Between May 20 and June 4, 1971, Sutter County sheriff's deputies dug the bodies of 25 men out of graves in orchards along the Feather River, north of Yuba City, California. Most of the men were older transient farmworkers who followed the harvests up and down the Sacramento Valley. Few had anyone looking for them. Four were never identified, and 14 were buried together in a common grave because no family claimed them.
Juan Vallejo Corona, a 37-year-old labor contractor who hired crews for the ranches where the graves were found, was arrested on May 26, 1971. A Solano County jury convicted him of 25 counts of first-degree murder in January 1973. In 1978 the California Court of Appeal set those convictions aside, finding that his lawyer, who had taken the literary rights to Corona's life story as his fee, had failed to give him a real defense. A jury in Hayward convicted him again on all 25 counts in 1982, and those are his final convictions. He never gave a reason for the killings. He was denied parole eight times and died in state custody in 2019, at 85.
Corona was born on February 7, 1934, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, according to the Associated Press. In 1950 he followed his older brothers to California to work in the fields. He settled in the Yuba City and Marysville area.
In December 1955 a flood on the Yuba and Feather rivers killed 37 people in and around Yuba City. Family members later said the flood left him convinced that everyone in the area had drowned. An Appeal-Democrat account says he had a breakdown during the flood and that a brother had him committed to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn. The Court of Appeal, reviewing his medical history in 1978, recorded that he was admitted to DeWitt in 1956, at 22, in a confused and delusional state. Doctors there diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, or a schizophrenic with catatonic features, and treated him with high doses of the drug Thorazine and with electric shock. The Appeal-Democrat put the number of shock treatments at 23. He was discharged in April 1956, listed as recovered.
He was then deported to Mexico. He came back legally with a green card and in the early 1960s became a licensed farm labor contractor, the Appeal-Democrat reported. By the middle of the decade he and his brothers had built successful contracting businesses, and a New York Times profile written after his arrest, as described by the Associated Press, called him prosperous. He married, and he and his wife, Gloria, had four daughters. In early 1970 he was committed to a mental hospital again, according to the AP.
By 1971 he lived with his family on Richland Road, south of Yuba City. Neighbors and the men who did business with him described him to the Appeal-Democrat as quiet and unremarkable. He belonged to a local charro riding association. Jack Sullivan, on whose ranch he housed many of the men he hired, called him "a bonded labor contractor with an excellent record." A neighbor remembered him coming and going at all hours of the night, especially in summer. Another neighbor, Beatrice Valdez, described him as an unusually clean man, and she testified at his first trial that he often washed out the inside of his vehicles.
On February 24, 1970, a 20-year-old man named Jose Romero Raya was beaten in the restroom of the Guadalajara Cafe, a bar in Marysville owned by Corona's half-brother, N. C. Raya was struck on the head with a heavy blade. The blow broke his skull in three places and left him with permanent scars and brain damage, the Appeal-Democrat reported. Raya later won a civil judgment, reported as a 250,000 dollar settlement, against the bar's owner, who returned to Mexico.
Raya's case mattered later for two reasons. The Court of Appeal noted that his name, with the date of the attack, appeared in a ledger seized from Corona's house in 1971. And Raya testified that Corona had offered him and a companion work on the Sullivan Ranch. The sheriff, Roy Whiteaker, and the district attorney, G. Dave Teja, believed that Corona had committed the assault; "There's no question about it," Whiteaker told the Appeal-Democrat in 2010. No report shows that Corona was ever charged with it.
The 25 men named in the counts against Corona were, in the order the court listed them, Kenneth Whitacre, Charles Fleming, Melford Sample, an unidentified man, Donald Smith, John J. Haluka, Warren Kelley, Segurd "Pete" Beierman, William Emery Kamp, Clarence Hocking, James W. Howard, Jona R. Smallwood, Elbert J. T. Riley, Paul B. Allen, Edward Martin Cupp, Albert Hayes, Raymond Muchache, John H. Jackson, Lloyd Wallace Wenzel, Mark Beverly Shields, Sam Bonafiede, who also went by Joe Carriveau, and Joseph Maczak, together with three more men who were never identified.
