffed in the back of a Suburban in the equipment yard. In an interrogation room of the Matamoros jail, Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, and two other suspects who had been arrested at the ranch confessed to kidnapping Kilroy and witnessing his ritual sacrifice. Serafin told investigators that he had buried Kilroy, and he led the way to Kilroy’s grave, which was marked by a piece of wire sticking out of the ground. The other end of the wire had been attached to Kilroy’s spinal column so that when his body decomposed members of the cult could pull out the vertebrae to make into a necklace. When Kilroy’s body was uncovered the comandante noticed that his legs had been cut off above the knees and asked Serafin is that was part of the ritual. “No,” Serafin said. “It just made him easier to bury.” Serafin had a baby face, a weak chin, and a Zapata-like mustache that seemed stuck to his face by accident. He was no peasant recently arrived on a wagon of maize; he was a spoiled suburban kid with a taste for designer jeans, tinted sunglasses, and fast American cars with cellular phones. Serafin worked at gunpoint in the hot sun for hours, digging up bodies. He seemed to resent the forced labor but was otherwise nonchalant, remorseless — curiously without passion. By midafternoon a dozen corpses lay in a row.
The story hit the wires before the last body had been exhumed. In a few hours all the major television networks and most of the major news organizations on both sides of the border had dispatched teams of journalists. Several media outlets chartered planes. Agents for Geraldo Rivera and Oprah Winfrey were on the phone. On the highway between Matamoros and Reynosa, campesinos working in the corn and wheat fields of their ejidos — communal farms — stopped and leaned on their hoe handles as jeeploads of federales raced by, closely followed by a stream of media vans and television-satellite trucks. A boy herding scrawny Mexican cattle removed his hat until the procession had passed.
Officials on both sides went out of their way to accommodate the media, effecting coverage in their own peculiar styles. U.S. Customs agent Oran Neck was crisp and to the point. Drugs caused this to happen, he emphasized. Lieutenant George Gavito of the Cameron County Sherriff’s Department was wry and laconic. When a reporter asked how the federales had gotten confessions so quickly, Gavito pointed to a bottle of mineral water — federales like to shake the bottle and squirt the water up the noses of reluctant witnesses. Press conferences were held twice daily in front of the courthouse in Brownsville, and politicians who had hurried to the Valley to assist and commiserate with the Kilroy family made their own agendas available. A Port Isabel legislator announced that he was introducing a law that would allow the killers to be tried for capital murder in Texas, even though the murders had taken place in Mexico, where there is no capital punishment. Everywhere the cameras turned — the courthouse in Brownsville, the federale headquarters in Matamoros, the killing field — there was Jim Mattox, the attorney general of Texas, his face as grave as ashes, mumbling pronouncements on the horror of it all.
The real drama was on the Mexican side, and the young comandante damn well knew it. Benitez was a new breed of federal authority in Mexico — young, educated, tough, moderately honest. He had a perfect Indian face, Bambi eyes, and a shaggy haircut, and he usually wore jeans and a Philadelphia Eagles football jacket. Mexican officials had discovered that Benitez’s predecessor and most of his top officers had squirreled away $5.5 million in cash and jewelry in confiscations and bribes. The violent border town of Matamoros was considered the end of the road for a comandante, but Benitez took to the assignment with unexpected zeal. So far the results had been spectacular: Drug busts had skyrocketed, and now he had captured practically the entire hierarchy of the infamous Hernandez gang. You could see in his eyes that the magic was working.
With a contingent of 250 international journalists jammed in the courtyard behind federale headquarters, the comandante appeared on the balcony with the four suspects in custody; warrants had been issued for the arrests of seven others. To the astonishment of American journalists, all four freely answered questions about their roles in the ritual murders. They seemed eager to confess. Elio Hernandez acknowledged that he had been ordained an executioner priest by the cult’s high priest and godfather, the fugitive Cuban sadomasochist Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. Constanzo had personally executed Kilroy: Indeed, the reason Kilroy had been abducted was the Cuban’s explicit order to find an American college student for the ceremony. As TV cameras zoomed in, Elio proudly displayed the badges of his office — groups of satanic symbols branded on his arms, chest, and back. Even after two days in the Matamoros jail, Elio was undaunted. A Mexican reporter wrote that the young leader of the gang had challenged the comandante to shoot him: “Go ahead,” Hernandez had said. “Your bullets will just bounce off.”
