Adolfo Constanzo

This article or section needs to be revised. Details should be given on the talk page. Please help to improve it , and then remove this flag.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

- Doctor Midnight ( discussion ) 16:15, 8 Mar. 2018 (CET)

Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo (born November 1, 1962 in Miami , Florida , USA ; † May 6, 1989 in Mexico City , Mexico ) was a Mexican serial killer of American origin.

biography

Early life

Adolfo Constanzo was born in Miami as the eldest child of Delia Aurora Gonzalez del Valle, a 15-year-old Cuban exile; he never got to know his father. As a toddler, he moved with his mother to San Juan , Puerto Rico , where he was baptized a Catholic . Although he as an altar boy served the Church, he lived in secret his mother to the faith Haitian went priests, and Voodoo -Riten followed. From the age of ten he was brought up by his mother in the faith of the Santería religion and in the same year came into contact with a voodoo priest for the first time on a trip to Haiti .

His mother married in San Juan. Constanzo's stepfather died a year after they married, and Constanzo moved back to Miami with his mother in 1972. Although she was financially well secured by her deceased husband, she became a petty criminal. She has been jailed more than 30 times for various offenses, but since she always excused her actions with her belief that ordered her to steal, she was released several times on parole.

Her faith, which Constanzo also internalized over time, showed forms of expression that were incompatible with social customs. So she moved with her son from apartment building to apartment building and always left her last place of residence behind in a terrible condition. The living quarters were untidy, the walls were smeared with blood, and the rooms were filled with body parts from sacrificed animals. The neighbors already suspected that Delia Gonzalez del Valle was a witch and that one must fear her anger if one stood in her way. Legends arose that in such a case you could find the severed head of a goat on your doorstep.

Adolfo Constanzo's youth were shaped by these influences. He was also engaged in occultism and reportedly developed the ability to foresee the future. According to his mother, he is said to have foreseen the assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Like his mother, he came into conflict with the law when he was arrested twice for shoplifting. He just got a high school diploma . He dropped out of junior college after just one semester.

In 1983 he completed his religious training with his teacher, a master of palo mayombe , a cult whose followers worship Satan as a deity. In order to underline this bond, Constanzo scratched the following two sentences in his flesh: My soul is dead! I don't have a god!

The medium

In the same year, the handsome Constanzo moved to Mexico City, where he found a job as a model . His supposed talent for predicting the future with the help of tarot cards soon caused a sensation in professional circles. Constanzo began to gather disciples around him; since he now stood by his bisexuality , only young men. Among the three most famous followers of his cult were Martín Quintana Rodriguez, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea Ochoa, of whom Constanzo Rodriguez used as a "man" and Ochoa as a "woman" for sexual services.

With these three first disciples, he quickly established a reputation in Mexico City and the surrounding area as a magician and artist who could see into the future and perform limpias - ritual cleansing. These services were not for free, so he began to ask high prices from his regular customers of up to 31. A single session, according to his records, cost up to $ 4,500. He also offered animal sacrifices. Here, too, he kept an exact record and named the price of a rooster $ 6, a goat $ 30, or a boa $ 450. He even offered adult zebras for sacrifice and charged 1,100 dollars for it, while lion cubs were offered as the most expensive sacrificial animal for 3,100 dollars.

Constanzo was also in contact with wealthy drug dealers, who would offer him money to help them plan and foresee their deals. He also cast spells and curses on them so that they would be immune to police bullets. Constanzo's ledger also gives an order of magnitude and names a drug dealer who had paid Constanzo $ 40,000 over a period of three years for the provision of such services.

Constanzo soon had followers from all walks of life. Doctors and real estate agents were just as much a part of the medium's inner circle as mannequins and transvestites. Even four members of the Mexico City police worshiped Constanzo as a deity, including Salvador Garcia, a representative of the narcotics department, and Florentino Ventura, head of Interpol's Mexican division . This served Constanzo right, as it enabled him to close his dealings with the drug dealers without being bothered by the police. Bribes and corruption were the order of the day in Constanzo's clan.

