#catcrime

Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is a folk saint in Mexican culture. She is the personification of death and helps people on their journey into the afterlife. She is often depicted as a skeleton in a gown and is used to remind people of their mortality. Most worshipers offer candy, cigarettes, and incense to her statue. But one small cult in Sonora Province took things a bit further.

It all started with the disappearance of 10- year-old Martin Rios in July 2010, followed by the disappearance of 10-year-old Jesus Martinez in March 2011. Both boys were known to frequent the house of Jesus’s step-grandmother, Silvia Meraz. Police were already suspicious of Meraz because of the parade of people visiting her house—they thought she might be running a brothel.

When a 55-year-old woman disappeared, the police finally decided to search the property. Once inside, the police quickly discovered the bodies of the two missing boys, one under the floorboards and the other buried in the yard. Police also learned that the body of the 55-year-old was buried in a different location. All three had been murdered by a Santa Muerte and her cult

The murders took place at night, by candlelight. The victims’ wrists and throats were slashed on an altar. Their blood was drained and collected in bowls before being poured around the altar in a sacrifice to Saint Death.

This six teens were found in 2010 guilty of "murdering four people with the aim of carrying out an initiation ritual into a sect and of desecrating the bodies of the dead," a court in the city ofYaroslavl, north-east of Moscow, said in a statement.

The group, four of whom were minors at the time, killed the four teenagers in June 2008, prosecutors said. They then desecrated the bodies and stole their possessions. The dismembered bodies of the teenagers were found buried in the forest in August that year.

All six were found guilty of murder, while four were found guilty of desecrating the victims' bodies. The longest sentence of 20 years went to the man named as the group's leader, Nikolai Ogolobnyak. The members of the gang called themselves Satanists and earlier carried out animal sacrifices, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Russian daily, reported, citing investigators.

They stabbed the victims and then dismembered their bodies and cooked and ate some body parts, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

Saeed Hanaei’s murders were known as “The Spider Killings” because he wrapped the bodies like a spider. All of his victims were prostitutes whom he picked up from the streets of Mashad, Iran. He took them to his house, where he strangled them with their headscarves and wrapped their bodies with their chadors. He then dumped their bodies on the streets. Once the body was found, Saeed would return to the scene and even help police in carrying the corpse into an ambulance.

Police found 19 bodies, and Saeed claimed responsibility for 16 of them, saying he’d have killed as many as 150 had he not been caught. He claimed to have started killing prostitutes after a driver mistook his wife for one. He described prostitutes as a “waste of blood,” as worthless to him as cockroaches.