Juan Vallejo Corona (c. 1934- March 4, 2019) was a spree killer who served a life sentence in Corcoran State Prison for raping and murdering 25 vagrants and migrant farm workers with a machete in 1971. The killings took place at the Sullivan Ranch, located near Lomo Crossing, which is between Yuba City and Live Oak. A divorced and remarried, yet devoutly Roman Catholic father of four, he suffered from schizophrenia and had an intensely homophobic reaction to discovering that his half-brother Natividad was gay. These factors apparently formed his motive for raping and killing the men he hired. 

Corona was born in San Antonio de los Moran, Jalisco, Mexico. His half-brother Natividad was about 11 years old when Juan was born. When Natividad was about 21 and Juan was about 10, Natividad moved to the United States and found work in Marysville. Juan followed him in 1950, at the age of about 16, entering the United States illegally and finding work on a local ranch. Although his co-workers noticed that he had a violent temper, he was respected for being a hard worker. After three years on the job, Juan married Gabriella E. Hermosillo in Reno, Nevada.

In late December 1955, a flood from the Feather River and the Yuba River broke through a levee and covered 150 square miles with a rush of water and debris, killing 38 people. Juan Corona had a severe schizophrenic episode and became convinced that everyone had died in the flood. He believed that the people he saw walking around were all ghosts. On January 17, 1956, Natividad had him committed to DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given 23 electroshock treatments. Three months later, the hospital pronounced him recovered and released him. He was then deported back to Mexico.

Corona soon returned to the United States legally, with a green card. Recognizing his mental precariousness, he gave up drinking. His marriage had ended by this time, but in 1959, he married again. His second wife, Gloria I. Moreno, would eventually have four daughters with him. Meanwhile, in 1962, Corona became a licensed labor contractor, in charge of hiring workers to staff the local fruit ranches. He also intensified his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Cursilistas, a group trying to revive religion among Chicanos. He went to Mass three times each week and said the rosary with his family every night.

Natividad had by this time worked his way up in his own line of work. He owned the Guadalajara Café (now known as the Silver Dollar Saloon) in Marysville. Juan often went to the café, although he didn't drink and rarely talked to anyone, either; he just sat silently and watched people. Early on the morning of February 25, 1970, a customer named José Romero Raya was brutally attacked with a machete in the restroom of the saloon. He was discovered by customers at 1:00 a.m., with bloody gashes all over his head, and with his lips completely chopped off. Natividad called the police. Romero Raya, who told the police he never saw the person who attacked him, filed a lawsuit against Natividad, alleging that he or his café had been responsible for the crime. Natividad sold the saloon and fled the country. Romero Raya won $250,000 in damages from Natividad, although no one knew who had committed the attack.

In March 1970, Juan Corona was again committed to DeWitt State Hospital for electroshock treatment. A year later, in March 1971, he applied for welfare for the first time, because increased farm mechanization had made it difficult for him to find work. His application was denied, however, because he owned two houses and had money in the bank. Despite the current difficulties he was facing, his career as a whole had been very successful.

On May 19, 1971, a Japanese-American rancher named Goro Kagehiro was touring his peach orchard when he saw a freshly dug hole, approximately seven feet long and three and a half feet deep. Returning that night, he found the hole had been filled in. Believing someone had buried their trash on his property, Kagehiro called the police. On the morning of May 20, several sheriff's deputies responded to Kagehiro's call and proceeded to dig. Instead of trash, they found the fresh corpse of a 40-year-old homeless man, Kenneth Whitacre. Whitacre had been stabbed to death, his head chopped open with a machete. Some reports say that he had also been raped and that gay pornography had been planted in his back pocket. It is surmised that rape and the planting of gay pornography could both have been intended as an accusation that the victim was gay, and that Juan Corona, who is said to have been intensely homophobic, might have used accusations of gayness as his ultimate insult against anyone he didn't like.

However, a recent Appeal-Democrat article disputes the existence of both the rape and the pornography, saying: "Numerous Web sites have exaggerated the scope of sex-related evidence in the Corona case. Current claims assert that Corona molested or raped all of his victims and that pornographic literature and photos were found with the bodies. Sex crimes never were part of the charges against the labor contractor, and former Sutter County Sheriff Roy Whiteaker says claims about pornography being found with corpses is patently false."¹

Four days later, workers on nearby Sullivan Ranch (Live Oak Blvd., near Lomo Crossing) reported finding a sunken area of ground. Homicide detectives discovered another body buried there. Before they had time to identify the victim, they found still another grave, and then another. As they continued excavating the surrounding area, they eventually found 25 bodies—most of them buried on Sullivan Ranch, where Juan Corona had been housing a lot of the migrant farm workers he hired. All them were men who had led such nomadic lives that no one ever suspected anything amiss when the men disappeared. 21 of the victims were eventually identified: 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.

All the victims bore a deep puncture in their chests and vicious machete slashes on their heads—including, in every case, two machete slashes across the back of the head in the shape of a cross. One victim was also shot. They were all buried face up, with their arms stretched above their heads and their shirts pulled up over their faces. Some were buried with their pants pulled down as well. The victims were found to have all been murdered during a period of six weeks—an average of one murder every 40 hours.

