Ep.13 The Narcosatanists (The Matamoros Cult)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Hidden Cults, the podcast that shines a light
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(00:47):
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(01:10):
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future Listener Stories episode. Your anonymity is guaranteed always today's episode,
let's begin the Narco Satanists Part one origins of ritual

(01:32):
and blood, Before the blood soaked rituals, before the mutilated
bodies discovered in shallow graves on a dusty Mexican ranch,
Before the name El Padrino struck fear into the hearts
of drug runners and police alike, there was a boy,
a boy named Adolpho Constanzo, born not into violence, but
into a family already steeped in superstition, ritual, and survival

(01:54):
at any cost. Adolpho deje Constanzo came into the world
on November first, nineteen six six two, a date marked
by irony, landing squarely on Dia de los Mortos, the
Day of the Dead. He was born in Miami, Florida,
to a young Cuban immigrant named Delia Aurora Gonzales. She
was just fifteen when she had him, already a widow,

(02:15):
already hardened. A refugee of Castro's Revolution, Delia had fled
to the US, like so many others, chasing the promise
of a better life. But what she found was poverty, marginalization,
and an uncertain future. She didn't run from the old ways, though,
if anything, she leaned harder into them. Delia brought her
beliefs with her. She was a practitioner of Santaria, a

(02:37):
syncretic religion that blends Catholicism with Yoruba derived spiritualism. It
came with candles, chants, altars, saints who were really spirits,
and rituals meant to shape reality itself. It wasn't unusual
for Adolpho to grow up surrounded by these things. What
was unusual was how early and how seriously he took
to them. As a child, Adolpho wasn't just present for

(02:59):
the us rituals he watched, he mimicked, and eventually he participated.
Delia encouraged it. By the time he was six or seven,
she claimed he had the gift. He could sense things,
read people, interpret omens. She saw him as special, maybe
even chosen. By the time he was ten, Delia had
remarried several times in fact, and her new husbands only

(03:20):
deepened the criminal environment Adolpho was growing up in. One
was a drug trafficker, another was rumored to be a
brutal enforcer. Violence and occultism ran parallel in the household,
guns and grimoires, cocaine and candles. When Adolpho was twelve,
his mother took him to Haiti, where he was introduced
to Vodu practices, not the sanitized western tourist version, but

(03:43):
the real thing, raw, ancestral, bloody. He was captivated. Power
didn't come from prayers alone. It came from sacrifice, from fear,
from command. Back in Miami, the teenage Adolpho was charismatic,
good looking, and deeply manipulative. He bounced between Catholic school
and the street with ease. He'd serve as an altar
boy in the morning and steal from stores in the afternoon.

(04:06):
Friends recalled his growing obsession with control, not just over others,
but over fate. He read books on the occult, dabbled
in tarot, and turned small time cons into ritual performances.
One day he might offer a candlelight reading. Another day
he might threaten someone with a curse. At age eighteen,
he formally apprenticed under a Cuban palo priest A Paleros

(04:28):
in Little Havana. Polo Mayombe was different from Santia, darker,
more aggressive. Where Santaria worked with the ureshas spirits of
nature and humanity, Pollo called upon the dead directly. It
used in ganghas cauldrons, filled with bones, sticks, blood, and
iron to house spirits under the command of the priest.
These weren't metaphorical spells. Pollo was believed to exact real consequences.

(04:53):
The training was brutal, Sacrifices of animals were common. Blood
was a necessary offering, and Constanzo was all in. This
wasn't just religion to him, it was a career path.
By his early twenties, he had cultivated a client base
among the wealthy and the dangerous. Drug dealers came to
him not for spiritual peace, but for protection. Gang members

(05:13):
wanted invincibility. He promised it for the right price. He
began to believe in his own power. He started dressing
all in black, gold chains, expensive cologne, a dramatic presence.
He claimed he could curse enemies, shield traffickers from bullets,
even predict betrayal. It didn't matter whether it was true.
It only mattered that his clients believed it, and they did.

(05:35):
The nineteen eighties Miami drug scene was vicious, paranoid, and
flush with cash, and here was a man who offered
supernatural armor in exchange for loyalty and payment to Constanzo.
Paolo Miombe wasn't a fringe religion anymore. It was a
tool of power, a hierarchy of spirits, and he was
climbing it fast. But the chaos of Miami was starting

(05:55):
to burn out. Shootouts in the street, federal crackdowns, and
rising gang tens made it an unstable place for someone
trying to grow an empire. Constanzo wanted more than small
time cartel clients. He wanted status, He wanted reverence, he
wanted an army. In nineteen eighty four, he left for
Mexico City. What he found there was exactly what he
had been waiting for. A vacuum of power, an underworld

(06:17):
that still ran on bribes and whispers, and a population
still deeply tied to superstition. He was just twenty two.
In Mexico City, Constanzo played his role to perfection. He
set up shop as a high level occultist, complete with candles, altars,
and carefully choreographed ceremonies. His services weren't cheap, but his
clients weren't poor. Police officers, politicians, drug traffickers. They all

(06:41):
came to him, and the more important they were, the
more theatrical his rituals became. He sacrificed goats than roosters.
Then eventually more his inner circle began to form followers
who called him El Padrino, the Godfather. Young men and
women drawn to his charm, his confidence, his promises of power,
they obeyed him without question. He gave them roles, ranks, rules.

