Seven names, nine courtrooms, and a map that no one would draw on purpose: a Scottish settler on an island hillside in the 1760s, an American handyman in Nassau in 1973, a warehouse worker in Freeport who walked into a police station, a Guatemalan day laborer whose name became a statute, a former police officer in a Salvadoran town, a Miami-born adviser who died in Mexico City before any court could hear him, and a mother and son whose paper trail runs through the Bahamas. They do not make a region in any tidy sense. What they share is the way the law met them: late, in pieces, and often for less than the public believed.
Lewis Hutchinson was executed in the square at Spanish Town, Jamaica, on March 16, 1773. He was a Scottish settler, described as a doctor, who lived on a remote estate in the hills of St Ann. In Jamaican tradition he is remembered as the man responsible for the deaths of travelers on the route through the island’s interior, and the Jamaica Gleaner has called him the island’s first serial murderer. The court record that the newspaper accounts describe is narrower. According to a 2002 Gleaner history feature by Rebecca Tortello, he was tried for one killing only: that of John Callendar, a soldier who had come to arrest him.
The rest of his story comes down through later histories and local memory. Two other men were convicted and sentenced to death in the same affair for the murders of two named victims. The number of people who died on his estate has never been established, and those deaths were never tried against Hutchinson himself.
Born in Scotland in 1733, according to the Gleaner (2002), he came to Jamaica in the 1760s. Paul H. Williams, writing in The Gleaner in 2024, reported an unnamed source’s suggestion that he might have left Scotland after similar crimes there; no court record of an earlier offense was cited. His neighbors accused him of building his herd from their cattle, and Tortello wrote that most of his cattle were strays taken from neighboring properties. His house stood in the Pedro district of St Ann, near the old route from St Ann’s Bay on the north coast across the island to the south, and Tortello wrote that it was the only inhabited place for miles, which is how travelers came to stop there.
What was said about the killings was tradition, not a finding of any court. Tortello wrote that travelers began to die soon after Hutchinson arrived, and Williams that he was reported to have entertained guests and then killed them as they left. Rumors spread through the district, but nothing was done for years. Williams explained why: the authorities did not act for want of evidence, and enslaved people, who were the witnesses to what happened on the estate, could not testify against white colonists under the law of the time. In his words, the master of the estate "was untouchable, it seemed." No traveler who died there has been named, and no count has ever been given.
One neighbor is named. Jonathan Hutton, also a doctor, lived nearby. Tortello wrote that Hutchinson injured him and that he survived; Williams wrote that Hutton was the second-to-last person Hutchinson killed. The accounts conflict, neither gives a date, and Hutton’s case was not among the charges reported at the trial.
The end came when the authorities moved against him. A soldier came with a warrant for his arrest, and Hutchinson killed him. Tortello named the soldier as John Callendar; Williams wrote that it happened in front of other colonists and that the authorities then acted quickly. He was arrested at Old Harbour, St Catherine, and brought to Spanish Town for trial. Tortello wrote that the testimony of the enslaved witnesses was judged to be hearsay, so he was tried only for the murder of John Callendar. He pleaded not guilty and was represented by a respected lawyer, but he was convicted. The court, the judge and the lawyer have not been named, and no date for the trial has been recorded.
The evidence, Tortello wrote, also exposed others. James Walker and Roger Maddix were convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of William Lickley and Timothy Cronin. Neither victim is described beyond his name. A woman tried in connection with Cronin’s death pleaded not guilty and was acquitted. Whether Walker and Maddix were executed is not recorded. Tortello wrote that the trial records were kept at the National Archives.
Hutchinson was executed at Spanish Town, and Williams gave the date as March 16, 1773. He quoted the writer Olive Senior, in her Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, as writing that he showed no remorse to the end, and Senior in turn quoted the Reverend G. W. Bridges, author of The Annals of Jamaica, as recording that Hutchinson left "one hundred pounds in gold to erect a monument." He wrote his own epitaph, a rhyming couplet, and asked for it to be cut on a tombstone. The two Gleaner features print it slightly differently. Tortello gave it as "Their sentence, pride and malice, I defy. Despise their power, and like a Roman, die." Williams gave the second line as "Despite their power, and, like a Roman, died." The wish was not carried out, according to both.
