Crime + investigation
The farm labor contractor murdered 25 migrant workers between February and May 1971.
Bettmann ArchiveAny list of the United States’ most prolific serial killers includes the usual names: John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway. Yet Juan Corona, who has around the same number of confirmed victims, managed to fly under the radar.
Corona moved frequently, worked labor-intensive jobs and dealt with mental illness before he faced justice for the horrendous crimes that led to him being the United States’ deadliest known serial killer at the time.
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Juan Vallejo Corona was born on February 7, 1934, in Ayutla, Jalisco, Mexico. Corona grew up one of 10 siblings; his older brothers left Mexico for the United States by 1950, and Corona himself first crossed the California border at the age of 16. He spent the early part of the decade working as a laborer on local ranches in Imperial Valley and Sacramento Valley before settling up north in Yuba City, Calif. with his first wife in 1953.
At the same time, he was known for having a violent temper that sometimes required him to be restrained. In 1955, his mental ailments grew to the point where, after a deadly flood in Sutter County, Corona swore he was being haunted by the deceased.
Matters came to a head in 1956 when Corona’s half-brother, José Natividad Corona Sánchez, committed Corona to DeWitt State Hospital. There, Corona was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and treated for three months with 23 electroconvulsive therapy sessions. Upon being released as “recovered,” he was deported back to Mexico. Corona married a second time in 1958, and by 1962, he returned to the United States on a green card, this time stepping up from a farm laborer to labor contractor.
However, by 1970, he was back at DeWitt State Hospital, where he stayed for four months. He then applied for welfare to supplement the impact of industrial mechanization on his livelihood, but was denied.
On May 19, 1971, a Japanese peach farmer was walking through his orchard in Marysville, Calif.—five miles north of Yuba City—when he spotted a large, freshly dug hole. Upon calling the police the following day, the corpse of a white man was discovered buried within the hole. Further digging around the orchard uncovered a total of 25 bodies, all male, all stabbed aside from one victim who’d been shot in the head. Investigators also found some victims had been sexually assaulted before or after their deaths.
Receipts and bank deposit slips with Corona’s signature were found in the first few makeshift graves, and a truck that had been spotted by witnesses matched Corona’s own vehicle. A week after the initial victim’s body was discovered, Corona’s home was served with a search warrant. Investigators discovered a blood-stained machete and, most tellingly, a ledger with the names of several of the victims—itinerant workers whom Corona had contracted out to ranches.
With this evidence, Corona was tried and found guilty of first-degree murder on January 18, 1973, after a four-month trial. No psychiatric evidence was presented on Corona’s behalf, and his lawyer, angling for literary rights to Corona’s story, fired the psychiatrists his first public defender had hired.
Due to chest pains and heart irregularities during the trial, Corona was imprisoned in California Medical Facility. By the end of 1973, he was stabbed 32 times by four inmates, causing him to lose his left eye and almost die from his injuries.
Remains have been found along Interstate 45 in Texas since the 1970s.
Remains have been found along Interstate 45 in Texas since the 1970s.
In 1978, Corona’s original conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeal, which determined that the attorney in the 1972-73 trial had compromised the defense. However, Corona wasn’t off the hook; even though he’d successfully appealed his case, the appeals court granted a second trial.
This new trial took place over seven months in 1982. This time, the defense attorneys and prosecutors brought in 175 witnesses. Corona himself was called to the stand and reaffirmed his innocence.
Corona’s defense argued that it was Natividad, Corona’s half-brother, who committed the crimes—especially after it came to light that, in 1970, Natividad may have attacked a man with a machete. Natividad had fled to Mexico and died in 1973, and it was ultimately determined he hadn’t been in Marysville enough times in 1971 to have killed all the victims.
In the end, Corona’s work ledger, with several victims’ names inside, ended up being the lynchpin against his innocence. He was resentenced to life in prison on September 23, 1982, this time for good.
Corona was transferred to Corcoran State Prison in 1992, where he served out the remainder of his 25 consecutive life sentences. There was always the question of whether Corona had committed more murders, but decisive evidence never came up to charge him beyond the original 25 men.
He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in his later years, and in 2011, Corona said he murdered his victims for being “winos” who trespassed on his property—before claiming he couldn’t recall the murders at all during his final parole hearing in 2016. Corona was denied parole a total of eight times; his ninth attempt would have been in 2021, but he died from natural causes on March 4, 2019.
Culturally, Corona’s murders influenced films like Lyvia’s House and John Waters’ Female Trouble. He remains the Golden State’s most prolific serial killer.
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Reshma Patricia Crawford is a freelance writer and aspiring novelist whose short stories and music reviews have been published in literary magazines and on digital media platforms. She has also spent a decade working as an Associate Producer and a Development Producer on nonfiction television series for A&E, Hulu, Lifetime, National Geographic, Smithsonian Channel and Animal Planet. Reshma holds an MFA in Screenwriting from Hollins University and currently lives in Culver City, Calif.
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