by Ray Black
In November 1977, Jim Jones and 1,000 of his faithful followers left for Guyana, and behind them San Francisco breathed a sigh of relief that the problem of The People’s Temple was no longer its own. All of San Francisco that was, except for one man – Leo Ryan.
LEO RYAN
Ryan was a local politician, and rather than waving Jones off, pleased to see the back of him, his concerns grew for the 1,000 citizens he had taken with him. He had already heard disturbing reports from the relatives of suicide victims who had belonged to, and attempted to leave, The People’s Temple while in San Francisco. Already, news was reaching him from the friends and family of those who had left for Guyana, that they were being held against their will, and that they were prisoners in Jonestown.
Ryan decided that he had to get out there, to see for himself the conditions in which these people were being held, and if indeed, they were being held against their will at all. He arranged the trip with the agreement of State Department officials, and also sent a telegram to Jim Jones to announce his forthcoming visit. Jones imposed some conditions on the visit, banning media coverage and insisting that the Temple’s legal counsel be present in all discussions.
When the time for the trip eventually came, Leo Ryan landed in Guyana to find that Jim Jones had retracted his permission to allow him to visit, and he was barred from even getting out of the plane. Lengthy negotiations ensued, and eventually Ryan was allowed access to Jonestown. What he found there confirmed his fears, and disturbed him greatly. The members, although professing complete devotion to their saviour Jim Jones, were indeed trapped – Jones had taken their passports from them. What’s more, they were in a poor physical state, weak and undernourished. Ryan addressed the group, telling them that any one of them was at complete liberty to leave with him, and that he guaranteed them total protection should they decide to do so. Out of the silent and slightly shocked group, one person stepped forward.
Ryan stayed on in Jonestown to talk further with the members of The People’s Temple. The journalists he had travelled out with, left to stay the night in a neighbouring town. When they were safely out of Jonestown, one of the journalists read a note which had been secretly passed to him by one of Jones’s followers. ‘Please, please get us out of here,’ it said, ‘before Jones kills us.’ Four people had signed the piece of paper. The second journalist claimed that one of the group had whispered the same thing, barely audibly to him.
On their return to Jonestown the next day, the journalists found Leo Ryan sitting with 15 people who had dared to say they wanted to leave. The plane in which Ryan and the journalists had made the trip to Guyana was only small, and it would have been impossible to carry the additional passengers back with them. So it was decided that they would have to call for a second plane to come and get them. The group was divided into two. Ryan was going to stay at the settlement and see if he could persuade any others to defect, but as the journalists and the defectors were about to leave, one of the Temple’s elders lunged at Ryan with a knife. He missed him, and Ryan was hauled onto the departing vehicle by his travelling companions. They travelled immediately to the airfield but the second plane had not yet arrived and they had to wait 40 minutes. As they reached the runway, a vehicle drove out at them, firing at them as it gave chase. Leo Ryan, one reporter, a cameraman and a photographer were killed straightaway. Then one of the followers, undoubtedly planted amongst the infidels by Jones, opened fire and murdered the pilot.
THE END OF THE IDEAL
Clearly already aware of the fate of Leo Ryan and his accompanying party, Jim Jones could forestall the inevitable no longer and knew that before long his ‘utopia’ would be destroyed. He gathered his community in front of him, and told them that it was time for them to depart to a better place, and that they were too good for the world they currently inhabited. He was talking about the complete destruction of everything he had created, and as he spoke, a concoction of cyanide and sedative-laced soft drinks was brought out to his people. Babies were brought forward first, and the deadly liquid injected into their mouths. Remaining children were the next to die. Finally it was the turn of the adults. One by one they queued up to take this poison, but some showed their fear. Their belief failed them and they didn’t want to die. Those who refused the poison had their throats cut by Temple elders, or were shot in the head. Jim Jones was taking his entire congregation with him.
CARNAGE
The scene which greeted the Guyanese soldiers who arrived the next day was complete and total carnage. Only one or two terrified survivors were found, having crawled into tiny spaces underneath buildings and hidden to save themselves. Others were missing, presumably having escaped into the jungle. Of a total of 1,100 people believed to be in the compound, 913 were found dead. The body of Jim Jones was found with a single bullet wound in the right temple, believed to be self-inflicted.
Investigations into the massacre at Jonestown, and into The People’s Temple revealed that in fact, Jim Jones had been preparing his people for this mass suicide for many years. He was paranoid that the American government was planning to destroy him, his people and his work and had instilled the idea in the minds of his followers that he was their salvation, that as long as they obeyed and trusted only him he would look after them. Therefore, when the order came from their leader, their ‘father’, that the enemy was finally upon them and about to slaughter them all, they were trained to follow his instructions and believed that in so doing, they were taking a noble and dignified path to a better place.
The bodies, many unidentifiable, were brought home to the United States, where many cemeteries refused to bury them. Eventually, the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland agreed to take the bodies – 409 in total. A memorial service is held there annually to remember those who died. The remainder were buried in family graveyards, or cremated.