Reliable records say little about most of them as individuals. Kenneth Whitacre, the first man found, was a transient laborer, 50 years old according to the Appeal-Democrat. The men were white, and investigators traced some of them to Skid Row in Los Angeles, to towns in the Central Valley and to Oregon. Anna Hill, a local history researcher who studied all 25, told a Marysville audience in 2019 that most were veterans or wanderers with hard pasts, and that one man had been only hours from boarding a Greyhound bus out of the area when he disappeared. "No matter what we did in life, we deserve to be remembered for what we were, good or bad," she said, adding that the victims deserved "to have a name and face, at least."
Some of them had last been seen with Corona. At the first trial a witness, Byron Shannon, testified that he watched Corona hire John Henry Jackson, and later Jona Smallwood, Elbert Riley and Paul Allen. All four left with Corona and were never seen alive again. Another witness, James Pervis, testified that Corona had offered him work too.
On May 19, 1971, Goro Kagehiro found a freshly dug hole in his peach orchard north of Yuba City. A UPI account written in 1982 says the rancher reported that someone had dug and then refilled the hole. Police found the body of Kenneth Whitacre there the next morning. Several witnesses placed Whitacre near the Kagehiro farm at about 1 p.m. on May 19, the only one of the 25 deaths whose date the prosecution could fix. Whiteaker, then 31 and the youngest sheriff in California, told an audience in 2019 that the first bodies were found on May 20.
The evidence near that grave pointed at Corona. A rancher named Khera testified that he had seen Corona on his land near the grave site a day or two before the body was found, driving a light-colored van. David and Sharon Schmidl, a couple who drove out to the neighboring Sullivan Ranch on the evening of May 19, saw a pickup lettered "Juan V. Corona, Labor Contractor" parked there between 8 and 8:30 p.m., and Sharon Schmidl saw Corona come out of the brush and drive away in a hurry. A plaster cast of the tire marks at the grave matched the tires on Corona's van.
A few days later a laborer on the J. L. Sullivan Ranch reported a strange hole to his supervisor, who had heard about the body on the Kagehiro land and called his employer, and deputies began digging there too. The Sullivan Ranch had a labor camp and a bunkhouse where Corona housed many of the men he hired, and most of the graves were found in its orchards.
The count rose quickly. There were 10 bodies by May 25, the Appeal-Democrat reported, and 12 on the day of Corona's arrest. On May 28 Whiteaker held a press conference in Yuba City, filmed by KRON-TV, at which he confirmed that 20 bodies had been found in orchards along the river, read the names of those identified so far, and said he expected to find more. The Associated Press reported that day that five more bodies had been found in a prune orchard before rain halted the search, and called the toll one of the largest numbers of people allegedly killed by one person in the United States in the 20th century. A Municipal Court judge, J. J. Hankins, imposed a ban on publicity about the case.
For the first two weeks reporters and photographers were kept out of the orchards. On May 31 Whiteaker took a group of newsmen through the orchards where 23 bodies had by then been found, according to a Sacramento Bee photo caption. A Bee photograph of June 3 shows two deputies looking over the grave of the 24th victim, opened in a peach orchard southeast of the Sullivan Ranch labor barracks. The 25th grave was found on June 4, and the search ended on June 5.
Whiteaker later recalled that his department had four detectives, far too few for a case of that size, that reporters from 11 countries followed him, and that he felt "like Custer at Little Big Horn." He said in 2019 that people close to the case believed more men might be buried in the area.
The Court of Appeal described a common pattern in the deaths. Most of the men had wounds to the head from a heavy cutting blade and stab wounds to the upper left chest. They had been buried on their backs, with their clothing pulled up over their heads. In at least seven graves the men's underwear had been removed, the court noted. William Kamp, in the 11th grave, had been shot in the head. Whiteaker told the 2019 audience that the men had defensive wounds.
None of the 25 had been reported missing before the graves were found.
Two finds in the graves themselves tied the deaths to Corona's business. In the third grave, near the feet of Melford Sample, deputies found two pink slips from the Del Pero meat company, dated May 21, 1971; one was signed "Juan V. Corona," and a meat cutter testified that he had given Corona the slips. In the 25th grave, Joseph Maczak's, they found two Bank of America deposit slips printed with Corona's name and address, along with broken glass from a candleholder, a broken mirror and a child's sock.
