Posted by In March 1989 Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old pre-med student at the University of Texas, was abducted in Matamoros, Mexico, during spring break. He was taken by the drug-trafficking cult of Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, who practised human sacrifice believing it made his men immune to the police. Fifteen bodies were found on his ranch. Constanzo had a follower kill him on 6 May 1989.
In popular imagination human sacrifice is linked to ancient pagan religions, to the Celts or the Aztecs, but certainly not to religious practices of the 20th century.
In 1989, however, Mark Kilroy became the victim of a human sacrifice carried out by a cult of Mexican drug traffickers.
The disappearance of Mark Kilroy
Mark James Kilroy was born in Chicago on 5 March 1968 and grew up in Santa Fe, a small town near Houston, Texas. He was a bright student and an athlete, and in 1989 he was at the University of Texas at Austin, studying to get into medical school.
For Texan students it is a tradition to spend spring break on South Padre Island, and Mark and his friends decided to go there too. Spring break falls on the same days for all Texas universities, and the island was full of young people looking for fun.
On the evening of 13 March 1989 Mark and three friends crossed the border into Matamoros, Mexico, where age limits for drinking and getting into clubs are much lower. They went bar-hopping and late at night, as they headed back towards the border, the group split up for a few minutes. When the friends found each other again, Mark was gone.
They searched for him for hours, until the streets emptied, then crossed the border thinking he had gone back to the car on his own. The next morning Mark still had not turned up and they called the police.
His parents handed out more than 20,000 flyers and offered a reward, and the case even featured on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, but for weeks nothing turned up.
Finding the body
The breakthrough came almost by chance. On 1 April 1989 a car ran a drug checkpoint without stopping. Mexican police followed it to a ranch outside Matamoros, Rancho Santa Elena, where they found ritual objects and traces of marijuana.
On 9 April officers returned and arrested several men. One of the ranch caretakers recognised Mark in a photo and pointed to a shack: that was where he had seen him. Under questioning, Serafín Hernández García confessed that several people had been killed at the ranch, including the American boy.
The ranch was the hideout of a cult led by Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, known as “El Padrino”. Born in Miami in 1962 to a Cuban mother, Constanzo practised a version of Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Caribbean religion rooted in the cults of African slaves, knew Santería, and had made a fortune in Mexico City reading tarot cards and selling magic rituals. His clients were mainly drug traffickers, but also corrupt police officers and members of high society.
Constanzo promised the traffickers he would make them invisible to the police and immune to bullets. For his rituals he first used bones stolen from cemeteries, then decided the spirits would be stronger with human sacrifices. At his side was Sara Aldrete, “La Madrina”, a student from Matamoros who recruited followers.
On 11 April police took the suspects to the ranch and forced them to dig. Fifteen mutilated bodies came to light, all men killed over nine months. One was Mark’s, identified from his dental records. Most of the victims were rival traffickers, while Mark had been chosen at random.
Police also seized 110 kilos of marijuana, cocaine, weapons and vehicles at the ranch. In an iron cauldron, the nganga, investigators found remains of a human brain, a goat’s head, chicken feet, a turtle, herbs and coins mixed with animal blood.
The sacrifice of Mark Kilroy
According to Serafín’s confession, Constanzo had ordered his men to find a young white male for a ritual: he wanted the “superior brain” of an American student.
On the night of the abduction some gang members had mingled with the students on the streets of Matamoros. One of them lured Mark close to a truck and the others dragged him inside. Mark managed to break free and run, but was stopped by another gang car and taken to the ranch at gunpoint.
They left him handcuffed in the car all night. About twelve hours later Constanzo arrived: they taped his mouth shut and took him to a shack, where he was tortured and raped all night. Then Constanzo killed him with a machete blow to the back of the neck. His brain was boiled in the nganga, the ritual cauldron.
To bury him more easily they cut off his legs and ran a wire along his spine, so the bones could be pulled out once the body had decomposed: the followers wanted to wear them around their necks as amulets. Contrary to what was said for years, investigators found no signs of cannibalism.
Mark’s parents showed incredible faith: his father told reporters he felt no anger towards the killers, and his mother asked people to pray for them.
The end of Constanzo
After the ranch was discovered Constanzo fled to Mexico City with some followers. On 6 May 1989 police surrounded their flat. Rather than be caught, Constanzo ordered one of his men to shoot him and his lover, Martín Quintana, with a submachine gun. Sara Aldrete was arrested at the scene.
In 1993 several cult members were convicted of murder and drug trafficking, although some claimed they had played no part in Mark’s death and had been tortured into confessing. Two suspects were never caught.
Two weeks after the bodies were found, Mexican police went back to the ranch, had a folk healer purify the shack and set it on fire, planting a wooden cross on the ashes.
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