Constanzo, though never rich as a child, lived fairly well. His mother married a prosperous small businessman, who took the family to Puerto Rico. When his stepfather died in 1973, his mother re-married and moved back to Florida. This marriage was not a success, however, and ended in acrimonious divorce. At just 12 years of age, Adolfo found himself the head of the family. To support them, he began shoplifting and trading in drugs. Through his teens, he earned a police record for theft and for a while the Miami drugs squad had him under observation.
At about this time, he realised he was bisexual. He was later to sire two children, but during his teens, before he could slake his lust elsewhere, his principal sexual satisfaction came through frequenting gay bars. It could be that things got too hot for the slim, dark and handsome youth with piercing eyes, or simply that he saw his main chance south of the border. At any rate, at the age of 21, Constanzo headed off to Mexico City, the smog-bound, sprawling urban mass where grinding poverty held hands with undreamed-of opulence. It was to the wealthier quarter that he gravitated.
Rich, bored businessmen and their wives were turned on by this youth and his exciting occult religion. Telling fortunes with apparently uncanny accuracy earned him his own small fortune. His fame as a sorcerer spread and he soon became the darling of the wealthy and the powerful. But it was the often superstitious leaders of narcotics cartels who fêted him the most. At a time when the richest market for illegal drugs, the United States, was cracking down hardest on the trade, credulous drugs family godfathers turned to him for advice and magical protection. Incredibly, Constanzo was able to demand up to $50,000 a time for spells to protect the smugglers.
It was subsequently discovered that much of his ‘divination’ came through corrupt Mexican police and customs officials. Florentino Ventura, the head of Mexican Interpol, was later to shoot his wife before turning the gun on himself when investigations got too close. However, the source of Constanzo’s knowledge mattered not at all to the drug barons. His word quickly became law. And all the while, to ensure that his protective spells came true, dismembered and decapitated corpses were regularly found floating in rivers and lakes outside Mexico City.
By now, Constanzo was calling himself the ‘padrino’ (godfather) of his own Palo Mayombe group, selling his services to the highest bidders, who for a while happened to be the close family of drugs overlord Guillermo Calzada. The ambitious Constanzo suggested to Calzada that because his magic was the source of the family’s success, he deserved half the proceeds. Calzada perhaps understandably refused and Constanzo left in a rage. A few days later he called to express regret for his demands and offered, as a sign of remorse, to perform a special ceremony that would give extra protection to the whole cartel.
On 30 April 1987, Calzada, his wife, his mother, his partner, his secretary, his maid and his bodyguard met Constanzo in an abandoned factory. All seven reappeared a few days later when their bodies were dragged from a river. They had been dreadfully mutilated before being killed. Their extremities – their fingers and toes and, in the case of the men, their genitals – had been sliced off. Significantly, their heads were missing. These had gone to feed the padrino’s nganga.
Constanzo was now hooked on his own mumbo-jumbo, believing ever more implicitly in his voodoo powers. Flush with cash through drug dealing and extortion, he moved his gang of savage killers to Matamoros, near the Texan border, where the narcotics cartels were even richer. There, in his remote Santa Elena ranch, he enjoyed a strange ménage-à-trois with his American ex-girlfriend, Sara Aldrete, and his two homosexual lovers, Orea Ochoa and Martin Quintera, who were treated as servants by their boss.
As he had done in Mexico City, Constanzo, with Aldrete’s help on this occasion, inveigled his way into the family of another drugs overlord, Elio Hernandez. Again he presented the Palo Mayombe rituals as the key to the family’s prosperity – and, sure enough, his business picked up. The Hernandez gang was now totally under the spell of the Constanzo’s voodoo group, and by 1988 the area round Matamoros was thick with dismembered corpses. Between May that year and March 1989, Constanzo tortured and ritually sacrificed at least 13 people. The victims were usually rival drug dealers but sometimes included strangers picked up at random.
