The Narco Satanists Finale: The Gruesome End of the Matamoros Cult

n this explosive final chapter of the Matamoros Cult saga, we dive deep into the violent collapse of Adolfo Costanzo's reign of terror. Dubbed "The Narco Satanists" by the media, Adolfo and his devoted followers escalated their ritualistic horrors, driven by twisted beliefs and promises of power and invincibility. As law enforcement closed in, a shocking shootout and Adolfo's unhinged last stand revealed the depravity of a man who believed he could evade justice with black magic and the power of the spirits. We explore the cult’s gruesome crimes, the lasting impact on Mexico, and the disturbing legacy that lingers, even today. Join us for the chilling conclusion to one of the darkest stories in true crime history.

Brace yourself for a finale filled with shocking twists and revelations.

Transcript

Matamoros Cult 3 (00:00)
Welcome back everybody. Are you ready for the final explosive conclusion of the Matamoros killing cult or as they're about to be labeled the Narco Satanists?

starting with a childhood filled with sacrificed animals, goat's heads displayed on coffee tables, and a mother and mentor that were competing to see who could fill Adolfo Costanzo's head with as much blood, gore, and sexual violence as possible from the time he was born.

Adolfo then traveled through South America building reputation for himself as a Palo Mayombe priest who made predictions so accurately and cast spells that actually came true that no one could deny that the handsome young man dressed in all white was frightening, but definitely had power over demons and spirits.

Adolfo collected a group of around two dozen followers around him, the most devoted of which was a beautiful college student named Sara Aldrete Villareal Together they were the El Padrino and La Madrina of the cult, the godfather and godmother that led them through the most gruesome and sick human sacrifices on a ranch that Adolfo owned outside of Matamoros

In just two years, the group had racked up dozens of corpses, each tortured, skinned alive, and killed in the most unimaginably horrible ways. The shack on the grounds of Rancho Helena was a room filled with screams, drums, candles, and harvested organs, meant for the now infamous black pot called Nganga

where the victims' brains and hearts were kept so that the spirits that were making them so impossibly rich and keeping them protected would always be fed and satisfied. If this sounds too outrageous to be true, go listen to part 1 and 2 of Adolfo Costanzo's birth, life and the whirlwind of horror that led to this point.

Because it's about to end in a shower of blood, bullets, and cult followers who were so indoctrinated that it took years for them to realize that they weren't invisible after all.

From my partners in crime and I, welcome everyone. I'm Bree. And I'm Heather.

I'm honestly relieved that it's coming to an end. I don't think I've ever heard of something this insane and gruesome before. It's just so sick that you need it to end at some point. I'm starting to get anxious. I think I need a holiday after this one. I hear you. This one's been especially rough, and it never seems to stop getting worse and worse. And worse it's going to get. Let me tell you that.

We kick right back off in February of 89 and Adolfo decided that the year needed to start off with a bang. First, the group lured a rival drug dealer to the ranch and tortured him for information about where he was storing his stash. When he spilled the beans and led them to another ranch where they stole the drugs, killed the dealer, and forced two innocent farmhands to dig a grave.

They killed the farmhands and harvested organs from all three victims to feed their living Nganga. Nine days later, they tried to kidnap a man from a bar, but Elio botched the whole affair by panicking and shooting the guy in the head when he tried to get away. Adolfo was furious that Elio had ruined the brains that the Nganga needed, and he beat Elio with a whip as punishment.

The followers were sent out to find another victim and returned with a man they had found walking on the side of the road.

They brought him to the shed with a sack over his head where Adolfo and Elio stood waiting. Elio swung the machete as soon as they removed the sack, decapitating the man.

But to Elio's horror, it wasn't a man at all, but his own 14-year-old cousin. It's highly probable that Adolfo arranged for them to kidnap someone related to Elio to really drive down his punishment for screwing up the last sacrifice. Elio was made to cut the boy's heart out himself.

Next, they kidnapped a drug dealer that was caught selling cocaine on Elio Hernandez turf.

Guillermo Calzada Sanchez was subjected to a gruesome torture session to find out where he hid his supply and who he was working for. Everyone was brought in to join in on the torture at one point or another.