(07:03):
Some called him a cult leader, others a Narco shaman.
But to his followers he was a prophet, a hybrid
of Jesus, Lucifer and Scarface. Among them was Sarah Aldrede,
a tall, bright college student studying to be a teacher.
By all appearances, she was a model citizen, but she
had another side, a fascination with the occult and a

(07:24):
deep desire to feel powerful in a world that had
constantly underestimated her. Constanzo pulled her in like a magnet.
She quickly became La Madrina, his high priestess and second
in command. Together they began to merge belief and brutality
into something new. It wasn't just about worship anymore. It
was about domination. In nineteen eighty six, Constanzo's group made

(07:46):
its move north toward the border town of Matamoros. It
was a perfect storm of opportunity The region was crawling
with narcos, corrupt officials, and a culture already steeped in
folk Catholicism and superstition. Fear and faith lived side by
side here, and El Padrino would weaponize both. They purchased
a property just outside Matamoros, a small ranch named Santa Elena.

(08:09):
From the outside it looked unremarkable, a few simple buildings,
cattle fences, quiet land. But underground and behind closed doors
it became something far more sinister. Constanzo built a ritual hut,
a kimbisa, where sacrifices could be made. Then ganga was installed, bones, sticks, dirt, blood.
It was fed frequently. The followers obeyed, carrying out the ceremonies.

(08:31):
They brought him animals, goats, chickens, even snakes. But Constanzo
was growing restless. He told them the spirits demanded more.
They needed stronger blood, more powerful offerings. They needed humans.
The shift was gradual than absolute. People began disappearing in
the region, locals at first, men without families, migrants, sex workers.

(08:51):
But as Constanzo's power grew, so did his boldness. The
sacrifices were no longer just about feeding the spirits. They
were about asserting control, total, unchecked dominance over life and death.
Constanzo believed that with each sacrifice, his ganga grew stronger,
that it absorbed the power of the victim, that he
himself became more invincible, that he could not be touched.

(09:13):
By nineteen eighty eight, the cult had fully embedded itself
in the Mattamoros drug trade. They weren't just spiritual advisors
to the cartels, they were active players. Constanzo broker deals,
offered protection spells for traffickers and demanded loyalty in return.
Rival dealers who defied him often vanished. His followers remained loyal,
bound by ritual fear and the belief that they were chosen.

(09:37):
At the center of it all, the cauldron sat full
of bones, blood, and something else, something darker, something that
would eventually lead the police to the ranch and to
the horror buried beneath it. But before the world knew
the name Adolfo Constanso, before journalists dubbed the group Narco Satanists,
before law enforcement uncovered the true scale of what had

(09:59):
happened to Santae Elena, a young American man would go missing.
His name was Mark Kilroy and his disappearance would unravel everything.
Part two, The Disappearance of Mark Kilroy. In March of
nineteen eighty nine, thousands of college students poured across the
border into Mexico. It was spring break, and South Padre
Island was one of the biggest destinations in the country

(10:22):
for American kids from across the South and Midwest. It
promised beaches, bars, cheap alcohol, and a brush with the unknown,
just far enough from home to feel like an escape,
not far enough to feel dangerous. Among the flood of
revelers that week was a twenty one year old pre
med student from the University of Texas named Mark Kilroy.
Mark had the kind of background that made him seem

(10:43):
immune to tragedy. Clean cut, athletic, intelligent. He had grown
up in a Catholic household in Santa Fe, Texas. His
father worked in chemical sales and his mother was a
volunteer paramedic. Mark was a strong student, disciplined and social
without being reckless. Everyone who knew him described him the
same way, a good kid with a good head on

(11:03):
his shoulders. He didn't drink heavily, he didn't do drugs.
He played basketball, He studied hard, He went to church.
He arrived in South Padre Island with three close friends. Together,
they booked a motel, spent the days at the beach,
and ventured out at night into the chaos. For a
few days. It was exactly what they'd hoped, a blur
of music, crowds, flirtation and freedom. But the lines between

(11:27):
South Padre and Matamoros were thin. At night, students often
walked or drove across the Gateway International Bridge into the
Mexican town. It was only a few blocks away, and
in Matamoros the drinks were cheaper, the atmosphere looser, the
thrill just a little sharper. On March thirteenth, nineteen eighty nine,
Mark Kilroy and his friends crossed into Mexico one more time.

