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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The complete story.,
By
This review is from: Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings (Paperback)
I've read six books on the Constanzo Cult killings and this one offers the most complete account of not only the gory events at the shack but it also offers some idea what made it all happen, such as what part Aldolfo's mother, smuggling, cultural differences and international politics played in the whole affair.I'd also like to say that this story is extremely horrifying the way it really happened, so I wonder why it is that the numerous movies about the killings which claim to be "Based on a true story" are all so wildly different than the real true story. These movies are insulting to anyone who knows the real truth. Should anyone ever make a movie that ACCURATELY depicts the real story of the Matamoros Cult Killings, it would be far scarier than ANY so called horror movie ever made.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CAULDRON OF BLOOD THE MATAMOROS CULT KILLINGS,
By jim pickens "jim pickens" (west virginia) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings (Paperback)
This book is a chilling true account of the disappearance and murder of Mark Kilroy and thirteen others in 1989 makes you wonder just how many more cults like this are out there and makes you think twice about allowing a loved one under 30 to travel the border country alone and unarmed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Roots of Evil,
By
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This review is from: Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings (Paperback)
A book like this one tells a story so horrible that all one can do is to try to understand the story in philosophical terms, rather than rational ones. There is no good reason for the savage actions of psychopaths, and so to try to reason out why they do the things they do is something of a waste of time. Such is the nature of the darkness presented in this book so skilfully by the author, Mr. Schutze. I want to commend the author for daring to present this lugubrious story within its context of culture, history, and international politics. Such contextualization does go a long way in helping the reader understand the story. Mr. Schutze also possesses an excellent grasp of Mexican culture that elucidates the events here described.Cauldron of Blood is, beyond a true crime book, a study in pogonology, or the study of evil. The subject of that study is the principal perpetrator, an occultist and psychopath by the name of Adolfo Constanzo. Having read quite a bit on psychopathy myself, I quickly recognized Constanzo as a psychopath, although I don't recall that word ever coming up in the book. I perceive that Mr. Schutze casts a wary eye on psychology, as I do. Often, the very terms and concepts of psychology can be used to mask horrific defects and evils in people. And also often, people use this ruse to mask their worst faults from themselves. However, Constanzo never perceived himself as a psychopath. His mother, being a witch herself, encouraged him to view himself as someone special--someone chosen--The Great Night. The Great Night, or Nanigo, is a particularly evil type of sorcerer who has no soul. Being someone without a soul means he cannot have remorse or regrets. Without a soul to make him think twice about anything, The Great Night is capable of anything. Without a soul, he does not even have to worry about heaven. He has no stops. Constanzo's special condition caused me to draw immediate parallels to what I understand to be psychopathy. Psychopaths don't have any stops either. They take what they want, and anyone who gets in the way will be hurt. The law itself is not a sufficient deterrent in a place like Mexico, where the law can be circumvented if one has enough money to do so. I will add that the US is not far from that state of affairs even now. THE ABSENCE OF LOVE Constanzo's terrible mother, Delia Aurora Gonzalez, had a nasty habit of making her husbands disappear, including Adolfo Constanzo's father. I can imagine that having been raised in such an environment must have had an influence on young Adolfo. He lived in a world in which fathers did not matter, only mother. Constanzo and his mother had a close bond. It is quite plausible that he had knowledge of how she was disposing of her husbands. True, Santeria practitioners have great knowledge of healing herbs. Also true, they have great knowledge of toxins. However, this is mere speculation. For all the detailed information included in this text, Schutze does not write in depth about the fates of Constanzo's father and step-fathers. It is clear that he did not know the love of a father, and none of the step-fathers was around long enough to give him that. One of this step-fathers was very bothered by Constanzo, as though he saw something very wrong in the boy, and tried to correct it, but he was soon out of the picture too. So was there love in that home? I hold that one of the roots of evil is the absence of love, but from this book I cannot determine if that was the case. Delia believed that Marilyn Monroe and all Hollywood celebrities were actual gods that may be prayed to and worshiped. Can someone so ignorant truly love anyone? What concept of love did she