Most of what is said about Hutchinson was never tested. The killings of travelers are attributed to him by tradition and by the accounts of the enslaved, but he was tried only for John Callendar. Williams counts Jonathan Hutton among the dead and Tortello says he survived. Williams reported an unnamed source’s suggestion of crimes in Scotland, and no record was cited. He is called a doctor in every account, but Tortello wrote only that he may have studied medicine.
Michiah Shobek was a handyman from Milwaukee who was executed in Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas, on the morning of October 19, 1976. He was 22. A Bahamian court had convicted him of murdering Irwin Bornstein, a 44-year-old accountant from New York, in January 1974. He had also confessed to killing two other Americans in Nassau over the same winter: Paul Howell, a 50-year-old lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, and Katie Smith, a 17-year-old from Detroit. United Press International reported that he was charged with both deaths. He was never tried for either.
His name appears in more than one form. The Associated Press and the historian William Steel Lofquist print it as Michiah Shobek; The Tribune of Nassau has used Michaiah. The accountant’s name varies too: the Associated Press gives Bornstein, while United Press International and Lofquist give Bernstein, and The Tribune printed Borstein.
Little about his early life was reported. The Associated Press described him in 1976 as a Milwaukee handyman, and UPI called him a Milwaukee native. The Tribune, looking back in 2013, said he had moved to Nassau from Milwaukee. His mother still lived in Milwaukee, where she worked as a cleaner. When he first went to The Bahamas, what work he did there and when he was born have not been reported.
All three people he confessed to killing were Americans visiting New Providence, the island on which Nassau stands, and all three died within about seven weeks. According to Lofquist’s history of executions in The Bahamas, Paul Howell died on December 5, 1973, and Katie Smith on January 26, 1974. The Associated Press described Katie Smith as a tourist. No public statement by the families, and no memorial or campaign in their names, has been reported.
Shobek confessed to all three. The Associated Press reported in October 1976 that the confession had come 29 months before his execution. In court, according to UPI, he said: "God, my Father, told me who to destroy in Nassau." He described the three Americans as "Angels of Lucifer." His defense argued that he was insane, and UPI reported that the appeal court rejected the psychiatric evidence offered on his behalf as unconvincing. Lofquist, whose study draws on the Nassau newspapers and Bahamian archival records, writes that Shobek was tried and convicted only for Bornstein’s murder. Howell and Smith in law remain confessed killings, not convictions.
The dates do not agree. UPI reported the conviction as taking place in 1974, while Lofquist gives September 26, 1975, as the date of the death sentence; the gap has never been explained. A statement prepared in the White House press office, now held in the papers of President Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, records that the American Embassy in Nassau had helped him obtain a prominent Bahamian attorney, who pursued his right of appeal, and that the guilty verdict was affirmed on appeal.
UPI, reporting before the execution, said that a year earlier his lawyers and the American Embassy had persuaded the Bahamian government to allow more time for appeals, saving him by a matter of hours. Lofquist writes that the execution was delayed after his mother raised claims about her son’s mental health. In the month before October 1976 the Bahamian minister Donald Rolle announced that the appeals had run their course, UPI reported. The Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy rejected a plea to spare his life, and the execution was set for October 19.
His mother’s appeal reached the United States government. The Ford Library statement records that the embassy had passed an appeal by Shobek’s mother to the Bahamian government. The Associated Press reported that President Ford relayed her appeal to the Bahamian authorities but was unable to become further involved in Bahamian affairs. On the night before the execution Thomas Cannon, a Legal Aid Society lawyer acting for the family, spent 45 minutes on the telephone with the President’s chief of staff pleading for intervention, the Associated Press reported, and failed. Lofquist sums up the outcome in one line: American authorities refused to intervene. His mother did not travel to Nassau. "There’s nothing I can do now to save him," she said. She spent the night in a vigil with relatives in Milwaukee and heard the news on the radio. The family wanted his body returned to Milwaukee, Cannon said, but could not pay for it; the embassy told him the costs would run to most of $1,000. "She is a cleaning lady and simply does not have access to those kinds of funds," Cannon said. Lofquist counts him among the few Americans ever executed in The Bahamas.
