Goro Kagehiro was walking his peach orchard on May 19, 1971, when he found a hole between two trees, about seven feet long and three and a half feet deep. When he came back that night someone had filled it in. He took it for trash buried on his land and called the Sutter County sheriff. Deputies dug the next morning and found a man who had been stabbed and whose head had been split open with a heavy blade. He was Kenneth Whitacre, forty years old, a drifter from the Oakland area.
The digging did not stop for sixteen days. Next door, on the Sullivan Ranch, a second grave held Charles Fleming, sixty-seven, originally from Louisiana. By May 25 there were nine bodies. By May 28 there were twenty. When the search was called off on June 4, deputies had taken twenty-five men out of shallow graves in the orchards and along the bank of the Feather River north of Yuba City. Nearly all of them had been stabbed or slashed about the head with a knife or a machete. One, William Kamp, sixty-two, from Minnesota, had been shot in the head. Nobody had reported any of them missing.
They were older men, most of them in their fifties and sixties, the kind of seasonal labor that moved up and down the Sacramento Valley following the harvest and slept in ranch bunkhouses between jobs. John Haluka had come west from New Jersey. Warren Kelley was from Texas, Lloyd Wenzel from South Dakota, Melford Sample from Nebraska, Donald "Red" Smith from Kansas, James Howard from New Mexico. Jonah Smallwood, whom men on the ranches called Driftwood, was from Tennessee, and Albert Hayes, called Scratchy, from Pennsylvania. Elbert Riley and Paul Allen were both Arkansas men. Joseph Maczak and Clarence Hocking had come out of Illinois, Edward Cupp out of Missouri, John Jackson out of New York. Sam Bonafide, who also went by Joe Carriveau, was from Washington. Sigurd Beierman, known as Pete, was not a stranger to anyone: he had lived in Marysville for twenty years. Mark Shields, fifty-six, and Raymond Muchache, forty-seven, were identified as well. Four men never were, and the remains of fourteen of the identified dead were never claimed by any relative.
What tied the graves together was work. Every ranch where bodies turned up took its crews from the same labor contractor, and the Sullivan Ranch bunkhouse was where he housed many of the men he hired. In one grave deputies found two meat-market receipts signed by Juan V. Corona. In two others they found crumpled Bank of America deposit slips printed with his name and address. Witnesses told investigators that several of the dead had last been seen riding in his pickup truck.
Deputies served a search warrant on Corona's house in Yuba City in the early hours of May 26 and arrested him there. From the house and his truck they took two bloodstained knives, a machete, an axe, a meat cleaver, a post-hole digger, a pistol and bloodstained clothing, and a work ledger holding thirty-four names with dates beside them. Seven of the names belonged to men in the graves by the prosecution's count; some later reports say eight. The state would call the book a death list and argue that the dates were the days the men were killed. Its first entry, dated February 24, 1970, was José Romero Raya, who was not dead at all.
Raya had been cut with a machete-like weapon in February 1970 at the Guadalajara Cafe in Marysville, which belonged to Corona's half-brother, José Natividad Corona. Raya sued, Natividad lost the suit, and Natividad went back to Mexico. After the arrest Sheriff Roy Whiteaker released a report linking Juan Corona to that assault. The defense would eventually point the other way, at the brother who had already been accused of attacking a man with a blade and who died in Guadalajara in 1973 without ever being charged with anything in the orchard case.
The man in the cell had arrived in California illegally in 1950, sixteen years old, following four older brothers and a sister. He picked carrots and melons in the Imperial Valley and then worked his way north, settling in the Marysville and Yuba City area in 1953 at Natividad's suggestion. The Yuba City flood of December 1955 killed thirty-seven people, and relatives said it left him convinced that everyone in the area had drowned. In January 1956 Natividad had him committed to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where doctors recorded "schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type" and gave him twenty-three electroconvulsive treatments. He was released three months later and deported. He came back legally in 1962 with a green card, married Gloria Moreno, raised four daughters, and built a licensed contracting business supplying fruit pickers to the ranches. In March 1970, a month after the cafe attack, he was readmitted to DeWitt. In March 1971 he applied for welfare and was turned down.