have in her mind? What concept of love did she teach her son? IGNORANCE From early on, Delia inculcated in Adolfo the belief that he was "the chosen one," or The Great Night. I see in this a sort of messiah complex. Many parents raise their kids this way, and it usually does cause problems. However, the Palo Mayombe belief system in which she raised him may have had much to do with how he turned out. He simply had a different take on the world from most people. His potential as a human being was dedicated to darkness--to becoming The Great Night, after all. How he was raised is information that is worth pursuing because it could tell us something of how psycopaths are made, helping us draw parallels to other famous psychopaths from history like Adolf Hitler and Napoleon. I believe that Adolfo Constanzo was of that ilk, and while reading of his horrible acts in this book I was reminded of the callousness of the ancient sorceress Medea, who, while fleeing from her father with Jason and the Argonauts, she conceived of a plan by which to delay her pursuing father and his ships. She killed her own brother and chopped him up, slowly dropping his limbs into the sea in order to make her father slow down his ships as he picked up the body parts. Constanzo had exactly that kind of callousness and cruelty, that kind of hardness and coldness. Interesting that, on top of having a character like Medea's, he was also a sorcerer like Medea. And isn't Medea famous for having killed her own children in order to spite her unfaithful husband? Constanzo and his cult were guilty of human sacrifice, and very cruel sacrifice at that. All his sacrificial victims were tortured and died screaming, according to the arrested cultists who presenced the rites. They were also strongly suspected of child sacrifice. They tortured little children and made them die screaming. The point of this was to enslave the spirits of the tortured and make them servants in their afterlife. It is here that the ignorance--the darkness if you will, becomes evident to me. The rigidity of their belief was such that these cultists could not see past it. It is always so with strong beliefs. Those beliefs shaped their reality. That's just how the world was to them. It is also my observation that, as evidenced in this story, psychopathy may be learned. Constanzo was, in a way, a teacher of psychopathy. Through intensely horrific rites, he brought his followers beyond their limits and taught them not to fear anything. He taught them how to lose their souls to The Great Night. In this way he contaminated fully grown adults with his own disease of psychopathy. The cultists later placed all the blame for what happened on the leader, but is that really the case? Psychology itself issues a pardon for people in that situation--Stockholm syndrome. But the details of the story do not lead me to believe that is what happened. He led them to the edge. He taught them to lose the inhibitions that kept their wills in check. Like another ancient sorceress, Circe, who turned men into pigs, Constanzo transformed his disciples into inhuman beings, capable of indulging inhuman appetites for suffering, blood, and screams. Such lessons do not evaporate simply because the teacher is dead and gone. And what is the first thing the cultists did when caught by the authorities? They lied about their involvement in the crimes, and they have been lying since. Lying is one of the hallmarks of psychopathy. I think he turned formerly normal adults into psychopaths. I hope some psychologist notes the importance of that because it means that one does not have to be raised a psychopath nor be born one. One can be indoctrinated into psychopathy as well. One can receive a "bad education," so to speak, well beyond adolescent years. THE FEAR OF DEATH The fear of death has long been named as one of the roots of evil. One of the purposes of the ritualistic killings is to instill the belief that in killing one gains some measure of control over death. Here is their ignorance again. To believe that one can control death is like believing one can put out the sun with one's hand. And yet, so they believed. The enormities people with this fear are capable of cannot be underestimated, and this story itself is proof of just that. I am reminded of another evil sorcerer, this time from the world of fiction, named Voldemort. How many people did he kill in order to achieve deathlessness? He made 7 horcruxes, but killed many more people than that. Constanzo kept a magical object that may be analogous to a horcrux. He called it a Nganga--a pot filled with the rotting blood and viscera of his sacrificial victims. This Nganga was his source of power. When it was discovered and destroyed, Constanzo "knew" that another sorcerer was on to him. But who? Who was it that played Harry Potter to his Voldemort? Who was great and evil enough to topple such a lord of darkness as this? Schutze blamed the media attention and the political machinery of US and Mexican relations. Threatened with a travel advisory, the Mexican government did everything possible to avoid losing American tourist dollars. And yet, I wonder if Constanzo wasn't right after all, if maybe there was indeed another sorcerer gunning for him. We may never know. Or perhaps we may, but I shudder to think of the price for such a story.
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