By Chris Bartholomew
I grew up in Yuba City, California. A lot of produce was grown there, and a lot of migrant workers came in to do the picking and sorting. I worked on tomato harvesters while my older brother picked peaches. It was a lot of work for very little pay in those days, but it kept us out of trouble and helped put food on the table. We had no idea that something sinister was happening not five miles from where we lived.
On a hot day in May, 1971, a Japanese farmer looking at his peach orchard found a freshly dug shallow hole, about seven feet long by about four feet wide. He thought it was strange and wondered why in the world someone had dug a hole on his land, but thought it even stranger when he went back that night and found that the hole had been filled in. He called the police, thinking someone had trespassed and buried trash on his land; it never occurred to him or the police what they would find.
Armed with shovels, several deputies began to dig, and instead of someone's trash, they found the body of a man. The body was slender, white, and obviously had been murdered. He was bashed in the head, stabbed in the chest and slashed several times on the back of the skull. He had deep cuts on his hands and it was assumed this was from struggling to defend himself. A lot of the head injuries were made after the man was already dead. He was fully dressed and had literature in his pocket that suggested he might be homosexual. There were no clues as to who the murderer was except some tire tracks near the grave.
Another farmer noticed what appeared to be a freshly dug grave on his land and police began digging again; this time finding an elderly man, Charles Fleming, known to be a drifter. More graves in this area yielded more men, all of them sodomized, stabbed (one was shot) and mutilated viciously about the head with a machete. The killer had followed a similar pattern in every case; each of the victims bore a deep puncture to the chest followed by two slashes across the back of the head in the shape of a cross. All had been buried face up, arms stretched above their heads, shirts pulled up over their faces. Some had their lower garments lewdly pulled down.
The police kept digging until June 4, 1971. They stopped at twenty-five bodies. The police said they couldn't keep digging as the ground everywhere was hilly, making it impossible to guess where more bodies might be found. It was exhausting and grueling work. I was dating the son of one of the deputies who were digging at the time, and wanting to see something we took coffee out to the officers working the site. They took the coffee and sent us on our way, but not before we could see that everyone who was working the case looked quite shaken and sickly.
Two bloodstained knives, a machete, a pistol and blood-caked clothes were in his home, along with an equally damning ledger in which Corona had officiously listed the names of seven of his victims and the dates of their murders. Juan Corona was arrested.
Juan Vallejo Corona managed a labor contracting business. Corona supplied area ranchers with cheap labor in the form of migrant workers from Mexico. Born in 1934, Corona moved to Yuba City, California in the early 50's as a migrant worker. There the Mexican national established himself as a family man and labor contractor. Corona, a father of four, was linked to the murders through a couple of receipts found in the clothing of two of the dead. He had his pick of victims, most of which were, for the most part, elderly alcoholics, social dropouts, and misfits, the kind of people who would not ordinarily be missed if they vanished.
His victims included Kenneth Whitacre, Charles Fleming, Melford Sample, Donald Smith, John J. Haluka, Warren Kelley, Sigurd Beierman, William Emery Kamp, Clarence Hocking, James W. Howard, Jonah R. Smallwood, Elbert T. Riley, Paul B. Allen, Edward Martin Cupp, Albert Hayes, Raymond Muchache, John H. Jackson, Lloyd Wallace Wenzel, Mark Beverly Shields, Sam Bonafide (also known as Joe Carriveau) and Joseph Maczak, plus four men who remain unidentified.
Corona was a predatory homosexual and a brutal sadist. His murder victims were all male and all were sexually assaulted before being killed. All of his victims were men that he first raped, and then killed with a machete over the span of six weeks.
At least one other member of the Corona family had a history of sexually motivated violence. In 1970, Juan's half-brother Natividad, who owned the Guadalajara cafe in nearby Marysville, had molested and beaten a young man in the washroom at his place of business. The victim was discovered bleeding by other customers, and when he sued Natividad for $250,000, Natividad fled back to Mexico.
The jury in the Corona case deliberated for forty-five hours and then brought in a verdict of guilty in the case of each of the twenty-five murdered men. In January 1973, Judge Richard E. Patton sentenced Corona to twenty-five life terms to run consecutively.
In 1978 an appeals court upheld a petition by Corona. He claimed that his original legal team had been incompetent: they had not put forward schizophrenia as a mitigating factor or pleaded insanity. Corona was granted a new trial. He pointed the finger at his brother Natividad as the real killer. While awaiting this process, he was attacked in prison by three other inmates and slashed with a razor thirty-two times, losing his sight in one eye. In 1982, his second trial confirmed all twenty-five guilty verdicts. The jury convicted Corona of all twenty-five counts of first-degree murder, more than anyone in America to date.
Editor's note: this article was written in 2008, when Juan Corona was serving his sentence at Corcoran State Prison. He was denied parole eight times and died in custody on March 4, 2019, aged eighty-five.