Sara Maria Aldrete Villarreal was born in Matamoros, Mexico, on September 6, 1964, and grew up crossing the border daily to attend school in Brownsville, Texas. She was an honours student at Texas Southmost College, a physical education major, tall and popular, and was named to the college's outstanding students list. She met Adolfo Constanzo in 1987 through a former boyfriend. She was called La Madrina, the Godmother.
Within two years she was living between Brownsville and the Santa Elena ranch outside Matamoros, where Constanzo's group killed at least fifteen people in rituals intended to protect their cannabis trafficking. She was known within the group as the Godmother, the madrina, and by her own account participated in the religious observances while maintaining that she was not present at and did not take part in the killings.
The disappearance of the American student Mark Kilroy in March 1989 brought the operation down. Aldrete was in the Mexico City flat with Constanzo when it was surrounded on May 6, 1989, and she telephoned the police from inside it. Constanzo ordered a follower to shoot him.
She was convicted in 1990 of criminal association and in 1994 of multiple homicide, and sentenced to sixty-two years. She has consistently maintained that she was manipulated and threatened by Constanzo and had no part in any death. She has taken degrees in prison and her case is periodically revisited in Mexico. The American coverage at the time, which cast her as a satanic cult priestess and an honours student in the same sentence, has been criticised since for what it left out.
A word on the figure. Mexican sentences of this kind are arithmetic totals of consecutive terms rather than statements of time to be served, and the time that can actually be served is capped well below them by the code of the state that imposed the sentence. The total should not be read as a life sentence, and nothing accessible records the release position.