Between May and September 2003, four boys from Freeport, the main town on Grand Bahama, died. Mackinson Colas and Junior Reme were 11, Deangelo McKenzie 13 and Desmond Rolle 14. Police had no answer for months. In October 2003 a 35-year-old warehouse worker named Cordell Farrington went to the police himself and confessed that he had killed them, and that the year before he had killed Jamal Robins, 22, the man he lived with.
He was charged with five counts of murder, but none of the five cases ended in a final murder conviction. A jury convicted him of murdering Robins in 2006 and he was sentenced to death. Two years later the Court of Appeal ruled that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intent to kill, substituted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and imposed life imprisonment. In 2010 prosecutors accepted his pleas of guilty to manslaughter of the four boys on the same ground, and a judge gave him four life sentences. On March 30, 2015, the Court of Appeal set aside the life sentence in the Robins case and sent it back to the Supreme Court for a fresh sentencing hearing, ordering that he stay in custody meanwhile. The four life terms for the boys were not challenged.
The town’s months of waiting are recalled in a May 2005 column by Larry Smith in The Tribune. Police were, in his words, totally stumped, and kept much of what they knew from the public; the Freeport News criticized that silence in an editorial and suggested it was a political decision. Rumors spread across the island, some about cults and foreign traffickers, and some damaged the reputations of people who had done nothing. Police publicly denied one of them. Officials from the FBI, Scotland Yard and the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children joined the work, according to Smith, and the American program America’s Most Wanted prepared a segment. In early October 2003 police arrested three people on the strength of tips from the public, and none of it led to an answer. A fifth boy, 12, had been reported missing on May 9, 2003; police said that case was not connected to the four, and none of the charges against Farrington concerned it. Smith wrote that the case was solved only because Farrington turned himself in. He told officers that he "couldn’t take it anymore," The Nassau Guardian reported.
In late October 2003 Farrington appeared in Freeport magistrate’s court charged with five counts of murder. Because the offenses were indictable he did not enter a plea, and he was remanded to Fox Hill Prison. The media were barred from the arraignment. He was indicted in the Supreme Court in Nassau in April 2004. His lawyer, Romona Farquharson, applied to have the case moved from Freeport to Nassau, and in May 2005 told Smith she did not expect a quick trial, because others had waited three or four years on serious charges and would be heard first. The charge laid in magistrate’s court said Robins was killed in Freeport at some time between July 12, 2002 and October 26, 2003; The Tribune in 2014 and The Nassau Guardian in 2015 dated his death to 2002. Robins’s mother told The Tribune in 2006 that she had contacted Farrington when her son could not be reached, and that Farrington was the last person she knew to have seen her son. His father hoped to give him a Christian burial in Freeport.
Before the Robins trial the defense asked for all five killings to be tried together. Farquharson argued that the five deaths, taken together, showed a pattern of psychosis. Justice Anita Allen ordered separate trials; the defense appealed, and the Court of Appeal did not overturn her ruling, The Tribune reported. The Robins case went first. The trial lasted about a month, ended in August 2006 and heard 32 witnesses: people who knew Farrington, police investigators, forensic experts and psychiatrists. The defense did not dispute that Farrington had killed Robins. Farquharson argued that he had been suffering from an abnormality of mind at the time, relying heavily on the psychiatrist Dr. Michael Neville and on Farrington’s account of a troubled childhood. Farrington gave an unsworn statement from the dock. The prosecution’s case was that he was not insane, knew right from wrong, and had killed Robins in cold blood.
Robins’s relatives wept at the verdict. "I am very happy with the verdict, justice has been served and now my son can rest," his father said. His mother accused Farrington of "playing crazy." Asked whether he wished to say anything, Farrington told the court, "I turned myself in to police because I knew I committed a crime"; The Tribune described the rest of what he said as incoherent. Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Cheryl Grant-Bethel said proceedings in the boys' cases were expected to begin within three months.
