ILLEGAL ALIEN, U.S. SERIAL KILLER, Juan Corona
Juan Corona
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Background information
Alias(es): The Machete Murderer
Born: 1934 (age 74, 75)
Autlán, Jalisco, Mexico
Penalty: 25 life sentences without the possibility of parole
Killings
Number of victims: 25
Span of killings: Approximately April 1, 1971 May 19, 1971
Country: U.S.
State(s): California
Date apprehended: May 26, 1971
Juan Vallejo Corona (born c. 1934) is a Mexican-born American serial killer.
He was convicted of the 1971 murders of 25 itinerant laborers; men who had been found buried in shallow graves in the orchards of fruit ranches in Sutter County, California, along the Feather River north of Yuba City, where they did seasonal harvesting and thinning jobs.
At that time, these gruesome crimes represented the worst and most notorious mass murder in U.S. history. The local sheriff said even more men may have been buried in the area.
Corona was sentenced in 1973 to 25 life sentences. His second trial, in 1982, failed to render an acquittal and he was returned to prison to serve out his sentence.
Early life
Born in Autlán, Jalisco, Corona first entered the United States in 1950. Crossing the border into California illegally, the 16 year old picked carrots and melons in the Imperial Valley for three months before moving on north to the Sacramento Valley. His half-brother, Natividad Corona (c. 1923-May 23, 1973), had migrated to the state in 1944 to work, and settled at Marysville, across the Feather River from Yuba City.
Corona moved to the Marysville/Yuba City area in May 1953, at the suggestion of Natividad, and found work on a local ranch. He was first married to Gabriella E. Hermosillo on October 24, 1953, in Reno, Nevada.[1] In 1959, he married Gloria I. Moreno and they had four daughters.
In late December 1955, a flood occurred on the Yuba and Feather Rivers. It was one of the most widespread and destructive of any in the recorded history of Northern California.[2] A rush of water broke through the west levee and flooded 150 square miles, killing 38 people. Corona was strangely affected by the death and destruction and had a mental breakdown. He believed everyone had died in the flood and that he was living in a land of ghosts.
Corona was suffering from an episode of schizophrenia.[3] On January 17, 1956, Natividad had him committed to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, where he was diagnosed with "schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type." He received 23 shock treatments, before being pronounced recovered and released only three months later.
Afterward, Corona was deported back to Mexico [4]. Corona then returned to the U.S. At this time, he stopped drinking. Besides schizophrenic episodes, and a reported violent temper, Corona was regarded as a hard worker. In 1962, he became a licensed labor contractor. He was in charge of hiring workers to staff the local fruit ranches.
Corona reportedly was outwardly macho and had anger issues with gay men. His half-brother, Natividad, who was gay, owned the Guadalajara Cafe in Marysville. Early on the morning of February 25, 1970, a young man named José Romero Raya was brutally attacked with a machete in the restroom of the cafe. He was discovered by customers at 1:00 a.m., hacked about the head and face, and Natividad called the police. Raya filed a lawsuit against Natividad, winning a judgment of $250,000, which prompted him to sell his business and return to Mexico before paying.
In March 1970, Corona was again committed to DeWitt State Hospital for treatment. A year later, in March 1971, he applied for welfare for the first time, as there was little ranch and/or farm work available. His application was denied, however, because he had too many assets, two houses and some money in the bank.
Victims discovered
On May 19, 1971, a Japanese American rancher named Goro Kagehiro was touring his peach orchard near Yuba City, when he saw a freshly dug hole, which was approximately seven feet long and three and a half feet deep. Returning that night, he found the hole had been filled in. Believing someone had buried their trash on his property, Kagehiro called the police. On the morning of May 20, several sheriff's deputies responded to Kagehiro's call and proceeded to dig. Instead of finding what was suspected, the fresh corpse of a slender White American male, aged 40 years, named Kenneth Whitacre,[5] was discovered in what turned out to be a shallow grave.[6] Whitacre, who was a vagrant, had been sodomized and then stabbed to death. His head had been chopped open with a machete. Gay pornography was found in the back pocket of his pants.
Deputies remove a corpse from gravesite in body bag.Four days later, workers on the nearby fruit ranch of Jack Sullivan reported finding a sunken area of ground. This second burial site contained the body of a 67-year-old drifter, Charles Fleming.[7] Before homicide detectives had him identified, another grave was discovered, and then another. As the surrounding area continued to be excavated, victims were unearthed at a surprising rate. All of them were white, except two. They were apparently men no one would miss — middle-aged and elderly down and out alcoholics and drifters who eked out anonymous existences.[8]
All of the victims had been stabbed and were mutilated viciously about their heads with a machete. One man was shot.[9][10] They all bore a deep puncture to the chest followed by two slashes across the back of the head in the shape of a cross. They were all buried face up, with their arms stretched above their heads and their shirts pulled up over their faces. Some had their pants pulled down.
The victims were found to have all been murdered during a period of six weeks; an average of one murder every 40 hours. Documents were found in some of the graves that showed the name Juan Corona.
Evidence
Juan Corona had been supplying workers to the ranches where the victims were discovered. He housed a lot of the men that worked for him in a bunkhouse on the Sullivan Ranch, where most of the victims were discovered.
In one grave, deputies found two meat receipts bearing Corona's signature. [11] In another two graves, there were two crumpled Bank of America deposit slips printed with Corona's name and address. This circumstantial evidence gave an added boost to the case.[6]
Witnesses later told police that some of the victims had been last seen riding in Corona's pickup truck.