(11:49):
It was just after sundown and the streets of Matamoros
were packed. Music blared from every open bar. Street vendors
called out in Spanish and English. Tourists swarmed the side
walks in tank tops and sandals. The energy was high,
but the mood was relaxed. The group bar hopped, laughed,
and took in the night without incident, but as the
hours passed they began to drift apart. In the crowd.

(12:11):
At some point, Mark became separated from the others. It
wasn't immediately alarming. People wandered, then found each other again.
There were crowds everywhere, but within a few minutes that
casual disconnection turned into something different. He was gone one minute.
His friends thought he was just steps behind. The next
they were circling the block, checking doorways, retracing steps. There

(12:34):
was no sign of him. They assumed maybe he'd gone
back to the car or returned to the hotel, but
he wasn't there. By sunrise, concern turned to fear Mark
Kilroy had vanished. His friends contacted Mexican police, then US authorities.
Flyers were printed, phone calls made. His parents were informed
and drove to the border immediately. What followed was an

(12:56):
exhaustive and desperate search. For days, investigators canvassed the area,
They questioned witnesses, searched the riverbanks, and reviewed every detail
of the night. But there were no answers, no struggle,
no body, no ransom demand. Initially, the case was treated
like a typical tourist disappearance. Mexico had seen its share
of missing Americans, mugging's gone wrong, drug overdoses, people who

(13:19):
slipped into the wrong alley at the wrong time. But
nothing about Mark Kilroy fit that pattern. He had no
known enemies, no criminal ties, no reason to disappear. His parents,
James and Helen Kilroy, refused to let the case go cold.
They stayed in the area. They worked with both American
and Mexican authorities. They offered a reward, They held press conferences,

(13:39):
and slowly public pressure mounted. This wasn't just another spring
breaker who got lost. This was a promising young man
who had evaporated in a crowd. In the weeks that followed,
rumors began to swirl. Some said he'd been kidnapped by
drug traffickers. Others whispered about organ theft. Still others claimed
it was a cartel punishment for unknowingly insulting someone in

(14:01):
a bar, but none of the theories stuck. The case
might have stalled completely if not for a separate, seemingly
unrelated event. Nearly a month later, in early April, Mexican
federal agents set up a routine checkpoint outside Matamoros. It
was meant to target drug smuggling routes, nothing unusual, but
during one inspection, a pickup truck blew through the checkpoint

(14:22):
without stopping. It was a bold move. The agents pursued.
The chase led them to a small property on the
outskirts of town, a ranch called Santa Elena. What they
found there was unsettling. The property was eerily quiet, no
signs of workers, no livestock, just dust, buildings and heat. Inside,
investigators discovered traces of drug paraphernalia, bundles of marijuana, scales,

(14:46):
packaging materials. It wasn't shocking. Many ranches in northern Mexico
were used as stash houses or transit points for traffickers,
but something about this place felt different. There were strange
markings on the walls, an outbuilding that looked more like
a shrine than a shelter, animal bones, wax, residue symbols
scrawled in ash. The agents took several suspects into custody.

(15:09):
Among them was a man named Seraphine Hernandez Garcia, the
nephew of a known drug trafficker. At first, he denied everything,
but after hours of interrogation, something cracked. He didn't confess
to drug trafficking. He confessed to something else, entirely rituals, sacrifices,
human offerings. Seraphine told the agents they were part of
a cult, that they worshiped a deity called katiem Pembe,

(15:32):
a spirit of the dead, that they had been commanded
by their leader to perform sacrifices for power, protection and strength,
and that one of those sacrifices had been an American,
Mark Kilroy. It was almost too grotesque to believe. The
agents pressed him for details. Saraphin led them back to
the ranch. He pointed to a specific spot behind the outbuilding.

(15:53):
The dirt was dry and cracked, but soft enough to dig.
Authorities brought shovels. What they uncovered in the shit sallow
grave was a mutilated corpse, decayed, dismembered, and wrapped in plastic.
The skull had been opened with a blade. The brain
was missing. Dental records confirmed it the body was Mark Kilroy.
News of the discovery spread like wildfire. Headlines screamed across

(16:16):
both sides of the border. Ritual killing, satanic cult in Mexico,
human sacrifice in the drug world. For a public still
reeling from the panic of the nineteen eighties, where heavy
metal and horror movies were blamed for moral decay, this
was a nightmare come to life. The truth as it
unraveled in the days and weeks that followed, was even

(16:37):
worse than the initial headlines suggested. Over the next week,
Mexican authorities excavated the land around the Santa Lena ranch.
One by one, they unearthed more bodies. By the end
of the dig, at least fifteen corpses had been recovered,
some missing hearts, others with spines removed, many with skulls
cut open. Most were believed to be victims of the cult.