Justice Allen sentenced Farrington to death. In October 2007, The Bahama Journal reported, he went before the Court of Appeal to challenge the sentence. His lawyer, Wayne Munroe, argued that the judge had not taken into account that Farrington had turned himself in, confessed and cooperated, which in counsel’s view showed remorse, and that she had not weighed his personality disorder or his history of childhood abuse. In October 2008 the Court of Appeal, with its President, Dame Joan Sawyer, sitting with Justices Milton Ganpatsingh and Emmanuel Osadebay, quashed the murder conviction and the death sentence, held that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intention to kill that murder requires, substituted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility and imposed life imprisonment.
In the end there was no trial in the boys' cases. In the week before sentencing in 2010, prosecutors accepted Farrington’s pleas of guilty to manslaughter in all four deaths, on the ground that he had been suffering from a severe personality disorder. At the hearing before Senior Justice Jon Isaacs the prosecutor, Neil Brathwaite, read Farrington’s confession statements into the record. The boys' relatives reacted with outbursts, and the judge ordered police to remove them from the courtroom. Farrington apologized to the families. The Freeport News reported in May 2011 that the families of the boys felt they had never received justice.
On the evening of July 5, 1998, federal fugitive agents arrested a woman of 63 and her 23-year-old son in New York on a warrant from Utah. The charge was minor: the pair were accused of buying a used car with a check that bounced. But Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old widow who rented rooms in a Manhattan townhouse, had become the subject of a police inquiry that day, and the pair soon faced the prosecution that made their names.
The woman was Sante Kimes. The Nevada Appeal’s archives, as reported in 2000 and 2014, show that she moved from Los Angeles to Carson City, Nevada, in 1947, was adopted that year by a local couple, and graduated from Carson High School in 1952 under the name Sandy Chambers. When she was arrested in 1998 an Associated Press report described a long list of earlier arrests for theft and forged credit cards. In the 1980s she and her husband, a general contractor, faced a federal case in Nevada. The Ninth Circuit later summarized the government’s evidence: the couple recruited young women from Mexico who were in the country illegally to work as maids, kept them isolated from their families, and used locks, fences and threats of deportation to keep them from leaving. A federal jury convicted her of five counts of involuntary servitude, and of transporting undocumented immigrants, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and escape, and she was sentenced in 1986 to five years, the Star-Bulletin reported. On July 24, 1991, the Ninth Circuit rejected her challenge to the conviction.
She and her son Kenneth were convicted of Silverman’s murder in Manhattan in 2000, though no body was ever located, and on June 27, 2000, were sentenced to an aggregate of 120 years to life; the Appellate Division affirmed in 2006. The Appellate Division recorded that the pair used more than 30 aliases and offered strangers jobs, money and, in at least three cases, trips to the Bahamas in return for favors. In November 2003 Kenneth Kimes admitted a Los Angeles murder, that of David Kazdin, and agreed to testify. In January 2004 prosecutors dropped the death penalty against his mother. A Los Angeles jury convicted her in July 2004 of Kazdin’s murder, and she received life without parole. She died on May 19, 2014, in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York, aged 79, still denying both killings.
The Bahamas appears in this record without a verdict. Syed Bilal Ahmed, a banker based in the Cayman Islands, died in 1996 after dealings with the mother and son in the Bahamas. Within days of the 1998 arrests a Bahamas police inspector, Douglas Hanna, told the Associated Press that his department had information linking the Kimeses to the banker. Sante Kimes was never charged over Ahmed’s death, and no court has ruled on it. Her son has since said, at the Los Angeles trial, that she directed it; that is his account, and it is not a finding.
On July 18, 1946, José María Miculax Bux was executed outside the Cementerio General in Guatemala City. He was 21. Less than three months earlier he had been arrested and accused of killing boys and adolescents in and around the capital, in Mixco and near Antigua Guatemala, since the start of the year. To try him, the Congress of Guatemala passed Decree 235, which shortened the procedure in criminal cases, and in popular use the law is known by his name: the Ley Miculax.