On May 26 deputies served search warrants on Corona's house and on his office in the mess hall at the Sullivan Ranch. The court's summary of what they found runs to several pages. In a locked desk drawer in the office was a 9mm Browning automatic pistol, loaded and cocked. In the same drawer was a long knife stamped "Tennessee Toothpick," with type B human blood near the hilt. A hunting knife hidden inside a Spanish-language magazine carried type A human blood. Receipts from the Del Pero Brothers market made out to Corona hung on a nail, and a candleholder stood in the sink. Chemical tests showed that the bullet that killed William Kamp could have come from the same batch as bullets found in the desk, and it matched bullets from Corona's gun in several respects.
At the house and garage deputies found a post-hole digger with mud and a human hair that was not Corona's, a denim jacket with type B blood, and a 1969 Chevrolet Impala with bloodstains in the trunk. In the van they found a bolo knife and 9mm shells under the driver's seat, rubber boots stained with type A blood, and blood of types A, B and O on the vehicle. Clothing in a cabin on the Sullivan Ranch carried type A and type B blood. Human blood of all four types turned up in the evidence. Corona's own type was O. A ranch engineer, Jacob Compton, testified that he had seen a light-colored van near the grave sites in late April. Another witness, Ernesto Garcia, testified that Corona had once asked him how deep a chisel went and marked the depth in the dirt.
The most debated item was a green ledger found in a filing cabinet drawer in the master bedroom. Prosecutors called it a "death list." The Appeal-Democrat and the Fairfield Daily Republic both report that it held 34 names. Next to the names were dates. It contained no Social Security numbers, wage figures or other entries of the kind a labor contractor might keep. Experts testified that every entry was in Corona's handwriting and that it had been written with a six-color Universal pen; the five ink colors in the ledger matched such a pen. An immigration document was tucked between pages 52 and 53.
The Court of Appeal counted seven names in the ledger that matched identified victims; the Associated Press, in 2019, said the ledger included eight. Other names belonged to men who were not among the dead. One of them was Jose Romero Raya, the man beaten in Marysville in 1970, listed with the date of that attack.
Corona was arrested at his home near the Hillcrest area of Yuba City on May 26, 1971. Officer Jesse Escovedo, who spoke Spanish, read him the warrants and the affidavit. When Corona asked what he should do, Escovedo told him to get a lawyer, the officer later told the Appeal-Democrat. By May 28 he had been charged with 10 of the killings, the AP reported. In July 1971 a Sutter County grand jury indicted him on 25 counts of murder.
His mental state was examined almost at once. On June 3, 1971, a psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Catton, found that he was hallucinating again, doubted that he could help with his own defense, and recommended that he be sent to a state psychiatric institution. In August and September another psychiatrist, Dr. Valentino Andres, diagnosed a "psychosis in exacerbation" with impaired judgment and recommended Atascadero State Hospital; his daily dose of Thorazine in jail reached 1,400 milligrams. Other doctors who saw him in 1971 and 1972 found signs of past schizophrenia but no active psychosis, though one judged him a danger to himself or others and recommended 90 days of observation.
Within weeks of the arrest, Corona's family replaced his public defender with a private lawyer, Richard E. Hawk. Corona could not pay Hawk's fees. Instead, the Court of Appeal found, he signed an agreement giving Hawk the "exclusive literary and dramatic property rights" to his life story. In the same document Corona irrevocably waived his attorney-client privilege, binding his heirs, and all the income was to go to Hawk. Hawk hired a writer, Ed Cray, as his investigator; Cray sat at the defense table during the trial. Before the trial the two men contracted with Macmillan to publish a book about the case, Burden of Proof, which appeared a few months after the verdict.
Hawk ruled out an insanity defense early. On June 16, 1971, before he had read any of the medical reports, he told reporters that he did not intend to have Corona plead not guilty by reason of insanity. He never consulted Dr. Andres, set aside the Catton and Andres reports, dismissed the psychiatrists working on the defense, and opposed any further examination. At a hearing on June 14, 1972, he said he would defy any court order for a psychiatric examination and would tell his client not to cooperate. He told the court he believed Corona was innocent, that a mental defense would only give the jury the motive the prosecution lacked, and that publicity was a concern.