(17:00):
A few were rival dealers, One was a former cult
member who had tried to leave, another was a transwoman
from the area who had disappeared months earlier. All had
been offered to then Ganga. The media dubbed them the
Narco Satanists, a brutal hybrid of cartel violence and dark mysticism,
and at the center of it all was one man,
Adolpho Constanzo el Padrino. He was nowhere to be found.

(17:24):
As authorities pieced together the group's structure, they uncovered a
tightly controlled inner circle. Constanzo, the self proclaimed high priest,
had chosen Sarah Aldredi as his second in command. She
had helped lure victims. She had been present for rituals.
She had taken notes on sacrifices in a coded journal
found at the scene. The writings detailed each ceremony, what

(17:44):
was taken, what was offered, what the spirits were believed
to have given in return. Mark Kilroy's entry was chilling
in its detail. It described his abduction, the time of day,
the way he had been bound, how he was walked
blindfolded through the brush, and how Constanzo himself had carved
into his skull while he was still alive. The goal,

(18:05):
according to the cult, had been to feed then Ganga,
a brain of high intelligence. Constanzo believed it would imbue
their spells with greater power. Kilroy, as a pre med
honor student, was seen as a particularly valuable offering. Authorities
were horrified not just by the act, but by the
belief system that justified it. This wasn't senseless violence, It

(18:26):
was calculated. The rituals followed a strict logic. They drew
from Palo Miyambe, a legitimate Afro Caribbean religion, but twisted
into something else. Entirely. Constanzo had perverted the tradition. He
claimed divine authority demanded obedience and used terror as a
spiritual instrument. With several cult members in custody and the
ranch now a full blown crime scene, the manhunt for

(18:48):
Constanzo began in earnest. Tips flooded in. Some said he
had fled to Monterey, Others claimed he was back in
Mexico City. A few believed he'd already crossed into the
US using a fake passport. Authorities were working blind Constanzo
had money, fake IDs, and loyal followers. The FBI became involved,
so did Interpol. Texas State officials worked closely with Mexican

(19:12):
law enforcement to track movements across the border. At the
same time, the press continued to fuel the panic. Tabloids
ran lurid photos of altars and bones. Talk shows debated
whether Satanism was infecting youth culture. Religious leaders condemned the
blending of occultism and crime, while also painting a wide
brush over Afro Caribbean religions that had no link to

(19:34):
the killings. Meanwhile, the Kilroy family returned home. They buried
their son, and they made a decision they would not
let his death be reduced to horror headlines or drug
war statistics. They launched a foundation in his name. They
spoke publicly about the need for tighter border security. They
advocated for better cooperation between Mexican and American authorities. Mark's

(19:58):
father appeared before Congress. His mother gave speeches to schools,
urging students to think twice about where they went and
who they trusted. But even as the narrative moved forward,
Constanzo remained elusive. In truth, he hadn't gone far. He
was hiding in plain sight, pulled up in a Mexico
City apartment with several followers, including Sara Aldrette. They had

(20:20):
stocked the place with food, weapons, cash, and candles. Every
night they performed rituals. Constanzo believed the spirits were still
protecting him. He even cast spells to confuse the police.
He burned cigars, offered blood and red omens in wax,
but the walls were closing in. By May sixth, nineteen
eighty nine, authorities had narrowed the search to a small

(20:42):
cluster of buildings in the Kuwal Temok district. A tip
had come in from a concerned neighbor. Federal agents surrounded
the complex. It was quiet, then a burst of gunfire
cracked through the air. Inside the apartment, Constanzo knew the
end had come, but he didn't surrender. He gathered two
of his followers and handed them a gun. He ordered
them to kill him. They did. When agents stormed the apartment,

(21:05):
they found his body alongside the others, shot multiple times,
slumped against a wall. The cult's leader, the man who
had declared himself bulletproof, had chosen death on his own terms.
Part three, Aftermath and the cult on Trial. The death

(21:27):
of Adolpho Constanzo did not bring peace. If anything, it
opened a deeper vein of horror. He was gone, yes,
but the cult he created had not vanished with him,
and in the weeks following the standoff in Mexico City,
investigators were left to sort through the wreckage he had
left behind, the bodies, the rituals, the testimonies, and the
people still alive who believed in what he taught. Inside

(21:50):
the apartment where Constanzo died, authorities found a scene of
eerie silence. The floor was scattered with ritual materials, charred bones,
half burned candles, bloodstained cloth, cigars, coins, and feathers, all
arranged with obsessive precision. The altar blackened and jagged still
stood in the corner. The scent of gunpowder was fresh,

(22:11):
but underneath it lingered the odour of dried blood and incense.
It was a contradiction in every direction. A crime scene
and a sanctuary, a house of death and worship. Sarah
Aldredgey was found alive in the same apartment. She had
not been shot, though she appeared disoriented and visibly shaken.
At first, she insisted she was a hostage, a woman

(22:33):
held against her will by a dangerous madman, but her
story unraveled quickly. When police searched her belongings. They found journals,
not diaries, but detailed records, pages of coded entries listing
the dates of rituals, the names of victims, and the
ingredients used in sacrifices. The writing was meticulous, cold clinical.
One page bore the title Ritual for Protection, Another read

(22:56):
to Punish the Trader. Several included lists of offerings, bones, fingers, tongues, hearts,
and beside those, the dates lined up with known disappearances.
Sarah had not only been present for the cult's activities,
she had been instrumental. As interrogations began, she remained calm,
at first, silent, but Over time, the details poured out.