In 1986 Ventura introduced him to the Calzada family, one of the most influential drug cartels in Mexico. Within a few months, Constanzo also became a wealthy man thanks to his orders for the Calzadas, who could buy his own home system for around $ 60,000, or a $ 80,000 Mercedes-Benz car for himself . Constanzo learned quickly and from time to time also committed frauds on a large scale. Disguised as a drug enforcement officer, he defrauded a Guadalajara cocaine dealer and sold the "goods" he had removed for $ 100,000.

Series of murders

Because of his religion, the belief in the palo mayombe , the nganga - the “cauldron of blood” - was also important for Constanzo . Initially specializing only in desecrating graves and practicing occult acts with human bones, he had come to a point where he began to sacrifice people as well. In the mid-1980s, 23 people were brutally killed in and around Mexico City. Countless people were also mutilated and seriously injured. Police assumed that many people did not trust the police out of fear, and that the number of unreported cases was therefore much higher.

Constanzo wanted to become a member of the Calzada cartel in April 1987, because he believed that it was only thanks to his skills that its upswing was due. When they rejected him, however, he made a momentous decision. On April 30, 1987, Guillermo Calzada Sanchez and six of his family members disappeared. The police, who were called to the family home on May 1, searched for them for six days until they recovered the bodies of seven people from the Zumpango River . All showed signs of cruel torture. All of the victims, without exception male, lacked genitals and hearts. Other body parts were also missing, which, as it later turned out, Constanzo had cooked and eaten in his "cauldron of blood".

In July 1987 Constanzo was introduced to another drug family by police officer Salvador Garcia, headed by the brothers Elio and Ovidio Hernandez. That month, 24-year-old Constanzo met 22-year-old Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal in Matamoros , who had a relationship with the drug smuggler Gilberto Sosa, who in turn worked for the Hernandez family. Constanzo fell in love with the good-looking woman who had her birthday on the same day (September 6th) as his mother's. Villareal was the only woman Constanzo was known to have shared his bed with; the young woman, who was a sports teacher at a college , fell so under the spell of Constanzo's sect that she was soon respected as madrina ( godmother ) by all followers. Soon she was not only a witness, but also a perpetrator of the sacrificial rituals.

In order to stage it even more horribly and, above all, in complete silence, Constanzo acquired a piece of desert 32 kilometers outside of Matamoros: the Rancha Santa Elena . On May 28, 1988, the drug trafficker Hector de la Fuente and the farmer Moises Castillo were both killed by gunshots. Since these executions were unsatisfactory for Constanzo, he had the transvestite Raul Paz Esquivel, a former lover of his male sexual partner Jorge Montes, dismembered in Mexico City on July 16, 1988.

On August 10, 1988, Ovidio Hernandez and his two-year-old son were kidnapped by a rival drug clan; whereupon Constanzo made a human sacrifice the following night and prayed for release. The abductees were released the next day, which Constanzo interpreted in his favor.

The fact that Constanzo had hardly any feelings of guilt can be seen in the suicide of Florentino Ventura, a sect member who sought to get out. On September 17, 1988, he first killed his wife and boyfriend and then himself. Adolfo Constanzo hardly noticed this incident.

The hunt for human sacrifice became more and more relentless. In November 1988, Constanzo murdered his disciple Jorge Valente de Fierro Gomez because he had used cocaine . Although Constanzo had dealings with drug dealers, he prohibited his followers from all drug use. In addition, competing drug traffickers were also executed: on February 14, 1989, Ezequiel Rodriguez Luna and his two partners Ruben Vela Garza and Ernesto Rivas Diaz. His first and only verifiable child sacrifice claimed Constanzo's cult on February 25, 1989, when he murdered Ovidio Hernandez's cousin, 14-year-old Jose Garcia.

Beginning of the end

On March 13, 1989, a still unidentified person was murdered on the ranch. Since the latter did not defend himself sufficiently and Constanzo was not satisfied with the execution, his accomplices kidnapped the 21-year-old US medical student Mark Kilroy from a bar in Matamoros the next day, March 14, 1989. Two weeks later, Gilberto Sosa, the ex-boyfriend of Constanzo's friend Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal, followed him into death.

