Juan Corona

What the record shows

Juan Vallejo Corona was a farm labor contractor in Sutter County, California, convicted of murdering 25 itinerant farmworkers whose bodies were found buried in orchards along the Feather River near Yuba City in May and June 1971. A jury in Fairfield found him guilty of 25 counts of first-degree murder in January 1973; a state appeals court reversed that verdict in 1978 because of his lawyer's conflict of interest and inadequate defense, and a second jury convicted him again on all 25 counts in 1982. Serving 25 concurrent life terms, he died of natural causes on March 4, 2019, aged 85, while in the custody of California State Prison-Corcoran, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Corona was born on February 7, 1934, in Jalisco, Mexico, and came to the United States in 1950 to pick crops, following older brothers, KQED reported. After the 1955 Sacramento Valley flood he was committed to a state hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia; the 1978 appeals court opinion records a stay at DeWitt State Hospital from January to April 1956. By the mid-1960s he and his brothers were established labor contractors who recruited workers for ranches around Yuba City and Marysville. His business hired the men who later became his victims, and each victim had either been seen with him or hired through that business, according to the corrections department.

The case began on May 19, 1971, when a rancher named Kagehiro noticed a hole in the corner of his peach orchard and called police. The next morning officers uncovered the body of Kenneth Whitacre. Further graves were found on the Kagehiro and Sullivan ranches between May 20 and June 4, 1971, until 25 bodies had been recovered; according to KQED, receipts made out to Corona were found with bodies in a second orchard. The appeals court opinion states that all but one victim had chopping-type head wounds, many also had stab wounds to the chest, and one man, William Kamp, had been shot in the head. Four victims were never identified, and KQED reported that 14 of the dead, including the four unknown men, were buried in a common grave in Sutter.

Corona was arrested on May 26, 1971. Searches of his home, vehicles and property produced knives, a machete, a pistol, a post-hole digger and bloodstained items, and a green ledger in his bedroom with handwritten names and dates. The appeals court found that seven of the names matched identified victims; the Wikipedia article says the prosecution called it a death list. The trial was moved out of Sutter County to the Solano County courthouse in Fairfield, where, after about four months, a jury convicted him on all 25 counts on January 18, 1973, as KPIX-TV news footage of that day records. His lawyer, Richard Hawk, had called no defense witnesses, according to UPI.

Corona was sent to state prison in February 1973. Later that year he was stabbed repeatedly in his cell at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville and lost the sight of his left eye. On May 8, 1978, the California Court of Appeal, First District, reversed the judgment and granted his petition for habeas corpus. It found that Hawk had taken the literary and dramatic rights to Corona's life story as his fee, creating a conflict of interest, and had failed to investigate defenses based on Corona's mental state.

The retrial took place in Hayward, Alameda County, in 1982. Over 28 weeks of testimony from 212 witnesses, at a cost UPI put at 5.2 million dollars, the new defense team argued that Corona's half-brother Natividad, a former Marysville cafe owner believed to have died in Mexico in 1973, was the killer; prosecutors said Natividad was in Mexico at the time. Corona testified that he had killed no one. On September 23, 1982, the jury again convicted him of all 25 murders, and its foreman told UPI that the ledger was the deciding evidence. He was sentenced to 25 concurrent life terms and began serving the Sutter County commitment in December 1982.

Corona was moved in 1992 to the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran. He was denied parole eight times, at hearings between 1984 and 2016. KQED reported that prosecutors said he admitted the killings at a 2011 hearing, describing the victims as trespassers, while at his last hearing in 2016 he said he could not recall killing anyone. His family maintained his innocence, and neither side ever established a motive. At the time of the 1971 discovery, the number of victims was a United States record, according to the corrections department.