Sara Maria Aldrete was 24 years old and a student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville when, in April 1989, Mexican police named her as a member of the group responsible for at least 13 killings near Matamoros, the Mexican city across the Rio Grande. Among the dead was Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student who had vanished during spring break. The group was led by Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a Cuban American who practiced Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Caribbean religion, and who was paid by a family of drug smugglers to protect their business. Police and prosecutors called Aldrete the group's "witch," its "high priestess" and its "godmother," La Madrina.
She was arrested in Mexico City on May 6, 1989, the day Constanzo died there in a police siege. In May 1994 the Associated Press reported that she had been sentenced to 62 years in prison for the killing of Kilroy and 12 other people. Mexican outlets report that the conviction covered 13 homicides together with drug offenses, criminal association and the burial and desecration of bodies, and that the term was reduced to 50 years in October 1995. She has never accepted the verdict. She says she took part in the group's religious rites but never went to the place where the killings happened, never killed anyone, and gave her statements to police under torture. As of August 2026 she was still in prison in Mexico City.
Aldrete was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on September 6, 1964, according to SDP Noticias. She grew up there and finished high school across the border in Brownsville, Texas. She obtained resident alien status in the United States so that she could study at Texas Southmost College, a two-year school in Brownsville, where she majored in physical education. Mexican outlets say she also studied social anthropology, and that her interest in religion began with a class project on the subject.
In 1989 she still lived with her parents in a middle-class neighborhood of Matamoros and crossed the international bridge to class. Texas Monthly reported that she was an honor student, a cheerleader for the college soccer team and a nominee for the college's "Who's Who." A teacher who had her in an anthropology class told the magazine that she was an A student, always present and always friendly, and that he never saw her wear any amulet or sign of the occult. Friends, instructors and relatives told reporters after the bodies were found that they had known nothing of any other life. Her parents said the same.
By her own account to El Financiero, she met Constanzo in 1987, when she was 22. "He hooked me, and there I stayed," she said. About a year later he became her godfather in his religion and gave her the name La Madrina. Texas Monthly, writing in 1989, gave as one account that she had read books on Santeria and met Constanzo through friends in Mexico City's Cuban community. The magazine also reported that she had been the girlfriend of Elio Hernandez Rivera, a member of the smuggling family that hired Constanzo. The Deseret News reported in August 1989 that she and another follower, Omar Orea, had both been Constanzo's lovers.
Constanzo had grown up near Miami and had studied Palo Mayombe from his late teens, according to Texas Monthly. In Matamoros he offered the Hernandez family, which smuggled marijuana into the United States, spiritual protection in exchange for a share of its profits. The magazine reported that he called himself El Padrino, the Godfather, and that over time he introduced human sacrifice into the group's rites. Police said the members believed the killings would protect them from police and from rival traffickers. "We killed them for protection," Elio Hernandez Rivera told reporters after his arrest in April 1989.
Most of the people killed were men involved in the drug trade, rivals or police officers whom the gang considered corrupt, according to Texas Monthly and the Associated Press. Some were not involved in any way. Kilroy was taken from the street at random, Mexican and US reports agree.
Mark Kilroy was 21, a junior studying pre-medicine at the University of Texas at Austin. He came from Santa Fe, Texas, where he had played basketball and baseball in high school, and he had attended another university before transferring to UT. Texas Monthly described him and the three friends he traveled with as tall, athletic and serious students. They spent spring break on South Padre Island and crossed into Matamoros for a night out. On March 14, 1989, Kilroy became separated from his friends in Matamoros, and he did not come back across the border with them. One of the friends said later that that was the last time he saw him. His parents traveled from the Houston area to Matamoros and offered a reward for information. He was held for about a day before he was killed, according to Texas Monthly.
