Juan Corona

"Yes, I did it, but I am a sick man and a sick man can't be judged by the same standards as other men."

Juan Corona, a.k.a. "The Machete Murderer", is a prolific Mexican serial killer and rapist who murdered at least 25 men in California in 1971.

Background
Corona was born Juan Vallejo Corona in Autlán, a rural population in the State of Jalisco, Mexico, on February 7, 1934. Vallejo was one of his two last names, but he only used Corona. Corona was one of ten children born to Sebastián Corona and his second wife, Cándida. In addition, Corona had three older half-siblings born from Sebastián's previous marriage to a woman who had died young. The eldest was his half-brother Natividad, who migrated to California in 1944 attracted by the jobs left vacant by the World War II draft.

In 1950, sixteen-year-old Corona dropped out of high school and moved illegally to California, where he worked in farms of the Imperial and Sacramento Valleys. Nevertheless, he still attended night school to gain fluency in Engligh. In May 1953, Corona settled in the Marysville-Yuba City area following an invitation of Natividad. On October 24, he married Sacramento native Gabriella E. Hermosillo in Reno, Nevada; this was done at the urging of Hermosillo's parents and the marriage fell apart after three months. In late December 1955, a flood in the Yuba and Feather Rivers broke a levee and flooded much of the Sacramento Valley including large sections of Yuba City and Marysville; the latter was declared "lost" at the time and evacuated completely. The flood killed 38 people, many of whom were undocumented Mexican laborers drafted in an effort to fix the levee. This event had a profound effect on Corona, who had always been afraid of water. He had a mental breakdown and came to believe that everyone had died and he was seeing ghosts. On January 17, 1956 Natividad had Corona committed to a mental hospital in Auburn, California, where he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. After receiving 23 shock treatments in a period of three months, he was declared recovered and was deported back to Mexico, but he returned as a legal immigrant later that year. In 1959, Corona married a second time, to Gloria I. Moreno, and had four daughters with her. Despite his violent temper, excessive interest in showing off his masculinity and well-known issues with openly gay men, Corona was trusted as a hard worker. In 1962, he became a licensed labor contractor and was put in charge of hiring workers to staff local fruit ranches.

Crimes, Arrest and Incarceration
In March 1970, Corona had a new schizophrenic episode and was briefly institutionalized again. At 1:00 AM on May 25, a young Mexican man named José Romero Raya was found in the restroom of the Guadalajara Cafe, owned by Natividad Corona. Romero had been attacked in the face and head with a machete and nearly scalped, prompting Natividad to call the police. Though Romero had not seen his attacker and Juan Corona was at the Cafe and considered a suspect at the time, Romero filled a lawsuit against Natividad instead, and won a judgement for $250,000. Rather than paying, Natividad sold all his properties in California and moved back to Mexico.

On May 19, 1971 Japanese-American farmer Goro Kagehiro found a large, freshly dug hole in the Sutter County peach orchard that he owned. Kagehiro asked his employees about the hole, all hired through Corona, but they knew nothing about it. At night, Kagehiro returned to the orchard and found the hole filled. He called the Sheriff office, who dug up the hole and found the body of a drifter called Kenneth Whiteacre. Though Whiteacre was dressed, the deputies found homosexual-themed literature in his pockets and the case was classified as a sex crime. However, the coroner did not look for signs of sexual assault and only performed a superficial examination. On May 24, workers driving a tractor at an adjoining ranch spotted another filled hole. They also alerted the Sheriff, who dug up another male body, and found yet another place where earth had been moved. This contained a third body and a couple of Yuba City Market meat tickets signed by Juan V. Corona on May 21. All three victims were drifters and farm workers, had been hacked and stabbed in the same manner, and a pickup truck resembling Corona's had been seen in the area at the time of the murders. Because the Sheriff office was reluctant to make an arrest before the real number of victims was known, they continued to search the area for graves. They found six more corpses in the same orchard, much more than they had expected. Many had been buried with their pants down or no pants at all. All had been hacked or stabbed, but one had also been shot. Like the preceding victims, they were all drifters and farm workers, and many had been seen asking Corona for work or riding his pickup. On May 26, the deputies arrested Corona and searched his home, office and car. Among the retrieved evidence was an eighteen-inch machete, a bloodstained club, knives, a pistol and munition, abundant digging material, other similar meat tickets and a blue ledger with 34 male names and dates. Bloodstains were also found in Corona's vehicle. As a result of these findings, the Sheriff solicited aircraft to take infrared photographs of the area and locate more graves. By June 4, when the search was concluded, the number of known victims was twenty-five. This was twice the body count of the Boston Strangler, the most prolific known serial killer in the United States up to that point. Though 1,500 people contacted authorities to report missing relatives that could be one of the victims, four bodies were never identified.