The court also faulted what it called his renewed attempts to try the case in the press. Hawk's main claim was that Corona had been framed by the real killer or killers, possibly Corona's half-brother or a cult of sexual deviants, the Appeal-Democrat reported. He sued county officials for 350,000 dollars, alleging that they had mishandled evidence and slandered his client, and he collected contempt citations for breaking the gag order; the Appeal-Democrat put the number at eight in one account and at 19 in another.
In February 1972 the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, and the case stopped being a capital one. A survey of Sutter County voters had found 70 percent believed Corona probably or certainly guilty, and the trial was moved to Solano County.
The trial opened in the Solano County courthouse in Fairfield on September 11, 1972, before Judge Richard Patton, a Colusa County judge assigned to the case. The prosecutor was the Sutter County district attorney, G. Dave Teja. Outside, Mexican-American demonstrators carried signs reading "Don't Pick a Racist Jury," since most of the victims were white, the Daily Republic recalled.
In his opening statement Hawk promised the jury a great deal. He said he would show that Corona had an alibi for May 19, the date of Whitacre's death; that a leg infection had kept Corona from walking from late March to mid-April 1971; that other people had access to the knives; that the blood in the van came from an injured man Corona had driven to a doctor; that the killings were homosexual murders, committed by someone other than a happily married man; and that character witnesses, among them a priest, would describe Corona as peaceful and religious.
None of it was delivered. The prosecution called more than 100 lay and expert witnesses; the Associated Press put the number at 119. The case had flaws: a plaster cast of a tire track went missing and surfaced late in the trial, and Time magazine noted in 1973 that investigators had failed to check for fingerprints, the Appeal-Democrat reported. But when the state rested, Hawk rested too, without calling a single witness, and Corona did not testify. The court later called his alibi effort "feeble." In closing, the prosecutor reminded the jury that the expert and character evidence promised in the opening statement had never come.
On January 18, 1973, after deliberating for about 45 hours over some five days, the jury found Corona guilty of first-degree murder on all 25 counts. One of his daughters fainted in the courtroom and was carried out on a stretcher, according to KPIX-TV footage. Hawk called a press conference two days later with Gloria Corona, who spoke through an interpreter, and claimed that a juror had been swayed by a police matron. He moved for a new trial, alleging jury tampering and misconduct by the district attorney; Judge Patton put off ruling on the motion, and the verdicts stood until the appeal. Hawk himself was arrested in a Fairfield bar after the verdict, a reporter who was there recalled.
Judge Patton sentenced Corona in February 1973 to 25 terms of life imprisonment, reported as consecutive. He was received into state prison on February 17, 1973.
Corona was sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. In August 1973 he told an Associated Press reporter there that he was innocent and expected a new trial. He said he was "ready and willing" to take a lie detector test, and when asked whether he knew who had committed the killings, he answered, "I don't know, sir." He added that whatever he was accused of was not true, "and God knows it is not true." That summer, the AP noted, the discovery of 27 bodies in Texas had passed the Yuba City case as the largest mass murder case in the country.
On December 6, 1973, he was stabbed 32 times in his cell at Vacaville. He survived but lost the sight in his left eye. The half-brother N. C. died in Mexico in June 1973. Gloria Corona divorced him after the first trial.
Corona's appeal was handled by court-appointed lawyers, Alan B. Exelrod and Michael A. Mendelson of San Francisco, who also filed a petition for habeas corpus. The Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Two, joined the two, appointed a referee and had him hold an evidentiary hearing on April 11 to 13, 1977. Psychiatrists testified that further inquiry into Corona's mental state had been warranted, and one of the doctors who had examined him in 1971 said he would have explored the question of legal insanity if he had been asked.
On May 8, 1978, the court reversed the judgment and granted the writ, sending the case back to the Sutter County Superior Court. Justice Kane wrote the opinion; Presiding Justice Taylor and Justice Rouse joined it. It rested on two grounds.
