GORDON STEWART NORTHCOTT – THE WINEVILLE CHICKEN MURDERER

Gordon Stewart Northcott was a Canadian born (1908) American serial killer near Riverside, California.  His father died in a lunatic asylum, and one of Northcott's paternal uncles died years later, in San Quentin, while serving a life term for murder.  Northcott claimed abuse by his father at age 10.

By age 21, Northcott was living on a poultry ranch near Riverside, California, with his mother and a 15-year-old nephew, Sanford Clark. For years, Northcott was abducting boys and hiding them out on his ranch, renting his victims to wealthy Southern California pedophiles. When he tired of the boys, they were shot or brained with an ax, their flesh dissolved with quick lime and their bones transported to the desert for disposal. The murders were dubbed The Wineville Chicken Murders

Only one victim was ever found - a headless teenage Mexican, discovered near La Puente during February 1928 - but homicide detectives identified three other victims. Walter Collins disappeared from home on March 10, 1928, and Northcott's mother was convicted of his death, but evidence suggests that she was acting under orders from her son. Twelve-year-old Lewis Winslow and his brother Nelson, 10, vanished from Pomona on May 16, 1928, and Northcott was later condemned for their murders, despite the absence of bodies.

In the summer of 1928, a neighbor reported seeing Gordon beat Clark on occasion, and he urged detectives to investigate what was going on at Northcott's ranch.

Immigration officials took Clark into custody on a complaint from his Canadian parents, and the boy told authorities tales of murder, pointing out newly-excavated grave sites on the ranch. Detectives dug up blood-soaked earth, unearthing human ankle bones and fingers on September 17. They also found a bloodstained ax and hatchet on the premises that Clark said had been used on human prey, as well as chickens.

Northcott fled to Canada, but he was captured there and extradited back to Riverside. His mother claimed responsibility for slaying Walter Collins, but Clark fingered Gordon as the actual killer. Convicted on three counts of murder, including the Winslow brothers, and an unidentified Mexican boy, Northcott was sentenced to death. Spared by her sex, his mother received a life sentence in the Collins case. Marking time at San Quentin, Northcott alternated between protestations of innocence and detailed confessions to the murder of "18 or 19, maybe 20" victims.

A pathological liar who loved the publicity, he offered to point out remains of more victims, always changing his mind at the last moment. (Northcott also named several of his wealthy "customers" at the ranch, but their identities were never published.) The warden recalled his conversations with Northcott as "a lurid account of mass murder, sodomy, oral copulation, and torture so vivid it made my flesh creep." Northcott mounted the gallows on October 2, 1930. Before the trap was sprung, he screamed, "A prayer! Please, say a prayer for me!" His mother subsequently died in prison, of old age."

The movie Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood is loosely based on the Wineville Chicken Murders, namely victim 10-year-old Walter Collins who vanished on March 10 1928.

Walter Collins disappeared on the way to a movie on March 10, 1928.  When his mother reported him missing, the police conducted a massive manhunt, dragging Lincoln Park lake for Walter's body. Tips poured in, with people claiming to have seen the boy in a Glendale gas station, sitting in a back seat of a car, wrapped in newspaper, and even as far away as San Francisco. The boy's father, Walter J.S. Collins, who was jail at the time for running a speak-easy, came up with the theory that some of his former inmates kidnapped his son, perhaps out of revenge.

Five months after his disappearance, the police brought a boy to Christine Collins, Walters' mother, and said it was Walter.  Despite protests from her that she didn't think the boy was her son; the police bullied her into taking the child home.

Three weeks later, she returned the child to the LAPD, armed with dental records of her actual son, and statements from people who knew Walter. The child turned out to be Arthur Hutchins, a 12-year-old runaway from Illinois who had pretended to be Walter because he wanted to go to Los Angeles and see cowboy star Tom Mix.