World Famous Cults and Fanatics Read online

  It was regarded as essential that the victim should scream as he died – the soul, Constanzo believed, must be confused and terrified when it left the body, to make it easier to subjugate. Oddly enough it was this obsession that was to bring about his downfall.

  In March 1989, his henchmen kidnapped a street cocaine dealer that none of them recognized – he has never been identified – and Constanzo went to work on him. But despite all his efforts he could not make the tough little Mexican cry out, even when he skinned his upper torso. The victim died without screaming. Constanzo was unnerved and declared the ceremony a failure. What they needed he decided was an American; someone soft, “someone who will scream”.

  The next victim was easy to find. At the beginning of March, Matamoros is generally packed with American “spring breakers” – mostly students from Texas attracted by cheap alcohol, pot and cocaine. The cultists simply waited until around two in the morning, found a drunk student heading back across the border, and offered him a lift. His name was Mark Kilroy, a twenty-one-year-old first-year medical student from the University of Texas. Constanzo did a very thorough job on the youth and was deeply satisfied with the result. He sliced the top from the screaming American’s head with a machete and dropped his brains into the nganga.

  Now, he told his excited followers, they were unstoppable. Previously they had only had Mexican spirits to protect them on the south side of the border; now they had an American ghost to keep them safe from the Texas police. They were now, he said, effectively invisible.

  But Constanzo’s sadism had overreached itself this time. The disappearance of an American student in Matamoros might normally have failed to attract much attention. But Mark Kilroy was the nephew of an important US Customs Adviser and the authorities on both sides of the border were soon involved in a large-scale search.

  A few days after the sacrifice of Mark Kilroy, Serafin Hernandez Jnr, Elio’s nephew, casually drove his pick-up truck past a queue of traffic and a police road check as if they could not see him. A patrol car quietly followed this apparent madman all the way to the Hernandez ranch. They waited until he had left again and searched the place. They found evidence of the storage of drugs and had him arrested.

  After a little heavy persuasion (involving the squirting of soda water spiked with tabasco up his nostrils – an agonizing but undetectable torture) he unexpectedly confessed to more shocking crimes than drug dealing. His casual confession – he still believed that the police could not defeat his padrino’s magic – led them back to the ranch to the shallow graves and the nganga shed.

  The police quickly moved to arrest all the members of the cult named in Serafin’s confession, but were too late to catch the padrino and his closest associates; Constanzo and his inner circle had already fled to Mexico City. The discoveries at the ranch worried many influential people. Constanzo had been a fashionable fortune teller, and many of his clients were from Mexican high society. Some of these were worried simply about their reputations. Others, especially in law enforcement, were terrified that Constanzo’s confession might reveal their involvement in drug trafficking. They could only pray that he would not be taken alive.

  After a brief stop in the capital, Constanzo and his followers fled to the resort of Cuernavaca, fifty miles south of Mexico City. They were not, in fact, too concerned about the problem; they had a large amount of money on them and were convinced that when things cooled down they could buy their way across the border. In fact, after three weeks, they even returned to Mexico City and hid in the apartment of a friend.

  On the 5 May, a police informer reported that a woman fitting Sara AIdrete’s description had been seen buying a large quantity of food, and that he had followed her to her apartment. The next day, Constanzo’s lookouts spotted cars of plain-clothes policemen moving in on the apartment block. Constanzo rushed to the window and saw heavily armed policemen preparing to storm the building.

  Panic reigned among the cultists. Constanzo and a henchman named Valdez – nicknamed “El Dubi” – exchanged machine-gun fire with the police, while Sara Aldrete and another lover of Constanzo’s, Omar Ochoa, hid under a bed. Then the hysterical padrino started to pile wads of money into the gas stove and burnt them.