On one occasion, the victim was a police undercover agent who had infiltrated the gang but had been discovered, possibly through a tip-off from one of the police officers on Constanzo’s payroll. On another occasion, Hernandez himself was ordered to supply the coup de grâce to a struggling young victim at the bubbling nganga. Only after slicing off the youth’s head did he recognise the green and white striped football shirt he was wearing. He had killed his own cousin.
Constanzo’s normal method of sacrifice was to have the victim brutally beaten, then dragged into a shed containing the sacred cauldron. Here he would cut off the nose, ears, fingers, toes and genitals of the hapless wretch and partially flay him. Then the others would be ordered out while Constanzo sodomised him. Only then would there be a merciful release through death.
It was essential to the success of the ceremony that there should be as much pain as possible and the victim should die screaming. The spirit had to be confused and terrified as it left the body, making it easier to subjugate. And it was this particular evil that was to bring about Constanzo’s downfall. In March 1989, the chosen victim was a small-time Mexican drugs dealer unknown to the gang. Every torture was applied to him, but the tough little man would not cry out, even when his upper body was skinned. He endured every torture, even castration, but died silently.
Constanzo declared the ceremony a failure and sent his men out to kidnap a softer touch. He was easy to find. A group of students were celebrating the end of term at their university by crossing the border for a night of cheap alcohol, perhaps a woman or two and possibly a session of pot smoking or cocaine snorting. When one became separated from his colleagues, he was pushed into the back of a truck and driven to the Santa Elena ranch.
His name was Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old medical student, and he must have screamed sufficiently to satisfy Constanzo before his brains were tipped into the nganga, for the padrino declared the ceremony a great success. The gang was now unstoppable. With an American spirit as well as any number of Mexican spirits to protect them, they believed themselves not only safe but invisible to the law. This time, however, the cultists had over-reached themselves. Kilroy’s parents, aided by the boy’s uncle, a US Customs official, fought for a thorough investigation by the lax Mexican authorities. The manhunt that ensued across both sides of the border had a swift result.
Mexican police set up a roadblock near Matamoros. One of the Hernandez brothers, Serafin, was at the wheel of a truck when he approached it – and, having been told by his leader that he was invisible, drove straight through it! The cops scrambled into their cars and followed at a discreet distance as Hernandez led them directly to Constanzo’s ranch. There they found some evidence of drug trading – but no sign of Constanzo himself. Hernandez was arrested and taken to local police headquarters, where he was subjected to a ‘Mexican interrogation’. With the help of a little soda laced with Tabasco squirted up his nostrils, an agonising, though undetectable torture, he broke and revealed the horrors of the hellish ranch. Returning to the ranch, he pointed out a number of shallow graves around the nganga shed. He also began to name names.
Detectives rounded up several of the cultists who, puzzled by the lack of promised protection, were forced to do the dirty work of digging up the bodies. One of the first they unearthed was that of the American student, Mark Kilroy. The grave was marked by a short length of wire sticking out of the ground. Subsequent examination revealed that the wire had been threaded the length of the boy’s spine. Once the body had decomposed sufficiently, it had been Constanzo’s intention to pull out the backbone and add it to the stomach-churning mix in his nganga.
Constanzo, along with his favoured inner circle, fled to Mexico City, where they laid low in an apartment i
n a poor part of town – Constanzo foolishly leaving his luxury limousine in the street nearby. On 6 May 1989, two beat cops spotted it and strolled over to investigate, thinking it might have been stolen. When Constanzo saw them, he assumed the game was up and opened fire from the apartment. An armed siege ensued.
Inside the apartment, panic reigned. As Constanzo’s gunmen were exchanging fire with police, the padrino himself was stuffing armfuls of cash into a fire. As Sara Aldrete cowered with Orea Ochoa under a bed, Constanzo and a hitman nicknamed El Dubi emptied their guns into the street. At other windows, more cultists were spraying the police with bullets. When they were almost out of ammunition, Constanzo suddenly became calm again. He called together El Dubi and his current lover, bodyguard Martin Rodriguez, whom he led into a walk-in wardrobe. Then he ordered El Dubi to shoot them both. When the gunman simply stared aghast, Constanzo slapped him across the face and ordered: ‘Do it or I’ll make things tough for you in Hell. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.’