His parents answered his death with unusual restraint. "I don't feel any anger at all, to be honest with you," his father told reporters. His mother asked people to pray for the men who killed her son. Texas Monthly wrote that the family had shown a grace few journalists had seen. They founded the Mark Kilroy Foundation to fight drug abuse; a resolution of the Texas House of Representatives marking the tenth anniversary of his death recorded that it paid for treatment programs, two scholarships a year and a drug-free program in the Santa Fe and Hitchcock school districts. His father wrote a book about the case, Sacrifice, whose proceeds went to the foundation. His mother, a volunteer paramedic who had fostered seven children through Catholic Charities and who helped run the foundation's annual fundraiser, died on December 22, 2014, and the Texas Senate adjourned in her memory.
Jose Luis Garcia was 14. His family were devout evangelicals who farmed land near Matamoros. He disappeared on February 25, 1989, three weeks before Kilroy. Texas Monthly noted that no one held press conferences or offered rewards for him. "If it weren't for the Kilroy boy," his mother told the magazine, "none of the other men, including my son, would ever have been found."
Moises Castillo was 52. He lived in Houston but went back every year to Ejido Morelos, near Matamoros, to work his corn fields. He disappeared in May 1988. His father, who was 76, told Texas Monthly that he had feared the worst. Castillo's body and that of another man were found near Matamoros after the first 13, and they were counted as the 14th and 15th victims.
A Matamoros police officer, surnamed Sauceda in Texas Monthly's account, was among the dead. The Associated Press reported in April 1989 that the victims also included a federal police volunteer and a 16-year-old. The names of the other men, and the dates on which they were killed, were not reported.
The case broke on Sunday, April 9, 1989, when Serafin Hernandez Garcia, a nephew of Elio Hernandez and a former student at Texas Southmost, drove through a drug checkpoint near Matamoros. Federal police followed the trail to a property west of the city, where they found marijuana and the shed the gang used for its rites. A caretaker identified a photograph of Kilroy. Four suspects confessed, and on April 11 investigators recovered Kilroy's body near Matamoros. By April 13, a 13th body had been found.
Five men in custody said they had carried out the killings on Constanzo's orders, according to the Associated Press. Mexican and US officials began searching for Constanzo and for Aldrete, whom the arrested men called "the witch." Police first feared she might herself be a victim when they found some of her clothing in a house the group had abandoned. The Deseret News reported on April 15 that police believed she had fled into the United States.
Constanzo had in fact flown out of Brownsville the day the bodies were found, Texas Monthly reported, and Aldrete went with him, together with Alvaro de Leon Valdez, known as El Duby, and several others. They hid for about three weeks.
On May 6, 1989, police surrounded a fourth-floor apartment in the Cuauhtemoc district of Mexico City where the group was hiding. Constanzo fired on them with an automatic weapon. According to Texas Monthly and La Cronica de Hoy, he threw money from the window as police closed in, then ordered El Duby to shoot him and Martin Quintana Rodriguez, another follower. Both were dead when police entered. Aldrete, El Duby and the others surrendered. Omar Francisco Orea Ochoa, a communications student, was among those arrested.
Aldrete has said she wrote a note asking for help, saying she was being held against her will, and threw it into the street, and that this note brought police to the building. Infobae, La Cronica and UnoTV describe this account as hers. She was 24.
What happened next is disputed. Aldrete says she was held for six days and nights before she was brought before a judge on May 12, 1989. In interviews for a 2023 documentary series and with the outlet Grupo Animal in 2026, she said police beat her, gave her electric shocks and humiliated her, and that she was moved between several police offices in that time. She says commanders Federico Ponce Rojas and Juan Benitez Ayala pressed her to implicate two people linked to drug trafficking, and that she refused. "I wanted to die," she said in the documentary. Grupo Animal reported in 2026 that a medical assessment under the Istanbul Protocol, the international standard for documenting torture, had found that she was tortured; the outlet did not say who carried it out or when.