  He and El Dubi continued to fire on the police until they were almost out of ammunition. Then, suddenly calm, Constanzo announced that they must all kill themselves. Taking his bodyguard/lover, Martin Rodriguez, into a walk-in closet he ordered El Dubi to shoot them. When the gunman just stared at him he slapped him and said, “Do it or I’ll make things tough on you in Hell.” As El Dubi raised the weapon Constanzo said calmly, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. Now do it.” At the order Valdez sprayed them with bullets. Both died instantly.

  The others were taken alive. Detailed confessions revealed that there had been fifteen murders at Matamoros, and eight in Mexico City (the eighth victim in the capital was a transvestite called Ramon Esquivel who had been tortured, murdered and his dissected body left on a public street corner). They added up to a total of twenty-three “sacrifices” to the god Kadiempembe. Police later investigated the possibility that Constanzo’s gang was responsible for sixteen ritual murders of children, all under the age of sixteen.

  The Matamoros police had the nganga and the shed that contained it exorcized by a curandero or white witch. Then they doused the shed with petrol and burned it to the ground.

  ***

  The religions of Santeria and Palo Mayombe are so widespread in Miami’s Cuban population, that the Miami River has been nicknamed “the River of Chickens” by the sanitation crews that work on it. Over a three-day period in 1989, a crew dredged up two hundred headless, unplucked chickens, twenty-two beheaded ducks, and a collection of other sacrificed fauna, including cats, dogs, snakes, eels, turtles, pigeons, iguanas and pelicans.

  ***

  Chapter Seven

  The New Death Cults

  With the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1992, forty-six years of Cold War fear ended. For almost ten years, throughout the 1990s, most of the world slept easier in their beds, freed from the threat of nuclear war. But during that time of comparative peace a new threat grew up: that of religiously inspired terrorism. But is the threat of the “mad mullahs” and the “religious whackos” something that should disturb our sleep?

  David Koresh and the Branch Davidians

  Early in the afternoon of 19 April 1993, the TV news began to broadcast pictures of the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, where David Koresh and his followers had been holding police and federal authorities at bay for fifty-one days. Koresh, who claimed to be the Son of God, had been wanted for questioning by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) because he and his followers were known to be stockpiling weapons and explosives – the Branch Davidians believed that the war of Armageddon was imminent. Koresh had made several offers to allow the ATF to inspect his weapons arsenal – all of it, he insisted, legal and licensed – but they refused, preferring to make a surprise visit.

  On 28 February, heavily armed agents from the ATF attempted to gain access to the Branch Davidian’s main building in the Waco compound. Someone started firing weapons. Four ATF officers and six Branch Davidians died in the battle.

  The ATF later claimed that the cultists fired first, and the Branch Davidians insisted that it was the ATF who opened fire. (In fact, Koresh later claimed his people never shot anyone – he said that the ATF, firing wildly, had accidentally shot their own people.) Ironically, the Branch Davidians would have been within their rights to use their weapons, as the ATF agents did not have a valid search warrant and, under Texas law, a citizen is allowed to forcibly defend his property from attempts at illegal breaking-and-entry. But such petty legal points did not stop the federal authorities descending on the Koresh compound with military force following the gun battle.

  Throughout March and early April, the surrounded cultists expressed defiance. On a number of occasions, the
ir leader agreed to surrender, then changed his mind at the last moment. To the worldwide audience that watched the siege daily on television, it seemed obvious that David Koresh was enjoying making fools of the authorities. Magazine articles about the thirty-three-year-old rock guitarist talked about his harem of wives – which included under-age girls – and hordes of children, while ex-disciples described his self-glorifying sermons, which sometimes went on for as long as sixteen hours. The result was that most people were impatient with the apparent “softly softly” tactics of the authorities, and looked forward to the day when Koresh would be standing in court and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

  So, on that April morning, when the federal agents decided to break the siege with tanks, there must have been few people in the worldwide audience who did not look forward to the prospect of Koresh getting his come-uppance. It all began when an armoured vehicle rolled up to the main building in the compound, and a loudspeaker asked those inside to surrender. The answer was a barrage of bullets that bounced off the armour. The vehicle rolled forward and tore the corner off the building. Meanwhile, other tanks, with metal extension tubes attached to their barrels, knocked holes in the buildings, then pumped in clouds of CS tear gas. Then the vehicles withdrew and waited.

