True Crime Collection

Mark Kilroy

Mark James Kilroy was born on 5th March 1968, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were James "Jim" William Kilroy, a chemical engineer, and Helen Josephine Kilroy, a volunteer paramedic. They moved to Texas from the Midwest after their son was born. Mark grew up in Santa Fe, Texas, a small town outside of Houston, for over 15 years along with his brother Keith Richard Kilroy. He was raised as a Catholic and his parents were frequent attendees at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the adjacent town of Hitchcock, Texas. Mark excelled in both academics and athletics as a teenager, and played baseball, basketball, and golf with his friends at school. He was in the Boy Scouts of America and an honours student at Santa Fe High School, where he was a member of the student council, and was ranked 14th in a class of 210 students. Upon graduation in 1986, he attended Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, before transferring to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, on a basketball scholarship. At Tarleton he became a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He then decided to give up his athletics and transferred to the University of Texas at Austin to become a pre-med student and prepare for his Medical College Admission Test.

On 10th March 1989, Mark's childhood friend Bradley Moore finished exams early at Texas A&M University and headed to Austin to pick him up. Both of them then headed to Santa Fe to pick up 2 other friends, Bill Huddleston and Brent Martin, before heading to South Padre Island, Texas for spring break. After a foggy, 9 hour drive to South Texas, they arrived at South Padre Island shortly before midnight. They checked in at the Sheraton Hotels and Resorts the next morning before heading to the beach. When they first arrived at South Padre Islands, there were few people because it was very early in the 5 week spring break season. But thousands of students from the entire U.S. were beginning to arrive as the weekend progressed. Beer sponsors were staging a variety of entertainment events, including free movies, music concerts, calls home, surf-simulator activities, and opportunities to appear on TV commercials. Mark and Bradley made free phone calls to their parents that day. Later that evening, they met a group of female students from Purdue University and partied until the next morning.

The following morning, Mark and his friends had more or less a daily routine in mind. They went to the beach in the morning and suntanned before lunch. After lunch they went to the beach area behind their hotel for the daily Miss Tanline contest. Once the event was over that afternoon, Mark headed to the hotel for a quick nap before planning their trip to Mexico. They left South Padre Island that evening and stopped for dinner at a Sonic Drive-In in Port Isabel, Texas, where they met a group of female students from University of Kansas who were planning to party in Mexico as well. The women then followed Bradley's car from Port Isabel to Brownsville and parked their cars close to the Gateway International Bridge before crossing the U.S. Mexico border by foot. Mark's friends and the Kansas women spent most of their evening at Sergeant Pepper's night club in Matamoros before the groups went their separate ways. Mark and his friends then returned to South Padre Island early the next morning. On 13th March, Mark and his friends attended another Miss Tanline contest behind the Sheraton. Early in the evening, Mark met with one of his former frat brothers at a condo party. At around 10:30pm, Mark and his friends headed back to Matamoros. They parked on the border and crossed by foot again.

That night, Matamoros was flooded with 15,000 spring tourists from the U.S. on the city's main tourist street, Álvaro Obregón. The sidewalks, streets and nightclubs were packed with foreign tourists looking to enjoy cheap alcohol and enjoy Mexico's lax drinking laws. When they got to Matamoros, Mark and his friends decided to go to the bar with the shortest waiting line. They ended up at Los Sombreros, a bar with rock music and bright neon. After a few drinks, Mark and his friends left Los Sombreros and wandered to London Pub, which rebranded itself as Hardrock Cafe for spring break. This bar was louder and wilder than Los Sombreros, and Mark and his friends stood at the bar while other tourists threw threw beer from the balcony. Mark met with a few women at the bar and was not seen by his friends for a while. Around 2:00am, Bill suggested the group head back to South Padre Island. As his friends stepped out of London Pub, they saw Mark leaning against a car and talking to a woman from Miss Tanline. Across Álvaro Obregón street, thousands of tourists were leaving the bars and heading to Brownsville, but others moved in different directions. The large crowd of people made it difficult for Mark and his friends to walk across the border uninterrupted and in a group.