In one grave, deputies found two meat receipts signed by Juan Corona. In another two graves, there were two crumpled Bank of America deposit slips printed with Corona's name and address. Witnesses told police that some of the victims had been last seen riding in Corona's pickup truck. Early in the morning on May 26, 1971, police burst into Corona's South Yuba City home with a search warrant and arrested him. They found and seized two bloodstained knives, a machete, a pistol, bloodstained clothing, and a work ledger that contained 34 names and dates, including seven of the known victims. Police later alleged that the dates recorded in the ledger were the dates that the men were murdered, and that Corona had therefore murdered 34 men, not only the 25 whose bodies police eventually found.

Corona was provided legal aid and assigned a public defender, Roy Van den Heuvel, who hired several psychiatrists to perform a psychological evaluation and entered a plea of "innocent." On June 14, Van den Heuvel was replaced by Richard Hawk, a privately retained defense attorney. In return for his legal representation, Corona granted Hawk exclusive literary and dramatic property rights to his life story, including the proceedings against him. Under the agreement, Corona waived the attorney-client privilege. Shortly after taking over the defense, and even before seeing Corona's medical record or reading any of the reports, Hawk decided against having him plead not guilty by reason of insanity and fired the psychiatrists.

On June 18, Corona complained of chest pain from his cell in the Sutter County Jail and was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed as having had a mild heart attack. On July 12, the grand jury returned a 25-count murder indictment against him. In early August, Corona was hospitalized again after complaining of chest pain that prevented him from sleeping.

The California Supreme Court ruled in a separate case on February 18, 1972, that the death penalty was unconstitutional. Therefore, Corona was not subject to it. Hawk obtained a change of venue from Sutter County to Solano County, and the trial began on September 11, 1972, at the courthouse in Fairfield. Jury selection took several weeks, and the trial itself another three months.

Though Corona denied guilt, he was not called to the stand to testify in his own defense, and no defense witnesses were called. The jury deliberated for 45 hours before finding Corona guilty of first-degree murder on all 25 counts charged. On January 18, 1973, Judge Richard Patton sentenced Corona to 25 consecutive terms of life imprisonment, without possibility of parole. Despite the sentence, the Department of Corrections said that Corona would be eligible for parole in seven years, citing section 669 of the penal code, which mandates that when a crime is punished by life imprisonment, with or without the possibility of parole, then all other convictions shall be merged and run concurrently.

Corona was first incarcerated at California Medical Facility in Vacaville, because of the heart irregularities he had experienced. In December 1973, he bumped into a fellow inmate in a corridor and apparently didn't say "excuse me." The sexual partner of the inmate he bumped into, and three of that inmate's friends, retaliated for the lack of "excuse me" by stabbing Corona 32 times in his cell. Corona's left eye was removed during the resulting surgery, and Corona was then transferred to the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad. In early January 1974, Corona's wife, Gloria, filed for divorce. It was granted on July 30. Also in 1974, Natividad Corona died in Guadalajara, Mexico.

On May 18, 1978, Juan Corona's conviction was overturned by an appeals court who upheld a petition by his new defense attorney, Terence Hallinan, claiming his original legal team had been incompetent because Hawk had not put forward schizophrenia as a mitigating factor or pleaded the insanity defense. The second trial began on February 22, 1982, in Hayward. Juan Corona's defense posited that his gay half-brother, Natividad, had committed the murders. Natividad had already fled to Mexico before the murders were committed, but defense attorneys suggested that because the victims had been raped, it made more sense to suspect a gay man in Mexico of committing the crimes than to suspect a twice-married, devoutly Catholic father of four whom several of the victims had last been seen with, and whose receipts were found in several victims' pockets, and who was arrested with bloodstained knives and clothing in his possession and a ledger with seven known victims' names on it.

Hallinan called more than 50 defense witnesses to the stand, including Juan Corona himself, who denied that he'd had anything to do with the killings in any way. The trial lasted seven months. The jury deliberated for 54 hours before again convicting him of the crimes on September 23, 1982. Afterward, the foreman told the press that the most incriminating piece of evidence against Corona was his work ledger, for which the labor contractor had "no reasonable explanation." He said the jury had dismissed the defense contention that Natividad committed the murders. "He wasn't in Marysville enough to have committed the bulk of the killings," the foreman said.

Juan Corona was transferred from the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad to Corcoran State Prison in 1992. Due to developing dementia, he served in the Sensitive Needs Yard. He died of natural causes at the age of 85 on March 4, 2019.

Links

Juan Corona entry on Wikipedia "Juan Corona: 'Overwhelmingly' guilty: Serial killer serving life sentences after second conviction" by Nancy Pasternack, Appeal-Democrat, February 15, 2010 Time Magazine: Anatomy of a Murder Suspect Serial Killer Juan Vallejo Corona and His Connection to the Silver Dollar Saloon

Footnotes

1. "Juan Corona: 'Overwhelmingly' guilty: Serial killer serving life sentences after second conviction" by Nancy Pasternack, Appeal-Democrat, February 15, 2010