Sadly, the 913 deaths recorded in Jonestown were not the end of the story. Members of the Temple who had survived the mass suicide in Guyana, took their own lives, and the lives of their children, within months of returning home anyway. Ex-members of the Temple, who presumably felt safe speaking out against Jim Jones and his followers following the disaster, were found shot dead.
Jonestown, having already been looted by locals, was destroyed by fire in the early 1980s.
Siberian Satanist Cult
Incited murder, or suicide?
In 1996, in the Russian city of Tyumen in Siberia, 1,400 miles east of Moscow, five young people were found hanged between the months of April and October. Police who investigated the individual deaths at first recorded them simply as suicides – tragic, but arousing no suspicion or cause for any further enquiries. However, when a link began to emerge between the five youths, the cases were re-opened, and a much larger investigation began to take shape.
Scribblings relating to secret and mystical beliefs were found amongst some of the possessions of the suicide victims. Decipherable, these related to an initiation ceremony, the final stage of which was ritual asphyxiation. Although the five youths had not died together, it was firmly believed that the deaths were somehow connected and that they had been involved in a very sinister organisation.
It emerged that this group of five had in fact been friends. Their ages varied, ranging from 17 to 22, but they all assembled together regularly in a basement. The basement, police discovered, contained a satanic altar, and the walls were adorned with signs of the devil, and secret messages which could not be understood.
The fourth of the quintet to die, Sergei Sidorov, had confided in his mother prior to his death that he was involved in something from which he could not escape. He told her that he was a satanist, but that even though he knew it was wrong he could not break out. When the father of Stas Buslov, a friend of Sergei who had died just before him, was informed of the details which were coming to light, he did some research of his own. He discovered that, in the previous year in the Tyumen region, 36 deaths by hanging had been recorded. All were aged between 12 an
d 22.
Despite having amassed no evidence to confirm that these were the actions of cult members, police believed that the deaths must have been the work of some kind of satanic cult. In March 1997, they launched a search for its leaders. It is rumoured that the head of the cult was a man in his early forties. With the help of two, younger assistants, he is believed to play on the naivety of the innocent, local children, persuading them to join him and his followers. Whether the deaths of the children of Tyumen were acts of murder, or whether their suicides were encouraged, or even demanded, is unlikely ever to be revealed. The police enquiries have so far been unsuccessful and it looks increasingly improbable that the truth will ever be revealed.
Section Two: Cult Killings
Adolfo De Jesus Constanzo
Murder in Matamoros, Mexico
In 1989, only three months since New Year’s Day, 60 people had been reported missing in the region of Matamoros, Mexico. Whether or not this was common knowledge, it would not have deterred the spring-break students of that year who had been planning their holiday, as generations of college-leavers had done for over 50 years before them, in the vice-ridden border town. Matamoros was the obvious choice for the fresh-faced students who had just completed their exams and wanted to party in a town where prostitution, sex-shows, drugs and alcohol were freely available. Matamoros was easily accessible across the Rio Grande from Brownsville in Texas, and so the students, an estimated 250,000 per year, came in their droves. In March 1989, Mark Kilroy was one of the college students to make the same time-honoured journey. Yet, unlike the others, he was never to return.
Mark Kilroy, however, did not simply become the 61st person to go missing. When his disappearance was reported his family demanded action, and his was a family with connections in high places. Immediately, a $15,000 reward was offered for either returning Mark safely to his family, or for information on who was responsible for his disappearance. The US Customs Service, who feared the involvement of Mexico’s evil drug traffickers, and the Texas authorities, kept up the pressure on the case in the USA, while in Mexico, the police in Matamoros began to question 127 of the area’s known criminals. In spite of trying to extract the required information by way of beating and torturing, the Mexican police were given no leads. It seemed to them that Mark Kilroy had simply ‘disappeared’.
OCCULT ACTIVITY
As the search for Mark continued in Mexico, the police were beginning another of their routine drug crackdowns. Knowing that they were not able to permeate the inner circles of the Mexican drug barons directly, the police used roadblocks at border towns to catch those who did the dirty work of passing the drugs from country to country for them. At one such roadblock just outside Matamoros, known drug-runner Serafin Hernandez Garcia failed to stop at the police checkpoint and ignored the police who followed him in hot pursuit signalling continuously for him to pull over. The police tailed Garcia until he eventually stopped at a nearby derelict ranch. Inside the property, the police found not only evidence of drugs but also of occult activity.
Garcia and another man, David Serna Valdez, were arrested on drug-related charges, yet their behaviour in custody disturbed the police. Their situation appeared to be of little concern to them, and they claimed that their fate was in the hands of a much higher power which they knew would protect them. Unnerved by the pair’s comments, the police returned to the ranch where they spoke to a caretaker who confirmed that the property was used frequently by members of a drug ring run by Garcia’s uncle, Elio Hernandez Rivera. On the police’s presentation of a photograph, the caretaker also confirmed to them Mark Kilroy had visited the ranch, but just one time.