(23:18):
She described Constanzo's belief that then Ganga, the ritual cauldron,
needed blood to remain powerful. She explained how the spirits
demanded fear, that pain was part of the ritual, that
Constanzo believed the brain, the spine, and the genitals of
victims all held specific powers depending on how the sacrifice
was conducted. She admitted to helping restrain victims. She helped

(23:40):
clean the blood, She helped maintain the altar. She never
physically killed anyone, she claimed, but she didn't stop it either.
Others arrested with her included members of the cult's inner circle,
men in their twenties, some barely out of high school.
They were described by media outlets as zombifiede followers, but
the truth was more complicated. They weren't mindless. They were

(24:02):
bound by belief. Several of them said they truly believed
Constanzo could protect them, that his rituals had kept bullets
from striking them, that the police hadn't rated Santa Elena
sooner because the spirits were shielding the ranch. They said
that after sacrifices, Constanzo would enter trances that he spoke
with voices not his own, that he claimed to see

(24:24):
future events. Sometimes, they said, he would scream and shake violently,
then whisper instructions from the spirits. Those instructions almost always
involved more blood. The testimony shocked prosecutors, but it also
presented a legal challenge. How do you prosecute a murder
committed in the name of faith? How do you sentence
someone who still believes what they did was sacred. Mexican

(24:45):
authorities decided to pursue the case aggressively. Sarah Aldrede was
charged with multiple counts of murder, association with criminal activity,
and involvement in drug trafficking. Her trial became a media circus.
Journalists flooded the courtroom. Protesters gathered outside with signs calling
her the High Priestess of Death. Inside, she sat stone faced,

(25:09):
calm unflinching. The prosecution painted her as the co leader
of a murderous cult. They presented journal entries, photographs of
the ranch, and the timeline of Kilroy's abduction. They read
aloud descriptions of how his body had been dismembered, how
parts were placed in then ganga, how his blood had
been used in rituals. They showed photographs of the cauldron
itself filled with bones and flesh. The defense tried to

(25:32):
separate her from Constanzo. They argued that she had been manipulated,
that she had been drawn in slowly, emotionally coerced, brainwashed,
that she had tried to leave but was afraid. They
highlighted her clean academic record, her scholarship awards, her goals
to become a teacher. They said she had been a
victim too, but the jury wasn't convinced. In nineteen ninety four,

(25:54):
she was convicted and sentenced to over sixty years in prison.
Other cult members received sentences ranging from from ten years
to life. One man Omar Area, was found dead in
the weeks after Constanzo's death, likely murdered by other cult
affiliates who believed he had betrayed them. Others simply disappeared.
Some names mentioned in the journals were never found. It's
believed that several lower ranking members fled deeper into Mexico,

(26:17):
protected by traffickers who still believed in the rituals. With
the trials complete and the ranch abandoned, attention turned to
the broader impact of the cult. What had just happened
was not merely a case of criminal activity, it had
exploded into something else, a full scale moral panic. News
outlets across the US and Mexico struggled to label the case.

(26:38):
Some called it a drug cult, others focused on the
Satanic imagery. The phrase Narco Satanists caught on almost immediately,
though it was a misnomer. The cult had not worshiped
Satan in the traditional sense. Their beliefs were rooted in Palomyombe,
albeit a corrupted version. Still, the term stuck, in part
because it made for good headlines. It sold fear, it

(27:00):
confirmed the worst suspicions of the time. In the late
nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, satanic panic was still
gripping large portions of the American public. There were rumors
of devil worshipers in daycares, coded messages in heavy metal albums,
and occult abuse in suburban neighborhoods. The Matamoros case felt
like proof that it wasn't all hysteria, that somewhere someone

(27:24):
really had sacrificed people to a dark god, that a
line had been crossed and it had bled across borders.
Law enforcement agencies began training officers to spot signs of
ritual abuse. Churches preached against the dangers of the occult.
TV specials ran hour long segments linking drug use, satanism,
and murder. Books were published painting Constanzo as the ultimate evil,

(27:47):
a demon in human form. None of these efforts had
any real connection to the deeper realities of Afro Caribbean religion,
but Nuance had no place in the conversation. The Pollo
community was caught in the crossfire. Priests and practitioners across
the Caribbean and Latin America found themselves under suspicion. They
issued public statements condemning Constanzo's actions. They reminded people that

