The Believers: Cult Murders in Mexico
Two weeks after the burning of Constanzo’s shrine, the police surrounded a rust-colored apartment building on a quiet residential street in Mexico City. Inside, the black-magic priest realized that the end was near. In a final, desperate act of defiance, Constanzo began throwing wads of money out of the window and firing his gun at passersby. “He went crazy, crazy,” recalls cult member Alvaro de Leon Valdez, 22.
Constanzo’s ability to bend weaker minds to his will was a talent that served him right up to the moment of his death. As the cops closed in, Constanzo ordered Alvaro de Leon Valdez to shoot him and his longtime companion, Martin Quintana Rodriguez. “He was telling him, ‘Do it, do it. If you don’t do it, you’re going to pay with circumstances in hell,'” said Aldrete afterward. “He said that he wanted to die with Martin.”
When the federales burst into the apartment a few moments later, they found black candles, two swords, a skull made of white wax and a blindfolded doll holding another doll. Constanzo and Quintana were found slumped together in a small closet, their bodies riddled with bullets. De Leon Valdez, Aldrete and three other members of the cult were arrested on charges of homicide, criminal association, wounding a police agent and damage to property.
Aldrete denied that she had participated in the ritual slayings and said that she had only learned about them from televised news reports. “It was like hell,” Aldrete said of the cult. “They treated me like a prisoner. It was hell.” But police remain convinced that Aldrete was a willing member of the group and that she had lured at least one of the victims, Gilberto Sosa, to his death. “I wonder which one came on TV, the student or the witch,” says one American law-enforcement official close to the case. “I think she’s a witch, a crook, and she’s guilty as hell.”
While Constanzo’s death marked the close of a hideous case, the effects of his dark doings continue to reverberate. The disquieting notion persists that some of Constanzo’s confederates may still be at large and that there may be others like him waiting to take his place. Sources close to the investigation have hinted that the cult’s ties extended far beyond Matamoros and into the highest echelons of Mexican society. The Dallas Morning News reported that Constanzo used his good looks and claims of clairvoyance to charm Mexico’s elite and attract drug traffickers and cultists willing to do anything for him. His clients — including top-ranking police and government officials, as well as popular entertainers — reportedly paid as much as $8000 a session for Constanzo’s predictions and ritual “cleansings,” which promised good luck.
Still, for people on both sides of the Mexican-American border, the news that the cultists had been captured was like waking up from a bad dream. “It won’t be as tranquil as before,” said one Matamoros resident. “Never, or at least not for a while.” For weeks after the discovery of Mark Kilroy’s body, El Sombrero and other clubs that catered to American students remained eerily empty, with rock music pounding out the beat for nonexistent dancers. Farther down Calle Alvaro Obregon, a bar frequented by the locals was packed with bodies, but the revelers were noticeably skittish, traveling only in groups of three or more. “After the massacres,” said a cab driver, “everything went to hell.”
There is a widespread feeling among the citizens of Brownsville and Matamoros that the reputations of both towns have been unfairly maligned. When Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general, said on Geraldo that despite the killings, Brownsville remained safer than Washington, D.C., or New York, the local studio audience burst into applause. Donald Wells, the American consul in Matamoros, is among those who are optimistic that the tourist trade will recover in time for next year’s spring-break crowds. “Quite frankly, beer is cheap in Mexico, and the Mexicans make some of the finest beer in the world,” says Wells. “Matamoros is a decent, hard-working Christian community. If there is any message, it is this: If it could happen here, it could happen anywhere.”
James and Helen Kilroy have turned their grief into action by establishing a nonprofit antidrug foundation in Mark’s name. “We’re definitely putting our energy into the fight against drugs,” said Mr. Kilroy after hearing that his son’s killer was dead. “For that reason, we don’t look back. We try to look forward.”
The ghost of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, however, would not be so easily put to rest. Two days after the shootout in Mexico City, there came a final bizarre twist in the case. On May 9th the New York Times ran an item that raised the possibility that Constanzo’s death might have been faked and that he might still be at large. Armando Ramirez, the resident agent in charge for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Brownsville, was quoted as saying that the faces of Constanzo and Quintana had been so badly mutilated by bullets that positive identification was impossible. The final verdict would have to wait until fingerprints and dental charts could prove whether or not the story of Constanzo’s death was not merely a clever trick engineered by the cultists to give their leader time to make his getaway.
The next day Ramirez confirmed that he had received assurances from the Mexicans that Constanzo’s death pact was no ruse: El Padrino had been his own last victim. Said Ramirez: “When you get right down to it, Constanzo was a killer, he was a madman, and he proved it right up to the end. We had to be sure he was dead.”