World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (36 page)

One of the most horrifying cult murderers of modern times was Adolfo Constanzo. Constanzo’s speciality was ritually torturing and killing his victims: he ripped out their hearts and brains, boiled them and then ate the result. According to Constanzo’s perverted logic, this ritual slaughter – which was derived from the Santeria and Voodoo religious practices his mother had taught him as a child – was intended to ensure him success in his career as a drug dealer. As it happened, he did prosper for some years and became a rich man, but in the end he met his fate as violently as had his unfortunate victims.

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was born in 1962 to a teenage Cuban mother, and grew up in Puerto Rico and Miami. As a child, he served as an altar boy in the Roman Catholic religion, and also accompanied his mother on trips to Haiti to learn about Voodoo. As a teenager, he became apprenticed to a local sorcerer, and he began to practise the occult African religion of Palo Mayombe, which involves animal sacrifice. Later, as an adult, he moved to Mexico City and met the men who were to become his first followers: Martin Quintana, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea. He set up a homosexual ménage a trois with Quintana and Orea (calling one his ‘man’ and the other his ‘woman’) and began to run a profitable business casting spells to bring good luck, which involved expensive ritual sacrifices of chickens, goats, snakes, zebras and even lion cubs. Many of his clients were rich drug dealers and hitmen who enjoyed the violence of Constanzo’s ‘magical’ displays. He also attracted other rich members of Mexican society, including several high-ranking, corrupt policemen, who introduced him to the city’s powerful narcotics cartels.

At this time, Constanzo started to raid graveyards for human bones to put in his nganga or cauldron, but he did not stop at that: before long, live human beings were being sacrificed. Over twenty victims, whose mutilated bodies were found in and around Mexico City, are thought to have met their end in this way. Constanzo began to believe that his magic spells were responsible for the success of the cartels, and demanded to become a full partner with one of the most powerful families, the Calzadas. When he was rejected, seven family members disappeared; their bodies were found with fingers, toes, ears, brains and even – in one case – the spine missing.

Not surprisingly, relations soon cooled with the Calzadas, so Constanzo made friends with a new cartel, the Hernandez brothers. He also took up with a young woman named Sara Aldrete, who became the high priestess of the cult. In 1988, he moved to Rancho Santa Elena, a house in the desert, where he carried out ever more sadistic ritual murders, sometimes of strangers, and sometimes – killing two birds with one stone, as it were – of rival drug dealers. He also used the ranch to store huge shipments of cocaine and marijuana.

However, on 13 March 1989, he made a fatal mistake. Looking for fresh meat to put in the pot, his henchmen abducted a student, Mark Kilroy, from outside a Mexican bar and took him back to the ranch. There Constanzo brutally murdered him. This time, however, the victim was no drug runner, petty crook or local peasant; he was a young man from a respectable Texan family that was determined to bring their son’s killer to justice.

Under pressure from Texan politicians, police initially picked up four of Constanzo’s followers, including two of the Hernandez brothers. They interrogated the men, eliciting horrifying tales of occult magic and ritual human sacrifice. Officers then raided the ranch, discovering Constanzo’s cauldron, which contained various items such as a dead black cat and a human brain. Fifteen mutilated corpses were then dug up at the ranch, one of them Mark Kilroy’s.

Death Pact

Constanzo meanwhile had fled to Mexico City. He was discovered only when police were called to his apartment because of a dispute taking place there. As the officers approached, Constanzo opened fire with a machine gun, but he soon realized that he was surrounded.

He handed the gun to a follower, Alvaro de Leon, who was a professional hitman, and ordered Leon to open fire on him and his lover, Martin Quintana. By the time police reached the apartment, Constanzo and Quintana were dead, locked in a ghoulish embrace. De Leon, known as ‘El Duby’, and Sara Aldrete, Constanzo’s female companion, were immediately arrested.

A total of fourteen cult members were charged with a range of crimes, from murder and drug running to obstructing the course of justice. Sara Aldrete, Elio Hernandez and Serafin Hernandez were convicted of multiple murders and were ordered to serve prison sentences of over sixty years each; El Duby was given a thirty-year term. The reign of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, high-society sorcerer and maniacal murderer, was over.

The Wilderness Killings

It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction – a serial killer who abducted his victims, set them loose in the Alaskan wilderness, then hunted them down with knife and rifle. Robert Hansen made it a nightmare reality for the dozen or more women he plucked from the sleazy Tenderloin district of Anchorage, Alaska, between 1973 and 1983. Hansen appears to have been motivated to kill by little more than a desire to get back at the world in general, and women in particular.

Resentment

Born in Pocahontas, Idaho, on 13 February 1939, Hansen’s father, Christian, was a Danish immigrant who ran his own bakery. A strict disciplinarian, he soon had his son working in the bakery at all hours. This did not help Robert’s social life as a teenager; neither did the young man’s acne, or his stammer.

After Robert left school he carried on working for his father, while also signing up for the army reserves. In 1960, he married a local girl. Shortly afterward he burnt down part of the local high school. He was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. His wife responded to discovering this unsuspected side of her new husband by divorcing him.

New Start

Shortly after his release from prison, Hansen remarried and in 1967, the couple decided to make a new start, and headed for America’s last frontier: Alaska. They settled in the main town of Anchorage and, for the first time, Hansen seemed to find a place where he could fit in. He had used his time in the army reserves to become an expert marksman and was now able to put these skills to use, gaining a reputation as an outdoorsman.

Somewhere along the way, though, killing wild animals failed to fulfil Hansen’s need for revenge. The year after the last of his record-breaking animal kills, he was arrested for the attempted rape of a housewife and the actual rape of a prostitute. The rape of prostitutes not being taken too seriously, he served only six months in prison.