(28:09):
real Palo Mayombe did not call for human sacrifice, that
then ganga was a sacred object, not a murder weapon,
that the spirits they honored did not ask for blood.
But public perception was already set. In the years that followed,
the story of the Matamoros cult entered a kind of
mythological status. It became the cautionary tale told at border crossings,

(28:31):
whispered about in churches, dissected in academic papers. Constanzo became
a symbol, a warning the man who fused drug trafficking,
and ritual murder into one coherent nightmare. Few portrayals captured
the complexity of the environment. He came from a blend
of spiritual longing, personal ambition, and unchecked power in a
world where violence was currency. For the Kilroy family, none

(28:54):
of that mattered. Their son was gone. Nothing could change that.
They remained vocal, not just about Mark, but about the
broader issues. The case revealed, cross border crime, gaps in
international cooperation, the vulnerability of young travelers. They became advocates
for safety, education and awareness. They built a scholarship fund

(29:15):
in Mark's name. They kept his memory rooted in the
life he lived, not the way it ended. As for
the ranch at Santa Elena, it was eventually abandoned. The
outbuildings crumbled, the altar was removed. Then Ganga was confiscated
and placed into evidence, though some say it was quietly destroyed.
Over time, the desert began to reclaim the land. Weeds

(29:36):
grew over the burial sites, the wind erased footprints, but
the reputation lingered. Even today, locals are reluctant to speak
of the place drivers pass without slowing down. Farmers refused
to build on the soil. A ranch once used to
channel fear and power has become a kind of dead zone,
and yet the story still flickers. In online forums and

(29:56):
whispered conversations, Constanzo's name comes up again. His rituals are
studied by true crime enthusiasts and occult researchers. His notebooks,
portions of which were leaked to the press, are still
analyzed by people trying to understand how faith became fused
with cruelty. One detail often resurfaces that he believed death
wasn't the end, that then Ganga, properly fed, could allow

(30:18):
the priest to rise again. That power didn't die, it transferred.
For those who followed him, that belief was real, it
was the core of their loyalty, and for some it
didn't die with him. Years after the trial, reports surfaced
of new groups adopting Constanzo's name, copycat rituals altars built
in the same style, bones stolen from cemeteries. None reached

(30:41):
the same level of violence, but the echo was unmistakable.
The cult had ended, but its influence hadn't fully disappeared.
In prison, Sarah Aldretti remained defiant for years. In interviews,
she wavered between denial and remorse. Sometimes she claimed total innocence,
other times she admitted to being seduced by She described
Constanzo as magnetic, terrifying, brilliant. She called him lost. She

(31:05):
spoke of spirits of protection, of confusion, but rarely, if ever,
of guilt. She later authored a book from prison recounting
her version of events. In it, she described feeling trapped, betrayed.
She called herself a survivor. Critics weren't convinced. The evidence
against her was overwhelming, and for the families of the dead,
there was no version of the story where she wasn't

(31:27):
part of the engine. The cult's story faded gradually from
the headlines, but it never really left. It remains one
of the clearest and most gruesome intersections of spiritual belief,
drug violence, and charismatic control in modern history. A case
where religion was not the backdrop to crime but the mechanism,
Where death was not a byproduct but the objective. Where faith,

(31:50):
when twisted, became a weapon more powerful than any cartel rifle.
And behind it all stood a man who believed he
was chosen, a man who saw himself not as a murderer,
but as a conduit, a man who told his followers
the gods demanded sacrifice, and they believed him. The line
between belief and delusion is thin, and in Matamoros it
was written in blood. Part four ritual symbol and the

(32:12):
Legacy of El Padrino. When Adolfo Constanzo died in a
hail of bullets in a Mexico City apartment in nineteen
eighty nine, many assumed the cult would die with him.
The ranch had been raided, the altar torn down, his
followers arrested or scattered. For a moment, it felt like
evil had been sealed off, like the Nightmare could be
boxed into a few news cycles and left behind. But

(32:34):
that wasn't the end, because evil doesn't vanish, it adapts,
and the rituals he created left more than bodies. They
left behind belief. The death toll was officially fifteen, some
investigators suspected it was much higher, perhaps twice that number.
Not all the victims were found at the ranch, not
all were identified, and not all were killed for the
same reason. Some were offerings, some were warnings, others were tests.