  After six hours of stand-off, the first wisps of smoke began to drift up from the buildings. It looked as if something had started a fire, perhaps igniting the CS gas. In a few minutes, flames were bursting out of upstairs windows. The TV cameras waited expectantly for the rush of fugitives from the quickly burning building, but none were to be seen. No attempt was made by the FBI to stop the fire – none could, as no fire trucks had been called. In a few minutes, the wood and plasterboard buildings were a roaring inferno. At least eighty cult members, including twenty-seven children, died in the fire. Only nine people escaped from the burning buildings. Koresh was not among them.

  The federal authorities, in the subsequent inquiry, claimed that Koresh had decided that he and his followers must die by fire, and had stopped most of the cultists escaping to safety. Many cult members were found lying face down, a position typical of death by smoke inhalation; others had died of gunshot wounds. Like the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978, Koresh, the FBI said, had enforced a mass suicide.

  But why had so many apparently normal people decided to leave their homes – some from England and Australia – to follow this skinny, long-haired Texan who made the pompous assertion that he was King David as well as the Son of God? As the evidence about Koresh began to emerge, the problem became more, and not less, puzzling. At first, it looked as if he was a straightforward conman. When he had first joined the Branch Davidian sect as an odd job man, he lost no time in seducing its leader, sixty-eight-year-old prophetess Lois Roden, explaining that he had received a revelation that he was to become the father of her child. Whether she believed him or not, she became his secret mistress, and was soon convinced she was pregnant. From then on, Koresh manoeuvred until he took over the cult.

  Revelations about Koresh’s later sexual behaviour reinforced the conman theme. Soon after the affair with Lois Roden, he announced that God had told him to marry a fourteen-year-old girl named Rachel Jones, daughter of sect members Perry and Mary Jones. Not long after he seduced another fourteen-year-old girl, Karen Doyle, daughter of another convert. When her father found out, he was furious. But Koresh explained that he had been equally shocked when God told him that he had to “give his seed” to Karen. “I begged God not to make me do this.”

  Karen first learned about God’s command when she was asleep in a bus used as a dormitory, and felt a tap on her shoulder. Koresh whispered to her that God had ordered him to give her his seed, and Karen whispered back “I will do whatever the Lord wants.” So Koresh climbed into bed with her. At the time, the first wife, Rachel, was on a visit to California.

  Twelve-year-old Michele Jones was his wife’s sister, and Koresh drove to California to bring her back to Texas. As he explained it, he was again an unwilling participant in the seduction. Halfway back to Texas he experienced a powerful urge to undress her and make love to her. He stopped the car, walked up the road, and asked God: “God, what’s happening to me? I mean I wanted to fuck her – that’s all I could think about.” God helped him overcome his lust and he drove her back to Texas. There, reading a passage in the Song of Solomon about a girl with no breasts, he realized that God was indicating that Michele was to become his wife. “So I go right to Michele and I climb into bed with her. She thinks I’m trying to get warm. I reached for her underwear to take ’em off. She didn’t know what I was doing so she struggled . . . But I was too strong, and I was doing this for God, and I told her about the prophecies. That’s how she became my wife.” He explained to his male followers that they should not envy him because “none of you men know the pain I endure to do God’s work”. Seeding all his women wore him out, he complained. “I get tired, I suffer.” His sufferings would eventually father twenty-two children.

  A book called Preacher of Death by Martin King and Marc Breault, fills out the picture. Breault was a leading disciple who later became disillusioned and defected. When he met Koresh, Breault was studying to become a minister. In 1986, Koresh’s father-in-law, Perry Jones, introduced himself to Breault as a journalist specializing in religion. When he told Breault that he thought his son-in-law had “inspiration from God”, Breault agreed to meet the prophet. Koresh turned up with his wife Rachel and baby son Cyrus. He seemed friendly and sympathetic, and Breault immediately liked him. In Breault’s apartment, Koresh launched into a three-hour Bible class. He had an amazing gift of fluency and conviction. His central point was that God always worked through prophets, and that God had granted him special insight into the Book of Revelation. To Breault, this sounded totally plausible; soon he was willing to follow Koresh anywhere.

