Mexican city where Americans were kidnapped has violent cult history

Last weekend’s fatal kidnapping of a group of Americans in Matamoros, Mexico harkened back to the sickening 1989 murder of a spring breaker in the border city that made international headlines.

University of Texas at Austin student Mark Kilroy was 21 when he and his friends booked a hotel to party on South Padre Island, Texas that year. Thirty-four years ago on March 14, he vanished while bar hopping with friends in nearby Matamoros’ party district.

The next month, investigators found that Kilroy had been kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed by a Satanic drug outfit bluntly dubbed “Los Narcos-Satanicos.”

Drug suspect Serafin Hernandez Garcia led authorities to a rural compound about 13 miles outside of Matamoros, where Kilroy’s remains had been burned alongside a 14-year-old Mexican boy.

The drug smuggling cult had purportedly sacrificed humans for magical protection, according to Investigation Discovery.

“It was our religion, our voodoo. We did it for success. We did it for protection,” Garcia, known as Little Serafin, reportedly told cops.

After members tortured and raped the student, leader Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo reportedly chopped off the top of his skull with a machete before members cooked his brain matter in a blood-filled cauldron.

Kilroy’s heart was also ripped from his chest in the unthinkable ritual — which Constanzo reportedly believed would help protect the drug shipments he was responsible for and help him and his gang gain supernatural powers.

Authorities dug up 13 mutilated corpses at the compound and two others from a nearby farm. The victims included rival outlaws and random targets. In addition officials learned that the gang had slaughtered countless “cats, dogs, chickens, snakes, goats, and even zebras and a lion club,” the outlet said.

In the wake of the exhumations, the “human slaughterhouse” smelled of the pungent odor of decomposing human flesh — a scene that had sickened even the most hardened police officials, the Associated Press reported in 1990.

Another Texas student was tied to the monstrous murder ritual. Police found an occult alter at the Matamoros apartment of Sara Aldrete Villarreal, who attended Texas Southmost College in Brownsville.

She was arrested at a Mexico City hideout and later convicted for a slew of homicide-related crimes as Constanzo and another companion were reportedly shot dead by another cult member on his orders as police closed in.

In 2022, Kilroy’s friend, Ryan Fenley issued a warning to other Americans thinking visiting the area, a hotspot for human trafficking and drug cartel activity.

“He wanted to become a medical doctor, that was his intent,” Fenley said. “Majoring in bio-chemistry at UT Austin,” Fenley told Corpus Christi’s KIII-TV.

“Even in the southern region of Texas, they still talk about Mark’s death every Spring Break,” said Fenley, who had planed on taking the trip with Kilroy, but instead went skiing — a last minute change of plans that he thanked a “protective angel” for.

The US State Department warns Americans not to travel to Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, where Matamoros is located, due to “crime and kidnapping.”

That warning was not heeded by four South Carolina residents that were violently kidnapped by a group of heavily armed men in a broad daylight caught-on-camera abduction shortly after entering Matamoros Friday, officials from the US and Mexico said.

Latavia “Tay” McGee, Shaeed Woodard, Zindell Brown, and Eric James Williams had traveled into the city to accompany McGee, who was slated to get a tummy tuck, according to her mom.

Two of the Americans were found dead and another was wounded, Mexican officials said, without revealing the identity of the victims.

The kidnapper may have confused the surgery-tourists for Haitian drug smugglers, a former law enforcement official with ties to the investigation told the Dallas Morning News.

When reached by phone at her Lake City, SC home, a woman who told The Post she was the aunt of Woodard and McGee said she didn’t know the pair had driven to Mexico.

“No. I didn’t know sir,” Retha Mae Darby, 72 said. If I did I would have tried … [to stop them] I try to keep him doing the right thing, but I can’t do so much because I can’t get around so much.”

Fenley echoed her concerns in his 2022 interview about his slain friend.

“Right now it’s considered a Red Alert about American travelers going over the border, going to hot destinations,” Finley reportedly said last year. “Be careful of the drug trafficking and the human trafficking involved, it’s just not a good safe destination for fun.” 

“All it takes is one time,” he added.

With Post wires