Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was 26 when he died in a Mexico City apartment in May 1989, shot by one of his own followers as police surrounded the building. A month earlier, Mexican federal police had dug up the bodies of a dozen men on a ranch west of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. One of them was Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student who had vanished during spring break. Men arrested at the ranch said they belonged to a group of marijuana smugglers who believed that human sacrifice gave them magical protection from police and bullets, and they named Constanzo, the man they called "El Padrino", the Godfather, as their leader.
Constanzo was never charged in court. Everything said about his part in the killings rests on the statements of his arrested followers, the findings of Mexican and Texas police, and the reporting of the time. Several of his followers were convicted in Mexico of the killings and sentenced to long prison terms.
Constanzo was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, according to Infobae, Prensa Libre and Vanguardia. Infobae reported that his mother had left Cuba while pregnant with him, a few months before his birth, and that she was 15 when he was born.
The family moved to Puerto Rico, where, Infobae reported, the boy was baptized a Catholic and served as an altar boy in San Juan. His mother practiced Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Cuban religion that uses animal sacrifice, and Infobae and Vanguardia both report that she raised him in it. Infobae wrote that mother and son spent several months in Haiti to learn Haitian Vodou. Vanguardia reported that he and his mother were arrested several times for minor offenses, including theft and vandalism, and that he was expelled from school. Prensa Libre wrote that his record went back to childhood.
In 1989 the Texas journalist Gary Cartwright, writing in Texas Monthly, described Constanzo as having grown up in a Cuban neighborhood near Miami, where Santeria was common, and reported that his mother sent him at about 18 to study Palo Mayombe with an older practitioner. Vanguardia, writing in 2025, said he learned from another Palo Mayombe priest as a young man.
Constanzo went to Mexico City as a young man, by most accounts hoping to work as a model or actor. Infobae put his age at 20; Prensa Libre said 22. Vanguardia wrote that friends in Miami had found him modeling work there, that he went back to Miami for a time and that he returned to Mexico in mid-1984.
The work he found was spiritual. Infobae reported that he read tarot cards and worked as a healer and clairvoyant. In a 2023 report drawing on an investigation by the Milenio journalist Laura Sanchez Ley, who reviewed more than 8,000 pages of the case file, Infobae wrote that by the early 1980s Constanzo had become known as a card reader in the Zona Rosa district, and that his clients reportedly included politicians hoping to win elections and performers hoping for leading roles. Infobae reported animal sacrifices for clients, of chickens, sheep, snakes, horses and even zebras, offered as a source of power.
In Mexico City he gathered his first close followers. Vanguardia and Infobae name Martin Quintana and Omar Orea Ochoa; Infobae and Prensa Libre add Jorge Montes. Vanguardia described Quintana and Orea as his servants, lovers and disciples. Texas Monthly reported that he lived in a costly Mexico City apartment shared with male companions.
His clients came to include drug traffickers. Infobae reported that he tried and failed to become a partner in the business of some of these clients, and that he then turned to Matamoros. A 2021 Prensa Libre profile said he first took bones from cemeteries for his rituals and later came to believe that human sacrifice was more powerful.
Constanzo's name was later linked in the press to celebrities. In 1989 two television actresses were rumored to be connected to him. Vanguardia reported in 2025 that one of them said in 2020 that the claims were invented, and that both had obtained a letter from the attorney general's office stating that they had no connection to the group.
In Matamoros, Constanzo became the spiritual adviser of a family of smugglers. Texas Monthly described the Hernandez family as running marijuana out of Matamoros since the early 1980s. One brother, Saul Hernandez Rivera, was shot dead in about early 1987; another, Serafin Hernandez Rivera, was arrested in the United States after a failed attempt to land a load of marijuana. The youngest brother, Elio Hernandez Rivera, took over the Mexican side of the business.
According to VICE, Constanzo persuaded the family that his magic could reverse their losses. Texas Monthly reported that he offered protection in exchange for a share of the profits, styled himself the group's high priest, and named Elio Hernandez and later Alvaro de Leon Valdez, a gunman known as "El Duby", as his "executioner priests". The magazine reported that Constanzo was probably the first to propose human sacrifice, though it noted that others in the group might have suggested it.
