In April 1989 police digging at the Rancho Santa Elena, a scrubby property off the highway west of Matamoros, pulled more than a dozen mutilated bodies out of a common grave. Among them was Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student who had vanished on spring break in March after a night in the bars across the river from Brownsville. At the site the searchers found human hair, brains, teeth and skulls, and an iron pot, a nganga, in which body parts had been cooked. The group responsible was a drug-smuggling gang run by Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a Cuban American who practiced a mixture of Palo Mayombe and Santeria, and the Mexican press named it the Narcosatanicos. Its second in command was a twenty-four-year-old woman its members called La Madrina, the Godmother.
Sara Maria Aldrete Villarreal was born in Matamoros on September 6, 1964. She went to high school in Brownsville while still living on the Mexican side, and took resident alien status so she could study at Texas Southmost College, where she majored in physical education and meant to transfer to a university to qualify as a teacher. She stood six foot one and was known as a good student. She was about twenty-three when Constanzo came into her life, and the friendship lasted two years.
By the account the case was built on, Constanzo initiated her into his religion, gave her the name La Madrina and made her his deputy, leaving her to supervise his followers while he moved marijuana across the border. The papers called her his lover, and later La concubina del diablo. In a documentary interview she denied that they were ever a couple, saying she knew he had two wives, one in Brazil and one in Guatemala. She has spoken of the thrill of the early days, of feeling that no one could touch her because she knew how to do things and had people under control.
When investigators found the shrine at Santa Elena, Constanzo, Aldrete and the rest of the group fled. Police traced them to an apartment in Mexico City on May 6, 1989. After a shootout, Constanzo and one of his accomplices were shot dead by another member of the group, apparently on Constanzo's own orders, and Aldrete was taken alive.
She was convicted of criminal association in 1990, and in a second trial of homicide at the ranch, along with the burial, exhumation and desecration of corpses. The figure most often reported is sixty-two years. Some Mexican coverage has put the first sentence as high as 647 years before appeal, and one account says the second trial gave her thirty. The sixty-two years were later reduced to fifty, a change dated variously to 1994, October 1995 and 1996. The murders she was convicted over number thirteen in most reports and fifteen or sixteen in others.
She has held throughout that she took part in the religious rites but was not present at the killings and killed no one, that she was manipulated and threatened by Constanzo, and that her confession was obtained by torture. "I don't defend myself, I'm not a victim, but I'm not a victimizer either," she told the interviewer Saskia Nino de Rivera. American authorities are reported to have said they would prosecute her for Kilroy's murder if she is ever freed.
Since her arrest she has been held in the Reclusorio Oriente, in Santa Martha Acatitla and in a prison in Baja California, and she is now at the Centro Femenil de Reinsercion Social in Tepepan, in the Xochimilco borough of Mexico City. There she has kept dozens of cats, thirty-two by one count, and named the corners of the prison where they live after neighborhoods of the capital. In 2020, after thirty-one years inside, she asked for early release and was refused; she has also asked a federal judge in Matamoros to let her serve the rest of her drug sentence under house arrest. An HBO Max docuseries, La Narcosatanica, told her story in 2023. Without an early release, she is due out around 2039 or 2040, at seventy-six.