The case came during the government of President Juan José Arévalo, which followed the revolution of 1944. Guatemalan outlets describe it as the first serial killing case in the country’s records. In 2023 Prensa Libre, reporting on a modern forensic investigation, went back to Miculax as the first serial offender identified in Guatemala’s historical records and gave the number of children he killed as more than 14. Most other reports give 15, and Prensa Libre’s 2016 archive feature reported that he was accused of killing 15 children and of other offenses against ten more. The República news site reported in 2023 that the death sentence rested on two of the 15 killings proven against him. His cousin, Mariano Macú Miculax, was tried with him and sentenced to 30 years in prison as his accomplice.
Miculax was born in 1925 in Patzicía, Chimaltenango, and worked as a day laborer. República’s 2023 account of his childhood rests on what he later told a cellmate: he was born to a mother who was still a teenager, grew up with a stepfather who was violent toward the family, and never went to school. The same report says he took up stealing, was arrested at 16 for robberies and sentenced to four years, and was released in January 1946, when his cousin Mariano met him.
The sources differ on when the series began: El Heraldo and the Diario La Voz put it between January and April 1946, La Voz de Guate and Soy502 between February and April. The towns named are Guatemala City, Mixco, Santa Catarina Pinula, Antigua Guatemala and San Pedro Sacatepéquez, in the departments of Guatemala, Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango. The victims were boys. El Heraldo and the Diario La Voz gave their ages as five aged 15, two aged 14, four aged 13, three aged 12 and one aged 11. República gave a different breakdown, ranging from 10 to 18 years old, and Soy502, drawing on Nuestro Diario, gave 11 to 15. Some were never identified. Enrique Sactic Cuyuch, 14, came from San Pedro Sacatepéquez, and La Voz de Guate reported that he had come to the capital to sell firewood; Relato.gt names Guillermo Rolando Castillo among the victims. The remaining boys are not named in the news reports.
Families kept their children indoors, Soy502 reported. The press called the unknown offender el monstruo de Guatemala, a name that has stayed with the case. President Arévalo spoke of the urgency of making an arrest, the authorities asked the public for help, and a reward was offered. A rumor spread, with no evidence behind it, that the president himself was behind the deaths, tying them to a car accident in December 1945 that had injured Arévalo’s spine; Relato.gt called it baseless gossip.
The break came from a witness. An elderly woman went to the police and described a man she had seen, and Relato.gt reported that a sketch was drawn from her description. República reported that the accounts of four children who survived, together with her description, confirmed his guilt. Miculax was arrested on April 26, 1946, according to Soy502, Relato.gt and La Voz de Guate; El Heraldo and the Diario La Voz give April 26 and 27 as the dates of the two arrests, and República gives April 27 as the day the woman identified him. His cousin Mariano was arrested in Antigua Guatemala. Miculax confessed before the Juzgado Quinto de Paz and named his cousin as his accomplice, the Diario La Voz and La Voz de Guate report. Mariano denied the accusations; at a careo, the formal confrontation used in Guatemalan criminal procedure, contradictions came out in his account, El Heraldo and the Diario La Voz reported, and he was charged as well. According to Relato.gt, Miculax also tried to shift blame onto his cousin, including for the death of an elderly woman that the court attributed to a fall. In his last words he claimed he had killed only four and blamed his cousin for the rest.
República reported that delays in the case led to the new law. The parents of the victims wrote to President Arévalo asking that both men be executed in public, saying that only with their lives could they pay for their crimes; Relato.gt reported a petition from residents of Antigua Guatemala demanding the death penalty for the two cousins. The Diario La Voz quotes the decree’s preamble on crimes that cause "justified alarm in society." NVI Noticias of Oaxaca reported that the crimes caused public outrage and that Arévalo pressed for a fast trial and penalty. At the trial Miculax described the killings calmly, and those present described him as sadistic, República reported. On June 18, 1946, he was sentenced to death. Mariano Macú Miculax was sentenced to 30 years as an accomplice; according to República there was evidence that he shared his cousin’s intentions, but not that he had acted directly in the killings. The judge and the court have not been named, and no appeal has been reported. The execution took place one month after the sentence, on July 18, 1946, according to Prensa Libre, El Heraldo, Soy502 and La Voz de Guate; Relato.gt and NVI Noticias give July 17.