The man was beaten, assaulted by Adolfo. His fingers and toes were cut off and they even began to skin him while he was still alive. But never through all of that unimaginable pain did he talk. He didn't even scream once before he died of blood loss and shock. If you remember, Adolfo claimed that great pain and suffering were needed to appease the spirits. Without it, the demons would not accept the sacrifice.

And now the El Padrino told his terrified followers the spirits were angry.

They couldn't just take any non-believer to sacrifice. They needed to do something special to make up for their incompetence. And for that, they needed a gringo. Specifically, a white American victim.

Convenient. Wasn't this at the end of February? Beginning of March? That's spring break time. Mexico was probably full of American students.

Yes, it was. And for our viewers who are tuning in from outside the US, here the legal drinking age is 21, but in Mexico, it's 18. So lots of college kids go over to Mexico for a week or two during spring break for some serious partying. The city of Matamoros is right on the Texas border. The two are only separated by a single bridge. As you can imagine, Matamoros has more college students during those weeks than

any other place in Mexico. A lot of kids don't even bother to drive. They just walk across the bridge and walk back when they're done drinking.

Picking up an intoxicated college kid wasn't hard. And Mark Kilroy was just the first guy they spotted that just happened to be alone for a moment. Mark was 21 years old and a student at the University of Texas, like so many others. He'd walked over the bridge with a few of his friends and they were on their way back when a very intoxicated Mark fell behind his friends.

A car containing four of the cult members dressed in fake police uniforms offered him a ride.

At first, Mark was grateful that the authorities were so kind, but as soon as he got into the car, he felt that something was off about the whole situation. When they told him that they were going to make a quick stop at a bar before they headed to the bridge, Mark jumped from the car and started running. But they commanded him to stop, telling him that they were going to shoot him.

Mark wasn't sure if it was the police or not, and since it was 2.30 at night, he couldn't see if they were carrying weapons or not. Fearing being shot to death, he stopped and allowed them to lead him back to the car. This time, they tied him up, gagged him, and stuffed him into the trunk.

Unfortunately, Mark's ordeal wasn't about to end anytime soon. Adolfo was out of town, so the followers left Mark in the trunk for a whole day while they waited for their leader to return.

Do you know how hot it gets there in March? It's amazing that he even lasted a day at all.

I mean, imagine he was horribly hungover, probably already dehydrated from all that drinking, and now even more fluid loss from being in the heat of a trunk all day too. Remember the caretaker Domingo Bustamante? He heard Mark's muffled screams and banging from inside the trunk and he snuck over. He opened the trunk and gave Mark some water and fed him some scrambled eggs.

But he closed the trunk on again, fearing what the cult would do to him if they found him gone. And then Adolfo stopped by. You know, he could have gotten Mark out of there. I don't care how scared he was, he could have saved that kid's life. Were there other people he could have saved too? This seems to be the only time that Bustamante ever interfered with cult activities directly.

If he'd done it before, chances are he'd probably have been killed long before this. It's possible that this guy had a family living on the property for all we know. Even if he took the victim and ran, he could be putting his family or relatives living in Matamoros in danger. I'm surprised that he had enough courage to even give Mark breakfast. Mark was taken out of the trunk and led into the shed.

where he was sodomized and castrated before being killed when Adolfo sliced the top of his skull with a machete. They took out the brain and various other body parts to feed their Nganga Afterwards, they went out for burgers and fries, a habit they developed after killing someone.

Sheesh, imagine still having an appetite after all of that.

They got nervous after Mark's death, let me tell you that. Never before had one of their killings garnered this much attention.

Mark's friends went back to look for him. They searched all day while he was trapped in the trunk and reported it to both the American and Mexican police stations. And despite Adolfo's assurances that this latest killing was their most powerful one yet, that the spirits would give them all of the protection they needed, the group got more and more nervous with every newspaper article

and television appearance of the missing student that was popping up everywhere. Mark Kilroy's disappearance was huge in the days following his kidnapping, but as Sara pointed out, never in one of the articles or news stories were any of them, or the ranch, ever mentioned. No police had reached out to any cult members, their protection was still in place.

And as always, the two psychopaths fed into each other's delusions like fire and gasoline. Adolfo agreed, but he also said that another sacrifice couldn't wait too long.

