Mark Kilroy, twenty-one, a premed senior at the University of Texas, vanished in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, at about two in the morning of March 14, 1989, after a night of spring-break revelry in the town's cantinas. According to the account Time pieced together from the Mexican police the next month, a thin, scar-faced man lured him toward a pickup truck with the offer of a ride, two men threw him into the back, and when he tried to escape five blocks away he was caught again and driven to Rancho Santa Elena, a cattle ranch outside the town. He was gagged and blindfolded with tape and left in a dark shed. His captors brought him bread and water and told him he was in no danger. Twelve hours later he was led outside and killed with a machete blow to the back of the neck. The man who swung it, the Mexican police said, was Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, who, officials said, had ordered his followers to go out and bring in an Anglo male.
A month later a search of the ranch in a drug investigation turned up seventy-five pounds of marijuana, and the caretaker, shown Kilroy's photograph, said he had seen him and pointed to a shed. In and around a corral the police dug up the bodies of thirteen males, one as young as fourteen, according to Time; later counts put the dead at the ranch at fifteen. One of them was Kilroy's. In the shed was an iron kettle, the nganga at the center of the group's rituals, holding a charred human brain and a roasted turtle. Time reported that all but two of the victims appeared to have been taken at random from the countryside around Matamoros. Four suspects were arrested, and their questioning laid out a cult of marijuana smugglers who believed human sacrifice would protect their trade. The press called them the Narcosatanists; the members called Constanzo El Padrino, the Godfather.
He was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, to Delia Aurora González, a Cuban immigrant who was fifteen when she had him and who had three children by different fathers. After her first husband died she moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and remarried. Constanzo was baptized a Catholic and served as an altar boy, and he also went with his mother on trips to Haiti to learn about Vodou. The family returned to Miami in 1972. His stepfather died soon after, leaving them some money, and as a teenager he was apprenticed to a local sorcerer and took up Palo Mayombe, a religion that uses animal sacrifice. His mother married again, to a man involved both in the religion and in dealing drugs. Mother and son were arrested repeatedly for theft, vandalism and shoplifting. He graduated from high school but was expelled from prep school.
In Mexico City he met the men who became his first followers, Martín Quintana, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea, and together they built a profitable business casting spells for luck, with costly sacrifices of chickens, goats, snakes, zebras and even lion cubs. Many of the clients were wealthy traffickers and hitmen, and several were senior police officers on the take who introduced him to the city's powerful drug organizations; his group was said to be tied to the Gulf Cartel. He began robbing graves for human bones for the nganga, and then the group decided that live sacrifices would make the spirits stronger. The killings around Mexico City came to more than twenty, the bodies mutilated. According to later accounts, when he demanded a full partnership with the Calzada family, one of the most powerful he knew, and was refused, seven members of the family vanished; their bodies were found with fingers, toes, ears and brains missing, and in one case the spine.
He then allied himself with the Hernández brothers and took up with Sara María Aldrete, a twenty-four-year-old honor student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, whom he made his second in command and the group's high priestess, La Madrina, to run his followers while he moved marijuana into the United States. In 1988 he moved to Rancho Santa Elena, and there the ritual killings continued, of strangers and of rival dealers.
After the raid he fled to Mexico City with four followers. They were found only because police were called to their apartment building over an unrelated dispute. Believing the officers had come for him, Constanzo opened fire with a machine gun, and reinforcements arrived. Determined not to go to prison, he handed the gun to a follower, Álvaro de León, known as El Duby, and ordered him to shoot him and Martín Quintana. By the time police got in on May 6, 1989, both were dead. He was twenty-six. De León and Aldrete were arrested on the spot. Fourteen members of the group were charged with crimes ranging from murder and drug trafficking to obstruction of justice. Aldrete, Elio Hernández and Serafín Hernández were convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to more than sixty years each, and de León to thirty. American authorities have said they intend to prosecute Aldrete for Kilroy's murder if she is ever released.