Juan Vallejo Corona was born in Autlan, Jalisco, on February 7, 1934, and came to California as a teenager to pick melons in the Imperial Valley. He stayed. By the 1960s he was a labour contractor in Sutter County, recruiting and housing crews of migrant workers for the peach ranches around Yuba City, a man with a family and a business and a reputation for reliability. He had been hospitalised for schizophrenia in 1956, after the Yuba City flood, and released.
On May 19, 1971, a Japanese-American farmer named Goro Kagehiro found a freshly dug hole between two trees in his orchard and called the sheriff. When they came back the next day the hole had been filled in. Under it was the body of a man with head wounds from a heavy blade. Over the following nine days, digging along the orchards and the river bank, investigators took out twenty-five bodies. All were men, most of them itinerant labourers, several unidentified for months. Each had been struck about the head with a machete or similar blade and stabbed in the chest. The California press called him the Machete Murderer.
Corona was arrested on May 26. Two receipts bearing his name were recovered from graves, along with a ledger of names, and a machete, knives and bloodstained clothing were taken from his property. The case was otherwise circumstantial, and it has been argued over ever since. He never confessed and never gave an account. His lawyers at both trials, and a number of writers since, have pointed at his brother Natividad, who ran a bar in Marysville, had been sued over a violent assault on a man in its lavatory, and left for Mexico shortly before the bodies were found, dying there in 1973.
He was convicted on January 18, 1973, of twenty-five counts of first degree murder and given twenty-five concurrent life sentences. That December he was stabbed thirty-two times by another prisoner and lost an eye. In 1978 the Ninth Circuit overturned the conviction on the ground that his trial counsel had been incompetent, having taken the case in exchange for literary rights. He was retried in Hayward in 1982 and convicted again.
He was denied parole eight times. He died at the California State Prison in Corcoran on March 4, 2019, aged eighty-five. For a decade after 1971 his was the largest number of murders ever charged against one person in the United States.