In the early morning hours of May 26, 1971, police burst into Corona's Yuba City home with a search warrant and arrested him. Damning evidence indicating his guilt was discovered and seized, such as two bloodstained knives, a machete, a pistol and blood stained clothing. There was also a work ledger that contained 34 names and dates, including seven of the known victims. The ledger came to be referred to as a "death list" by the prosecution, who alleged it recorded the dates the men were murdered.
Legal proceedings
Corona was provided legal aid and assigned a public defender, Roy Van den Heuvel, who hired several psychiatrists to perform a psychological evaluation. Although the sheriff, Roy Whiteaker, said the prisoner was in no apparent or immediate danger from his fellow townsmen, Corona was moved to the new and larger county jail in Marysville, on May 30, 1971, for "security reasons."[12]
On June 2, Corona was returned to Sutter County for arraignment, which was closed to the media and public. A plea of innocent was entered and a date was set for Corona's preliminary hearing .[13]
By the time the search was terminated on June 4, a total of 25 male victims had been discovered. Four of them were unidentified. Whiteaker said he believed even more bodies may have been buried in the area.
On June 14, Van den Heuvel was replaced by Richard Hawk, a privately retained defense attorney.[14] In return for his legal representation, an agreement was made granting Hawk exclusive literary and dramatic property rights to the defendant's life story, including the proceedings against him. Under the agreement, Corona waived the attorney-client privilege. Shortly after taking over the defense, and even before seeing Corona's medical record or reading any of the reports, Hawk decided against having him plead not guilty by reason of insanity and fired the psychiatrists.[15]
Corona complained of chest pain from his cell in Yuba City, on June 18, and was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with having had a mild heart attack.[16] The grand jury returned a 25-count murder indictment against him on July 12.[17] In early August, Corona was hospitalized again after complaining of chest pain and saying he had not been able to sleep because of it.[18]
Trial
It took over a year after the murders were discovered for the case against Corona to come to trial. The California Supreme Court voided the death penalty in the state on February 18, 1972, ruling it unconstitutional, cruel and unusual.[19] Therefore, it would not be a capital case. Hawk succeeded in getting a change of venue from Sutter County, to Solano County.
The trial began on September 11, 1972, at the courthouse in Fairfield, California, more than an hour from Yuba City. Jury selection took several weeks, and the trial itself another three months.[9]
Though Corona denied culpability, he was not called to the stand to testify in his own defense and no defense witnesses were called. The jury deliberated for 45 hours and returned a verdict, on January 18, 1973, finding Corona guilty of first degree murder on all 25 counts charged.[20] The judge, Richard Patton, sentenced Corona to 25 terms of life imprisonment, to run consecutively, without the possibility of parole.[21] Despite being sentenced to so many consecutive terms, the Department of Corrections said that Corona would be eligible for parole in seven years, citing section 669 of the penal code, which mandates that when a crime is punished by life imprisonment, with or without the possibility of parole, then all other convictions shall be merged and run concurrently.[22]
Corona was first incarcerated at Vacaville's California Medical Facility, nine miles from Fairfield, because of the heart irregularities he had experienced. On December 6, 1973, he was stabbed 32 times in his cell because he had bumped into a homosexual inmate in a corridor and failed to say, "excuse me." His left eye was removed in surgery. Of the five men questioned, including the one involved in the bumping incident, one identified as the man's homosexual partner and three inmates identified as friends of the partner, four were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.[23][24]
He was transferred to the Correctional Training Facility (CTF), Soledad, California. In early January 1974, Corona's wife, Gloria, filed for divorce in Fairfield, citing irreconcilable differences.[25] It was granted on July 30.
Second trial
On May 18, 1978, Corona's conviction was overturned by an appeals court who upheld a petition by his defense attorney, Terence Hallinan, claiming his original legal team had been incompetent. They had not put forward schizophrenia as a mitigating factor or pleaded the insanity defense.[3] A new trial was ordered.
The second trial began on February 22, 1982, in Hayward, California.[26] Corona's defense posited that the real murderer of the ranch workers was most likely Natividad Corona, a known homosexual who was accused of attacking Romero Raya at his cafe in Marysville, and after losing the lawsuit Raya filed had fled back to his native Mexico.[27] Natividad had died eight years earlier in Guadalajara.[28]
This time around, more than 50 defense witnesses were called to the stand by Hallinan. Corona was called in his own defense. He was asked only two questions, through an interpreter, taking only two minutes. "Do you understand the state has accused you of killing 25 men?" "Yes," Corona answered, almost inaudibly. "Did you have anything to do with killing those men?" "No," Corona replied. Hallinan then turned Corona over to the prosecutor, Ronald Fahey, for cross-examination. Startled prosecution attorneys requested a brief recess to gather their wits and prepare some of the more than 630 exhibits for their cross.[29] Later, Fahey questioned Corona about various vans and cars he used at the ranch where he worked and where he lived, in which some weapons were found.
The trial lasted seven months. Corona was again convicted of the crimes on September 23, 1982, and returned to prison after the strategy failed to persuade the jury, which deliberated for 54 hours over a two week period, of his innocence. Afterward, the foreman told the press that the most incriminating piece of evidence against Corona was his work ledger, for which the labor contractor had "no reasonable explanation."[30] He said the jury had dismissed the defense contention that Natividad committed the murders. "He wasn't in Marysville enough to have committed the bulk of the killings," he said.
Juan Corona was transferred from CTF at Soledad to Corcoran State Prison, Corcoran, California, in 1992, where he is currently serving his life sentence in the protective housing unit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Corona
