by Ray Black
PART FOUR: CULT KILLERS
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo and Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal
The son of a teenage Cuban immigrant to Miami, Adolofo Constanzo was introduced to black magic by his mother at an early and impressionable age and used his perceived powers to gruesome effect.
THE GODFATHER OF MATAMOROS
By the time he achieved notoriety as a cult leader, drug dealer and serial killer in the late 1980s, his own depraved and horrific brand of torture resembled that of the apparently far-fetched cruelty depicted in the ‘video nasties’ that were synonymous with the same era.
As part of his ritual torture and of his victims, Constanzo, who also became known as El Padrino de Matamoros – The Godfather of Matamoros – would rip out their brains and hearts for his nganga – a cauldron. This, he believed, would guarantee him success in his career of choice dealing drugs. Sara Aldrete, a promising Mexican student, joined Constanzo’s cult in 1987, becoming its High Priestess the following year.
Constanzo was born in Miami in 1962 and spent the early years of his childhood there until his widowed mother moved him to Puerto Rico where she remarried. There, he was baptized a Roman Catholic and was an altar boy in his local church.
When he was only nine years old, Constanzo’s mother introduced him to the Santeria religion and even took him on trips to Haiti to learn more about the dark art of Voodoo. Around a year later, his family returned to Miami and his stepfather died soon afterwards, leaving the young Constanzo and his mother financially secure. This didn’t stop them from staying out of trouble with the law, with his mother arrested over thirty times for petty crimes and Adolfo himself twice arrested for shoplifting among other minor offences.
In 1976, Constanzo became the apprentice to a practitioner of Palo Mayombe, a form of religion that involves animal sacrifice, and was told by his mentor – who also imparted his experience of drug dealing – that non-believers should be allowed to kill themselves with drugs and that the likes of Constanzo should profit from this. It was around this time that his mother began to believe that he had psychic powers, later reporting that he had prophesied future events including the attempted assassination of President Regan in 1981.
By 1983, Constanzo had pledged his allegiance to Kadiempembe – his religion’s equivalent of Satan – when he also visited Mexico City on a modelling assignment. There, he met three men who became his first disciples, Martín Quintana Rodríguez, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea Ochoa. He seduced both Quintana and Orea into a homosexual ménage a trois, calling one his ‘man’ and the other his ‘woman’.
After a brief return to Miami, Constanzo made the permanent move to Mexico City where his reputation as a man of magic continued to gain him more followers. True to his chosen path – the worship of evil for profit – he cultivated a successful business of sorts, whereby he cast spells that involved animal sacrifice to bring his clients good fortune. Naturally, these didn’t come cheap; documents found after his death showed that he had thirty-one regular customers and that he charged in the region of $4,500 per ceremony. There was even a menu detailing the costs of the various sacrificial animals available. At the low end of the scale were roosters which cost $6 each and at the other extreme, $1,100 and $3,100 would buy a zebra and lion cub respectively. These high prices were, of course, designed to attract rich criminals and corrupt police officers and Constanzo was soon using these connections to become acquainted with the city’s drugs cartels.
SACRIFICING LIVE HUMAN BEINGS
As his cult following – which included a wide cross-section of Mexican society – continued to grow he turned his attention to grave robbing in order to obtain human bones to put in his nganga to increase his strength and power. This phase was not to last for long, however, as he promptly moved on to sacrificing live human beings. There is no recorded total available for how many people he slaughtered, although twenty-three cases are well documented and there were several other unsolved mutilation killing cases in the Mexico City area at the time, which many experts believe were his doing. Constanzo believed that his magic was solely responsible for the success of the narcotics cartels and demanded to be made a business partner with the Calzadas – one of the most powerful families he knew. His demand was rejected with dire consequences; no fewer than seven of the Caldaza family disappeared and were found dead with body parts missing. The absent body parts included brains, toes, ears, fingers and, in one instance, part of the spine.