The group's beliefs drew on Palo Mayombe, Santeria and Vodou. Investigators in 1989 likened the rituals to Santeria, and police later said the group practiced a variation of Palo Mayombe. Its members did not call themselves Satanists. Infobae and the podcast drawn from the case file describe the "narcosatanic" label as an invention of the 1980s press; the Mexican media used it widely, and it stuck.
Sara Maria Aldrete Villarreal was a student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville. The Deseret News, in April 1989, quoted an anthropology professor who taught her as calling her "the perfect student", and a physical education teacher who could not believe the allegations until she heard them from Aldrete herself. Texas Monthly described her as an honor student and a nominee for a national student honors listing. Police called her the group's "high priestess"; she became known as "La Madrina". El Financiero reported that Constanzo drew her in around 1987.
Aldrete has always denied taking part in the killings. She says she joined in only one of Constanzo's ceremonies, as part of her anthropology studies, according to La Prensa of Honduras, and in 2026 she told Grupo Animal that she had never been to Rancho Santa Elena.
What is known of the victims comes from the bodies found in April 1989 and from what the arrested men told police. Texas Monthly, in its June 1989 account, identified several of them.
Moises Castillo, 52, lived in Houston and worked the corn fields of a farm settlement near the ranch. He disappeared in May 1988. His elderly father told reporters he had feared the worst. He was one of the last two bodies found.
A boy of 14 disappeared on February 25, 1989, three weeks before Kilroy. His family were evangelical farmers who lived two miles from the ranch. His sister identified him.
AP reported that the dead also included a Matamoros police officer, a volunteer with the Mexican federal police and a 16-year-old. Texas Monthly wrote that some victims were rivals in the drug trade. Police said all the dead were male. According to AP, they believed the sacrifices had gone on for about nine months before the bodies were found, and that two of the victims died after Kilroy.
Not all the victims were named in the reporting of the time, and AP reported in 1989 that the bodies were awaiting identification through dental records. Infobae wrote in 2024 that twelve of the fifteen bodies recovered were identified.
Mark Kilroy was 21, a pre-med student at the University of Texas at Austin from Santa Fe, Texas, near Houston. Texas Monthly reported that he had played basketball and baseball in high school. In March 1989 he went to South Padre Island for spring break with three friends, and one night they crossed into Matamoros to visit its bars.
He disappeared from a Matamoros street at about 2 a.m. on March 14, according to AP. Texas Monthly, which spoke to his friends, reported that one of them last saw him near the steps of a private home. Another friend, who went on the trip but was not with him that night, told ABC13 Houston in 2016 that Kilroy's last words to him were reassurances that there was nothing to worry about and that they were friends.
For a month there was no trace. AP reported that nearly 100 people were questioned and a reward of $15,000 went unclaimed. His disappearance was re-enacted on the Fox program America's Most Wanted. In his hometown, neighbors held a garage sale and a car wash to raise money for the family.
Police later said Kilroy was taken at random. Group members, they said, had been told to "pick one Anglo male that particular night." Texas Monthly, reconstructing events from the suspects' statements, reported that Serafin Hernandez Garcia and three companions took him, that he briefly escaped and was caught by a second car, and that he was held at the ranch overnight before he was killed about twelve hours later. Serafin Hernandez Garcia told police that Constanzo killed Kilroy, AP reported, and Texas Monthly wrote that Constanzo killed him personally. Infobae reported in 2024 that he was killed with a machete. Constanzo was never tried for his death.
The case broke by chance. On Sunday, April 9, 1989, Texas Monthly reported, Serafin Hernandez Garcia drove through a roadblock and led Mexican federal police to Rancho Santa Elena, about 20 miles west of Matamoros. In its 1994 account, AP named the driver as Elio Hernandez and reported that he believed the group's rituals had made him invisible. At the ranch, police found marijuana and then a shed holding ritual objects.
