In 1928 Christine Collins was locked in the psychiatric ward of Los Angeles County Hospital because she would not accept a stranger's child as her son. Her boy, Walter, nine, had disappeared in March. Under heavy public pressure, the Los Angeles police produced a boy found in Illinois and presented him to her as Walter. She said he was not her son and went on saying it, and Captain J. J. Jones had her committed under a code five order. She was released after the boy admitted the deception, sued and won, and the case helped bring about limits on the code five power. The inquiry into what had happened to Walter led fifty miles east of the city, to a poultry ranch at Wineville in Riverside County, where a twenty-one-year-old Canadian named Gordon Stewart Northcott had been abducting boys.
Northcott was born on November 9, 1906, in Bladworth, Saskatchewan, to Cyrus and Sarah Louise Northcott, and grew up in British Columbia. His father later called him an abnormal boy, both physically and mentally; his mother kept him in dresses and playing with dolls into his middle teens. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1924. Northcott had his father, a builder, buy land at Wineville, and with his help put up a house and chicken coops there. To help with the building he brought his nephew, Sanford Clark, a boy of about fifteen, down from Saskatchewan, and kept him on the ranch as a laborer and a victim.
Boys were brought to the ranch and sexually abused. By the account that later emerged, most were driven home afterward and let go, and some were killed. In February 1928 the headless body of a Mexican boy was found near La Puente. The press called him the Headless Mexican; later accounts name him Alvin Gothea, others give a different name, and some treat him as never identified. Lewis Winslow, twelve, and his brother Nelson, ten, were reported missing from Pomona on May 16. Remains were burned and buried in quicklime, and Cyrus Northcott would testify that he had supplied a truckload of it.
It came out through Sanford Clark. Immigration officers drove up to the ranch in the late summer of 1928 on a complaint from his family, Northcott saw them coming and fled, and the boy was taken into custody. On September 15 Clark told investigators that his uncle had kidnapped him and abused him, and had made him watch the abuse and killing of Walter Collins, the Winslow brothers and other boys. He showed them where to dig near the chicken coop. They found bone fragments and axes crusted with blood and human hair. Northcott and his mother were arrested in Canada on September 19. Mistakes in the extradition papers held them there, and they were not brought back to Los Angeles until November 30.
Sarah Louise Northcott confessed in late 1928 to taking part in the murder of Walter Collins and was sentenced without trial to life imprisonment. Because she had been sentenced for that death, the state never tried her son for it. In December detectives took Northcott back to the ranch, where he admitted aloud to five killings, Collins and the Winslow boys among them; the written statement he gave the same day admitted only one, the Mexican boy. At other points he put the total at nine. Newspapers speculated about as many as twenty, but California never found evidence for more than three, and the indictment named the Winslow brothers and the Mexican boy.
The trial opened in Riverside in January 1929 before Judge George R. Freeman and an all-male jury, prosecutors having argued that the evidence was too gruesome for women. Northcott fired several lawyers and conducted his own defense. He told the court that he had abused boys because he loved them. He called his mother, who testified that she was really his grandmother and that her husband had fathered Gordon on their daughter Winnefred. His father testified that Gordon had bragged to him of killing many boys. After twenty-seven days of trial the jury deliberated about two hours and convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder. Most accounts date the verdict February 8, 1929, although the New York Times carried the story on February 7. The night before sentencing, the Winslow brothers' father led a crowd to the jail demanding that Northcott say where the bodies were, and officers held them back. Freeman sentenced him to death, and the Los Angeles Times of February 13 reported him on San Quentin's condemned row as prisoner No. 46,597.
For his part in the killings Sanford Clark spent several years at the Whittier State School for boys before being sent home to Canada. In San Quentin Northcott refused treatment for appendicitis twice, in September 1929 and again in May 1930. The Supreme Court of California rejected his appeal on June 26, 1930. He left notes behind. One, to the warden, blamed his father for Walter Collins and Clark for Nelson Winslow while admitting the Mexican boy and Lewis Winslow. Another, to his spiritual adviser, the evangelist Larry Newgent, swore before God that he was innocent and said the police had made him say things. He was hanged at San Quentin on October 2, 1930, at twenty-three. Clint Eastwood's 2008 film Changeling tells Christine Collins's story, with Jason Butler Harner as Northcott.