On receipt of this information, the police returned with no delay to interrogate Garcia in custody. To their surprise, Garcia disclosed further details willingly. He told police that Mark Kilroy had indeed been kidnapped and killed, and that he himself had been involved in his murder. Yet, he didn’t describe it as murder but rather as human sacrifice, one of many he claimed, which were performed in order to ensure occult protection over the drug syndicate. He called it their religion, their ‘voodoo’. The leader of this group, according to Garcia, was Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. He was a master of magic and ordered the murders of the victims, first raping them and then making a ‘magic stew’ from their internal organs and dismembered bodies.
Police needed to amass the evidence, and so took Garcia back to the ranch. He accompanied them willingly and led them straight to the makeshift graveyard where he showed them where to begin digging to uncover the remains of the first of 12 bodies. One of the bodies was that of Mark Kilroy, his skull was split in two, and his brain had been removed. Garcia led police to where they could find the missing brain – floating in a mixture of blood, animal remains and insects in a cauldron located in a nearby shed.
With all the evidence they had collected at the ranch, and Garcia’s willingness to assist them with their enquiries, the police were now evaded by only one last detail – the whereabouts of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.
ADOLFO DE JESUS CONSTANZO
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was born to a Cuban immigrant in Miami in 1962. He had two siblings, and all three children had different fathers. The priest who blessed the infant Adolfo at the age of six months declared to his mother that the child was the chosen one, and destined for great things. The priest was of the Palo Mayombe religion, and blessed the young boy accordingly. Palo mayombe is an African religion, and believes that everything on earth is controlled by the spirits. Accordingly, its followers practise communicating with the spirits in order to control their own fate. It is considered an amoral religion as it allows each worshipper to create his own destiny using either black or white magic and drawing no distinction between the two.
When Adolfo’s mother moved her family to Puerto Rico, she kept their Palo Mayombe faith a secret and allowed the San Juan society to believe that her son had been baptized a Catholic. In private however, she was devoted to her faith and began Adolfo’s education in witchcraft and magic with fellow followers in both San Juan and Haiti. When they moved back to Miami in 1972, Adolfo began his formal training with a priest in Little Havana.
In school, Adolfo was a poor student. He was far more interested in the secrets of Palo Mayombe and chose to spend his time with his teacher. They went together to dig up graves in order to steal the contents for the sacrificial cauldron known to the religion as a ‘Nganga’, around which the main worship and practice of palo mayombe is carried out. Adolfo also began to get involved in petty crime, and within a couple of years had been arrested twice for shoplifting. He believed his ‘powers’ to be increasing though, and his mother and teacher proclaimed him to be developing strong psychic abilities.
Adolfo’s faith took a sinister turn in 1983 when he chose Kadiempembe, Palo Mayombe’s equivalent of Satan, as his own patron saint and henceforth devoted his life to the worship of evil for profit. Encouraged by his mentor, he carved symbols into his own flesh and declared his soul to be dead. This signified the end of his training.
MAGICAL POWERS
Later the same year, Adolfo took a modelling job in Mexico City and when he wasn’t working he went down to the red light district to tell fortunes with tarot cards. He became increasingly popular and developed a reputation as being a clairvoyant and having magic abilities. He attracted supporters and admirers, and took two male lovers from the group who followed him. He did return to Miami when the modelling was over, but he came back to Mexico City the following year. He moved in with his two lovers, and began a profitable career as a fortune teller and cleanser of enemy curses. His services were expensive, and it is recorded that some of his clients paid as much as $4,500 for just one treatment. Adolfo added magical potions to his list of services offered, and used the heads of goats, zebras, snakes and other animals in his costly concoctions.
Ordinary citizens provided Adolfo with a steady and satisfactory income but the real money, he was soon to discover, was to be
made from Mexico’s drug dealers. They came to him to predict the outcome of larger deals and to forewarn them of police raids. They even paid him for magic which they believed would make them invisible to the police. For the money they were paying him, Adolfo realised that he would have to put on more of a performance than he had been and so his magical ceremonies became all the more elaborate. It was at this time that he began robbing graves of bones to add to his own cauldron.
Adolfo’s clientele became more and more high-profile. He even attracted members of the Federal Judicial Police, amongst them the commander in charge of narcotics investigations, and the head of the Mexican branch of Interpol. They were not just convinced by Adolfo’s fortune-telling and magic tricks, but revered him as a kind of god – he was their direct link to the spirits. Through his connections in the corrupt Mexican police force, Adolfo became acquainted with more of Mexico’s major drugs dealers and his profits began to soar.
HUMAN SACRIFICES
It is not known at what point Adolfo stopped using the remains of those who were already dead, and instead began to make his own human sacrifices. It was, however, a massive drawing card for the drug barons he sought to impress, and his readiness to mutilate and murder both strangers and friends secured him what he believed to be firm connections within the upper echelons of the drug-dealing cartels. He had perhaps got a little carried away. He approached the Caldaza family, whose business and interests he had been closely protecting and nurturing over an entire year, and declared that he and his powers were the sole reason for their success and mere existence. He claimed that he should be granted full partnership in the association accordingly. The Caldaza family was one of the largest and most notorious drug cartels in Mexico, and they refused his presumptuous request.
