The Story of Mark Kilroy

He was tortured and sacrificed for police enforcement protection.

It was March 1989. It was spring break and like many college students, 21-year old Mark Kilroy and his 3 long-time friends went for a spring vacation in South Padre Island, Texas. They parked their car near the border before crossing over to Mexico on foot. Over the span of 3 days, they had their fun as they partied and attended the Miss Tanline Contest.

On the last day, they returned to the border town of Matamoros to cross the border by foot again by nightfall. That night, Matamoros was increasingly packed with the spring-break tourists as it was further in the spring break. The cheap alcohol combined with a lax drinking law as the legal drinking age is younger there drew the US youths.

The large crowd made it difficult for Kilroy and his friends to cross the border as a group. Moore and Martin were separated from Kilroy and Huddleston but they were only a few yards ahead. When Kilroy and Huddleston reached a local gift shop close to the border, Kilroy said goodbye to his female friend that he befriended the day before while Huddleston ran to a nearby alley to urinate.

When Huddleston returned along with their two other friends, Kilroy was nowhere to be seen. They searched for Kilroy for several hours before they decided to cross the border, thinking that perhaps Kilroy crossed the border and was waiting by their parked car there. It was not the case. They waited for a while before they considered that maybe Kilroy left for the hotel with someone else.

The next morning, the whereabouts of Kilroy remained unknown. Worried, they reported him missing as Kilroy was not someone who would just disappear without telling them. He was religious, athletic, and excelled in his studies. He was also soon to become a pre-med student. However, like many of the reported missing people cases there, the officers were not concerned. Thus, the initial search on Kilroy was just a routine investigation. The reason behind that was most of the reported missing people usually turned up in a few days with a bad hangover.

Kilroy’s case began to draw more attention from the US authorities as Kilroy’s uncle was working in the US Customs Service. Because Matamoros’s economy was relatively dependent on tourism, the Mexican Federal Police combined forces with the US to search for Kilroy, questioned potential witnesses, and processed tips. Despite police combined efforts, 20,000 leaflets handed out, a $15,000 reward offered by Kilroy’s parent, and the case featured on a television crime program, there was not any break in Kilroy’s case.

It was weeks later that the case finally had a break and it was actually led by an unrelated effort to Kilroy’s case. In April 1989, a vehicle drove by Serafin Garcia ran through a routine checkpoint stationed near Santa Elena, Mexico. It led the police to a secluded ranch, Rancho Santa Elena that belonged to a drug lord where the police found a large amount of narcotics namely marijuana. It was a case of marijuana smugglers, but it was never linked to Kilroy’s case until the caretaker of the ranch recognized Kilroy’s photograph. He remembered Kilroy handcuffed but he did not understand Kilroy as the caretaker only spoke Spanish. He even fed Kilroy bread and water the night before Kilroy was taken away.

At the same time, Serafin Hernandez was interrogated at the police station. Under pressure, he admitted to aiding the murder of Kilroy where Kilroy was tortured and sodomized before he was killed by Adolfo Constanzo with a machete. His legs were severed just because it made the burial easier while his brain was removed, boiled, and sacrificed.

Accordingly, Serafin admitted to them belonging to a cult that was led by Adolfo Constanzo and Sara Aldrete. Serafin and the cult truly believed that this practice protected them, the Hernandez gang, which was infamous for drug smuggling from law enforcement. Even after the suspects were caught, none of them showed any remorse during their confession. One of the cult member, Elio Hernandez, even challenged the comandante to shoot him,

“Go ahead. Your bullets will just bounce off.”

When the combined force of US and Mexican police approached the ranch that the caretaker and Serafin mentioned, they first noticed the stench of decaying flesh. The Mexican police were reluctant to approach as they feared the possibility of witchcraft and occult. On the dried blood-smeared floor, they found an iron pot containing iron and wooden spikes, remains of human brain and animal parts. Serafin said that Mark Kilroy’s brain was in that pot.

He even pointed out the location of Kilroy’s body which was buried in a shallow grave that was marked by a wire where the other end of the wire was attached to Kilroy’s spinal column. A total of 15 bodies were found in the area, all of them mutilated. They were either shot or slashed. Some of them had missing heart, ears, eyes, and testicles. 3 out of the 15 disfigured bodies were never identified.

Experts believed that the cult was influenced by Santeria and Palo Mayombe based on the items found in the ranch. Even though both Santeria and Palo Mayombe do practice the offerings of animal sacrifice and exhume human bones but neither of them commonly practice human sacrifice.

The hunt for Constanzo led the police to Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City. When Constanzo noticed the police from the window of his apartment, he began to open fire on the officers and passersby on the ground. Eventually, he ran out of ammunition so he convinced Alvaro de Leon Valdez to shoot both him and Martin Quintana Rodriquez. Aldrete said that Alvaro hesitated, but Constanzo convinced him that De Leon Valdez would suffer in hell if he did not comply with his order. Aldrete and 3 other members of the cult were arrested.

However, Aldrete denied her involvement with the murders and said that she only knew about the murders when she saw them on national television. However, she was able to describe some of the murders in detail and failed to provide any evidence that she was abducted. She was sentenced to 62 years in prison while the rest of the cult members, Elio, Serafín Jr., Martínez Salinas, and Serna Valdez received 67 years in prison. She had a shorter sentence because she was not caught with the usage of weapons.

Kilroy’s parents mentioned that they grieved for their son and believed that their son had brought these murders to an end. Otherwise, the 14 other murders would be unlikely to be found and there would be more deaths. Kilroy’s parents also founded the Mark Kilroy Foundation, a nonprofit anti-drug foundation to spread awareness for substance abuse and drugs for the youths.