The first was inadequate representation. In the face of substantial psychiatric evidence, the court held, Hawk had failed to investigate whether Corona was competent to stand trial, whether he had diminished capacity, and whether he was legally insane. Given the evidence against him, the court wrote, a defense based on his mental incompetence and legal insanity "was not only a 'crucial,' but the 'sole' defense," and by abandoning it without investigation Hawk had reduced the trial to a sham. The court found him "in gross neglect of his basic duty."
The second was a conflict of interest. The literary rights agreement gave Hawk a personal stake in the case that ran against his client's. The court pointed to his refusal to pursue any mental defense, his conduct toward the press and his premature opening statement, and found that "trial counsel assumed a position virtually adverse to his client." Professional rules, it noted, barred a lawyer from acquiring publication rights to a client's case.
The reversal was not a finding that Corona was innocent. The court described the evidence against him as circumstantial but "overwhelming," and said that the strength of a case does not decide whether a defendant was given an adequate defense. It rejected several of his other arguments, including a challenge to the testimony of Jose Romero Raya, and found a separate error in the trial court's refusal to hear witnesses challenging the search warrant affidavits. The California Supreme Court denied a hearing, with Chief Justice Rose Bird dissenting from the denial. Corona's 1973 convictions were thereby set aside, and he was to be tried again.
Hawk later admitted that he had taken the case "because I wanted to be famous," according to the Appeal-Democrat, which also reported that the court had said he made "a farce and a mockery" of the proceedings.
Soon after the reversal, Corona moved to quash his indictment, arguing that Mexican-Americans had been underrepresented on the Sutter County grand jury. The trial court found no intentional discrimination and denied the motion; the Court of Appeal later held that any error had not prejudiced him.
In 1978, while the case was pending, Corona wrote to Judge Patton offering to plead guilty, though without admitting that he had killed anyone. His later lawyer said a jailhouse lawyer had persuaded him that a plea would bring his release, and that talks had touched on a deal under which he would plead to something and leave for Mexico. No plea was entered. In 1981 he was moved to the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad and held there for safekeeping while the case moved to Alameda County.
His new lead lawyer was Terence Hallinan of San Francisco. Before the retrial Hallinan said Corona was mentally fit and would not plead insanity. Asked whether the defense would name the real killer, he said yes, and would not say more.
The retrial opened in Hayward, in Alameda County, on February 22, 1982, before the same judge, Richard Patton. A United Press International report that day estimated its cost at 3 million dollars, possibly rising to 5 million. Corona was 48, had served 11 years and had lost an eye in prison.
The prosecution's evidence was much the same as in 1972, with two additions. The first was a statement Corona had made in April 1978 to Jesus Rodriguez Navarro, then the Mexican consul in San Jose, who had met him to discuss whether he might qualify for a prisoner exchange between Mexico and the United States. Asked whether he had committed the crimes, Corona answered, by the consul's account: "Yes, I did it and I'm a sick man and a sick man cannot be judged as the rest of them." The second was a 1974 statement to another prisoner that he had committed the crimes but "it was my brother's idea." Prosecutors also argued a motive this time: they said robbery was his main aim.
The defense team rejected the earlier view that mental incompetence was Corona's only defense. Instead it argued that his half-brother N. C., who had owned the bar where Raya was attacked and who had died in Mexico in 1973, committed the killings. N. C. was never charged in connection with the deaths. Sheriff Whiteaker said there had never been any evidence that he was involved, and that he had not even been around at the time. This time Corona testified, and he denied killing anyone.
The trial lasted more than seven months. Sixteen jurors and alternates sat through it, and defense lawyers complained of hissing from the jury box, the Appeal-Democrat reported. After more than 53 hours of deliberation, the jury found Corona guilty of 25 counts of first-degree murder, as the Associated Press reported on September 24, 1982. He showed little emotion. Hallinan said his client "took it like a man" but was depressed, called the jury "basically lawless" for trying to solve the case instead of deciding whether the prosecution had proved it, and said he would seek a third trial. Judge Patton set sentencing for October 21, 1982. Because the killings had been committed when California had no valid death penalty, the most the court could impose was life imprisonment. Corona was sentenced to 25 concurrent terms of 25 years to life, and he began serving the Sutter County commitment on December 23, 1982.
