Juan V. Corona, who joined the grim pantheon of America’s serial killers when he was convicted of slaughtering 25 migrant workers and burying them on farms near his home in the Sacramento Valley in California, died on Monday. He was 85.
A statement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he had died at a hospital near the state prison in Corcoran, in the south-central part of the state, where for almost a half-century he had been serving 25 concurrent life sentences for first-degree murder.
Mr. Corona’s victims were luckless drifters who moved from farm to farm, scratching out a bare existence in the valley’s orchards, groves and vineyards. No one seemed to miss these “fruit tramps,” as the locals called them, when they disappeared.
The killings came to light after a peach farmer spotted a fresh hole in one of his orchards near Yuba City on May 19, 1971. When he returned to investigate later that day, the hole had been filled in.
Suspicious, the farmer called the Sutter County sheriff’s office. Deputies dug up the body of a man. He had been stabbed in the chest and his head had been split open. A search of the orchards in the vicinity revealed other graves, some freshly dug, some made weeks before.
The digging went on for days, until 25 corpses had been unearthed. The victims ranged in age from about 40 to the mid-60s. All had been hacked and stabbed. One had been shot as well.
Store receipts and bank-deposit slips found in some graves were linked to Mr. Corona, a stocky man in his late 30s who was described in 1971 as a Mexican-born resident alien. As a licensed labor contractor, he had recruited field hands from bars and other places where migrant workers gathered. His wife sometimes cooked for them.
A search of his house in Yuba City turned up a bloodstained machete and a ledger with the names of victims. Blood was found in his pickup truck.
Mr. Corona was convicted twice, a second trial having been ordered because of incompetent representation in the first.
Mr. Corona maintained his innocence for years. Then, at a parole hearing on Dec. 5, 2011, he admitted his crimes, apparently for the first time in a public forum. (He was reported to have confessed before to a prison psychologist.)
Asked if he knew why he was in prison, Mr. Corona replied, “Well, I commit all those — those dead persons, 25.”
When asked why he had killed them, he gave a rambling answer in which he called the victims “winos” and “creeps” who had been “trespassing.” It was the closest he ever came to saying why he did it. Prosecutors never offered a motive.
With a wife, Gloria, and four young daughters, Juan Vallejo Corona seemed an unlikely killer. But he had trouble in his past. A flood that killed dozens of people in Sutter County in late 1955 had apparently left him unhinged, convinced that the people around him were the ghosts of those who had drowned.
A half brother, Natividad Corona, committed him to a mental hospital in early 1956. He was released months later, after undergoing electroshock treatments for schizophrenia. For a time he seemed to have a stable life, working his way up from farm laborer to labor contractor. He went to church.
Yet he was known to be quick-tempered and a brooder. In March 1970 he began another monthslong stay in a mental hospital. The next year, with increasing mechanization hurting his business, he applied for welfare. When his application was denied, he flew into a rage, a welfare official recalled.
Then came the horrific discoveries in the orchards and the ensuing trials, which had elements of farce as well as horror and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.
The first trial began on Sept. 11, 1972, in the Solano County city of Fairfield, east of San Francisco, after the defense was granted a change of venue. In the courtroom, the defendant’s wife shouted, “Good luck, Juan!” One of Mr. Corona’s sisters was later arrested, charged with obstructing the entrance to the courthouse by lying down outside it and refusing to move.
The trial was embarrassing for both sides. Prosecutors were found to have misplaced or mishandled evidence, and forensic tests that ought to have been done early on were delayed. At one point a prosecutor improperly suggested that Mr. Corona’s refusal to testify suggested that he was guilty.
The judge, who repeatedly expressed dismay at the prosecutors’ performance, reminded the jury that the burden of proof rested totally on the prosecution. Mr. Corona was convicted on Jan. 18, 1973, and sentenced to life in prison. (The California Supreme Court had overturned the state’s death penalty months before the trial.)
Even after finding Mr. Corona guilty, some jurors said they were “shocked” and “flabbergasted” that his defense had presented no psychiatric evidence on his behalf. His original public defender had planned to have him plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the family retained a lawyer who spurned that approach. Later, the lawyer was found to have been angling for a book deal about the case.
In May 1978, a California appeals court overturned the conviction, declaring that Mr. Corona’s defense had been inept and compromised.
The second trial was held in Hayward, in Alameda County, near San Francisco and lasted from Feb. 22 to Sept. 23, 1982. Represented by a new defense team, Mr. Corona took the stand, insisting that he was innocent. (His wife was not there; she had divorced him in 1974.)
A defense lawyer suggested that the real killer was the half brother Natividad Corona, whom he described as an “aggressive homosexual.” Natividad Corona was an ideal scapegoat: He had owned a saloon where a customer was found in a bathroom one night in February 1970 with slashes on his head and face. And by the time of Juan Corona’s second trial, Natividad Corona had returned to Mexico and could not be located.
No one was ever charged in the saloon incident, although the victim sued Natividad Corona and was awarded $250,000. It is not known whether he collected.
Convicted again, Juan Corona was resentenced to life in prison, where he deteriorated mentally and physically. A decade earlier, on Dec. 1, 1973, he had suffered more than 30 wounds and lost his left eye when another inmate stabbed him in a prison hospital.
At a parole hearing in December 2011, Mr. Corona often wandered into near-incoherence. He told of being the ninth of 10 children born to a couple in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1934; of coming to the United States illegally as a boy and getting sent back to Mexico, then returning to the States legally after his half brother had settled in California.
Asked if he felt remorse, Mr. Corona gave a meandering answer, then said, “So I went and buy the machete and then O.K., I started killing when I had to kill all those persons, one by one.” At another point he said he must have been “sick in my thinking.”
Mr. Corona was denied parole. There was no information about whether he had any survivors. At his parole hearing he said that his brothers and sisters were “all dead.”
There has been speculation that there may have been more victims of Mr. Corona lying undiscovered among the orchards. The bodies of 14 of his known victims were never claimed. Four were never identified.
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