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Hey, weirdo, Zainash. I'm Alina. She's back. And this is morbid. This is morbid.
Oh, thank you guys. I'm alive. I'm alive. We made it through. We just had one of those things that, you know, the stomach bug it just rolls right through.
And then it paused and came back, which is really big. It paused before it hit the last of us, and then it hit the last of us, and then we cleared it all out. That's bullshit. And we said goodbye. Glad you cleared it up though.
Appreciate that. We did. We made it through. We're washing their hands as much as possible. I know sometimes that doesn't do it, but trust me, because we're hand-washing the house.
At least it's getting hot out again. I feel like it's hot out. Yeah, it's hot out. They don't do as well. Don't thrive.
Well, that's what I'm doing. I don't know if this one does. I feel like tummy bugs don't necessarily. Yeah, this one thrives in cold weather, I think, best. Yeah.
Yeah. Which of course, it's literally about to get cold again. Of course, like hotter than Satan's but a whole outside. It's true. I got to announce this solo, and it didn't quite feel so right.
So we just want to remind you one more time that we have a game. We have a fucking game with Hunt to Killers. This feels so much better that you're here and we can talk about it together. I'm really excited. It's nuts, because I was saying when I announced it, that was our first sponsor that we ever had on the pot.
They were the first ones that reached out. Hunt to Killers. I was always a big Hunt to Killers. And I'm being so for real. I need to find the boxes somewhere, like the early boxes.
And it was when they came in those black plane boxes. In the early days, me and John used to love them, especially before we had kids. Oh, yeah. We love that kind of thing. That's really cute.
You played games together? We loved games. The only games that me and Drew play are Mario Kart. Yeah, we love Mario Kart. That was a really cool opportunity game.
Yeah, like a board game house, but I would like to become a board game house. I was really fun with kids. I was just playing a board game for your kids. Yeah. I got that reading board game for me.
I was learning how to read. There you go. Good. I'm glad. We're fucking stoked about the Salem slicer.
Salem slicer? It's very 80s themed. It's very New England. It's Salem. It's very fake true grimy.
There's a special exclusive podcast episode in the game from how cool is that. It's fun to do. They've been great to work. We had a blast. We were part of the whole thing from beginning to end.
crazy that it's actually like hitting a source now because it's been a while and it's just like if you ever wanted to be a detective now you get to do so it is honestly a hunter killer is so fun that way there's like real evidence in there there's things you can touch things you have to unlock things like you really have to get into it it's fun as hell and telling you through all the evidence so right now it's available for pre-order at Walmart so definitely go pre-order at police do it and do we have any other biz nasty biz nasty i would say uh hey you're looking for a signed copy of the butcher legacy speaking of pre-orders speaking of pre-orders hey go to premiere collectibles i have the link is on my instagram go click it premiere collectibles i'm sure if you type in the butcher legacy on there it'll come up yeah i'm signing things for them signing copies and i will continue until you guys say hey you dumb bitch we don't want any more signed copies i doubt people say that i doubt i doubt the true blues will say that i doubt the good people say that i have been reading
your book all afternoon and i like all i read like a little bit last week i was reading it out of pedicure and i was like i was scaring everybody around me just like i was just blood dripping off because all the cover people are like what do you mean what's going on there that's that guy that's that guy i love it yay i only always has me read like when she's writing so the first two i read a lot of chapters before the final product yeah but i obviously then still read the books and that was fun and i still love them but with this one you didn't have me read as much you know as you were writing so it's like a completely different reading experience i love that i'm really fun because i forget the twist yeah that's i know you're like i know there's a twist but i don't i'm like i know it's like i'm not gonna tell you i know i was i'm very excited about it i'm getting very close to the end i'm like more than halfway through i'm very excited it's if you guys i'm telling you get into it man get into it yelp get into it it's fun i swear and i said it'll love you forever that's nice so make sure you go pre-order the but your legacy here and if there's some reason you're like fuck that i don't want to sign copy but i would like a copy of the book i get it for sure why not okay if you want to do that go to
uh but your legacy dot com buy it anywhere you want to get it anywhere the fuck you want you you can you can pre-order it anywhere you want the world is really your oyster it is and i'll keep making sure it's your oyster you can't we should be specific you can't buy it like an i-hop no or like a denny hey that's an idea okay so you can talk to your literary agent about that one i'm going to try to get it in anywhere okay so jennifer has a pancake here she comes here i come we are sloppy because this is later and i feel like we never record this later no we don't but life happened life sure happens like has continued to happen yeah it's cool i like that life keeps happening yeah that's great we can get the korean but sometimes it's just hard to fit everything in the day all right everybody so look at your stopwatch the episode's about to start okay all right you can say that it's about to start now okay there you go there's your minute mark thanks so much whoever you are so we're gonna be talking today this is gonna be a toupada a toupada it is true crime yeah it's true crime yeah so this this is a very tragic case very interesting though i don't know this case i didn't know this case before day found this i was telling y'all about it and i said please do that one and we started looking into it and i said whoa a lot is going on here so we're gonna go over a lot in part one we're going
to be talking about mark hillroy and who he was and how he found himself to be missing and we'll get into right when they're getting hot on the case but not quite there yet and then we'll pick up again in part too oh i love that so let's talk about mark hillroy first he was born on march 5th 19 at 68 in Chicago in shikago he was the oldest of two children born up to jim and hellen and not long after he was born his parents decided they wanted to leave the city for a slower pace of life and they ended up moving to texas sanife to be specific for his entire life mark hillroy was the kind of kid that parents can only dream of he went to church regularly with his parents he was an active member of the community especially the church community his father said when he was around he always lifted people up he went in the right direction all the time he was a real good guy to be around oh he also was always a good student he avoided drinking he didn't do drugs when he was in high school he joined the sanife high school baseball and the basketball team and he was involved in student government he was involved in boy scouts but he always made sure to spend enough time on his studies at the same time so he's like involved in all these different extracurriculars but also managing to be a good student at this time
not easy no it's not now when he graduated from high school in 1986 he was accepted at southwest texas state university and he had a brief stint there before he ended up transferring to tarlatan state university and that was on a basketball scholarship okay sports had always played a really big part in his life but after a few years it became clear to him that this wasn't going to be his whole life like he wasn't going to be in the nba yeah so he transferred to a third school this time the university of texas and he ended up deciding to study medicine there oh wow yeah that's a big deal it is now even though their lives had led them in separate directions mark and his core group of friends from high school still managed to stay in touch through their college years and whenever they were home on school break or anything like that they always got together now in late winter of 1989 mark and his friends Bradley Moore bill huddlesden and brent martin started planning details for their spring break vacation okay they were stoked about this yeah as soon as the semester ended they were going to be a back and or they were going to meet back in sanife and take off together for a few days on south paudrey island which is a resort town not too far from the mexican border for mark that year was more exciting than the usual spring break trip because it also coincided with his 21st
birthday oh what a what a lucky thing and remember he didn't really drink or do drugs or anything like that so he's 21 now he's waiting for it to be legal yeah he can't have a little drinky poo if he wants to and what better time to have a drink than spring break of course they had all attended spring break break festivities in south paudrey before but this was the first time that also that mark and his four high school best friends were going to be visiting together so that was also like an exciting thing as soon as Bradley finished up his exams around noon on march 10th he jumped in his car and drummed in his it too and he drove to austin to pick up mark and they headed to sanife to meet up with and brant okay it's also very funny to me that there's bradley bill brent and mark yeah it's just now along the way they caught up on the things that they missed in each other's lives about their plans for the future just boy talk just by just hanging just hanging just hanging Bradley said we talked about how it would probably be our last summer at home together which is like that's really sad it's sad but it's also like okay so like let's make the most of this trip like yeah there's a there's like a tension there almost where you know this is like kind of the end of a chapter well it feels like one of those like you know those shows or movies you see where it's like the group of friends and it's their last summer at home before they all head off in different directions yeah and you
wanted to end well like this is supposed to be like you know a summer where you get like you have fun and you let loose yeah it's like supposed to end with this like happy ending it's supposed to end all together and i now that you're beginning to talk i do know this okay um i do know this i think we talked about it on crime countdown you know what that actually makes sense because the name i think you're right the name sounded really familiar to me yeah and all of a sudden i was like wait a minute we talked about so much on crime countdown and it was like such little burson information like snippets exactly so every now and again i'm like did we talk about that yeah i'm like did we do a whole episode on them then i'm like no we didn't i know exactly yeah so it was late by the time they reached Santa Fe but the four boys decided they didn't want to waste any time so they started making their way to south pardre around midnight in total it took about nine hours for them to get there including two stops along the way but there was really no time to rest as soon as they checked into the hotel they showered they ate and they hit the beach yeah this is their last year they make the most of it now with roughly a quarter of a million students expected at south pardre that spring break the entire area had been transformed in anticipation of all these kids arrivals according to journalist
gary cartwright the weekend attractions and offerings included beer companies sponsoring an unprecedented variety of entertainment including free movies free concert free calls home which like please just think about that which is wild and surf simulator rides religious organizations from as far away as maddison wisconsin were handing out pamphlets and free suntan lotion urging students to pray rather than to party a beer company offered the free use of a swimming pool to students who didn't mind being filmed for part of a commercial and the boys took advantage of it yeah so it's just like all kinds of things go again it's just like let loose it reminds me of like like just that little like snippet reminds me of saved by the bell when they go on that like beach vacation oh my god yes right yeah i for some reason that that episode sticks out of my head i'm in a series of episodes it's like saved by the bell and then it made me think of kill more girls when they go on spring break i don't even remember that yeah and they go on you can count on a girl you can count on elina to pinpoint a specific kill more girls reference absolutely wild yeah so mark and brad took advantage of the free phone calls home and they let their parents know that they all had got there safely and they were just hanging out on the beach later that night they met up with a group of girls who traveled from
Purdue university and they just spent the night drinking and hanging out in their joining hotel rooms until dawn getting to know each other just having a good time yeah within a couple days of their arrival the four guys had kind of settled into a routine of waking up early hitting the beach going back to their hotel rooms for a little nap before ending or before starting the evenings round of drinking like typical vacation yeah occasionally the routine was interrupted by an event like the daily mistand line contest i love it but for the most part it was just a lot of sun a lot of drinking a lot of fun so this was pretty much what they expected but none of them had expected it to get old quite so fast and by sunday march 12 they decided they wanted to change it up a little bit like they were like okay why don't we go like sight see why don't we go to matamoros mexico just over the border we're so close to mexico it would be so fun to travel yeah so that night mark and his friend stopped at the sonic drive and import is a belford dinner they're they met a group of girls from the university of cancer so they were also on their way to matamoros so they all decided okay let's go together and the girls followed behind as brett drove to the border after parking their cars on the brown spill side of the bridge they all walked across the border into matamoros and they just spent the night kind of bar hopping and they specifically landed at one bar called sergeant peppers okay
once they got back to their cars early the next morning the two groups said their buys and they went their separate ways now they all had so much fun in matamoros that night so after a day at the beach the next day they all decided why don't we go back into mexico again like that was so much fun yeah so they did and they arrived a little after 10 p.m it turned out that mark and his friends were not the only one with that plan though by the time they arrived in the small border town the sidewalks were crammed with the nearly 15 000 students oh shit all of whom had come to party and celebrate spring so looking for the bar with the shortest line they ended up at a place called los sombreros described as a spot with a lot of neon and music loud enough to shatter brick whoa yeah sounds like my worst name i was just gonna say i hate everything about that i will say though if i was 21 dream like let's go yeah would have loved it now couldn't pay me couldn't know music loud enough to shatter brick is actually so scary to me yeah it actually is we went to dinner together one time forget where we went but i just remember sitting down at the table with you and the music was really loud and i you looked like you were going to crawl inside yourself i was so sorry i remember that vividly yeah and i know exactly what you
literally looked at me and said how are we gonna get there i said i was like i can't hear anything like i don't know what's going on what if i agreed it's something crazy yeah i could not yeah love music it was a lot especially if i could split brick yeah so after a few hours with music splitting brick at los sombreros they traveled deeper into the city ending up at the london pub which i feel like you wouldn't expect to see no it had just rebranded itself actually as the hard rock cafe which has no relation to the american chain really yeah wow uh the group apparently we all just have good ideas all right the group stayed there until about two in the morning and then bill decided it was probably time to head back across the bridge back into the u.s. technically so by that point the four boys had separated when they walked in when they walked out of the bar marx friend saw him leaning against a car outside talking to a girl who he had met earlier that day at the mistandland contest but seeing him and getting to him were two very different things entirely at this point because remember i just said there's 15 000 people littering the streets like that's stressed out all i can picture now it's like just to relate this to us and maybe anybody else in boston is like the um st patty spriti or like pride or something like something like or when it's like um fourth of july on the s-well now yes like that's what i'm thinking just like shoulder to shoulder yeah
so getting to him was gonna be tough so rather than try to fight the movement of the crowd brad and brad figured it would be easier to just go in the direction of the bridge that led back to texas and then they could all just meet there yeah they figured why wouldn't we all just do that yeah why not by that time marque had caught up with bill and so they assumed that they would find their friends but as they near the border marque told bill to go ahead of him because he had to relieve himself so he ducked behind a tree to do that a short time later bill met up with brad and brad and the three of them were sitting around waiting for marque who they figured would emerge at any second but minutes passed and he still wasn't showing up and eventually they started to get concerned by then nearly all the bars had closed and all of the tourists had flowed back over the border and there were still no signs of marque so they spent hours roaming the town looking for him they went back over the border but it was like he vanished without a trace he was just gone and honestly you don't think and i know like you don't think about this happening with like a man no you know what i mean like when it's not your first thought like when it's like a group of men together you would assume nothing could happen like they're invincible essentially you know what i mean i know that's not true i'm just saying that's the initial thought you were kind of like conditioned to be with these
kinds of stories like a group of young men one of them suddenly going missing is like what you like how it wasn't safe like it's just like very shocking it is it's chilling yeah it is chilling that's the perfect way to describe it so they spent all night searching the increasingly empty streets of matamoros for marque growing more and more concerned with every single hour that passed finally when the sun came up and they still hadn't found any sign of marque the three decided maybe he had just gotten a ride back to south ponjorie with someone that he met at the bar maybe that girl that they saw him talking to earlier like hopefully we're overreacting here yeah because the alternative that their friend had now disappeared in a foreign country was way too frightening to accept that time and like who takes a grown man well you don't um i i don't think you initially go to that like obviously you're looking for your friend for hours and hours and you can't find them like panics starts to set in but then after a little bit you're like okay let's be a little logical here maybe he did just get it right now like you don't want to believe that works in a scenario yeah right unfortunately
though when they got back to the Sheraton later that morning back in texas they discovered marque's bed was empty it didn't look like it had been slept in and there was nothing in the room to indicate that he returned exhausted though from their night of partying and searching they went to bed hoping that when they woke back up he would be back remember this is the 80s like we're not all super long formed in how to respond to a situation like this and honestly i think what you were just saying as men they don't want thinking they're not thinking like yeah because they're not conditioned to think like this and again remember like back then it's not like they were listening to true crime podcasts or watching documentaries on the date line and seeing this kind of shit happening all the time exactly this was not something that anybody was thinking about you know but here's the thing when they woke up several hours later marque still wasn't back and they decided that under the circumstances it didn't seem wise just to keep waiting for a show back up so that afternoon march 15th they all together went to the south pager island police department and they filed a missing person's report including every relevant detail that they could remember from the night before now during spring british quiet south pager community had learned to brace itself for an increase in everything that comes with the increase in the number of visitors from hotel bookings to also reports of criminal
activity so marque wasn't necessarily the first person to be reported missing during spring break he wasn't even the first person actually reported missing that week that's wild yeah spring break scares the shit out of me i never was allowed to go inside never was either and i will not allow my children to go and i know i know that there's like all these things that you say before you have kids that you're not like i'm not gonna do this and i'm not gonna do that that's one i know i'll be standing ten toes down on someone with kids no i'm not even happening it's just not happening we take a family vacation so while the police took the report seriously they still they still were confident that he would chill back yeah he was like drunk and like passed out somewhere exactly yeah but when marx friends mentioned mexico the detectives did become somewhat more concerned author jim shoots and we will link his book on the show note show notes he said no matter how casually the kids themselves took this business of crossing into mexico to raissell no one in law enforcement in south texas took mexico cases lightly because they're in a completely different jurisdiction yeah of course and yeah a completely different area now throughout the 1980 specifically drug trafficking and organized crime had spiked in mexico do mostly to a massive economic crisis that put a lot of
people out of work and led to few options for legitimate employment criminal gangs that were once very poorly organized and focused mostly on pettie crime had become a lot more formal and now there were lots of different networks for trafficking guns drugs people you know gang violence was a problem all over the country but it was particularly challenging at the american border i'm sure because large amounts of drugs and other illicit substances were flowing into the country there so it wasn't that uncommon for torus or unlucky american workers to get kidnapped and ransom back to their families so this is what the investigators in south pager had been thinking when they got the report about mark going missing in madam or else and if that was what happened to mark the small police department in south pager did lack the resources to deal with this yeah that's a big deal yeah so that afternoon the case was forwarded to cameron county sheriff alix perez in brownsville texas which you do have to respect how quickly these police forces moved yeah that doesn't always happen no it's not often that a small police department realizes that they don't have the resources which is out so when they do like you got a snap bomb yeah now if mark had been kidnapped for ransom the county sheriff would have had the resources and the regional knowledge necessary to resolve
everything hopefully without getting on the wrong side of mexican authorities so perez assigned the case to his most reliable deputy george govito who immediately recruited the help of deputy lupé lemas a formal brownsville police officer who had recently started working with the sheriff's department and he had a lot of experience working on cases that crossed over into the border so this is kind of that's what you need a perfect duo right yeah so govito and lemas were aware of the potential implications of mark having gone missing especially over the border he was one of 60 americans to have been reported missing in mexico in just three months whoa yeah however they were also familiar like we were just saying with chaos and you know just the drunken vibes going on spring break so neither of them were ready to assume the complete worst yeah because it could just be debauchery exactly and honestly i'm sure you're hoping it was yeah that's the thing you're hoping this is just a lesson learned exactly you know so instead of going to worst case scenario they decided to proceed as they would with any other missing person's case operating on the assumption and the hope that mark had simply caught a ride with a girl that he met at a bar and he would turn back up soon enough that's how they planned to approach the case but before the day was over that plan changed dramatically after mark's
friends filed a report with the south pager police they returned to the hotel and they called mark's obviously to let them know that he was missing what the the call no parent wants to get in the call like it's got to be so stressful to send your kids on spring break like and also here's the other thing these aren't kids he's a dead one year old so they didn't have a lot of sand if you literally didn't it's their kid and it's like you go you sit there and you're like it won't happen to my kid right and then when you the worst happens i don't even know how you bring you wrap your brain around it let's just not feel like no because you're like no this is literally the worst case scenario how is it actually happening right oh so they had heard the news reports of people going missing along the mexican border as it was all happening and they immediately worried that something bad happened to their son once they realized he was one of those people so rather than wait to hear from the police Jim called his brother Ken who was a u.s. customs agent which is like great content to him he was based in la and he asked for a salt now Ken knew his nephew pretty well and he knew that well mark might have had a few beers now and again and you know maybe partied too hard every now and again he wasn't a drug user and there wasn't anything else on that side of the border that he would have gotten caught up yeah plus his car was still on the american side of the border and all of his
belongings were inside and they were they knew that he wouldn't have just abandoned all of that so in just a few hours the missing person's case had escalated from a local matter to now a federal investigation yeah fast by the time which is honestly a good thing good aesthetic level this eye yeah by the time ken kelroy and his partner or a neck gotten touched with uh george govito several calls had already been made to the kamron county sheriff's department and a large team of law enforcement officials was assembled to search for mark at the same time marx father jim was on his way to brownsville to help in the search however he could govito remembered later about marx father uh he came into the sheriff's office and he never left the sheriff's office he was there for 30 days each single day saturday's and sundays too he begged me to help him look for his oh my god that just destroys my heart i know that's apparent right there that's a full letter and the problem was while govito and the rest of the investigators assigned to the case obviously desperately wanted to find marq hillroy they had no evidence and there were no leads to work with and even if they did have those leads and did have that evidence none of them had jurisdiction to launch an investigation in mexico yeah so that's really really complicated and you're not thinking
that as a one-year-old on spring break crossing over the border no but now that we have that information it is something that you have to consider yeah you do if something happens to me it's not that easy for people to get the resources and the jurisdiction and the warrants and the this and that and the share information and that's why i think it's so important that we share stories like this yeah because you need to know that you have to at least be aware of these things it's it's so scary because it's good this is anywhere anywhere that's not where you're based and where you're all your shit is well just like you're talking about yeah just like when we were talking about the inebra the case like international waters it just becomes more complex the web becomes tighter and that's hard it's awful and it sucks because people should be able to go on vacation should be able to let loose without monsters praying about it people just stop being shitheads it's never happened and all of humanity and all things it would be so sick if we could all just agree to stop being assholes i would love that everyone i would love that i would love that what it peace on earth is a real i'm like damn i know that is you just you wish somebody would get that that wish and actually that would happen honestly because it would be real nice if everyone was just chilling yeah everyone was just chilling i can't
even picture it to be honest with you that everybody was just minding their own business no helping out with brethren when they could yeah i mean that's how i try to live my life i obviously everybody can be an asshole sometimes i'm like of course to this to me no at this point in my life i'm just trying to chill yeah she just threw up a picture i'm just trying to chill i am just trying to chill so but no that's like i said i really do think that's why we should be telling these stories so aware of the restrictions on law enforcement and international in an international case the killer always turned to the nearby communities for help in the early days Jim went down to the bridge that crossed into madam moros and handed out missing flyers from mourning until night just hoping that somebody he was going to run into and hand that flyer to would know something and give them some kind of lead they could work with that truly breaks my heart it's awful family friends also joined the search uh marx former basketball coach joe rodriguez spent the first week traveling back and forth to madam moros uh interviewing what are called velodores and those are the men who provided security for local businesses and bars kind of like a bouncer jim said of the real grande valley in communities that helped search for mark they were just absolutely wonderful how they coddled us and took care of us which is really sweet like it's this case does not
end up no you know this is not happy ending no i obviously hate but at the very least it's nice that these communities were able to work together oh yeah for sure people were supported in the search yeah now while the family and the community continued to search on both sides of the border the sheriff's department took two more atypical methods of investigation a few days into the search devito brought bradmore into the sheriff's office to be hypnotized hoping that it might jog his memory and reveal some critical clue about the night that mark went missing now when i first read that i was like okay maybe that'll make sure but you know sometimes these things work hey we don't know everything there is to know we really don't know the human mind about what this should happen so if something could potentially help and especially i would as a parent i would do fucking anything absolutely nothing would be off the table absolutely so willy canon of the u.s custom service said it's kind of an unusual situation because there's really nothing to go on yeah so when brad was unable to come up with anything new they moved on to bill hollstone and while he was under hypnosis he described seeing mark walking near a quote Hispanic man with a cut on his cheek right before he disappeared
hmm which is like pretty to have the cut on the cheek to go on that's a little more than just your typical description of somebody you know so bill said he didn't recall mark talking to the man but when he looked back he said he saw the strange man motion towards mark okay interesting right yeah so when more than a week passed and there was still no sign of mark the co-workers were getting desperate and they turned to another outlet for help that was kind of a newer outlet just one year earlier the tv program america's most wanted made its debut which like wow isn't that crazy you just feel like that's always been a thing even though you know it's not in my life it always hasn't been yeah and pretty much your life too like yeah for most of our pretty much of your life in all of mine it has yeah so and the thing was it had debuted a year earlier before this case and it had already led to the capture of many violent criminals yeah so the producers of america's most wanted agreed to feature the story on the program and they immediately traveled out to brownsville to record a recreation of the night that everything happened in mark went missing to air on the show okay while they were taking a break from filming the segment a woman staggered up to one of the cameramen scott judy she was clutching a crumpled missing person's poster in her hand and she told him
he's dead you know they found him shot in the head what the fuck out of completely nowhere that's horrifying and just like what what it turned out that rumors had already started circulating among the spring breakers in south pajre that mark had been found dead moments later one of the producers angrily escorted the woman out of the area and made sure she didn't come back but it got everybody thinking yeah now the segment was rushed to completion and it aired on the show a few nights later along with a 22nd psa recorded both in spanish and in english telling viewers how they could the episode did result in more than 150 tips called in by viewers claiming everything from mark was dead to mark was seen working in a convenient store in california not true none of the tips really led to anything but according to jim shoots it allowed investigators to see into the mexican side by tracking what the mexicans were doing with tips from the show so they didn't have jurisdiction there but now that community is able to kind of talk to them a little bit so there's it's giving them something yeah for sure they really hadn't made any more progress on the case than the american counterparts but detectives in texas could see that the mexican investigators were taking marks very seriously and they also were running all these tips down so that was nice yeah so things are
in motion they are but by the end of the month investigators on both sides of the border weren't much closer to finding mark hillroy than they had on the day he went missing and it was starting to feel like he was never going to be found in order to feel like they were doing something productive and proactive jim and helland withdrew mark from school jim told reporters were trying to find out what things we can do because we don't really know we're holding up well but it's a matter of what you can do how much can you do and you start to run out of things you can do to try to find mark yeah it's just awful it is now just as everybody was starting to lose hope that mark would ever be found there was a break in the case and it came in one of the most unexpected and innocuous forms on the end this is where we really take a hard left so bear with me everybody all right i'm here we're going into a completely different area here so in the afternoon of april first mexican police were conducting a checkpoint on highway two that's the main road that connects matamoros to texas okay this setup was a simple drug checkpoint like countless others along the border basically attempting to stop drugs from coming into or out of mexico okay now they're sitting there on this on the stop and they spot police spot a red truck they recognize coming down the highway and they quickly ran the
plate and discovered that it belonged to seraphine hernandez garcia now at the time the hernandez family was well known to the police in manoros for decades they had been one of the better organized gangs in the region responsible for a lot of drug trafficking and smuggling in more recent years though the organization had expanded to include several members of the family living across the border in brownsville texas so they were kind of like working dual sides of the border okay now unlike more of the hardcore gangs that had been recently established in the region the hernandez family mostly just ran marijuana back and forth from texas to mexico so okay they the police they'd run into the police a lot but they weren't like super games or anything like that despite that they had been successful for many years due in large part to their charismatic leader sol hernandez but when sol was killed by machining on fire in 1986 the family business started to fall apart now paul's paul's brother seraphine tried to step into his brother's role and keep everything together but within a month he was arrested by us officials which left their entire operation and disarray yeah now without the charisma of their former leader the hernandez business wasn't just in danger of losing money but they were also in danger of being taken over by one of the other organizations in the region
because that was happening too they would just walk in and be like well you're part of us now and you're gonna be paying us everything that you're making and that's it like otherwise we can just shoot you yeah so in order to fend off any potential takeovers which would have been ever really ended in the murder of those higher up in the family like i just said yeah what remained of the hernandez leadership turned to adolpho constanzo the cuban american leader of the criminal organization that was dubbed los narkos satanicos the narco satanist yeah as one of the more feared and dangerous gangs in the region adolpho constanzo's group operated less like a criminal syndicate and more like a religious cult okay yeah and it was all oriented around constanzo who was the known as the godfather and his quote unquote high priestess sera maria aldrette v arreal i really hope i'm saying this pronunciations correctly i looked him up so yeah interesting okay now at first the deal that was struck between constanzo and the remaining hernandez family members was just for simple protection but before long the remaining hernandez family members basically were absorbed
into the narco satanist okay so as soon as they received the report about mark hillbroy who had in mottamoros it occurred to investigators that he could have been kidnapped by one of the local gangs that was one of the first things on everybody's radar absolutely publicly mexican authorities quote tried to claim that that killroy must have vanished in brownsville because they were aware that news of another kid nap torus was going to hurt the local economy which was already hurting but behind closed doors more than a few people brought up adolpho constanzo and hernandez family and sadly they knew that if mark had been kidnapped by the narco satanist there was very little hope that they would get him back alive if they ever even got him back at all because that's worst case scenario it really is like really worst case scenario to not even get to think that you wouldn't even get his body you'll just never get him back like that's like oh god i can't so now back to the afternoon of april first agent uh raul morales had been stationed at the checkpoint on highway two he'd been an agent in the area for many years and he was familiar with the various members of all the gangs especially their nandez family so when he saw the compact red pickup coming down the highway he knew right away that he would find little seraphine behind the wheel and that was
confirmed when they managed to check the plate and since little seraphine had blown through the checkpoint without stopping they also knew that they had ample reason to stop him and even arrest him if they needed to but morales and all the other officers had been through that before they'd stop one of the gang members as they came across the border they tried to get information inevitably the gang members would stay silent and the whole thing was kind of just a pointless exercise and frustration yeah so instead he had a better idea and the way that this all works out i was like there's some kind of divine intervention here because the fact that he was like you know what i'm not going to do that today yeah it all worked out yeah not in a time of honor but it worked so rather than hitting the sirens and forcing her nandez to pull over he and his partner jumped in an unmarked board bronco and they followed seraphine at a safe distance hoping that he would lead them somewhere or give them a lead on whatever it was this family was up to so they ended up following him to the Santa Elena ranch which was a hmm it was an old farm about 20 miles outside of madam or else morales and the
other investigators had figured konstanzo's organization had been headquartered somewhere just outside of the city and later that would be confirmed by a raid and information that they obtained from u.s customs officials in the report customs agents estimated that there were up to 24 people smuggling drugs for a drug for konstanzo and they were all coming and going at the ranch but they wrote that no more than 12 were involved in the kidnappings and the slayings that eventually took place at the ranch oh jesus so at the time morales and the other investigators had no proof of what they suspected was going on between this gang here yeah and they had only really just learned about the location of the ranch when they followed seraphine so rather than risk losing valuable evidence morales chose to hang back and stake out the ranch hoping that they could gather some kind of compelling evidence to justify of search warrant for the property this is great detective work so the next day he returned to the ranch pretending that he was a lost traveler looking for directions back into town wow which i was just gonna say that's terrifying yeah so he spoke with an elderly man who said that he was the caretaker and the man did seem to be tending to the animals that day so he was like maybe you are a character what was the fuck the man said his name was domingo but he
said he didn't know who owned the ranch he just showed up every day to do his job and he didn't ask questions i mean hey i don't blame him yeah so morales could tell the man was lying to him he was like i definitely think he knew more than he was like no but he also didn't want to blow his cover so he didn't push uh also his job that afternoon was to keep the caretaker busy while his partner poked around the property trying to stay out of sight this is this is scary this is terrifying but a lot of police work happening here yeah in really good police yeah so as the other agent crept around the property he spotted what looked like a brand new chevy suburban which was not exactly the type one would expect to find on a farm in the middle of nowhere probably not now peering into the back of the car he could see a layer of uh dark dust covering almost the entire backseat which he immediately recognized as the resin dust that shakes off of dried marijuana plants uh so it's like cake on in that car okay and he started to turn away from the truck though something else caught his eye on the floor in the backseat of the car was a gray cement statue of what looked to the agent like some kind of demonic figure not wanting to raise any alarms he just went back to the car waited for his partner morales who came back a short time later okay now back at the station the two
agents checked in with their supervisor commander wan bonita's and gave him an update on what they had all seen at the ranch now bonita's had been raised in the traditional i hope i say this correctly uh wahaken community and he was more familiar with folk religions than the other agents were oh that's good though they had somebody that actually you should it really worked out because we're pulling on a front here yeah for sure so when bonita's heard the description of the statue in the back of the car he immediately recognized it as the statue of a la gua who's a trickster god in santa ria and this god is recognized as the messenger to the supreme creator ala wufi oh again i really hope i'm saying all that right so bonita has explained that the trickster was a favorite among the drug traffickers to kind of worship and like ask for protection especially those who wanted to curse their enemies according to author edward huems among the legends was the belief that if the proper offerings were made to ala gua he could make you bulletproof and invisible whoa so that being the case the promise of those powers would have made some of the greatest criminals in the world uh yeah i would say so and for that those criminals felt like there was nothing too valuable to sacrifice oh so it was
obvious that there was drug smuggling going on at the ranch but they needed something a little bit more and they because they knew something much worse was going on this is not looking good right now so bonita's himself had overseen the downfall of the hernandas family in the last few years so he knew that whatever was happening at the farm they weren't working alone and they probably weren't running the show anymore either which meant that another cartel was involved and that's a big deal yeah so he ordered that the ranch be monitored day and night and in the meantime he placed a call to his contact at the dia to find out whether they knew anything about the operation of the ranch now the dia had also been monitoring the hernandas family since before they expanded beyond the border but that focus became more intense when the family expanded into brownsville texas it was as bonita's something had changed changed in the family's fortune since the elder leaders had died so for decades like i said hernandas family had been trafficking small amounts of marijuana back and forth but their operation was not that impressive especially compared to the new work cartels and after the death of sol and the failure of his brother it was expected that they would kind of just be on their way out but that was hardly what the dia had seen edrich hums wrote the hernandas boys were living in a
fine home driving a fleet of brand new trucks and walking the streets like swaggering feudal lords whoa yeah what a description exactly and they said obviously that kind of money and confidence didn't come from selling small amounts of weed or even cocaine about point to torus yeah there was something a lot bigger going on here so the agent pretty much confirmed what baneeta's already knew the remaining hernandas family must have hooked up with a more powerful cartel but he mentioned one more thing that baneeta's didn't know according to the dia agent there have been rumors circulating lately about the hernandas boys talking about how they had all the protection they needed and that they had bought off the local cops all of which they attributed to quote some weird religion that made them invincible okay yeah okay so it was the comment about the religion that started to bring everything into focus for all of these agents here the statue of the trickster god that maralis's partner had founded the back of the suburban the fact that little seraphine had just blown through the police checkpoint with a less lightest hesitation and the fact that he didn't even seem to think about being followed when he led them directly to the ranch like that wasn't on his radar yeah
it all started to make sense now little seraphine had never been the brightest member of the family but even he wasn't so stupid as to openly defy the police that reasonably unless he thought he was untouchable and protected oh yeah oh my god that makes so much sense yeah damn and that means they're making the ultimate sacrifice in their mind yeah this god yep so by the morning of april 8th 1989 commander benita has gathered enough information from his agents and from all his other sources to confirm pretty much every suspicion he had now fortunately for him and the other agents whatever religious beliefs that the family had and their connections had and it made them confident to the point of carelessness after getting a warrant for a wiretap a few days earlier agents started listening in on the phone calls that were coming and going out of the ranch during which one of the hernandas boys in their contacts didn't even bother to use codenames or obscure the subject of their conversation at all that comes where they're invincible they're protected yeah so they think that morning little seraphine was to receive a very big amount of marijuana at the ranch and that was exactly the kind of information that benita has needed to justify a raid on the
compound we should so before little seraphine hung up the call he also said something about el padrino but he does didn't know what or to whom seraphine was referring because it was the first time he heard the reference but for the time being that had to wait but that will come back later okay so later that day several agents descended on seraphine's house in matamoros where they found him with another known drug dealer sergio martinez upon searching the house they didn't actually find any drugs but they found more than enough evidence of a drug operation yeah thousands of foot yeah it was rather dusted everywhere there was guns there's paraphernalia there's a lot going on so when he was questioned about the large quantity of marijuana that they just received seraphine was silent but rather than continue to press him benita's through them both in the back of a police car and drove them both out to the ranch the bigger ranch now after breaking a lock on one of the large sheds the agents discovered 60 pounds of marijuana along with a significant cache of weapons and the chevy suburb and that moraleist and his partner had seen earlier that week well now back in matamoros agents watching seraphine's house managed to grab a few more members of the gang as they arrived including one of the older members elio hernandas like seraphine and martinez none of them really seemed to be
too concerned about having just been arrested they all kind of presented with like cocky certainty that because they're all gonna be fine yeah because they're divinely protected exactly something's gonna happen it was deeply frustrating for the investigators because it must have been the freaky because it's like oh they genuinely believe yeah that this is this this trickster god is protecting them and what sacrifice must they have made to him for them to believe that they are so protected here that honestly would be the thing that would send shells down like they believe that they're invisible not just invincible invisible so they had to have felt pretty confident with the sacrifice they had made yeah their sacrifices yeah but nita said later they weren't worried at all they thought we couldn't hurt them they thought they were protected now although they were pretty profoundly irritated by the confidence they also knew that they'd eventually got a confession one way or the other yeah so here's the thing we've told case we've told stories before there's been cases where officers resort to violence to get answers of course we've seen those and that was especially common in this area in the 1980s i'm sure there were the more common tactics like we've talked about beatings threats but there were also more extreme tactics and
Dave found one that i said excuse me what hold the phone oh one one of the most effective techniques at this time involved adding large quantities of hot sauce to soda water the fuck which was then shaken up and shot up the suspects nostrils oh my god hot sauce and soda water shoved into your nostrils all i can think of is the sensation when you get the bubbles in your nose if you're like drinking and you're like oh that hurts that hot and spicy at it with hot sauce and have it shot directly into your nose yeah holy shit yeah edward humes wrote as you're thinking about that he described it first comes a hideous sensation of drowning as the foaming liquid floods but breathing passages followed by an indescribable searing pain as the peppery liquid scores sensitive nasal tissue oh my god yeah so not too shocking this one was particularly effective oh yeah that i'd tell you shit i'd tell you yeah i didn't do my goodness i would make up stuff that you didn't even know about yep oh my god that hurts my nose hurts like can you even know so in this case it turned out that the hot sauce soda technique would not be necessary okay the rumors of it alone would suffice when
it came to demingo boost amount a the caretaker at the ranch you know what i heard that that's a thing and i'm not gonna do i think they were like yeah i do that and he was like you know what you know what i'm just trying why don't i just tell you what's going on and remember he was the one who had already talked to one of the officers i was like nothing about nothing i just came into my job precisely now he had been picked up by the feds when he got to work on the morning of april mites and a short time later he was sitting across from bannitas in the interrogation room now from the moment they met bannitas could tell that he wasn't a drug smuggler or some hardened criminal he was clearly just a man trying to make enough money to support his family and he had gotten caught up in something yeah much bigger than him more importantly he didn't believe in witchcraft or the trickster gods so he didn't have any of the confidence and the smug cockiness that kept the others from talking he said i know i'm not invisible so he said i know you've seen me right here right now yeah basically he would be easy to break yeah just easy to get information out of so it turned out that bannitas's assessment of the caretaker was right within just a few minutes of the interrogation he was telling agents everything he knew he confirms that the ranch was the headquarters of the hernanda smuggling operation and then he began rattling off all the names of the smugglers at the ranch at least all the ones he knew he told them people come and go all the time at the ranch summer friends
of the bosses or workers but there are others they're treated very badly oh he began to say something about an american who he had seen at the ranch recently and then he kind of trailed off almost seeming to realize that he said something you shouldn't know keep talking so the other agents empanitas were aware of the disappearance of arkyl roy and several of them had been involved in the case on the mexican side but it wasn't until that moment that they all assumed the case they were working on was a separate matter entirely oh shit they had thought that and then they were like oh this is damn this is not so it was when the caretaker brought up the american that had occurred to all of the agents that this case could be related so bannitas pressed further demingo the caretaker hesitated and then he started talking about a day a month earlier when he saw a young man tied up in the back of the blue shebbie suburban at the ranch the men at the ranch had left him tied up like that in the truck overnight demingo said i felt very sorry for him i made him something to eat i brought him some eggs and water for breakfast and then the bosses came and took him away oh my god he makes my stomach hurt it's horrific he estimated that this had occurred two or three weeks earlier and he said the young
man was white with blonde hair which matched the description of mark hillroy but that was all he knew he said so bannitas thinking quickly went back to his desk and rummaged through the drawers until he found the glossy black and white photo of mark hillroy that was being used in all the missing coasters he slapped the photo down on the table in front of demingo and demingo immediately recognized the man in the picture he told detectives yes that's him the giro oh and giro is um is like slaying in mexico talking about like a white blonde person oh man and that is where we are going to end for oh shit yeah so i took you what we probably felt like on a hard left but then we kind of got back to our original decision oh man yeah that's really sad part two gets even sad yeah i feel so fucking hard for this family and this group of friends what they've had to go through that all just started from a celebratory time in their lives spring break then like what like jesus they weren't even doing anything wrong no they were just not like they were like getting into trouble you know what i mean no they were just they crossed over the border they had a fun night and like they just didn't i think they just didn't have the information no no like they were just lacking
information exactly because of the time exactly i mean again remember this was the 80s it's not now no so we can't judge it off of now where you where you know certain things and even judging off of now how many millions of kids go into mexico is true you know like it's not like this is you should be able to and this is like a this is one of those cases that it's like worst case scenario it is you know it really is it's the cases that you got warned about when you go on for sure it gets awful yeah so we will be back with part two and we will get a lot deeper into this and it's jarring so in fact apparently in japan if you're a found drunk and violent police will physically roll you up in a giant plastic sheet and carry you away like a burrito that's iconic they said we don't have time for this kid burrito route burrito like that so don't get drunk and violent in japan okay i won't i mean don't get drunk and violent anywhere but but definitely don't even come up burrito wrap you up and take you away yeah they'll just throw you over their shoulder you heard it here first yeah maybe not but maybe that's for sure maybe all right we heads we love you we hope you keep listening and we hope you keep it weird but not so we're that you got crazy and violent in japan or in mexico or
in the u.s or anywhere don't be crazy especially anywhere you're unfamiliar be careful everybody everywhere