disappearance. The US Customs Service, who feared the involvement of Mexico’s evil drug traffickers, and the Texas authorities, kept up the pressure on the case in the USA, while in Mexico, the police in Matamoros began to question 127 of the area’s known criminals. In spite of trying to extract the required information by way of beating and torturing, the Mexican police were given no leads. It seemed to them that Mark Kilroy had simply ‘disappeared’.
OCCULT ACTIVITY
As the search for Mark continued in Mexico, the police were beginning another of their routine drug crackdowns. Knowing that they were not able to permeate the inner circles of the Mexican drug barons directly, the police used roadblocks at border towns to catch those who did the dirty work of passing the drugs from country to country for them. At one such roadblock just outside Matamoros, known drug-runner Serafin Hernandez Garcia failed to stop at the police checkpoint and ignored the police who followed him in hot pursuit signalling continuously for him to pull over. The police tailed Garcia until he eventually stopped at a nearby derelict ranch. Inside the property, the police found not only evidence of drugs but also of occult activity.
Garcia and another man, David Serna Valdez, were arrested on drug-related charges, yet their behaviour in custody disturbed the police. Their situation appeared to be of little concern to them, and they claimed that their fate was in the hands of a much higher power which they knew would protect them. Unnerved by the pair’s comments, the police returned to the ranch where they spoke to a caretaker who confirmed that the property was used frequently by members of a drug ring run by Garcia’s uncle, Elio Hernandez Rivera. On the police’s presentation of a photograph, the caretaker also confirmed to them Mark Kilroy had visited the ranch, but just one time.
On receipt of this information, the police returned with no delay to interrogate Garcia in custody. To their surprise, Garcia disclosed further details willingly. He told police that Mark Kilroy had indeed been kidnapped and killed, and that he himself had been involved in his murder. Yet, he didn’t describe it as murder but rather as human sacrifice, one of many he claimed, which were performed in order to ensure occult protection over the drug syndicate. He called it their religion, their ‘voodoo’. The leader of this group, according to Garcia, was Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. He was a master of magic and ordered the murders of the victims, first raping them and then making a ‘magic stew’ from their internal organs and dismembered bodies.
Police needed to amass the evidence, and so took Garcia back to the ranch. He accompanied them willingly and led them straight to the makeshift graveyard where he showed them where to begin digging to uncover the remains of the first of 12 bodies. One of the bodies was that of Mark Kilroy, his skull was split in two, and his brain had been removed. Garcia led police to where they could find the missing brain – floating in a mixture of blood, animal remains and insects in a cauldron located in a nearby shed.
With all the evidence they had collected at the ranch, and Garcia’s willingness to assist them with their enquiries, the police were now evaded by only one last detail – the whereabouts of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.
ADOLFO DE JESUS CONSTANZO
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was born to a Cuban immigrant in Miami in 1962. He had two siblings, and all three children had different fathers. The priest who blessed the infant Adolfo at the age of six months declared to his mother that the child was the chosen one, and destined for great things. The priest was of the Palo Mayombe religion, and blessed the young boy accordingly. Palo mayombe is an African religion, and believes that everything on earth is controlled by the spirits. Accordingly, its followers practise communicating with the spirits in order to control their own fate. It is considered an amoral religion as it allows each worshipper to create his own destiny using either black or white magic and drawing no distinction between the two.
When Adolfo’s mother moved her family to Puerto Rico, she kept their Palo Mayombe faith a secret and allowed the San Juan society to believe that her son had been baptized a Catholic. In private however, she was devoted to her faith and began Adolfo’s education in witchcraft and magic with fellow followers in both San Juan and Haiti. When they moved back to Miami in 1972, Adolfo began his formal training with a priest in Little Havana.