  And why should a young man with a promising career in the ministry abandon everything to follow such a madman? Reading Breault’s description of the meeting, it all becomes clear. Koresh presented himself as an open, friendly but intense young man (he was then twenty-seven) who differed from others only in the depth of his biblical knowledge, and his conviction that God had had chosen him as His instrument for a special revelation.

  Hitler’s deputy Albert Speer recorded that Hitler converted him to Nazism under parallel circumstances. Expecting a ranting maniac, he was surprised to find that Hitler spoke gently and reasonably, and said many things about Germany that Speer perceived as true. Once intellectual assent has been given, the rest followed naturally: all humans long for powerful conviction, for ideas that seem to offer them a new and more meaningful way of life. When Breault decided to follow Koresh, he felt that it was the ideas he was following; the fact that their mouthpiece was an intense but unthreatening individual made it seem natural and inevitable. Breault’s account makes it clear that Koresh was no mere Tartuffe, ineptly faking a mask of piety. He was either an intellectual conman of awesome plausibility or, perhaps, a true believer in his own prophethood.

  Once Breault had accepted Koresh as a prophet, it was not difficult to accept that he was – in some sense – the Son of God. And once he had gone this far, it became easier to accept the greatest stumbling block to regarding him as a messiah – his obsessive seduction of teenage cult members. Koresh explained that he simply wanted them to receive his holy seed, to build up the future generation who would inherit the earth. The whole process was so gradual that there was no point at which Breault felt that he was trying to swallow a camel.

  Breault’s disillusionment began when he witnessed the mistreatment of Cyrus, Koresh’s own three-year-old son. Koresh had ordered the child to acknowledge that another cult member was his true mother; when Cyrus refused, Koresh beat him for twenty minutes on his bare bottom with a wooden paddle, then made him sleep in a garage that was (Koresh told the terrified boy) infested with rats. When the child still refused to deny his true mother, Koresh starved him for two days until
he was too weak to hold a glass of water. Koresh was clearly a person who would not, under any circumstances, allow himself to be contradicted.

  Further disillusionment followed when Koresh delivered a sixteen-hour sermon whose content was the declaration that all the women in the compound belonged to him. (Endless sermons and harangues are one of the basic techniques of brainwashing.) Judy Schneider, the wife of chief disciple Steve Schneider, was seduced while Steve was abroad on a recruiting drive, and was soon pregnant. Steve was at first shattered, and even thought of murdering the prophet; but the thought of what might happen to his wife if he failed finally deterred him. The seduction of Judy served a double purpose; it subdued Steve, who had always felt ambivalent about the prophet, and it persuaded all the other married women in the compound that they ought to follow suit.

  It was when Koresh started making advances to another recent convert, with whom Marc Breault was in love, that Breault decided it was time to leave. It happened in California: Breault openly contradicted “King David” who, infuriated, ordered him to humble himself and lick the dust. Breault refused and was ordered to return to Texas. Instead, he flew back to Australia, and there set about de-converting other Branch Davidians.

  When Koresh heard the news, he rushed to Australia, where there was a confrontation. Koresh won hands down, with a performance that included gazing at the heavens and declaring that he was being crucified all over again. Breault beat a tactical retreat. But soon after his exit, the police arrived – Breault had asked his brother to call them if he was not home by ten – and Koresh left hastily by the back door and caught the next plane back to America.

  It was largely due to Breault’s efforts that the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms finally decided to take action about the enormous cache of weapons and explosives that Koresh was known to have stored at the compound, and the siege of the Branch Davidians began. When it ended on 19 April, police found over a million rounds of ammunition still unspent in the underground arsenal of the compound.