Ponce Rojas denied her account in the same series, calling one part of it "a mere diabolical fantasy." He said that when she saw Constanzo's body she cried out, "Forgive me, godfather," and then began to curse. No court finding on her torture complaint has been reported.
In June 1989 Mexican authorities filed murder indictments against Aldrete, Orea and de Leon over 15 killings in Matamoros. The charges also included weapons, drug and criminal association offenses. All three pleaded not guilty. The three had already been indicted over the deaths of Constanzo and Quintana in the Mexico City apartment, the Deseret News reported. Her lawyer at the time was Horacio Moyar Quintanilla, and prosecutors described her in court as the group's godmother.
Accounts of her trials differ.
El Financiero and SDP Noticias report that she was convicted in 1990 of criminal association and of homicide, El Financiero giving the number of homicides as 13, together with drug offenses (in Mexican law, crimes against health) and the burial and desecration of corpses. On May 4, 1994, the Associated Press reported that Aldrete had been sentenced to 62 years in prison "for the ritual slaying of a Texas college student and 12 other people." In the same report four men each received 67 years: Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, David Serna Valdez and Sergio Martinez Salinas. De Leon was still awaiting sentence in Mexico City. The AP noted that Aldrete maintained her innocence and said police had tortured her into confessing.
In October 1995, according to SDP Noticias and El Financiero, an appeals court, the Third Unitary Tribunal, reduced her term to 50 years. Grupo Animal reported in 2026 that her original sentence, adding the separate counts, came to 647 years and 5 months, for homicide, drug offenses, stockpiling firearms, desecration of corpses and criminal association, and that it now stands at a little under 50 years. UnoTV gave the original as more than 600 years, later reduced to 50. How the totals were reached was not explained.
She has not been tried for any killing in the United States.
In 1989 police said she was a zealous member of the group and that she had taken part in at least one killing, choosing a man who had insulted her, according to Texas Monthly. That allegation was not tied to a named victim, and no separate conviction for that act was reported. The magazine also wrote that she was in some ways the least valued member of the group in Constanzo's eyes.
Aldrete has told the same story for more than three decades. She says she joined Constanzo's religion, believed in it and took part in its ceremonies, but that she knew nothing of the killings, never went to the place where the killings happened, and was held by Constanzo against her will at the end. She says he told her, "You are going to be in prison because of me." She told El Financiero that she had told the truth about what she did and never lied. To Grupo Animal she said in 2026 that she was guilty of having become involved with people she should not have known, but not of the killings. "Much has been said about the file on the woman, but not about the woman in the file," she said.
In 2000 she published a book, Me dicen la narcosatanica (They call me the narco-satanist), written with the help of the author Josefina Estrada, with statements from some of her co-defendants. She has said she wrote it to plead for justice more than for forgiveness. Grupo Animal reported that she still had amparo petitions, the Mexican constitutional challenge, pending, and that the federal public defender's office and a lawyer in Tamaulipas now represent her.
Aldrete has spent her adult life in Mexican prisons. Grupo Animal, which interviewed her in 2026, set out her moves: about fifteen and a half years at the women's prison in the east of Mexico City, known as Oriente; seven years at Santa Martha Acatitla; a federal prison in Baja California; two months and 17 days at the Islas Marias penal colony; a maximum-security prison in Mazatlan; four years in Tepic; two years at a federal women's prison; and, for the last nine years, the Centro Femenil de Reinsercion Social in Tepepan, in the south of the capital. At Oriente she spent more than three months in an isolation cell, she said, until a new director released her and put her to work.
In prison she founded a theater group, the Teatro Penitenciario, and has directed plays, including entries at a Christmas pastorela festival. She has won national prizes for short stories and poetry, and she contributed to Mujeres de Oriente, a collection of writing by 17 women held at Oriente. The documentary director Patricia Martinez first met her at Santa Martha Acatitla about 15 years before 2023, while working on another project, and told UnoTV that Aldrete had earned respect inside.