The spirits were working overtime to protect them and they needed to be fed soon if they were going to keep it up. A month after Mark's disappearance and murder, they took a person close to them. Gilberto Sosa, that ex-boyfriend of Sara's that she dumped when she met Adolfo. Gilberto had never forgotten about the once pretty and brilliant college student.

who'd left him so heartbroken. It was easy to lure him to Sara's house. He was taken to the ranch and savagely beaten and dismembered while he was still alive.

A few days later they took a man by the name of Victor Sauceda, a guy who'd angered El Duby at one point.

This time Adolfo paid two corrupt police officers to kidnap him and drop him off at the ranch.

Once they left, Adolfo did to him as he did to all of his previous victims. Now, he said, they'd finally killed enough people to appease the spirits.

Not only were they protected in business and detection, they were completely invisible to the police, and the group believed him completely, as in they truly, totally believed that they were invisible.

One of the followers was on his way back to the ranch just a few days later after that last murder when he came upon a police roadblock just a few miles away from his destination. He drove right through the roadblock, utterly convinced that they wouldn't be able to see him.

When police took off after him, the man was still convinced that they wouldn't be able to make it onto Rancho Santa Helena, because Adolfo claimed that there was some kind of magical barrier around the place that was powered by the spirits.

Well, apparently blue and red lights are the equivalent of kryptonite to that hocus pocus barrier, because the cops sailed right through it and caught up to their target. It took them only minutes to find a shack with pounds and pounds of drugs hidden inside,

And with scores of police now swarming the place, all of the cultists that were present at the ranch were arrested for drug possession, with the intent to distribute.

But what about the ritual shack, mass grave sites, and the El Padrino himself? Well, the ranch was huge, and the shack that held all of the cult's sins was tucked away at the back, so police didn't find it on that first day.

As for Adolfo, well, one member managed to escape that initial arrest and warn Adolfo of the police being on his property. Adolfo, Sara, El Duby, and Martin just happened to be in the city when the police descended on the place. So, the six of them fled together across the border. They were able to get in without a hitch since no bolos were out for their arrest yet.

Meanwhile, back at the Rancho Helena, police were interrogating the cult members. The police found strange carved figures all over the property and the cultists that they'd arrested for drug possession were an unusually happy bunch. The group joked and laughed as they were being handcuffed and interrogated.

They were completely convinced that their blood magic was going to get them out of this mess. As far as the two dozen arrested members were concerned, this was all one big joke and they were going to be released by some supernatural force any minute now.

and the police weren't exactly gentle with them either. Obviously those first few hours the officers on the scene were under the impression that this was a drug trafficking ring, and judging by the amount of drugs that they found in the first building, a huge organization at that.

But this whole thing was starting to have a very creepy and unreal quality about it.

The followers didn't act like any criminals they'd ever arrested before. The statues and the whole air around the place was disconcerting.

They couldn't get a straight answer out of any of them. They roughed up the group pretty badly trying to find out who they were working for, but no matter how physical they became, no one was talking. That's until they found the caretaker.

Domingo Bustamante wasted no time in telling the police that the missing American boy had been at the ranch and even though he hadn't witnessed it himself, he knew that the boy had been murdered. After that, the police spread out, searching the rest of the ranch. They found the sacrificial said, the discovery was so gruesome that the police took one look at it and refused to investigate any further until the ranch could be blessed by a priest.

And I don't blame them for wanting divine protection after seeing what was inside of that little nondescript shed. In the middle of the room was a big black pot, what we now know to be the Nganga. Filled to the brim with bones, half-rotten organs, and a fresh heart from their last victim. The floor was so thick with congealed blood that had built up over last two years,

that it was one solid gelatinous mess.

There were hooks hanging from the ceiling that the victims were hung from after they died to make dismembering them easier. Candles, machetes, knives, hooks, various tools of torture, and empty bottles of cheap rum. In various mass graves, a total of 27 bodies, or what was left of them at least, were found scattered across the property. Mark

Kilroy's remains were among them. And get this, the police made the cult members dig them up. No way.

No joke, I told you there's nothing gentle about how Mexico's police force handles criminals. I have to say, I kind of get it. Every follower of this cult were animals as far as they were concerned and they were all treated as such.