The federal police commander in Matamoros, Juan Benitez Ayala, was leading a drug crackdown that had produced many arrests, Texas Monthly reported. On Monday, April 10, a caretaker at the ranch recognized a photograph of Kilroy. Four suspects were arrested and gave statements, and Serafin Hernandez Garcia led police to Kilroy's grave.
On Tuesday, April 11, police dug up Kilroy's body and, by midafternoon, those of eleven other men. AP reported 12 bodies in nine graves. Cameron County Sheriff Alex Perez called the ranch "a human slaughterhouse." Lt. George Gavito of the sheriff's department said Kilroy had been buried in a grave about three feet deep, with the other bodies nearby. Snapshots of the scene showed a cauldron and body bags. Investigators declined to describe the evidence in detail.
Mexican officials said five men had been arrested. AP reported that Elio Hernandez Rivera, 22, told a news conference that he had taken part in killings, saying, "We killed them for protection." Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox said the group believed that human and animal sacrifices created a magical shield against harm, even against bullets, and that it had about ten members.
Four of the arrested men said they had killed on the orders of a cult "godfather" whom they named as Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. The first reports were confused about him: one AP story described him as a Cuban national in his late forties, and another gave his name in a garbled form. By April 14, AP was reporting him as 26.
Within days, one of the arrested men, Sergio Martinez Salinas, led police to a thirteenth body, a man in his thirties who had been buried about four months earlier, AP reported. Texas Monthly reported that two more bodies were found two days later, Moises Castillo and a man not named, bringing the count to fifteen. AP later reported that the bodies came from the ranch and from a nearby farm, and the Deseret News, in June 1989, wrote of bodies buried on two ranches.
Oran Neck, the U.S. Customs agent in charge in Brownsville, said there was no evidence of cannibalism, contrary to statements officials had made the day before, and that suspects in Mexican custody had told police of 14 human sacrifices. The suspects were held pending formal charges of murder, kidnapping, weapons possession and crimes against the state, according to Jose Silva Arroyo, narcotics supervisor for the Mexican federal judicial police in Matamoros.
A search of the Aldrete family home in Matamoros found an altar in her upstairs room, AP and the Deseret News reported, but no bodies. Her parents told reporters they had last seen her a week before the raid and knew nothing of her activities. Mexican federal police burned the ranch shed to the ground after a curandero, a folk healer, purified the site, Texas Monthly reported.
Constanzo had been seen in Brownsville on the day the bodies were found, AP reported, and officials feared he was heading for South Florida, where he had contacts. Officials described him and Aldrete as "extremely dangerous." Her clothing was found in a house the group had abandoned, and police at first feared she had been a victim, Texas Monthly reported. In fact she had flown to Mexico City with Constanzo.
The group went into hiding in early April: Constanzo, Martin Quintana Rodriguez, Aldrete, Omar Francisco Orea Ochoa and Alvaro de Leon Valdez, according to the Deseret News. Infobae reported that they hid in an apartment in the Cuauhtemoc borough, near the Paseo de la Reforma, and that rival traffickers with police connections were also hunting them, so that word of where Constanzo was spread through the underworld.
On May 6, 1989, about three weeks after the bodies were found, police surrounded the building. Infobae's 2024 account, which draws on the case history, says three members of the group walked out and were arrested. Constanzo, Aldrete, de Leon and Quintana held out. They fired on the police, burned cash on a stove and threw money out of the windows. Texas Monthly reported that Constanzo fired a machine gun and threw money from a fourth-floor window. Vanguardia reported about two hours of gunfire.
When their ammunition was running low, according to Infobae, Constanzo ordered de Leon to kill him and Quintana. After some hesitation, de Leon shot both men and then surrendered with Aldrete. Texas Monthly gave the same order of events: de Leon shot Quintana, Constanzo's companion and bodyguard, and then Constanzo. The Associated Press, reporting the 1994 sentences, described the deaths as an apparent suicide pact.
The account has never been fully settled. Infobae noted in 2023 that versions still differ on whether the police killed Constanzo, whether Aldrete ordered his death, or whether he asked a follower to shoot him to avoid prison. Aldrete told Grupo Animal in 2026 that she had thrown a note out of a window asking for help, because she wanted to escape him, and that he "could not be left alive" because so many people were involved in the case. Those remain her claims.