His first lawyer, the public defender Roy Van den Heuvel, hired psychiatrists to examine him. On June 14, 1971, Corona replaced him with Richard Hawk, a private attorney whose fee was the exclusive literary and dramatic rights to Corona's life story and to the case itself. Under the agreement Corona waived the attorney-client privilege. Hawk dismissed the psychiatrists and ruled out an insanity plea before he had read the medical records. A Sutter County grand jury returned a twenty-five-count murder indictment on July 12, 1971. When the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in February 1972, the case stopped being a capital one, and Hawk won a change of venue to Solano County.
The trial opened in Fairfield on September 11, 1972. Jury selection alone took weeks and the testimony ran three months. Corona never took the stand, and after the prosecution had called 119 witnesses, Hawk rested too, without calling a single witness for the defense. The jury deliberated for forty-five hours and on January 18, 1973, found Corona guilty of first-degree murder on all twenty-five counts. Judge Richard Patton ordered twenty-five life terms served consecutively. Within weeks the Department of Corrections pointed out that Section 669 of the Penal Code merged every other sentence into a life term, so the twenty-five ran together in practice and Corona would be eligible for parole in seven years. That is why the record describes the same sentence both ways.
Corona went to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville because of his heart; he had suffered a mild heart attack in the Yuba City jail in June 1971. In December 1973 he was stabbed thirty-two times in his cell. He lost his left eye and was left with a piece of blade lodged behind the right. The attack was traced to his having bumped into another inmate in a corridor without apologizing, and four prisoners were charged. His wife filed for divorce, and it was granted on July 30, 1974.
On May 18, 1978, the California Court of Appeal threw out the convictions. His appellate lawyers, Alan Exelrod and Michael Mendelson, argued two things and the court accepted both: that Hawk had not done the legal and factual investigation any competent defense required, and that a lawyer who owned the publication rights to his client's case had an interest at odds with that client's.
The retrial began on February 22, 1982, in Hayward, in Alameda County. This time the defense, led by Terence Hallinan, called more than fifty witnesses and put Natividad at the center of it. Corona took the stand, spoke through an interpreter, and answered two questions. Asked whether he understood that the state accused him of killing twenty-five men, he said yes. Asked whether he had anything to do with killing them, he said no. Hallinan then handed him to the prosecutor, Ronald Fahey, and the prosecution had to ask for a recess to organize its exhibits, which numbered more than six hundred and thirty, for a cross-examination it had not expected to conduct.
The state's case in 1982 leaned on money. Early coverage of the graves had treated the killings as sexual, but the prosecution now argued robbery: of the first nine victims it walked the jury through, all but one had been buried without money, a wallet or jewelry, and a witness testified that Charles Fleming had shown him five hundred-dollar bills shortly before he disappeared. Fleming went into the ground with nothing. The trial ran seven months. On September 23, 1982, after fifty-four hours of deliberation spread over two weeks, the jury convicted Corona again on all twenty-five counts. Its foreman told reporters that the ledger had decided it, because Corona had offered "no reasonable explanation" for it, and that the jurors had rejected the Natividad theory on geography: the brother "wasn't in Marysville enough to have committed the bulk of the killings."
Corona served the rest of his life in the state system, at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad and, from 1992, in the protective housing unit at Corcoran. He came before the parole board eight times beginning in 1984 and was denied each time. At a 2011 hearing, seventy-seven years old and suffering from dementia, he acknowledged the killings for the first time, according to prosecutors, and justified them by calling the dead men winos who had trespassed in the orchards. At a hearing in 2016 he said he could not remember committing them. Sutter County District Attorney Amanda Hopper, arguing against his release in his old age and in a wheelchair, reminded the board that one of the men had been shot rather than cut. No relative of any victim came to the hearing.
He died on March 4, 2019, at a hospital outside Corcoran, aged eighty-five. For seven years after 1973 no one in the United States had been convicted of more murders; John Wayne Gacy's thirty-three convictions in 1980 passed him, and he remains the most prolific convicted killer in California history. The ledger's other names were never matched to a body, and the state's suggestion that they belonged to more dead men was never proved. Four of the twenty-five in the orchards are still unnamed.