Corona was initially provided with a public defender, Roy Van den Heuvel, who hired several psychiatrists to evaluate Corona's mental state. However, on June 14 Van den Heuvel was replaced by Richard Hawk, a private attorney who took up the case in exchange for exclusive literary and dramatic rights to Corona's life story and the criminal proceedings against him. Hawk decided not to plead innocence by reason of insanity, fired the psychiatrists, made no mention of Corona's schizophrenia and called no witnesses. The proceedings were delayed twice, once because of Corona being hospitalized after suffering two consecutive heart attacks, and another because of the abolition of the death penalty in California, which took place while the trial was underway on February 18, 1972. Finally, Corona was found guilty of all charges on January 18, 1973 and sentenced to twenty-five consecutive sentences of life in prison with no possibility of parole. However, further changes in the criminal legislation of California allowed him to get a parole hearing after seven years. In 1974, Corona's wife divorced him. In 1978, Corona's first defense was ruled incompetent and he was granted a retrial to begin in 1982. Corona's new defense attorney, Terence Hallinan, called fifty witnesses and attributed the murders to Natividad Corona, who had died in Mexico in 1973. Citing Romero's 1970 lawsuit, Hallinan claimed that Natividad was a violent homosexual, while Juan was "hopelessly heterosexual". However, Juan Corona had admitted one homosexual encounter in Mexico before he migrated to the United States. This time, the main witness for the prosecution was a Mexican Consulate employee who had met Corona in jail in 1978, while he was preparing his appeal. According to him, Corona had admitted to the killings stating (in Spanish): "Yes, I did it, but I am a sick man and a sick man can't be judged by the same standards as other men." Hallinan countered this claiming that Corona had not actually said "Yes, I did it" ("Sí, lo hice," in Spanish), but a hypothetical "If I did it" ("Si lo hice..."). However, not even him could find an explanation for "the Death Ledger", as the press had called it. After seven months of trial, the jury found Corona guilty on all counts again, and dismissed any involvement of Natividad, arguing that it was not proven that he was in California at the time of most murders. Shortly after resuming his imprisonment, Corona was savagely stabbed in the face by other inmates and lost all sight in his right eye. He is currently serving his sentence in Corcoran State Prison. During his last parole hearing in November 2016, he admitted to have killed some of the victims before a Californian court for the first time, but claimed that they were all tresspassers.

Modus Operandi
Corona largely targeted male itinerant farm workers between forty and sixty-five years old who had abandoned their families. Many were homeless, alcoholic and slept in the Wino Park across the street from the Guadalajara Cafe. Because Corona denied to have committed the crimes and these workers (known as "winos", "tramps" or simply derelicts) were considered unreliable and not hired by Corona (who only worked with green card-carrying Mexicans), it is unclear how he obtained his victims. They might have asked him for work or been lured with job offers by Corona. Likewise, fifteen of the victims were found undressed in some way, but it is not known when it happened in the sequence of events. Corona would first club or non-fatally hack his victims in the head with a machete, and later stab them fatally in the chest (excluding one victim, who was shot in the head, and another, who was killed with a knife). He would then hit them in the head again, post-mortem, and bury them in a pre-dug hole, north of an orchard tree, with their hands around their heads. Either before or after the murders, he would write the victim's name and the date of the murder (or non-fatal attack, in the case of Romero) in his blue ledger.

Known Victims

 * May 25, 1970, Marysville, California: José Romero Raya
 * Sutter County, California, 1971:
 * Undetermined dates between February and May:
 * Donald Dale Smith
 * Elbert J.T. Riley
 * John Joseph Haluka
 * Lloyd Wallace Wenzel
 * Paul Buel Allen
 * Warren Jerome Kelley
 * Joseph J. Maczak
 * Sigurd Emil Beiermann
 * William Emery Kamp
 * Clarence Hocking
 * James Wylie Howard
 * John Raggio Smallwood
 * Edward Martin Cupp
 * Albert Leon Hayes
 * Raymond Reand Muchache
 * John Henry Jackson
 * Mark Beverly Shields
 * Joe Carriveau
 * Four unnamed men
 * May 19: Kenneth Edward Whiteacre
 * May 21: Melford Everett Sample
 * May 24: Charles Cleveland Fleming

On Criminal Minds
Corona seems to have provided some inspiration for Armando Salinas, because both were Mexican serial killers active in California who worked in farms and had a half-brother who was also an immigrant. Corona also has some loose similarities to Paul Westin. Both were homosexual serial killers who tried to project an outward appearance of heterosexuality; killed by bludgeoning, stabbing and shooting; had a first unplanned victim who was the most like them (Paul's first victim was a young homosexual man and the following were women or older men; Corona first attempted to kill a Mexican man but his fatal victims were non-Hispanic whites, two African-Americans and one Native American), their first victim found was dressed and the following undressed (although in Corona's case, the dressed victim was actually the last he killed); and both were institutionalized by their family prior to their killings (though in Paul's case, it was at a quack ex-gay camp rather than a mental hospital).