CRIME HUNTER: Cheerleader by day, serial killing Satanist by night

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“I’m a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas. But when I went over there, I put a cross around my neck.” — Antonio Zavaleta, an expert on the occult, at Texas Southmost College. Texas Monthly, 1989

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Three international bridges link Brownsville, Texas to notorious Matamoros, Mexico where the good times are cheap.

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Forty minutes away from Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico is South Padre Island, a wet T-shirt wonderland that attracts tens of thousands of college kids from around the U.S. for the annual spring break booze-a-rama.

Apparently, the birdwatching is pretty good in South Padre as well.

University of Texas at Austin student Mark James Kilroy was seeking birds of a different feather in the spring of 1989.

On March 14, 1989, Kilroy was in South Padre Island with pals when they became separated. The 21-year-old student was never seen alive again.

Some reports suggest he was snatched off the island, others said it happened over the border in Matamoros.

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At 6-foot-1, Sara Aldrete was an exceptionally tall, striking woman with flowing brown hair. While she lived in Matamoros, she attended Texas Southmost College where she played soccer and was a cheerleader.

According to Texas Monthly, she was courteous, friendly, and always eager to please.

“She sat in my anthropology class all semester, an A student, always present, always friendly. I never saw her wear an emblem, an amulet, a talisman, any sign of black magic — and I’m trained to watch for such things; never heard her ask a weird question, even when we talked about weird religions,” Zavaleta said.

But at night, she would return to her parent’s middle-class Matamoros home, lock her bedroom door and pray to Satan on a blood-splattered alter.

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Aldrete was leading a secret double life: Student by day, witch and devil worshipper by night.

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Mexican media called them Los Narcosatánicos — The Narcosatanists.

In the 1980s, Aldrete met the charismatic Adolfo Constanzo, a fortune teller and grifter turned cult leader. Constanzo marinated the young woman in the dark lord’s way, black magic and witchcraft in a Satanic gumbo of Santeria, Aztec warrior rituals and Palo Mayombe.

Constanzo initiated Aldrete into the cult and dubbed her La Madrina — The Godmother.

Cops would later say the cheerleader became as bloodthirsty as the cult leader, and there were plenty of blood sacrifices.

The cult mainly targeted drug dealers, stealing their dope and pushing it over the border. Constanzotold his followers that human sacrifice granted them immunity from law enforcement for their drug smuggling operations. Win-win.

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And at an old warehouse in Matamoros, they tortured and murdered scores of victims, their dismembered body parts cooked in a large pot.

Aldrete played an active role in the slaughter, investigators believed, and that included human sacrifice.

In one instance, Aldrete personally selected the victim to be butchered. He had the temerity to insult La Madrina and such effrontery needed to be punished. The leggy cheerleader lured the victim herself.

Then, she supervised his agonizing death, cutting off his nipples before boiling him alive.

Murder has never been in short supply in Matamoros. People disappeared all the time, part of the transient nature of border towns and the desperate scramble to enter the U.S. for a better life.

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But by 1989, homicide detectives in Mexico were beginning to take notice of the body parts in their midst. When Mark Kilroy disappeared, that changed everything.

Aldrete had ordered cult members to bring her a white American male as a sacrifice. The details that later emerged were sickening.

Kilroy was taken to a remote ranch where he was tortured and sodomized for hours by cult members before being ritualistically murdered with a machete blow. Cultists then removed his brain and boiled it in a pot. He was buried on the property with 14 of the group’s previous victims.

It didn’t take cops long to find the ranch but by then Aldrete, Constanzo and other fanatics were on the run. At the death ranch, investigators made the macabre discovery of human hair, brains, teeth and skulls.

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On May 6, 1989, acting on a tip, detectives raided their Mexico City hideout in a blaze of bullets and Constanzo begged another cult member to shoot him. Ever dutiful, he blew the boss’s brains out.

Aldrete was captured not long afterwards and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

If she is ever released, American officials have said they’ll be waiting with extradition papers — and a needle.

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@HunterTOSun