Those were his last words. He and his lover died in a hail of lead. The rest were taken alive. In all, 14 cultists were given lengthy jail terms on charges from multiple murder to drug running. There being no death penalty in Mexico, the maximum sentence that could be handed down was 50 years for aggravated homicide. Oddest among the accused was Sara Aldrete, the all-American ex-college student from Brownsville, Texas, who had thrown away a glittering future as an athlete to join the cult. At her trial and in subsequent interviews, she proclaimed her innocence and complained bitterly about the treatment she said she had endured at the hands of the police. ‘I could not leave the gang,’ she explained in her defence, ‘because they threatened to use witchcraft on my family.’ She was sentenced to 62 years without possibility of parole.
The detailed confessions of the other cultists allowed police to close the files on a number of mystery killings. There had been 15 human sacrifices at the Matamoros ranch, two at another ranch nearby and several in Mexico City. Added to these were the slayings of rival gang members and those of Constanzo’s own followers who had been killed to maintain discipline. In Matamoros, the police had the nganga and the shed in which it was housed exorcised by a white witch and a priest. Then they doused the building with petrol and burned it to the ground. Constanzo’s body was claimed by his mother and taken back to Miami, where he was cremated.
CHAPTER 24
‘DEVIL’S CHILDREN’ – DRIVEN TO KILL BY A MESSIANIC MADMAN
‘Charles Manson is the greatest advertisement for the death penalty.’ So said Stephen Kay, the long-serving principal prosecutor in California’s most infamous gang massacre. Few who were involved in the case would disagree. For Manson was not only the epitome of sheer evil himself, the messianic madman also had the power to transform others from fresh-faced innocents into blood-lusting murderers.
How this scruffy, unprepossessing fantasist managed to mesmerise his gang of followers to commit sickening acts of brutality is an unsolved mystery. Forty years after the 1969 killing spree by his ‘Devil’s Children’ sect, former Los Angeles District Attorney Kay was still warning: ‘He can cast a spell and that’s how he got other people to do his killing. He had such evil control – and he still has it today.’
Manson himself had long recognised the danger he posed to the public. Early in his criminal career, he had pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to remain locked up in jail. If only they had granted his wish. For within two years, he had gathered together a cult of impressionable devotees who were willing to kill at his command.
Manson was born illegitimately in 1934 to 16-year-old prostitute Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 12 November 1934, his birth name being recorded as ‘No Name Maddox’. The identity of his father is unknown and his surname derives from one of his mother’s lovers at the time. Manson lived in foster homes but, still in his early teens, he became a juvenile delinquent who spent much time in detention centres. Inexorably, his escalating criminality led to harsher penalties. At the age of 16, he was sentenced to two years at the National Training School for Boys in Washington DC and was not freed until his eighteenth birthday.
In his teens, Manson showed violent sexual tendencies, usually directed towards other men. During one such period at a detention centre, he grabbed a boy from behind and held a razor blade to his throat as he carried out a violent rape. Eventually, with his file marked ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Not to be trusted’, he was transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Virginia.
Soon after his release on parole in 1954, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a 17-year-old waitress. Despite his previous homosexuality, Rosalie was pregnant when the two travelled to California in a stolen car. Convicted of the theft, Manson was sentenced to three years at the Terminal Island jail in San Pedro. Faithful Rosalie visited him often, sometimes taking along Charles Manson Junior, but then suddenly stopped her visits. Manson discovered she had fallen for someone else and, although paroled in 1958, he was never to see Rosalie or his son again. In between jail sentences, Manson married again and sired another son: a second Charles Manson Junior. That marriage did not last either.
By the time he was 32, Manson had spent most of his life in prison. So institutionalised was he that, when yet another parole came up, he asked to remain within the four walls he knew as home. He did not feel easy being released into a society that he felt had dealt him a bad hand. But the authorities refused his plea to be a voluntary inmate and in 1967 the criminal menace was once more back on the road, this time heading for San Francisco, centre of the hippy flower-power cult. With a guitar on his back, the drug-taking drifter and aspiring musician mixed with other drop-outs and discovered that he could exercise a strange magnetism over them.