Corona appealed again. On June 14, 1989, the Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Five, affirmed his convictions in People v. Corona, 211 Cal.App.3d 529. Justice King wrote for the court, joined by Presiding Justice Low and Justice Haning.
The court held that the consul's testimony should not have been admitted, because the privilege covering a consul's communications belongs to the sending state, and Mexico had never waived it in writing. The Sutter County district attorney had testified that a Mexican official told him the government would not issue a written waiver but did not object unofficially. Because the privilege belonged to Mexico, not to Corona, the court ruled that he could not raise the error on appeal. It also rejected his argument that a prisoner exchange treaty and Mexican law barred the testimony, upheld limits placed on his cross-examination of the consul, and found that his grand jury challenge did not require reversal because he had shown no actual prejudice; he had not even been tried in the county where the indictment was returned. "A defendant is entitled to a fair trial but not a perfect one," the court wrote. The 1982 convictions stood.
Corona came up for parole regularly once his life terms allowed it, and he was turned down every time: in 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2011 and 2016, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. From 1992 he was held in the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, which houses prisoners whose safety would be at risk among the general population.
A hearing set for December 2009 was postponed several times. By 2010 Corona was 76, in a wheelchair and in the prison's hospital ward. His lawyer told the Appeal-Democrat that he had severe dementia and would forget a conversation within 10 minutes, and that he could not take part properly in his own hearing. That hearing ended in a one-year waiver instead of a decision. A brother in Phoenix had offered to take him in.
At his next hearing, reported by the Associated Press on December 5, 2011, Corona admitted the killings before the full parole board for the first time, according to the Sutter County prosecutor who attended, Jana McClung. He said the men were trespassers and "winos." He told the board that he had used a kitchen knife on his first victim and cut himself doing it, that he had shot his second, and that he had used a machete on the rest. McClung said he "was a little bit all over the road" and needed to be redirected when he rambled, and that he did not seem to understand that what he had done was wrong. His lawyer argued that his age and more than 10 years without violence should count in his favor. He was denied parole for five years. No relative of any victim attended. The district attorney, Carl Adams, said his office had had no contact with survivors of the victims for two decades.
In November 2016, at 82, Corona went before the board for the eighth time. The Sutter County district attorney, Amanda Hopper, attended to oppose his release. This time he said he did not remember killing anyone or doing anything, prosecutors said. Hopper said that whenever questions turned to the killings or his mental state, he "conveniently could no longer remember," and argued that despite his age and wheelchair he could still shoot someone, as he had shot one of the 25. Parole was denied for another five years. Again, no relative of any victim came.
Corona died of natural causes at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, March 4, 2019, at a hospital outside the prison, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced. He was 85. The department did not name the hospital. He would not have been eligible for another parole hearing until 2021.
Fourteen of the 25 men, including the four never identified, are buried in a common grave at the cemetery in Sutter, west of Yuba City. A local woman raised 700 dollars for grave markers. The marker reads: "Here lie fourteen men of the sod, four of them known only to God."
The Associated Press put the cost of the second trial to the state at an estimated 5 million dollars, and the Appeal-Democrat gave 5 million dollars as the cost of the whole case. A state law passed after the trials helps small counties pay for major prosecutions, the Appeal-Democrat reported.
For a time, CBS Sacramento noted at his death, the Yuba City killings were the deadliest such case in the United States; only John Wayne Gacy's conviction on 33 murders in 1980 passed them.
The people closest to the prosecution never believed the count of 25 was complete. Teja suspected Corona had killed at least 43 men. "We only got him convicted of killing half the victims I think he had," he said in 2010. He also said that authorities in nearby jurisdictions had resisted searches on their land. A special prosecutor, Ronald W. Fahey, told a judge that the state had come "to the inescapable conclusion that there are more bodies out there."
Proven by final judgment: the murders of the 25 men named in the counts, 21 of them identified and four never identified, by the jury verdicts of September 1982, affirmed in 1989. The 1973 verdicts on the same counts were reversed in 1978 and are not his convictions.