In May 1989 Aldrete, Orea Ochoa and de Leon were indicted in the two deaths in the apartment, those of Constanzo and Quintana, the Deseret News reported.
On June 10, 1989, murder indictments were filed against the same three people in connection with the 15 deaths at Matamoros, before the Ninth Federal Criminal Court in Mexico City, the Deseret News reported. The charges also covered weapons, drugs and criminal association. A court spokesman, Hector Miranda, confirmed the filing; all three pleaded not guilty. The paper described Aldrete, then 24, as the group's high priestess, Orea Ochoa, 23, as one of Constanzo's lovers, and de Leon, 22, as his bodyguard.
A separate case went forward in Tamaulipas. In March 1990, AP reported that Judge Francisco Salvador Perez of the Fourth State District Court in Matamoros was weighing the evidence against seven people accused of the killings, in case number 89-110.
Orea Ochoa died in prison, Chilango reported in 2010.
In May 1994, five years after the arrests, the Associated Press reported the sentences in the Matamoros case, which it described as the ritual slaying of a Texas college student and 12 other people. Aldrete received 62 years in prison. Four men received 67 years each: Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, David Serna Valdez and Sergio Martinez Salinas. De Leon, held in Mexico City, was awaiting sentence. AP noted that Aldrete maintained her innocence and said police had tortured a confession out of her. Kilroy's mother said the sentences brought her family a sense of relief, and that she thought the people of Mexico could feel safer too.
Reports on Aldrete's later legal history differ. El Financiero reported in 2024 that she was convicted in 1990 of 13 homicides, with further counts of drug offenses, criminal association and illegal burial and desecration of bodies, that she was first sentenced to 62 years and that the sentence was cut to 50 years in October 1995. Grupo Animal reported in 2026 that her original sentence totaled 647 years and five months, on charges of homicide, drug offenses, illegal weapons stockpiling, desecration of bodies and criminal association, and that it was later reduced to just under 50 years. Chilango, in 2010, also gave the 647-year figure. The two totals likely reflect separate sentences in separate proceedings, but the reports do not explain how they fit together.
De Leon, Chilango reported in 2010, was serving a sentence for intentional homicide and drug trafficking. The length of his sentence was not reported.
Aldrete has spent more than three decades in Mexican prisons. Grupo Animal listed at least eight facilities, among them the women's prison in eastern Mexico City, Santa Martha, the Islas Marias, and Tepepan in Mexico City, where she had spent nine years as of August 2026. In 2000 she published a memoir, Me dicen la narcosatanica, written with the writer Josefina Estrada.
She says she was tortured for six days after her arrest and was put before a judge only on May 12, 1989. Grupo Animal reported that her account was documented under the Istanbul Protocol, the international standard for investigating torture. In the 2023 documentary series La Narcosatanica, Infobae reported, she repeated those claims. Federico Ponce Rojas, who took part in the investigation, flatly denied them in the same series and called one of her claims a "devilish fantasy". No court decision on the allegations has been reported.
As of August 2026, Grupo Animal reported, Aldrete was 61, in poor health, and still held at Tepepan; her most recent request for early release had been denied over an unpaid reparation of damages, which her supporters say has lapsed. She has a federal public defender and a lawyer in Tamaulipas.
Mark Kilroy's parents turned their loss into public work against drugs. In March 1990 they told AP that a growing awareness of the dangers of drugs was the one good to come from their son's death, and that they had not read the books rushed out about the case, which his mother said seemed meant to sensationalize it. They founded the Mark Kilroy Foundation, which supports drug-prevention and violence-prevention work and counseling for children at risk; the Congressional Record dates the foundation to 1995.
His mother died on December 22, 2014, aged 70, after a long illness. The Texas Senate adjourned in her memory on March 2, 2015, and a Texas congressman paid tribute to her in the U.S. House on February 26, 2015, recalling that she had fostered seven children and served as a volunteer paramedic as well as leading the foundation.