On the night of May 7, 2021, neighbors in Chalchuapa, a town in western El Salvador, called the police. By the end of that night two women were dead: Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, 26, and her mother, Mirna Cruz Lima, 57. The man arrested was a former police officer named Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez, and in June 2022 a specialized court in Santa Ana convicted him of two femicides and sentenced him to 70 years in prison, 35 for each woman.
His arrest opened a much larger case. Forensic teams worked at the property from May to July 2021, and in October 2021 the Institute of Legal Medicine handed over 12 identified victims to eight families, EFE reported; two of the 12 were minors, and one family received five relatives, two of them children. Estimates of how many more people might have died ran from about 30, the figure given by the prosecutor Graciela Sagastume, who said an exact number was hard to give, to more than 40, a figure attributed to Osorio himself in local press reports and one the Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, called unproven. "What is certain is that we have delivered 12," Sagastume said. Osorio became the prosecution’s cooperating witness against nine other people. A judge acquitted all nine in May 2023; an appeals chamber annulled that verdict, and at a retrial in October 2023 six were convicted and three acquitted. No charges against Osorio himself for those deaths have been reported. In November 2022 he received a further 18 years in a separate case concerning a girl.
Osorio joined El Salvador’s National Civil Police in 1997, according to an AFP report from May 2021. He was separated from the force in 2005 after he was accused in a case involving a minor, and he was in prison until 2011, the agency reported. The national police chief, Mauricio Arriaza, told Reuters that Osorio had been removed from the ranks about 15 years before the 2021 killings after a criminal conviction and had served a five-year sentence. AFP and Reuters both gave his age as 51 in 2021; Diario El Mundo described him as 53 at his sentencing in June 2022. Little else about his early life was reported. He lived in the Las Flores neighborhood of Chalchuapa, a town of Santa Ana department roughly 73 to 90 kilometers west of San Salvador, depending on the report. Prosecutors later said the house did not belong to him but to a third party.
Mirna Cruz Lima worked at a store alongside her daughter, according to Reuters, which spoke to the family at the end of May 2021. AFP gave the daughter’s name as Jackeline Cristina Palomo, and Diario El Mundo, reporting from the trial, called her Jackeline. The two women had been looking for Mirna’s son, Alexis Palomo Lima, whom Reuters described as a fourth-year medical student who planned to travel to the United States to work. AFP gave his age as 24. Police said Osorio killed Alexis, Reuters reported, and the death of Alexis is not among the convictions reported against Osorio. "If it had not been for her, I would still be looking for them," the women’s father and grandfather, then 79, told Reuters in July 2021. Asked in May whether he could forgive, he said he could not judge Osorio and that God would judge him. "My soul has left me," he said. AFP’s report of May 28, 2021, said that two men had also died, named one as Alexis and said the second was Osorio’s own brother; President Nayib Bukele had said publicly that Osorio killed several people, including his brother. In those first weeks Osorio was charged with killing two women and two men, Reuters reported. The outcome of the charges over the two men has not been reported.
AFP reported that Osorio was detained on May 8; its later account and the reports from the trial place the arrest on the night of May 7. On May 12 he was charged with two counts of femicide, the offense in Salvadoran law for the killing of a woman for reasons of gender, and two counts of homicide were added later, according to Reuters. He was held in the maximum-security prison at Zacatecoluca, in La Paz department. The Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro, used the word psychopath in public and told reporters, according to EFE, that the case did not reflect the country’s general pattern. The authorities also moved against others. By May 20, 2021, a magistrates' court in Chalchuapa ordered provisional detention for 11 people linked to Osorio, on charges of aggravated femicide and aggravated homicide, AFP reported, and its May 28 report said that at least ten alleged accomplices were in custody and that prosecutors were working on at least 11 cases of aggravated femicide. By May 20, AFP and EFE reported that at least 14 people had been identified in the work at the property, and Israel Ticas, a forensic criminologist working for the prosecution, told AFP the work could last more than a month. Villatoro announced the end of the work on July 14, 2021, without giving a total, Reuters reported, and Reuters added that Ticas had been sanctioned after suggesting there were at least 40 victims. In June 2021 the magazine Revista Factum published what it described as his confession; a court ordered the article taken down two days later, according to Reuters, which said it could not verify the account, and Diario El Mundo later reported that a judge had ordered its removal for breaching the confidentiality of the case. The prosecution’s file stayed under reserve, and much of what was later known about his testimony came from the hearings against the people he accused.