She now uses a wheelchair and has several health problems, and she has had surgery at Tepepan for what she says are burns left by the electric shocks of 1989. She cares for 29 cats, each with a name. Both her parents have died, her father only recently, Grupo Animal reported in August 2026, and two sisters in Tamaulipas still support her.
Aldrete has applied repeatedly to leave prison early. El Heraldo of Honduras reported in 2023 that after 31 years in prison she asked the federal courts to replace the remaining 19 years of her sentence with a non-custodial measure, and that the request was denied. Grupo Animal reported in August 2026 that, despite good conduct reports and a full program of activities, her release had stalled again: her most recent application for early release was refused because a reparation payment owed under the sentence had not been paid, a debt the outlet says has lapsed. As of that report she was still held at Tepepan, aged 61. No release date has been reported.
On July 13, 2023, HBO Max released La Narcosatanica, a three-part documentary series directed by Patricia Martinez and made with the production company Artegios for Warner Bros. Discovery, Expansion reported. It drew on archive footage, interviews with officials and an interview with Aldrete in prison, and Expansion described it as the first documentary series of its kind in HBO Max's programming. Martinez said the aim was to present the evidence and new information and let viewers judge. Aldrete told Grupo Animal that she was not paid for her part and that nothing she had been led to expect came of it. She also appears as a character in the 2024 series Quien lo mato?, according to El Financiero and SDP Noticias.
Her role. Authorities in 1989 called her the group's high priestess and its godmother, and police said she took part in at least one killing. She was convicted, by Mexican accounts, of 13 homicides. She denies any part in the killings, and the reports of her conviction do not show how the court treated each death.
Her confession. She says statements she gave after her arrest were obtained under torture; the officer who led the arrest denies it. Grupo Animal reported in 2026 that there is no forensic evidence against her and that the case rests on statements later withdrawn; that is the outlet's account, and no court finding confirming it has been reported.
Her origins. La Cronica de Hoy described her in 2022 as a woman from Monterrey; other accounts place her birth and upbringing in Matamoros.
The number of dead. The figure most often linked to her conviction is 13. Mexican authorities indicted her and two others in June 1989 over 15 deaths, and the bodies of Moises Castillo and another man were counted as the 14th and 15th. Some later reports give higher totals for the group as a whole, including killings in Mexico City, but no conviction for those has been reported.
The year of conviction. Mexican outlets date her conviction to 1990; the Associated Press reported the 62-year sentence in May 1994. The reports do not explain the difference; there may have been more than one trial.
The prison. In July 2023 UnoTV placed her at Santa Martha Acatitla; Infobae, El Financiero and Grupo Animal place her at Tepepan.
1964, September 6: born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas (SDP Noticias).
1987: meets Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, by her account.
1988, May: Moises Castillo disappears near Matamoros.
1989, February 25: Jose Luis Garcia, 14, disappears.
1989, March 14: Mark Kilroy disappears in Matamoros during spring break.
1989, April 9: Serafin Hernandez Garcia drives through a checkpoint; police search a property west of Matamoros.
1989, April 11: Kilroy's body is found; Aldrete leaves with Constanzo.
1989, April 13: the 13th body is recovered; police search for Aldrete.
1989, May 6: police siege in Mexico City; Constanzo and Martin Quintana are shot dead by a follower on Constanzo's order; Aldrete is arrested.
1989, May 12: brought before a judge, by her account after six days in police custody.
1989, June: indicted with Omar Orea and Alvaro de Leon over 15 deaths; all plead not guilty.
1990: convicted, according to Mexican outlets.
1994, May: AP reports her 62-year sentence for the killing of Kilroy and 12 others.
1995, October: sentence reduced to 50 years on appeal.
2000: publishes Me dicen la narcosatanica.
2014, December 22: Kilroy's mother dies.
2023, July 13: HBO Max releases La Narcosatanica.
2026, August: reported still held at Tepepan, early release refused.