Early in 1902, according to the story as it is usually told, a transient named Steven Korad took a job as a farmhand on Joseph Briggen's hog ranch at Sierra Morena, in the hills of northern California. On his first night, settling into his quarters, he found two severed human fingers under the bed. He slipped away from the farm and went to the authorities, and when the police searched the property they found human remains; later accounts say the bones and skulls of at least a dozen men were recovered from the pig sty.
Briggen was then about fifty-two. He raised Berkshire hogs that were said to have won the top prizes at the state fair in Sacramento, and when other farmers asked him his secret he is supposed to have said that it was all in the feeding. For years, the accounts say, he had gone into the poorest districts of San Francisco, and in some versions Sacramento, to hire vagrants and drifters, men without families who would not be looked for, offering them room and board, and they were never seen again. The versions differ on how he killed them; one says he shot the men when they asked for wages and tried to leave. It is believed he began around 1880.
He was tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to life in San Quentin, and most accounts say he died there in 1903, within a year of his conviction. That ending is not certain. A researcher who looked at the San Quentin records reported that a Joseph Briggen was paroled after twenty years on condition that he return to Switzerland, with a handwritten note under his prison photograph giving his death as April 1957.
Almost everything about the case comes from popular crime compilations written long afterward, which repeat one another and cite no contemporary court record or newspaper report; Sierra Morena does not appear under that name as a settlement, and the victims were never identified. What can be said is that a man of that name was convicted of murder and sent to San Quentin. The figure of twelve or more is the number of missing laborers the story assigns to him, and it has never been tied to a single named person.