One of Kilroy's friends who had planned to make the 1989 trip and changed his mind now gives safety seminars in his memory, ABC13 Houston reported in 2016. The station said the case changed spring break for a generation of students.
The Matamoros case drew intense coverage. Texas Monthly reported that about 250 journalists from around the world came to the border. A state legislator from Port Isabel proposed a Texas capital murder law in response. Mexico had no federal death penalty, AP noted in 1989.
In 2021 VICE visited the Matamoros house linked to the group, by then abandoned and known locally as a haunted house; VICE noted that it was not where the killings took place. In 2023 HBO Max released La Narcosatanica, a documentary series on Aldrete, and Laura Sanchez Ley's podcast Expediente Narcosatanico, drawn from the declassified file, revisited the group's ties to powerful clients and to officials.
Constanzo's guilt. He was never charged, tried or convicted. The killings at the ranch are attributed to him by police and by his followers' statements; no court ruled on his conduct.
The number of victims. Counts range from 12 bodies on the first day to 13 (AP, April 14, 1989), to 15 (Texas Monthly, June 1989; Deseret News, June 1989; AP, 1990 and 1994). The 1994 sentences covered the slaying of 13 people as AP described them. VICE, in 2021, wrote of at least 16 killings and about 10 more suspected; Prensa Libre wrote of more than twenty. These higher totals were not traced to an official record.
Killings in Mexico City. Texas Monthly reported in 1989 that Constanzo's inner circle in Mexico City may have been involved in at least eight more killings. Those victims were not named in the reports, and no conviction for those killings was reported.
His birthplace and age. Early AP reports called him a Cuban national in his late forties, and Texas Monthly called him Cuban-born. Later reporting gives Miami, November 1, 1962, and he was 26 at his death.
How he died. De Leon and others said Constanzo ordered his own death; Aldrete has suggested he was silenced; Infobae in 2023 called the matter unresolved.
How police found the apartment. Aldrete says she threw a note from the window. No official account of how the police located the building has been published.
Celebrity clients. Reports of famous clients come from testimony in the case file as described by Milenio and Infobae, and some have been denied. Two actresses obtained an official letter clearing them.
November 1, 1962: Constanzo born in Miami.
Mid-1984: returns to Mexico, according to Vanguardia, after time in Miami.
About 1987: Sara Aldrete drawn into the group (El Financiero).
May 1988: Moises Castillo disappears near Matamoros.
About mid-1988: police later say the sacrifices began about nine months before April 1989.
February 25, 1989: a 14-year-old boy from a family near the ranch disappears.
March 14, 1989, about 2 a.m.: Mark Kilroy disappears in Matamoros.
April 9, 1989: Serafin Hernandez Garcia drives through a checkpoint and leads police to Rancho Santa Elena.
April 10, 1989: caretaker recognizes Kilroy's photograph; four suspects arrested.
April 11, 1989: Kilroy's body and eleven others dug up.
By April 14, 1989 (AP report): Sergio Martinez Salinas has led police to a thirteenth body.
Mid-April 1989: two more bodies found, bringing the count to fifteen (Texas Monthly).
May 6, 1989: police surround the group's Mexico City apartment; Constanzo and Martin Quintana Rodriguez are shot dead by Alvaro de Leon Valdez; Aldrete and de Leon arrested.
May 1989: Aldrete, Orea Ochoa and de Leon indicted in the deaths of Constanzo and Quintana.
June 10, 1989: murder indictments in the 15 Matamoros deaths filed in the Ninth Federal Criminal Court, Mexico City.
March 1990: Tamaulipas judge weighing evidence against seven accused.
May 1994: Aldrete sentenced to 62 years; four men to 67 years each.
October 1995: Aldrete's sentence reported reduced to 50 years (El Financiero).
1995: Mark Kilroy Foundation founded (Congressional Record).
2000: Aldrete publishes Me dicen la narcosatanica.
December 22, 2014: Kilroy's mother dies.
2023: HBO Max documentary series La Narcosatanica released.
August 2026: Aldrete still held at Tepepan (Grupo Animal).