Admitted, then denied: Corona denied the killings for decades, admitted them to the Mexican consul in 1978 and to a fellow prisoner in 1974 by those men's accounts, admitted them at the 2011 parole hearing according to the prosecutor present, and said in 2016 he remembered nothing. His 2011 description of the order of the killings did not match the record in every respect: the 1978 court opinion places the shooting victim in the 11th grave, and the prosecutor at the 2011 hearing questioned whether his account reflected his failing memory.
Never charged: the 1970 attack on Jose Romero Raya, which the sheriff and district attorney linked to Corona. No charge against anyone for it was reported beyond the civil case.
The half-brother defense: the 1982 defense argued that N. C. committed the killings. He was never charged, he had died before the retrial, the sheriff said there was no evidence against him, and the jury rejected the theory.
More victims: the suspicion that more men were buried in the area, or that other names in the ledger belonged to further victims, was never proven, and no further remains were reported linked to Corona.
Motive: none was proven. Hawk promised to show the killings were homosexual murders committed by someone else; the 1982 prosecution argued robbery; Corona himself, in 2011, spoke of trespassing. The AP wrote at his death that neither prosecutors nor Corona had offered a motive.
Details that vary between sources: the number of names in the ledger matching victims (seven, per the Court of Appeal; eight, per the AP); the number of Hawk's contempt citations (eight or 19, in two Appeal-Democrat accounts); the year of the Vacaville stabbing (December 1973 in the Appeal-Democrat; 1972 in a UPI report of 2019); and the date of the reversal (May 8, 1978, on the opinion itself; May 18 in a later Daily Republic column).
February 7, 1934: Juan Vallejo Corona is born in Jalisco, Mexico.
1950: follows his older brothers to California to work in the fields.
December 1955: a flood kills 37 people around Yuba City.
1956: committed to DeWitt State Hospital, Auburn; diagnosed with schizophrenia; discharged in April. He is later deported.
Early 1960s: returns legally and becomes a licensed farm labor contractor.
February 24, 1970: Jose Romero Raya is attacked at the Guadalajara Cafe in Marysville.
Early 1970: committed to a mental hospital again.
February to May 1971: 25 men are killed and buried in orchards north of Yuba City.
May 19, 1971: Goro Kagehiro finds a hole in his orchard that is later filled in; the Schmidls see Corona near the Sullivan Ranch that evening.
May 20, 1971: the body of Kenneth Whitacre is found.
May 26, 1971: Corona is arrested; his house and ranch office are searched.
May 28, 1971: 20 bodies found; Corona charged with 10 killings.
June 3, 1971: Dr. Joseph Catton finds him hallucinating and doubts his competence.
June 4 to 5, 1971: the 25th grave is found and the search ends.
June 16, 1971: Richard Hawk says there will be no insanity plea.
July 1971: Sutter County grand jury indicts him on 25 counts of murder.
February 1972: California Supreme Court rules the death penalty unconstitutional; the trial is moved to Solano County.
September 11, 1972: first trial opens in Fairfield.
January 18, 1973: jury finds him guilty on all 25 counts.
February 17, 1973: received into state prison after being sentenced to 25 life terms.
June 1973: his half-brother dies in Mexico.
August 1973: tells the AP at Vacaville that he is innocent.
December 6, 1973: stabbed 32 times at Vacaville; loses the sight of his left eye.
1974: tells a fellow prisoner he committed the crimes, by that prisoner's account.
April 11 to 13, 1977: referee's evidentiary hearing.
April 1978: tells the Mexican consul, "Yes, I did it," by the consul's account.
May 8, 1978: Court of Appeal reverses the 1973 convictions.
1981: moved to Soledad pending the retrial.
February 22, 1982: retrial opens in Hayward.
September 1982: jury finds him guilty on all 25 counts again.
December 23, 1982: begins serving 25 concurrent terms of 25 years to life.
1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1998 and 2003: denied parole.
June 14, 1989: Court of Appeal affirms the 1982 convictions.
1992: moved to the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran.
2010: hearing postponed; his lawyer says he has severe dementia.
2011: admits the killings at a parole hearing; denied parole.
November 2016: says he cannot remember; denied parole for the eighth time.
March 4, 2019: dies of natural causes at a hospital outside Corcoran, aged 85.