coralstuffandthings: In March 1989, a University of Texas student named Mark Kilroy went missing wh

coralstuffandthings:

In March 1989, a University of Texas student named Mark Kilroy went missing while on spring break. He’d been staying on South Padre Island, but on the night in question, he’d ventured across the border to Mexico to check out the bar scene, where he vanished without a trace. Four weeks later, his grisly fate was revealed. his brain was found first.

“It turned up in a black cauldron, and it had been boiled in blood over an open fire along with a turtle shell, a horseshoe, a spinal column and other human bones.

His ritual death and dismemberment had been carried out in service to religion—a bizarre, drug-demented occult religion practiced by an American marijuana smuggler operating out of Mexico. Authorities were led to a grave containing Kilroy’s body, or at least what remained of it, and after that the uncovering of mutilated corpses went on and on.

The first day of digging brought up a dozen bodies, all of them buried on the grounds of Rancho Santa Elena … the victims had been slashed, beaten, shot, hanged or boiled alive, the only commonality to their deaths the ritual mutilations that followed.”

The drug smugglers believed that human sacrifice would somehow magically protect them from being caught by the police, and even make them bulletproof. They were mistaken. Their downfall came when a man tied to the cult was nabbed for running a roadblock—an offense that worsened when he was found to have weed on him. In search of a bigger bust, and looking for clues in the Kilroy case, cops ventured to the farm belonging to the man’s family, the infamous Rancho Santa Elena mentioned above.

There, they found more drugs. But they also found the brutally disfigured bodies.

The leader and his girlfriend order an underling to shoot them and other members of the cult were arrested and charged with a multitude of crimes, including murder.