The trials of the others followed one another through 2023. Diario El Mundo reported in January that 10 accused had been processed and a judge sent ten to trial, and El Diario de Hoy reported that the house had been seized; the trial, expected to last two weeks, opened in April. On May 8, 2023, a judge acquitted nine defendants, El Diario de Hoy and Diario El Mundo reported, after finding Osorio’s testimony unreliable; the prosecution called the judge partial, and the judge in turn accused the prosecution of exposing her to "media lynchings." Police re-arrested eight of the acquitted on May 11 on a charge of unlawful association, and they were sent to prison on May 27. On May 13 the prosecution won forfeiture of the house to the state. The prosecution appealed in June, an appeals chamber ordered a new trial in August, the retrial opened in September, and on October 6, 2023, six people were convicted. El Diario de Hoy reported in June 2024 a 45-year sentence for a femicide linked to the Chalchuapa property.
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was 26 when he died in an apartment in Mexico City in May 1989, killed by one of his own followers as police surrounded the building. A month earlier Mexican federal police had begun to establish a number of deaths at a ranch west of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. One was Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student. Men arrested at the ranch said they belonged to a group of marijuana smugglers who believed that human sacrifice gave them protection from police and bullets, and they named Constanzo, the man they called "El Padrino," the Godfather, as their leader. He was never charged in court. Everything said about his part rests on the statements of his arrested followers, the findings of Mexican and Texas police, and the reporting of the time. Several followers were convicted in Mexico and sentenced to long prison terms.
He was born on November 1, 1962, in Miami, to a Cuban immigrant mother, according to Infobae, Prensa Libre and Vanguardia. 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 raised him in an Afro-Cuban religion she practiced, Infobae and Vanguardia both report, and Infobae wrote that mother and son spent several months in Haiti. 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 him as having grown up in a Cuban neighborhood near Miami. The work he found was spiritual. Infobae reported that he read tarot cards and worked as a healer and clairvoyant, and in a 2023 report drawing on the Milenio journalist Laura Sanchez Ley, who reviewed more than 8,000 pages of the case file, wrote that by the early 1980s he was known as a card reader in the Zona Rosa district of Mexico City, with clients said to include politicians and performers. Vanguardia and Infobae name Martin Quintana and Omar Orea Ochoa among his first close followers. Constanzo’s name was later linked in the press to celebrities; Vanguardia reported in 2025 that one of two television actresses rumored to be connected to him said in 2020 that the claims were invented, and that both had obtained a letter from the attorney general’s office stating they had no connection to the group.
In Matamoros he 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 killed in about early 1987; another, Serafin Hernandez Rivera, was arrested in the United States; the youngest, 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. Investigators in 1989 likened the group’s rituals to Santeria, and police later said it practiced a variation of Palo Mayombe; its members did not call themselves Satanists, and Infobae describes the "narcosatanic" label as an invention of the 1980s press that 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 Texas Monthly described her as an honor student. She became known as "La Madrina." 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 the ranch.
The case came to light in April 1989 at Rancho Santa Elena, about 20 miles west of Matamoros. Texas Monthly reported that on Sunday, April 9, Serafin Hernandez Garcia drove through a federal police checkpoint, which led police to the ranch; the 1994 Associated Press account named the driver as Elio Hernandez and reported that he believed the group’s rituals had made him invisible. The federal police commander in Matamoros, Juan Benitez Ayala, was leading a drug crackdown, and four suspects were arrested and gave statements. By Tuesday, April 11, police had established the deaths of Kilroy and eleven other men, AP reported. Cameron County Sheriff Alex Perez called the ranch "a human slaughterhouse." Mexican officials said five men had been arrested. Elio Hernandez Rivera, 22, told a news conference that he had taken part in killings, saying, "We killed them for protection," AP reported, and Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox said the group believed that human and animal sacrifices created a magical shield against harm and had about ten members. Police later said Kilroy was selected at random. Serafin Hernandez Garcia told police that Constanzo killed Kilroy, AP reported, and Texas Monthly wrote that Constanzo did it personally. Constanzo was never tried for his death.