They were going to show them as little mercy as the law allowed, which is a hell of a lot more mercy than they showed to their victims. That's very true. Moving on, the cult members at the station, when confronted with the findings, were perfectly happy to admit everything. But even after weeks of clearing the place, collecting evidence, hours of questioning, and all that time spent behind bars,

Every single one of those followers remained convinced that they were going to be saved at any time now. They just couldn't believe that they were caught for a crime. Their El Padrino and his spirits were going to break them out. Or they were going to turn invisible and the police wouldn't see them walking through the walls. Their indoctrination was so completely ingrained into them that they just couldn't conceive of any alternative for months after their arrest.

Since Mark Kilroy was an American citizen, Mexican authorities gave the FBI permission to conduct their own investigation too. Police allowed American authorities to conduct their own inspection of the ranch before they got

priests to come in again to bless the place one last time.

Before they left, they erected a cross in memory of the victims, and since then, it looks like the place was abandoned. I'll get back to the ranch in a minute. First, let's get back to the Narcosatanists, like the media was calling them now. This story was huge. It wasn't just in Mexico and Texas. Everybody was talking about it. Every major network, every newspaper and magazine. Even Oprah did a special on it.

Adolfo, Sara, El Dubi, Martin, Omar, and a guy that they called El Gato were keeping a low profile. Their faces were everywhere, and they kept moving around.

From Texas, they made it back to Mexico City, but somewhere along the way, Elgato got separated from the group. He got arrested, but the police not knowing who he was or who he was connected to, allowed him to escape. Elgato hasn't been seen since that day. And of all the cult members.

He's the only one who's still unaccounted for.

Things were getting heated in the interrogation rooms. It had now been more than a month since the ranch had been raided and still none of the cult members were talking. One officer got so frustrated that he picked up a rifle and blasted it right next to Elio's ear, bursting his eardrum. It worked. Finally, someone was willing to talk. Elio disclosed the locations of all of his warehouses and all of Adolfo's.

properties in mansions across Mexico. The police raided all of the addresses and in each one of them there were rotting body parts and shrines in dried blood and hundreds if not thousands of pounds of drugs. That Mexican police force don't play.

Wait, were the body parts in the mansions ever linked to the bodies at the ranch? Nope. Some of Adolfo's properties were on the other side of the country, so it's all but certain that these were other victims. There's no way to tell how many people he killed, but just about everyone involved in the investigation can confirm that it was definitely more than 30, and most believe that the true number is close to 100.

How many were there really? Well, that's anybody's guess. And to make matters worse, other groups that were inspired by Adolfo's success had been operating across Mexico since Adolfo arrived in Matamoros.

And the ripple effect of the all-powerful El Padrino became apparent when a mass grave containing the corpses of infants was discovered a few months after the raid. How can we be sure it wasn't the Narco Satanists? Adolfo was pretty consistent with his victim profiles and the methods that he used to dispatch of them. He preferred to kill men and most of them were killed on his property or at least along the routes he traveled.

This grave site didn't match his MO and it was far removed from any of his properties and regular routes. And from what I've read in the translated articles, it looks like this site was dated to some time after the raid.

Also, there were hints that there were more cases of copycats out there. The case of the murdered babies is still unsolved and all but forgotten.

I just don't know how to reply to that, what to say to that. Every time you think that this story can't get any worse, it just throws a more tragic and gruesome curveball at you. At least tell me that the Adolfo and the three followers with him didn't manage to kill somebody else. It doesn't look like it, but how they got caught is kind of ironic. You see,

They were hopping between hotels, keeping a low profile and not stepping out of the buildings if they could help it. The only person they contacted was Salvador, the stooge they had in Interpol. The guy with the scars on his face that Adolfo said was possessed by three demons? That's the guy. He supplied them with hair dye, guns, ammunition and whatever supplies they needed.

The plan was to wait until the heat died down so that they could all go to Guatemala to start over. Adolfo even stopped wearing white shirts, swapping them out for colorful Hawaiian shirts and a short haircut.

Do want me to continue with the next part or do you want to take over, baby? I was just about to ask if you wanted to do the next part.

The Mexican police weren't getting any closer to finding Adolfo. After two months of searching, the FBI had the bright idea to bring in an anthropologist who specialized in religions like Palo Mayombe. With his advice, they concocted a plan.

They dragged the Nganga pot out of evidence and on live TV filmed a cleansing ritual with an actual tribal priest. The guy burned the kill shack to the ground, lit the Nganga on fire, and released a white dove into the sky. He declared that the Nganga was dead because the dove would have died being attacked by the spirits if it still had any power. This was a genius move.