According to his own confession, from 1973 onwards Hansen developed a routine whereby he would pick up prostitutes and topless dancers from Anchorage’s Tenderloin district, fly them out into the wilderness and rape them. If they submitted to his sexual whims, he let them live, taking them back to Anchorage with the threat that if they reported what had happened they would be in big trouble. He murdered those who did not comply; setting them loose in the wilderness, giving them a head start, then hunting and killing them. His activities went on unnoticed Anchorage, during the 1970s oil boom, was a wild town, where people came and went all the time.

In 1980, however, the bodies of two young women did come to light. One has never been identified. The second was a topless dancer named Joanna Messina. Two years later the body of another topless dancer called Sherry Morrow was found by hunters near the Knik River. By now, the police suspected they were dealing with a serial killer.

Respected Citizen

Far from being a suspected murderer, Hansen had by now become a well-to-do respected citizen. He had his own bakery, lived in a pleasant house with his wife and two children, and even had his own small private plane.

In June 1983, all that changed. A trucker picked up a prostitute running down the road with a pair of handcuffs trailing from one wrist. He took her to the police station, where she explained that she had been picked up by a client who had taken her to his house, raped and brutalized her, then taken her to his private plane. She had managed to escape at the last minute, and was convinced that, if she had not run, the man would certainly have killed her since he had made no attempt to hide his face. She led the police to the house and then to the light aircraft from which she had escaped. Both belonged to Robert Hansen.

Hansen denied everything. He produced an alibi, claiming to have spent the evening in question with two friends. With no more evidence than the unsupported word of a prostitute, the police decided not to press charges.

Three months later, another body was found, that of Paula Golding. The police task force called in FBI serial-killer expert John Douglas, and they decided to have another look at Hansen. Hansen’s friends admitted that the alibi was false. Hansen’s house was searched and the police found weapons used in the murders, plus IDs taken from the dead girls.

Hansen made a deal whereby he would be charged with four murders, and would serve his time in a federal prison. In return for this he confessed to many other murders, for which he was never charged. He took state troopers on a tour of the wilderness, in the course of which they were able to recover eleven bodies, several of which remain unidentified.

On 18 February 1984, Hansen was convicted of murder and sentenced to life plus 461 years.

The Woman in a Box

The ‘Woman In A Box’ refers to a case so traumatic to its victim that the media have universally protected her anonymity to this very day, twenty years after her case finally came to trial. Even today, she is referred to simply as ‘Carol Smith’ (or sometimes ‘Colleen Stan’).

Twenty-year-old Carol was living in Eugene, Oregon, when she left one May morning in 1977 to visit her friend in Westwood, California, to wish her a happy birthday. It was a four-hundred mile trip, but this was the 1970s, and Carol shared the free-wheeling spirit of her times. She walked on down to Interstate 5 to hitch a ride with someone kind enough to give her a lift – but tragically chose the wrong car.

After four days with no news of Carol, her friends back in Eugene rang her family, but they had not heard from her either. When they found out she had never arrived in Westwood, alarm bells started ring: Carol had always been the sort of person who kept in touch with those close to her, and now nobody knew where she was. Her friends in Eugene filed a missing persons report with the local police department.

Miracle Return

The first suspect was Carol’s ex-husband (Carol had married when she was seventeen), but he was easily ruled out. Time passed, still with no sign of the young woman, and hope faded. Jenise, her sister, was the first to believe that she had been murdered, and as time went by, her case grew cold.

Then came an amazing development: more than two years after she disappeared, her sisters received a letter from her. It was full of affection, but short on detail: she had settled down somewhere with a man, ‘Michael’, and they were not to worry. She was sorry she could not be in touch more. Carol’s family breathed a sigh of relief. Three years later, they finally got to see her again. She did not divulge much about her own life, but she was visibly overjoyed at seeing her family again. They were curious, of course, about what she had really been up to all that time, but they felt that they must have somehow offended her for her to go off like that, and they did not want to risk offending her again. They did not press her on her personal life but it might have been much better if they had, because Carol’s life had turned into a living nightmare.

Head In A Box

Carol had hitch-hiked all the way down to Red Bluff on the day she had left Eugene, back in 1977, and she only had another fifty miles to go when a blue Dodge Colt pulled over with a young family inside. She climbed in without hesitation, but however clean-cut the young couple and their baby appeared to be, she began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. The Hooker family seemed amiable enough, but deep down she felt something was wrong. When they stopped at a gas station she very nearly did not get back in the car, but when she did they were so nice to her she felt ashamed of herself. Then they made a detour to look at some ice caves. When they pulled off the road the man held a knife to her throat, and asked her if she was going to do whatever he said.

‘Yes,’ said Carol, desperately afraid. One word: yes. It destroyed her life, but it also saved it. She was then bound, blindfolded, and gagged. The man took a heavy soundproofed plywood box and fastened it to her head, which nearly suffocated her. Then she could feel them putting her into a sleeping bag.

Daily Torture

When they got her back to their home she was kept in a large wooden box in the cellar, although Hooker would often take her out to torture her, or leave her dangling by her wrists from the ceiling. At other times she would be left in the box for days on end, with a bedpan. Initially she was fed a single meal every other day, but when her health began to seriously deteriorate Hooker and his wife began to feed her once a day. Hooker made her sign a contract which appeared to give their master-slave relationship some legal status. He told her she was registered with the Slave Company, who saw everything, and who would kill Carol’s family if she ever ran away. Over the years, Carol’s mind gave way and she came to believe it all.