The dead included a Matamoros police officer, a volunteer with the Mexican federal police and a 16-year-old, AP reported, and police said all the dead were male. They believed the killings had gone on for about nine months before April 1989, and that two of the victims died after Kilroy. Texas Monthly identified several in its June 1989 account, among them Moises Castillo, 52, who lived in Houston. Not all were named at the time; Infobae wrote in 2024 that twelve of the fifteen had been identified. The Deseret News reported in June 1989 that charges were filed in Mexico over the deaths of 15. Kilroy’s family later spoke of some good coming from his death, the Associated Press reported in 1990, and the Texas Senate adopted a resolution in memory of his mother, Helen Kilroy, in 2015.
Constanzo died on May 6, 1989. He was killed by his follower Alvaro de Leon Valdez, on his own order, according to de Leon and others arrested at the place; Aldrete has since said he "could not be left alive," and a 2023 report says the circumstances are still disputed. De Leon was charged with the deaths of Constanzo and Martin Quintana Rodriguez and was reported in 2010 to be serving a sentence for homicide and drug trafficking. In May 1994, the Associated Press reported, five followers were sentenced in Mexico in the case reported as the killing of Kilroy and 12 others: Aldrete received 62 years, and Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, David Serna Valdez and Sergio Martinez Salinas 67 years each.
Set side by side, the cases show courts and publics rarely agreeing on what had happened. In Jamaica the court tried one killing and the tradition remembered many. In Nassau a defendant’s religious statements were heard and weighed as a question of insanity, and rejected; in Freeport the same question of mind produced manslaughter instead of murder, twice, and a death sentence was quashed. In Guatemala the number of victims in the verdict was two of fifteen, and the legislature shortened the procedure to reach it. In El Salvador the conviction for two deaths came first and the larger question was handed to trials of others, with the accused man as witness, until a judge refused to believe him. In Mexico the man named as leader never appeared before a judge, and the followers who did were sentenced for deaths he was said to have ordered. In the Bahamas thread of the Kimes case, the one death that links the island to the verdicts in New York and Los Angeles has no verdict at all.
Names are missing, dates conflict, and the outcomes of several proceedings were never reported.
• 1733: Lewis Hutchinson born in Scotland (Jamaica Gleaner, 2002).
• March 16, 1773: Hutchinson executed at Spanish Town.
• 1946: Miculax Bux arrested April 26 or 27; sentenced to death June 18; executed July 18 (July 17 in two sources).
• 1962: Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo born in Miami, November 1.
• December 5, 1973 to January 26, 1974: Paul Howell, Irwin Bornstein and Katie Smith die in Nassau.
• October 19, 1976: Michiah Shobek executed at Fox Hill Prison.
• 1986: Sante Kimes sentenced in Nevada on federal servitude counts.
• 1988 to 1989: Killings attributed to Constanzo’s group near Matamoros; April 1989 case comes to light; May 6, 1989, Constanzo dies.
• May 1994: Five Constanzo followers sentenced in Mexico.
• 1996: Syed Bilal Ahmed dies; no charge laid.
• July 5, 1998: Sante Kimes and her son arrested in New York.
• 2000: Kimes and her son convicted of the murder of Irene Silverman.
• 2002 and 2003: Jamal Robins and four boys die in Freeport; October 2003 Cordell Farrington confesses to police.
• 2004: Sante Kimes convicted of the murder of David Kazdin.
• August 2006: Farrington convicted of murder in the Robins case; October 2008 conviction reduced to manslaughter.
• 2010: Farrington sentenced to four life terms for the boys.
• May 19, 2014: Sante Kimes dies in prison.
• March 30, 2015: Court of Appeal remits Farrington’s Robins sentence for a fresh hearing.
• May 7, 2021: Two women die in Chalchuapa; Hugo Osorio Chávez arrested.
• June 10, 2022: Osorio sentenced to 70 years; November 11, 2022, a further 18 years.
• May 2023: Nine defendants acquitted; October 6, 2023, six convicted on retrial.