The group saw the news coverage and Adolfo just about lost his damn mind. For hours he screamed and raged, breaking every piece of furniture in the motel room. He screamed for so long that his voice cracked and he could only talk in a whisper for days afterward. Salvador arranged for the group to meet with a plastic surgeon. The plan was to change their appearance and with fake documentation that Salvador was going to get for them, they could finally flee the country.

But the plastic surgeon that met with her recognized Sara and refused to have anything to do with them.

Knowing that the doctor was going to go to the police and that the search wasn't tapering off like they'd hoped, Sara was starting to get cold feet. She dropped notes out of the motel windows claiming that a woman was being held hostage by a cult and that this woman was going to be killed soon. But even though people found the notes, no one reported it, thinking it was a prank.

Desperate, she approached two police officers in the street and came right out introducing herself by her full name and pointing to the motel that Adolfo was in across the street. The officers didn't recognize her and chased her away, thinking she was a lunatic. She approached another police car and even stopped random people on the street when she was sent out on errands.

That's insane. I know,

But at least the cops and the many witnesses Sara asked for help eventually reported enough sightings of her that police set up patrols in the general area, hoping to catch her going to one of the many corner stores that she seemed to be frequenting to buy food for the group. Finally, on May 16, 1989, a patrol car just happened to be parked across the street from where the last of the cult members were hiding.

Convinced that the police had finally found them, even though the two officers in the car had no idea that they happened to be across the street, Adolfo, already on the brink of insanity, threw wads of cash out the window. As people on the street rushed to the motel to pick up the money, he used them as a human shield so that he could open fire on the officers with a machine gun. It was absolutely insane.

El Duby joined in with his machine gun and Adolfo shot at a propane tank that was connected to the building. But it didn't explode like he had hoped it would. As more police cars arrived and surrounded the building, Adolfo commanded El Duby to shoot him and his favorite lover, the bodyguard Martin.

El Duby complied, emptying the gun into both of them. Then he sat down on the bed and waited for the police to come in and arrest him and Omar.

They found Sara running from the scene, but instead of running away from the cops, she ran toward them, begging not to die. Adolfo was 27 years old when he died, and Sara was just 24 when she was arrested.

Wow, talk about going out with a bang. Did any bystanders get hurt? Miraculously, no civilians or police got hurt at all.

Finally, someone makes it out alive after meeting Adolfo, hey?

The media circus that followed was enormous. Mexico doesn't do things like they do in the US.

El Duby, Omar, and Sara were brought before the public where they were filmed talking about their rituals and the belief system that Adolfo roped them into. El Duby and Omar complied, but Sara barely said anything. El Duby was only snapped out of his conviction that Adolfo was going to rise from the dead after he was marched to the coroner's office and Adolfo's remains.

Headless and looking like Swiss cheese was shoved into his face. Sara was a different story. She played her cards

before the final shootout very well. I'll give her that. the notes in walking up to the cops and such?

Exactly, she claimed that her confessions were coerced, that she was beaten by police until she admitted to things she didn't do. According to Sara, she was kidnapped and made to live on the ranch by Adolfo. She said that he never allowed the women in the cult to join in on the rituals. She only came in after the victims were already dead to dismember and bury the bodies, and she was under the impression that they were

all drug dealers. Seeking help after they went on the run was nothing new. She claimed that she had asked multiple strangers for help over the years, but she was almost always under Adolfo's supervision. And on that occasion that he left the ranch and put her in charge, she acted the part for fear that other followers would rat her out.

Well, the 16 followers that were convicted were adamant that La Madrina was the co-leader and that she was very much a part of the killings. After that shootout, their faith crumbled like dominoes in a line. Sara wrote a book about her version of events and it's actually a pretty good read. I'm not gonna lie. Don't tell me she got to make money from that thing. She probably did.

But the cops and the psychiatrists that saw her have very different opinions on the matter. Obviously, they deny the abuse, though they admit to being rough with all of the cult members. Sara was a strange character. To the media, she portrayed a frightened, well-spoken, and educated young woman, a persona that her former classmates and friends could recognize and vouch for. With investigators during questioning and confessions,

Police said that she was a calculating witch who showed no remorse for her murders. But alone in her cell, guards witnessed her talking to herself and pacing in her cell like a deranged lunatic that you'd find in a loony bin. Most of the professionals suspect a split personality and they're convinced that she isn't faking it.