(32:58):
Each death fit into a system Constanzo believed in a
brutal logic he had twisted from older traditions. At the
center of that system was Palomambe, a religion with deep
African roots. It came to the Americas with enslaved people
and took shape in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America.
In its true form, Pollo is spiritual, complex and deeply
rooted in nature and ancestor reverence. Its rituals involved communication

(33:22):
with spirits through ing ganga, a sacred cauldron filled with
earth bones and symbolic items. A trained palero uses this
vessel to speak to the dead and seek guidance. Sometimes
animal sacrifices are made, but human life is never part
of the bargain. Constanzo ignored that boundary. He had learned
the basics of Pollo in Miami during his teenage years,

(33:42):
but his teachers were already unorthodox, and by the time
he arrived in Mexico he had begun warping the practice
into something darker. Ing ganga became his altar of power.
Instead of ancestral bones, he used fresh human remains, skulls, vertebrae, brains, genitalia.
He believed each art held unique spiritual power, strength in

(34:03):
the spine, foresight in the eyes, wisdom in the brain.
The more terrified the victim, the more powerful the energy.
The killings at Rancho Sanna Elena followed this logic. Victims
were kept for days, blindfolded, isolated, sometimes starved. Constanzo insisted
that fear was necessary, that person's spirit was stronger when

(34:23):
released in panic. The murders weren't frenzied, they were methodical.
He often carried them out himself. He would speak in
strange tongues, chanting over the victims before removing the chosen
body part. That part went straight into the ganga. Soaked
in blood, stirred with knives, blessed with rum and cigar smoke.
It was theater, but deadly serious to those inside. After

(34:43):
each ritual, Constanzo made predictions who to avoid, who to
kill next, where to move, drugs, whose loyalty needed testing.
Every action was fed back into the ritual. Then ganga
always needed more. When police raided the ranch, they found
it a rusted iron cauldron filled with remains, spines, teeth,
coins embedded in eye sockets, bones tied with string, and

(35:06):
among them what they believed were parts of Mark Kilroy,
the American student whose death had triggered the investigation. Constanzo's
followers didn't see themselves as killers. They saw themselves as chosen.
They wore amulets filled with animal bones. Some had tattoos
of eyes or crosses, a strange hybrid of Pollo symbols,
Catholic imagery, and Constanzo's own inventions. One ring found during

(35:29):
the raid bore an inverted triangle in the letter M.
It stood for Morte. Death. Symbols were central to his power.
He taught that the right symbol could open a door,
that if you drew it, spoke the right name, and
gave the right offering, the spirit world would answer. The
altar room reflected this belief, its walls painted black, the
floor marked with chalk sigils. Some were borrowed from Haitian vodu,

(35:51):
others were Constanzo's own design. A camera found at the
ranch contained photos of the rituals. Cult members kneeling, shirtless,
armed with machetes, eyes closedos. In one photo, Constanzo stands
at the center, chest bare, skull in hand, face painted white.
To outsiders, it looked like madness, but inside the circle
it was order. After his death, the imagery didn't fade,

(36:11):
it spread. Symbols from the Santa Elena rituals began turning
up across Mexico, Graffitian border towns, tattoos in prison altars,
and cartel safe houses. Not all were direct imitations. Some
were half understood recreations of Constanzo's style, but the message
was clear. The cult hadn't vanished. It had become an idea,

(36:32):
one that others could borrow. Some cartels began adapting elements
of Palo Mayombe into their own rituals, often clumsily. Traffickers
paid spiritual advisors to blessed shipments, read omens or curse rivals.
Most of it was symbolic, but in rare cases authorities
found signs of something more. Remains arranged like offerings objects
placed with clear ritual intent. The methods varied, but the

(36:55):
logic power through fear remained. Even outside the world of crime,
Constanzo's legacy twisted its way into other corners. His writings
circulated in occult circles, translated and discussed online. Some treated
them as forbidden knowledge, others as dangerous nonsense, but few
dismissed their intensity. Academic researchers studied his group as a

(37:16):
fringe religious movement, not just a cult, but a system.
One paper suggested Constanzo had effectively founded a new religion,
one without a future leader, but with a doctrine that
could outlive him. That prediction turned out to be true.
In the years following the Matamoros case, copycat crimes appeared
in Vera Cruz, a murder scene included a ritual altar
and an iron pot filled with bones. In Guatemala, disappearances

(37:40):
were linked to a group that spoke of El Morto
Sagrado and practiced beheadings. These weren't splinter cells, they weren't
organized under a single banner, but they shared methods, and
they showed that the idea had survived. Part five Reflections
on power, ritual and the cost of obedience. The real
aftermath of the Narco Satanists wasn't legal. It was personal

(38:03):
for the families who lost sons, daughters, siblings and friends,
for the survivors still imprisoned decades later, and for the
people who came close to joining but walked away before
the rituals turned bloody. Some did leave quietly early, Others
stayed just long enough to see what was coming. And
then vanished. A few would later speak to reporters. They
described a world that didn't start with murder. It started

(38:24):
with promises. Constanzo didn't introduce himself as a killer. He
introduced himself as a protector, a guide, someone who saw
deeper than the rest. He offered a worldview that made
chaos feel orderly. The spirits weren't abstract. They were active, hungry, responsive.
The altar was a communication line to something bigger. He
didn't demand loyalty up front. He rewarded those who gave it.