But Mark Kilroy's murder on the day of his abduction marks the turning point in Adolfo Constanzo's biography. Unlike nameless farmers or transvestites, Kilroy was a young man who not only had a family but also a lobby behind him: his uncle worked in the US Department of Commerce. The US authorities offered $ 15,000 for information on Mark Kilroy's disappearance. The search on both the US and Mexican sides has been pursued internationally.

End of the series of murders

On April 1, 1989, Constanzo's police officer Victor Sauceda was murdered on the ranch . With his death, they wanted to please Satan, because the drug dealers planned to import half a ton of marijuana across the border into the United States a week later . Eight days later, on April 9th, cult members Serafin Hernandez Garcia and David Martinez wanted to drive away from a police patrol in their car near Brownsville , Texas , assuming that Constanzo's spells had made them invisible. But the police found the two men and arrested them. She elicited first confessions from the two. For further investigations, the police drove with the arrested persons to the ranch, where they ran into two other followers of the cult, Sergio Martinez and Elio Hernandez. The men gave confessions after long interrogations and revealed the full extent of the series of murders to investigators.

The ranch was systematically searched through April 16, 1989. The mutilated corpses of 15 people were found in a cemetery specially laid out by Constanzo, including that of Mark Kilroy, whose skull had been split open and whose brain had been removed. Two police officers, Joaquin Manzo and Miguel Garcia, were also among the dead. To date, three people have not been identified.

Constanzo's death

Adolfo Constanzo was now wanted with an international arrest warrant. The police raided his home near Atizapan on April 17, 1989 , but could not find anything except a chamber used for ritual sacrifices. From everywhere to caller reported that thought they had seen Constanzo, even in Chicago ( Illinois ).

Constanzo, however, had retired to a small apartment in Mexico City with his girlfriend Sara and three disciples . Sara, who feared for her life and who by now had realized that she had loved a serial killer, wrote a piece of paper with the following wording, which she threw out the window on May 2, 1989:

Please call the judicial authorities and tell them that this building is the one you are looking for. Tell them that a woman is being held hostage. I'm asking because I want to talk above all else - or they'll kill the girl.

A passer-by who found the note ignored it, saying it was a bad joke.

Four days later, it was May 6, 1989, the police officers were called to an apartment building because residents had complained about the loud argument from the neighboring apartment. Not knowing that it was Adolfo Constanzo's apartment, the officers drove to the scene. Constanzo, seeing the policemen from the window, picked up his Uzi and opened fire. It borders on a miracle that only one officer was slightly injured in the 45-minute firefight in which 180 police officers were most recently involved.

When Adolfo Constanzo realized that there was no more escape for him, he handed his weapon to Alvaro de Leon Valdez, a professional killer and cult member, and gave him the order to kill him and Martín Quintana Rodriguez. Although Valdez initially refused, he eventually carried out the order.

When the police finally stormed the apartment, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo and Martín Quintana Rodriguez were dead in their blood; Valdez, Omar Orea Ochoa and Sara were arrested.

Aftermath

• In August 1990, Alvaro de Leon Valdez was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the murder of Constanzo and Rodriguez.
• Juan Fragosa and Jorge Montes also received 35 years' imprisonment for the murder of transvestite Raul Paz Esquivel.
• Omar Orea Ochoa was also charged in the same murder case but died of AIDS before he could be sentenced.
• Sara Maria Aldrete Villareal, who protested to the last that she knew nothing about the murders on the ranch, received a 62-year prison sentence in 1994.
• Other sect members, including Elio Hernandez, also received prison sentences of up to 67 years.

filming

In 2007 director Zev Berman produced the horror film Borderland , which is freely about the events surrounding Adolfo Constanzo's cult. The focus of the film is on the murder of Mark Kilroy, who is portrayed in the film by three US college graduates ( Brian Presley , Jake Muxworthy and Rider Strong ).

literature

• Michael Newton: The Great Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. Verlag für Collectors , Graz 2002, 447 pages, ISBN 3-85365-189-5

Web links

• Borderland in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Michael Newton: Adolfo Constanzo. Crime Library, 2015, archived from the original on February 9, 2015 ; accessed on October 10, 2019 (original website no longer available).