The police say that psychiatrists are full of it and she's a criminal, pure and simple. The legal system all over South America is a little unusual and no one is allowed to serve more than 50 years, no matter how many years they were sentenced for. After all the drug dealing convictions, kidnapping, weapons and whatnot, not even counting the murders, everyone was slapped with multiple life sentences.

But it doesn't really matter. Sara, if she's still alive by then, will be released when she's 74 years old.

That'll be in 2039. That's crazy. I just hope she doesn't try to kill again.

If she's still alive then, the US plans to take her to court the moment she gets released, because she was never tried for the murder of Mark Kilroy. I found records of her petitioning for an early release during the pandemic, though there's no information on how that went.

But since she's still in jail, we can assume it was denied. El Duby died in prison, but as far as I can tell, most of the other cult members are all alive and well behind bars.

Waiting to be released. Yeah, I can't see that out of all of the followers, after living and doing these terrible things, can come out and just be normal. I don't care if they're wheelchair-bound, but I guess we'll have to wait till 2039 to hear about a geriatric man killing half a dozen people as soon as they're let out. You bring up a good point.

The psychological impact of living through this is enormous. I can't see how any of them could go on to function normally after this. Professionals who've studied the case have interesting opinions. You get the usual theories that Adolfo was a psychopath, that he had narcissistic personality disorder, that sort of thing.

But they almost all agree that Adolfo completely believed in the theology of the Palo Mayombe. He was as much a believer as the followers he collected around him. That's where he veers off from the norm. Look at a guy like Charles Manson, for instance. He pumped his followers full of drugs and stripped away their sense of reality through that.

He never believed any of the crazy he told them, he just got his rocks off from controlling them. Adolfo used threats and violence to control people, and I'm sure he enjoyed it. But he genuinely believed that he had powers of premonition and control over demons. Does that mean he was schizophrenic, delusional? What mental illness can explain his complete belief?

Two things. If you're told something from birth, take any religion in the world as an example, you're going to believe it with all of your heart and soul. Adolfo was told that he was the chosen one since he first came out of the oven, and secondly, there was probably some truth to all of it. So, you think real demons and spirits? yes.

I think we can all agree that Adolfo's predictions and the amount of criminalities that he got away with is unbelievable. Supernatural, even.

There's no denying that the amount of shipments that he got over the border, equating to probably hundreds of trips that went undetected, is abnormal, and a lot of his predictions about people had nothing to do with reading them well, like how mentalists do.

This guy was too good for it to be explained away by being charismatic and well informed. And before you shoot it down as a coincidence, Mom. You got me. I gotta play devil's advocate. I was about to shoot some holes into that.

Remember how you were willing to believe that Anlise Michel was possessed by demons? Mm-hmm.

So how can that be possible, but a man like Adolfo who was quite literally raised with an evil that went out of its way to invite demons and spirits in a man who killed in the most grotesque ways possible to call up the monsters from the underworld. How could he not have demons around him? I think that evil finds innocent people all the time, but-

those that seek out true evil that immerse themselves in it? They don't need horned gremlins running around in the physical world for them to be real. The demons were already living inside Adolfo, and probably inside his followers too. True evil wouldn't have to reveal itself physically if the vessels already belonged to them. This level of depravity and total

giving over himself to the darkness. No matter how he'd constructed the belief system that would facilitate doors to open, he did enough true evil to invite them in. They were there, whether they were performing impossible blindness over the cop's eyes and making predictions or not. The demons were involved in some way.

You aren't wrong. There isn't even a need to debate on whether or not he fooled a bunch of people into believing him. Mexico isn't full of a bunch of crazy, spiritually gullible people. Yet everyone he met walked away from him convinced that he was the real deal. I think that if the hundreds of people both in and out of the criminal world that interacted with him were all convinced that this guy was legit, there probably is something to it.

Not even that Long Island medium woman has this many believers. Yet every single person that met Adolfo was convinced that he was in command of spirits, or demons, or entities, whatever you want to call it. But what about Sara? Was she a victim, or was she really the La Madrina?