(38:47):
And that slow drip of validation is where cults find
their grip. It starts small. Maybe it's a ritual to
cleanse bad energy, a candle burned while someone chants. Then
it's a charm worned to avoid the eyes of the police.
It's a rooster sacrifice than a goat, than a man
who had betrayed them, or so they're told. Step by step,
the horror becomes familiar. Constanzo wasn't alone in using that progression.

(39:10):
It's how most destructive cults work. They don't begin with blood.
They begin with belief, with inclusion, with power shared in pieces,
given just slowly enough to make the next step feel
reasonable until it isn't. For his followers, the final line,
the point at which murder became holy, wasn't crossed in
a single moment. It was walked toward. Each ritual numbed

(39:31):
them to the next. Each sacrifice was framed as necessary, useful, blessed.
It's easy to look back and ask how they didn't
see it. How a college student like Sarah Aldrede, top
of her class, with a scholarship and a family, could
end up bathing a skull and blood while watching her
friend carve a man open. But that's the wrong question.
The better one is what made her stay? What need

(39:54):
did Constanzo phil The psychology of cult obedience is complicated.
There's no single profile. There are patterns. People who join cults,
even violent ones, aren't typically unstable or evil. They're often
looking for order, for safety, for a system that explains
why the world hurts the way it does. In Constanzo's orbit,
those systems came with ritual, and for some that was enough.

(40:15):
He gave his followers a framework in which their suffering mattered,
their loyalty was spiritual, their actions were sanctified, and for
people operating on the margins, of society, poor, frightened, overlooked.
That was intoxicating, the idea that you could be chosen,
that you could carry power in your pocket, that you
could be feared by people who once stepped over you.

(40:36):
He weaponized that feeling. This is what made his cult
more than just a gang with candles. It was structured
belief with a violent endpoint. And that makes it dangerous
in a way few crimes are, because if people think
God wants what they're doing, they won't stop, not when
they're arrested, not when they're exposed, not even when their
leader dies. They'll call it sacrifice, and if they've given

(40:58):
enough of themselves already, they'll see no way out. What's
chilling is that Constanzo understood this perfectly. He knew how
to escalate devotion, how to dress it in symbols, how
to punish doubts without appearing cruel. His most loyal followers
weren't held by chains. They were held by faith. When
the rituals started to involve people, no one rebelled. When

(41:19):
the skulls started piling up in the ganga, no one
walked away. Some were afraid, some were in too deep,
Some maybe believed it was all real, that the pain
of others protected them, that the fear in their victims
fed the spirits who were now watching over them. This
is the final cost of a cult like Constanzos. It
takes more than lives. It rewires people from the inside out,

(41:43):
and when it ends, there's no easy way back. Today,
many of his surviving followers are still imprisoned in Mexico.
Some have renounced him, some haven't. Their interviews over the
years paint a fractured picture. Some claim they were victims,
others that they were chosen. The truth is, even if
they had doubts, even if some of them feared him,

(42:04):
they stayed, and in a cult, that's often all the
leader needs. Presence, silence, compliance. Constanzo built a theology out
of suffering. He cast himself as its high priest, its interpreter,
it's knife, and his legacy is that others believed him.
What happened in Matamoros wasn't the natural result of religious tradition.
It wasn't Paulo Miambe, It wasn't African diaspora faith. It

(42:26):
was what happens when one man takes spiritual structure and
turns it inward. When ritual becomes spectacle when symbols become threats.
There's a reason this case still holds people's attention after
all these years. It isn't just the horror, it's the recognition,
because when you strip away the cauldron and the candles,
the machetes and the chants, what's left is something we
all recognize, the desire to feel protected, to feel chosen,

(42:50):
to feel like part of a plan. That's what Constanzo sold,
wrapped in shadow, sealed in blood, and for a time
people bought it. We end this with no comfort, no redemption,
just questions, what does it take to turn belief into violence,
what happens when people lose the ability to say no?
And how do we prevent it from happening again. These

(43:11):
are the questions that define every cult we examine, but
in Matamoros they took a shape that still shakes the ground,
because belief, when twisted by fear and crowned by power,
becomes something unrecognizable, and once it takes root, it's almost
impossible to kill. That's the cost of obedience when it's
given too freely. That's the legacy of El Padrino, and

(43:32):
that's where we leave Matamoros, but not the journey, because
next we turn to a very different kind of darkness,
one that began in post war London, a group of intellectuals, idealists,
thinkers who believe they could reconcile good and evil by
embracing both at once. They wore black, they worshiped Jehovah,
Lucifer and Christ simultaneously, and they claim the end of

(43:54):
the world would not be a disaster but a rebirth.
Next time on hidden Cults, we stay into the apocalyptic
world of the processed Church of the Final Judgment, where
theology met theater and the line between religion and performance
disappeared until then,

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Ep.13 The Narcosatanists (The Matamoros Cult)

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal