Magdalena imperiously informed the villagers that before she could once again perform healings or reveal the treasure, there must be a serious purging of their lusts and their bodily demons. Once she had warmed to the idea of being a goddess, Magdalena found that she had a real flair for fashioning impromptu rituals. On the night of the “holy one’s” arrival, the farmers and their wives were led through an orgy that included weird chants, bizarre dances, uninhibited sex, and the communal sharing of a bowl that had been filled with chicken blood and marijuana leaves.
The two priests and the two deities settled into comfortable adjustments. Eleazor and Cayetano had the robust farmers on whom to indulge their homosexual yearnings; and in the interest of harmony, Santos surrendered his claim on the beautiful Celina to Magdalena and contented himself with the rustic charms of the farmers’ wives.
After a time, however, there were once again rumblings of discontent. Jesus Rubio, a villager whom the Hernandez brothers had taken into their confidence since he was too bright to fall for the scam, came to them with tales of impatience and distrust among the people. Magdalena pacified the potential rebellion with an extra portion of marijuana leaves in the brew that she dispensed at the ceremonies.
Eventually, the day had to come when marijuana and group sex could no longer distract the poor villagers’ thoughts of ending their poverty with the Inca treasure. Jesus Rubio informed the conspirators that the men had grown weary of Eleazor and Cayetano using them for sexual acts that they considered loathsome and unnatural, and their wives had become impatient with the continual purging of demons from their bodies. The villagers wanted to see the glorious gold that they had been promised for so many months. Magdalena told the others that she would handle the problem. Her hardened survival instinct was about to bring the villagers a terrible kind of fear and immerse the cult into new depths of loathsome perversion.
That night she told the group assembled in the cave that, while it was true that most of them had been faithful, there existed among them those who had profaned the priests and the gods. “It is these doubters who are keeping the gold from you,” she screamed at them, “not the gods!” Pausing for effect and allowing the murmuring and the nervous side-long glances to subside, Magdalena continued: “It is the gods’ wish that you should be happy. But they will not release their ancient gold into the hands of those who doubt. Alas, all of you suffer because of the lack of faith of a few.”
A confused babble and wailing arose as the villagers loudly protested their fidelity and their devotion to the gods. At a secretive nod from Magdalena, Jesus Rubio pushed two men into the center of the circle.
The inca civilization left behind many artifacts of their religion, such as this figurine of one of their gods.
“Your Holiness,” he shouted above the gasps of surprise and the whimpers of fear. “These pigs have denied the old gods and their priests. They have blasphemed your own holiness. The guilt lies not with the others, O Holy One, but with these dogs!”
Magdalena was swift in her judgment. They must be destroyed. They must be killed or the gods would never release the gold of the ancient kingdom! With cool efficiency, the blonde “goddess” commanded the two men to be stoned and their blood collected in basins for the group communion.
After her grisly orders had been obeyed, Magdalena told the villagers that they must now work even harder to convince the gods of their love and sincerity. And thus it was that Magdalena Solis had created a method by which to guarantee the scam a longer life at the expense of a few villagers’ lives. She had discovered that impatient and dissenting followers might be dealt with in that most ancient and heinous method—human sacrifice.
By May 28, 1963, at least eight villagers had been eliminated by Magdalena’s primitive manner of cult purification. But also by that time, those men and women who guessed that they might be marked for sacrifice had begun fleeing Yerba Buena. Jesus Rubio reported that the villagers had been pushed as far as they could. It would probably be only a matter of a very short time before some of those who had fled the village would be contacting the Federales.
Cayetano, Santos, and Eleazor all voted to terminate the scam at once and head back to Monterrey before the authorities learned of their cult. Magdalena, however, decided that what the cult really needed to survive was one great and dramatic act on the part of the priesthood. Celina, the lovely village girl, had existed only to serve the cult. In spite of all the perversities that she had witnessed and the unnatural way that her body had been used, she had never lost her faith in the gods and the priests. Now, in Magdalena’s demonic mind, it was simply expedient to put the girl to death in an elaborately staged sacrifice.
Then, in one of those remarkable coincidences that so often halt a career of crime, perhaps the only citizen of Yerba Buena who did not know about the gods and the goddess of the cave, happened to walk by the cave at that terrible time and witness the vicious sacrificial murder of Celina.
Teenaged Sebastian Gurrero was a young man with ambition, and each day during the school year, he rose before dawn so that he might walk the 17 miles to the small, one-room schoolhouse in Villa Gran. With such a schedule to keep, young Sebastian had not even heard a whisper of group sex and ritual sacrifices. But now, all at once, he was witnessing a scene out of humankind’s primordial past.
After the girl had been beaten to a bloody, faceless corpse by ceremonial clubbing, a blonde woman in flowing robes put a torch to the pyre at her feet. A man, whom Sebastian recognized, stepped forward and shouted something about how he now wanted the gold at once. The woman in the robes screamed at him for being a doubter and commanded the others to fling him to the ground and to slash out his heart with machetes.
While Sebastian watched the gruesome act with disbelieving, horror-widened eyes, the villagers hacked upon the chest of the man and ripped out his still-beating heart.
While Sebastian watched the gruesome act with disbelieving, horror-widened eyes, the villagers hacked upon the chest of the man and ripped out his still-beating heart. As if that scene from hell was not enough, the blonde woman stepped forward to catch the man’s blood in an earthen bowl. Somehow, Sebastian managed to run, walk, and crawl the 17 miles to Villa Gran in a virtual state of shock.
Patrolman Luis Martinez did not laugh at the boy’s wild story. He had been hearing some very strange rumors about a pagan cult flourishing in Yerba Buena. If Patrolman Martinez had not decided to return to the village with the teenager to investigate the story, today Sebastian might well have been a successful doctor practicing among his people. As it was, the cultists fell upon the officer and the boy, hacked them to death with machetes, and added their corpses as sacrifice to the Inca gods.
Inspector Abelardo G. Gomez did not repeat the patrolman’s fatal mistake. Although the cultists resisted arrest and fired upon Gomez and his officers, they dropped their weapons and surrendered when their “immortal” priest, Santos, caught a slug from a policeman’s rifle and died instantly.
On June 13, 1963, only 11 days after their arrest, Eleazor and Magdalena Solis were brought to trial along with 12 members of the cult. The Mexican state of Tarnaulipas had abolished capital punishment, but each of the 14 cultists brought to trial received the maximum sentence of 30 years in the state prison at Victoria. At the trial it was learned that Cayetano Hernandez, the man who had originally conceived the scheme to milk Yerba Buena for sex and money, had been murdered by Jesus Rubio in a power play within the cult shortly after Patrolman Martinez and Sebastian Gurrero had been murdered.
As distasteful as it may seem to many, space age technology and the ancient traditions of blood sacrifice can exist side by side very easily in the crazy quilt patterns of planet Earth. The February 1990 issue of Omni magazine’s