Nah, I think she was as guilty as Adolfo. If she really was being held against her will, she wasn't on the ranch all the time. She could have asked for help a million times in those two years. I'm not too lenient with the caretaker either.

He might not have gone out and killed anyone, but he knew what was going on. He could have alerted someone, or at least tried to look for a way out. But he decided that doing nothing for two years absolved him from guilt. If anything, the bodyguard was the one being held against his will. Never once since they met did Martin leave Adolfo's sight. The abuse he suffered was excruciating.

dream and all of them who participated, I think he was the only one who was really being forced to do it. If he didn't comply, then the torture and possible death waiting for him at the hands of Adolfo would've been unbearable. But he's dead, so that's just a theory. It's not like we can ask him now.

I never gave Martin much thought and in none of the interviews or reports does he really come up in any significant capacity.

Like, he was always just in the background of where Adolfo was. But we know for sure that he was probably receiving the worst of the punishments simply because he was always at the padrino's side.

But I have another question. How many people do you guys think they actually killed?

That was a bit of a headache to determine. Lots of people got the details mixed up because the biggest mass grave that the followers were told to dig up held 14 bodies. So the focus is on that number.

But there were other graves and the bones were so mixed up and scattered that it's really hard to tell. There were definitely 27 separate people's remains found on the ranch, possibly even more.

Then we mustn't forget the Calzada family massacre, that's another six victims, bringing the total up to 33, but we have no idea about what happened in his various mansions and properties. They all had shrines that had blood and organs present.

There are no official reports to state whether or not they were human or animal remains.

But Adolfo never went back to animal sacrifice during the cult's last two years of operation. There's no way to know where he disposed of the bodies or if the organs did belong to people. In other words, the cops are probably not too far off when they suspect a hundred or more victims.

Damn, that's a lot of missing people in a very short time.

Which also means that there's all the more reason to believe that something supernatural was protecting them. What about the ranch? Is it still abandoned? The police burned down every building on that property. The only thing left standing is the cross that was erected for the victims. Locals do not go near it. And as you can imagine, stories of ghosts and demons in the bushes haunt the place.

It looks like other Satanists and practitioners of Palo Mayombe frequent the ranch to give their ritual extra power, given that they believe it's where most of their spirits were gathered in a single place. And this touches on something else. The mass grave of human children that were found not long after the Matamoros cult disbanded, and the many cults and practitioners that followed the most powerful Padrinas example.

For years, ritual sacrifices, both animal and human, cropped up all over Mexico. It's died down since then, but it's almost certain that Adolfo's extreme version of Payo-mayombe and the success he achieved with it inspired many, many others to do the same. And the ripple effects of the gruesome murders are still present to this very day.

I can see how a serial killing cult that went to these lengths can leave a permanent scar on a country, but what does surprise me is how this sort of fizzled into the background. At the time it was huge, but the Narco Satanists aren't nearly as well known as Ted Bundy or the Jamestown and Charles Manson cults, yet they were arguably much more gruesome.

And if the suspicion is true, we racked up a much bigger death count.

And the two police officers that kidnapped one of the victims and the Salvador guy at Interpol, were they ever apprehended? It was proven that they weren't involved in the murders.

Salvador was stripped of his position and put behind bars. So were the two cops that did the kidnapping that led to the death of the victim. There was a bit of a purge in the Matamoros police stations in the next year.

Everyone connected to the cult was removed from their positions and most of them faced jail time after investigations revealed that they were corrupt in more ways than one. So there's at least that silver lining. The only real unanswered part of this is how...

how many victims there really were and where the heck El Gato disappeared to.

And with that, we can finally put an end to the Narco Satanists. The human sacrifice cult that had its roots right here in Miami, before coming full circle in the city of Matamoros, where drug trafficking, partying college students, and apparently the devil himself comes together. And I have to admit, I cannot sleep easy knowing that a woman like Sara is going to be out on the streets.

even if she's in her 70s, or that a man like Elgato is still out there somewhere. Let's just hope he's not responsible for one of these copycat cults that spring up after the ranch got raided, because that would mean that Adolfo's secret demon knowledge definitely lives on to this very day.

Good night everybody. I'd say have sweet dreams, but this was the stuff that nightmares are made of. Thank you for joining me and my PICs. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we will see you next time with more True Crime.