Constanzo then befriended another cartel, the Hernandez brothers and, in 1987, engineered a ‘chance meeting’ with Sara Aldrete who was dating Gilberto Sosa, a drug-dealing affiliate of the new cartel’s family. A matter of weeks afterwards, Sosa received an anonymous telephone call stating that Aldrete had been having an affair and duly ended their relationship. Aldrete turned to Constanzo for support, who told her that he had seen her break-up coming on his tarot cards. A brief sexual liaison followed, although Constanzo made no secret of his preference for men. Already hooked on the occult element of their relationship, however, Aldrete seemed to accept this rejection and became High Priestess or La Madrina – the godmother – of his cult and contributed to the torture of its victims.
RANCHO SANTA ELENA
The sadistic violence of Constanzo, Aldrete and their followers escalated after the cult moved to Rancho Santa Elena in the nearby desert. On 28 May 1988, he shot dead two victims, one of whom was a rival drug dealer. Unsatisfied with these killings – as they didn’t die screaming – he ordered the execution and dismemberment of a cult member’s transvestite ex-lover on 16 July and had the remains dumped on a street corner where they were found by children.
In November of the same year, he made a gory example of one of his flock – a former policeman named Jorge Valente de Fierro Gomez – for disobeying his ban on drug use.
Valentine’s Day 1989 witnessed the torturous murder of rival Ezequiel Rodriguez Luna and when two other dealers, Ruben Vela Garza and Ernesto Rivas Diaz, arrived uninvited to the ‘ceremony’, they too were brutally murdered. More deaths followed, including the fourteen-year-old cousin of Ovidio Hernandez – who by this point had cemented Constanzo’s alliance with the Hernandez family by joining the cult – and Sara Aldrete’s ex, Gilberto Sosa. A fortnight prior to Sosa’s death, however, the cult had unwittingly made a fatal mistake that would ultimately result in its demise.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
On 13 March 1989, Constanzo, angered by his latest victim not screaming, despatched cult members to find a new offering for his nganga; they returned with twenty-one-year-old Texan student, Mark Kilroy. Unlike the cult’s other numerous casualties, at least three of whom were never identified, the American was not someone who could disappear without trace; he came from an affluent and well-connected family who were determined to bring his killers to justice. It was the beginning of the end for Constanzo. With Kilroy’s disappearance threatening to become an international incident, the Mexican police were eager to solve the case quickly and received a very welcome piece of luck that simultaneously made a mockery of Contanzo’s alleged powers.
On 9 April, cult member, Serafin Hernandez, drove past a police road block under the illusion that Constanzo’s black magic made him invisible to the authorities. He was pursued and arrested along with fellow disciple David Martinez and driven to Rancho Santa Elena. There, police found a huge stash of marijuana and firearms. Two other cult members, Elio Hernandez and Sergio Martinez, then arrived and were also arrested. The four men were interrogated through the night in which they were almost boastful about their barbaric acts of ritual sacrifice. Over the next couple of days, the ranch was raided. Constanzo’s cauldron was found, which held a human brain, a dead black cat, scorpions, spiders and deer antlers among other items and the corpses of fifteen victims exhumed.
THE GODFATHER IS DEAD
Constanzo, along with Aldrete, Quintana and Orea as well as Hernandez family hitman, Alvaro de Leon Valdez, fled to Mexico City moving from
the home of one cult member to the next.
Their eventual discovery on 6 May 1989 was by chance – in spite of a note thrown out of the window by Aldrete being dismissed as a joke and kept to himself by the passer-by who found it a few days beforehand. Police were conducting a door-to-door search for a missing child when they were spotted by the cult leader. He panicked and opened fire, only for the apartment building to be surrounded by 180 police officers. After a forty-five-minute siege, it became apparent to Constanzo that there was no escape. He ordered Alvaro de Leon to shoot both him and his lover, Quintana. Upon arrival in the apartment, police discovered the bodies of Constanzo and Quintana slumped against each other in a closet. Aldrete, Orea and de Leon were arrested immediately. In total, fourteen of Constanzo’s surviving disciples were convicted for a number of offences.