‘He surrounded himself with young and impressionable hangers-on,’ recalled Manson expert Vincent Bugliori, the former prosecutor who would eventually try the evil killer. ‘The kids were literally at his feet, so he started up what he called his “family”. Manson at that point became a maestro, orchestrating what everyone else did. He had this phenomenal ability to gain control over other people and get them to do terrible things.’
This strange mix of misfits – runaway youngsters, homeless bikers and small-time criminals – moved south, settling in run-down Spahn Ranch, a former Wild West movie set outside Los Angeles. Further vulnerable youths were lured into the gang with the promise of free sex and drugs. Among them were impressionable girls who so adored Manson that they willingly gave up stable, middle-class lives to be with him.
One such devotee was 20-year-old Linda Kasabian who, in July 1969, was introduced to the ‘family’ by Manson follower Catherine Share, known as ‘Gypsy’. Kasabian, who moved to the ranch with her daughter, won the trust of the group when she volunteered to steal $5,000 in cash from her estranged husband. She was then presented to the leader of the commune. ‘Meeting Charles for the first time was very exciting,’ she later recalled. ‘There was a magnetism about him – charisma, charm, power. I felt really safe and protected. We were like his children.’
By the summer of 1969, Manson had gathered a hard core of 25 devotees with more than 60 other ‘associates’. In his drug-befuddled state, he became obsessed with The Beatles’ White Album, which he believed was directed at him. ‘In every single song on the album, he felt that they were singing about us,’ Catherine ‘Gypsy’ Share later recalled. ‘He thought that The Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years – a forthcoming racial cataclysm.’
Manson ordered his followers to prepare for an imminent race war that he dubbed ‘Helter Skelter’, his ultimate mission named after the title of a track on The White Album. He told them that the songs contained hidden messages that had meaning only for him. Songs such as ‘Revolution 9’ were especially prophetic for the ‘family’: they believed it all led to another battle of Armageddon, Manson’s term for a planned race war in which American Blacks would reign supreme over the Whites. Only Manson and those who chose to stay with him would be
spared the mass racial slaughter. Chosen Blacks, spouted Manson, would become part of the ‘family’, numbering no less than 144,000. They would become his ‘Chosen People’. He had taken the term from The Bible, referring to the 12 Tribes of Israel, each numbering 12,000. Together, he said, they would take over the world. And The Beatles, Manson proclaimed, would be his ‘spokesmen’. Manson told his disciples that nothing could be achieved unless he had utterly devoted followers, who alone could change the world. They would strike out at the white Establishment; they would kill.
A parallel mission of Manson at the time was to achieve his ambition of becoming a star by using a tenuous connection with a member of the Beach Boys group, Dennis Wilson. The dream was shattered, however, when Wilson’s associate, record producer Terry Melcher, son of film star Doris Day, failed to offer him a contract. This brought together two lines of thought in the mind of the deranged Manson. He decided to launch an attack on Melcher’s Los Angeles home.
According to Vincent Bugliori, the house came to symbolise the entertainment establishment that had rejected him. ‘Manson wanted to start Helter Skelter by murdering white people and framing the black man for it,’ said Bugliori. With mounting paranoia, he began arming his followers. ‘It wasn’t peace and love anymore,’ recalled Catherine Share, ‘it was almost like an army.’
Helter Skelter got underway on a hot August night in 1969 when Manson allotted his murderous mission to Linda Kasabian and three other followers: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson. He ordered them to drive to Melcher’s home, in an isolated area between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley, and launch a vicious attack on the occupants. Manson had not adequately researched his ‘war’ strategy, however. Melcher was no longer at the bungalow-style property, which was being rented by film director Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, who had recently returned there to have her baby after working in London. Polanski was still in Europe directing his latest film.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 23