Gordon Stewart Northcott was born in Canada in 1906 and by 1928 was twenty-one and living on a poultry ranch at Wineville, in Riverside County, with his mother Sarah Louise and his fifteen-year-old nephew Sanford Clark, whom he had brought down from Saskatchewan and kept there as forced labour and as a victim.
He abducted boys, held them at the ranch, and killed them when he tired of them, shooting them or using an axe, dissolving the remains in quicklime and scattering the bones in the desert. Walter Collins, nine, disappeared from Los Angeles in March 1928. Lewis Winslow, twelve, and his brother Nelson, ten, disappeared from Pomona in May. A headless Mexican teenager was found near La Puente in February 1928 and never identified.
It came out because of Sanford Clark. Canadian immigration officers took the boy into custody in August 1928 on a complaint from his parents, and he told them about the killings and showed detectives where to dig. Blood-soaked earth, ankle bones, finger bones and a bloodstained axe were recovered on September 17.
The Walter Collins case is the part that changed things. The Los Angeles police, under pressure over the disappearance, produced a boy from Illinois and presented him to Christine Collins as her son. She said he was not. The police captain in charge, J. J. Jones, had her committed to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles County Hospital under a code five order for insisting on it. She was released after the boy admitted the deception, sued, and won, and the case contributed directly to the restriction of the code five power. It is the subject of Clint Eastwood's film Changeling.
Northcott fled to Canada, was extradited, and was convicted on three counts of murder and sentenced to death. His mother took responsibility for Walter Collins and was given life, though Clark named Gordon as the killer. In San Quentin Northcott alternated between claiming innocence and confessing to eighteen, nineteen or twenty killings, and offered repeatedly to identify further remains and always changed his mind. He was hanged on October 2, 1930.