A haunting echo of ’89 horror
Last weekend’s fatal kidnapping of a group of Americans in Matamoros, Mexico, harkened back to the 1989 murder of a spring breaker in that border city that made international headlines.
University of Texas student Mark Kilroy, 21, and his friends booked a hotel to party in on South Padre Island, Texas, that year. On March 14, he vanished while bar hopping with friends across the border in Matamoros.
The next month, investigators found that Kilroy had been kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed by a satanic drug outfit bluntly dubbed “Los Narcos-Satanicos.”
Drug suspect Serafin Hernandez Garcia led authorities to a rural compound about 13 miles outside Matamoros, where Kilroy’s remains had been burned alongside those of a 14-yearold Mexican boy.
The cult had purportedly sacrificed humans for magical protection.
“It was our religion, our voodoo. We did it for success. We did it for protection,” Garcia, known as Little Serafin, reportedly told cops.
After members tortured and raped the student, leader Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo reportedly chopped off the top of his skull with a machete before members cooked his brain matter in a blood-filled cauldron.
Kilroy’s heart was also ripped from his chest in the ritual, which Constanzo reportedly believed would help protect the drug shipments for which he was responsible and help him and his gang gain supernatural powers.
Authorities dug up 13 mutilated corpses at the compound and two others from a nearby farm.
The victims included rival outlaws and random targets.
In addition, officials learned that the gang had slaughtered countless “cats, dogs, chickens, snakes, goats and even zebras and a lion club,” the Investigation Discovery channel said.
In the wake of the exhumations, the “human slaughterhouse” smelled of the pungent odor of decomposing human flesh — a scene that had sickened even the most hardened police officials, The Associated Press reported in 1990.
The State Department warns Americans not to travel to Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, due to “crime and kidnapping.”