Aldrete and two of the Hernandez brothers, Elio and Serafin, were found guilty of multiple murders and sentenced to over sixty years each. Although Constanzo was dead and his accomplices imprisoned, his influence on others was not; disturbingly, a smiling and self-assured Alvaro de Leon told police: ‘The godfather will not be dead for long.’
Charles Manson
One of America’s most infamous criminals, Charles Manson achieved notoriety in the late 1960s as the head of a hippie cult known as ‘The Family’.
TURBULENT AND UNHAPPY
Manson was born an illegitimate child to sixteen-year-old Kathleen Maddox. At first, he was known as ‘No Name Maddox’, but within weeks he was Charles Milles Maddox. He gained the surname he is now known by, when his mother married labourer, William Manson. It is thought that his biological father was one Colonel Scott, who his mother successfully filed a bastardy suit against in 1937.
Manson’s early years were turbulent and unhappy; apparently unwanted by his mother who rejected him on several occasions – indeed, she once tried to sell him for a pitcher of beer. He also spent a significant amount of his youth in correctional centres. He would later go on record as saying that his solitary happy childhood memory was being embraced by his mother after she was released
from prison.
After spells inside – and escapes from – the Gibault School for Boys in Indiana and Boys Town in Nebraska, Manson was sent to the harshly disciplinarian Indiana School for Boys.
In 1951, he made his latest escape and embarked on a spree of petrol station robberies before being apprehended again. This time though, he was sent to a federal institution in Washington. It was in this latest episode of custody that Manson would commit his first violent crime, holding a razor blade to another boy’s throat while raping him.
He was released in 1954 and married Rosalie Willis the following year, but trouble was never far away. Soon after their marriage, Manson was arrested twice for stealing cars and was sentenced to three years. While he was incarcerated, he missed the birth of his son, Charles Manson Junior, and Rosalie divorced him.
He was paroled in 1958 but was soon earning a living as a pimp. A year later, he received a suspended sentence of ten years for attempting to cash forged cheques. Inevitably, he broke this probation too; conning a woman out of $700 – making her pregnant in the process – before drugging and raping her roommate and was sent to the U.S Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington.
’the family’ was born
In prison, Manson developed a series of fanatical obsessions. At first, these were in the form of various religions including Scientology and Buddhism, but these would give way to music; specifically that of The Beatles. He learned to play the guitar and believed that he had the ability to be better and more successful than his heroes, writing between eighty and ninety songs and devoting hours on end to playing them.
In 1967, having been transferred to Terminal Island, California, Manson was released although he wanted to stay in custody. He pleaded with the guards to keep him locked away, citing his belief that prison was now his home and that he would not be able to adjust to a life of freedom in the much-changed world he was being released into. His request was ignored by the authorities, with devastating results.
He moved to San Francisco where he managed to blend into the hippie scene. Here, he learned about drugs and observed that LSD in particular could be used to control others. A mysterious man who played the guitar and came across as deep and meaningful, it didn’t take Manson long to attract followers. Most of them were rebellious but impressionable young women from respectable backgrounds and it wasn’t difficult for him to manipulate them with his enigmatic philosophies and drugs. In Manson, they believed that they had found their true leader and ‘The Family’ was born.
Although his new-found role as a guru to a throng of young women was a major preoccupation, Manson still dreamt of becoming a successful musician and thought he had received the break he craved in 1968 when he met Denis Wilson of the Beach Boys after befriending Gary Hinman, a music teacher who knew the star. The leader and his groupies would hang around Wilson’s home at every opportunity. Wilson was initially receptive to Manson, paying for studio time for him, introducing him to industry contacts and even persuading his fellow Beach Boys to record one of his songs. His interest didn’t last though and The Family were thrown out of his mansion when he became uneasy about their leader’s manipulative presence.