In school, Adolfo was a poor student. He was far more interested in the secrets of Palo Mayombe and chose to spend his time with his teacher. They went together to dig up graves in order to steal the contents for the sacrificial cauldron known to the religion as a ‘Nganga’, around which the main worship and practice of palo mayombe is carried out. Adolfo also began to get involved in petty crime, and within a couple of years had been arrested twice for shoplifting. He believed his ‘powers’ to be increasing though, and his mother and teacher proclaimed him to be developing strong psychic abilities.
Adolfo’s faith took a sinister turn in 1983 when he chose Kadiempembe, Palo Mayombe’s equivalent of Satan, as his own patron saint and henceforth devoted his life to the worship of evil for profit. Encouraged by his mentor, he carved symbols into his own flesh and declared his soul to be dead. This signified the end of his training.
MAGICAL POWERS
Later the same year, Adolfo took a modelling job in Mexico City and when he wasn’t working he went down to the red light district to tell fortunes with tarot cards. He became increasingly popular and developed a reputation as being a clairvoyant and having magic abilities. He attracted supporters and admirers, and took two male lovers from the group who followed him. He did return to Miami when the modelling was over, but he came back to Mexico City the following year. He moved in with his two lovers, and began a profitable career as a fortune teller and cleanser of enemy curses. His services were expensive, and it is recorded that some of his clients paid as much as $4,500 for just one treatment. Adolfo added magical potions to his list of services offered, and used the heads of goats, zebras, snakes and other animals in his costly concoctions.
Ordinary citizens provided Adolfo with a steady and satisfactory income but the real money, he was soon to discover, was to be made from Mexico’s drug dealers. They came to him to predict the outcome of larger deals and to forewarn them of police raids. They even paid him for magic which they believed would make them invisible to the police. For the money they were paying him, Adolfo realised that he would have to put on more of a performance than he had been and so his magical ceremonies became all the more elaborate. It was at this time that he began robbing graves of bones to add to his own cauldron.
Adolfo’s clientele became more and more high-profile. He even attracted members of the Federal Judicial Police, amongst them the commander in charge of narcotics investigations, and the head of the Mexican branch of Interpol. They were not just convinced by Adolfo’s fortune-telling and magic tricks, but revered him as a kind of god – he was their direct link to the spirits. Through his connections in the corrupt Mexican police force, Adolfo became acquainted with more of Mexico’s major drugs dealers and his profits began to soar.
HUMAN SACRIFICES
It is not known at what point Adolfo stopped using the remains of those who were already dead, and instead began to make his own human sacrifices. It was, however, a massive drawing card for the drug barons he sought to impress, and his readiness to mutilate and murder both strangers and friends secured him what he believed to be firm connections within the upper echelons of the drug-dealing cartels. He had perhaps got a little carried away. He approached the Caldaza family, whose business and interests he had been closely protecting and nurturing over an entire year, and declared that he and his powers were the sole reason for their success and mere existence. He claimed that he should be granted full partnership in the association accordingly. The Caldaza family was one of the largest and most notorious drug cartels in Mexico, and they refused his presumptuous request.
Adolfo did not take this rejection well. Days later, the head of the family and six of the household disappeared. One week later, police found seven bodies, which had been dumped in the Zumpango River. They had been tortured, mutilated and some parts of the bodies had been removed. In Adolfo’s cauldron, these missing fingers, toes, hearts and genitals were bubbling away satisfactorily.
SARA MARIA ALDRETE VILLAREAL
Across the border in Brownsville, Texas, Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal was a conscientious and successful student at the Porter High School. A model pupil according to her teachers, she was encouraged to pursue a college education but she became distracted by the attentions of Miguel Zacharias. They married, but it was not to last and after only five months they had separated.
With her failed marriage behind her, the Mexican-born Sara returned home to her parents’ house in Matamoros, but also resumed her academic career and enrolled at Texas Southmost College to study physical education. Once again, she excelled in her chosen field and quickly became one of the college’s most outstanding students. She devoted a lot of time to her studies and even commenced part-time work as both an aerobics