The Family found a new home in a ranch owned by the elderly George Spahn. Manson persuaded Spahn to allow this in exchange for cleaning services and sexual favours from one of his followers. It was here that Manson began to cultivate the twisted philosophy that would end in a killing spree. He believed that the Beatles song Helter Skelter from their White Album contained a hidden warning about an uprising by black people. He was a racist and this attitude had been exacerbated by the fact that many of the inmates who raped him in prison had been black. His theory was that the blacks would kill the whites but not be able to retain power due to their perceived inferiority. He and The Family would hide in a bottomless pit in the desert of Death Valley until the racial holocaust was over – by which time, he estimated, there would be 144,000 members of The Family. Then they would rise up and take the power back. His beliefs also incorporated his interpretation of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament; he was Jesus Christ and would lead The Family into a new world. Meanwhile, he had still not given up on becoming a musician and turned to Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, who he had met through Denis Wilson. Melcher listened to a live performance, but was not impressed and didn’t grant Manson the studio time he so desperately wanted. This enraged the cult leader and acted as the catalyst for the evil acts that were soon to follow.
10050 CIELO DRIVE
Manson told The Family that they might have to show the blacks how to start it and on 27 July 1969, The Family claimed its first victim.
Manson had sent three of his followers, namely Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins, to the home of Gary Hinman two days beforehand to extort money from him. Hinman was uncooperative and was held hostage. Manson turned up with a sword and slashed his ear before instructing Beausoleil to stab him to death. One of Manson’s three followers then wrote ‘Political piggy’ on the wall in their victim’s blood and also drew a panther’s paw in an attempt to pin the blame on the Black Panthers, a black separatist group. This vicious killing was merely a warm up for the atrocities that were to follow and on 8 August, Manson instructed Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel to visit Terry Melcher’s old home on Cielo Drive.
‘Now is the time for Helter Skelter,’ he told them. ‘Totally destroy everyone in it as gruesome as you can.’
The house was now home to film director Roman Polanski and his wife, Hollywood actress, Sharon Tate. Upon arriving at 10050 Cielo Drive in the early hours of 9 August, Watson climbed the nearest telephone pole and cut the wires to the house while the rest of the gang climbed the walls. Their first victim was eighteen-year-old Steven Parent who was driving out having visited the caretaker who lived in the property’s guest hous
e. Watson shot him four times from point blank range. He then broke in to the house with Krenwinkel and Atkins while Kasabian was sent to the gate on lookout duty. Polanski was working abroad, but Sharon Tate – who was eight months pregnant – was home and she was not alone; Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski and his girlfriend Abigail Folger – a coffee heiress – were also present, along with Jay Sebring, a hair stylist of international fame.
As Frykowski awoke from sleeping on the sofa, Watson stood over him, ‘I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,’ he said.
Atkins and Krenwinkel rounded up the other occupants before Watson tied Tate and Sebring to each other at the neck. It is thought that Sebring broke free and, protesting over the treatment of his pregnant host, was shot by Watson and then stabbed several times. Folger, meanwhile, was briefly taken back to a bedroom to get her purse, believing that they were being burgled. When she was returned to the living room Frykowski, who had been bound with a towel, attempted to take Watson’s gun. He failed and was beaten around the head with its butt and shot twice. Kasabian then showed up and tried to put a stop to the brutality by claiming that somebody was coming, but her appeals fell on deaf ears. As Frykowski struggled to the door screaming for help, he was caught by Atkins and Krenwinkel who stabbed him a total of fifty-one times. Watson then stabbed Folger repeatedly as she tried to escape. The terrified Tate had watched this all and knew she was next. She pleaded for her own life and that of her child, but her assailants showed no compassion; Atkins stabbed her sixteen times.
With all four occupants dead, Atkins wrote ‘PIG’ on the front door in Tate’s blood.
