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Thread: Juan Corona - California

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Juan Corona - California




    Juan Corona, once worst known serial killer, again denied parole in deaths of 25 farmworkers

    A California man who was once known as the nation’s worst serial killer was again denied parole Monday after he admitted his guilt for the first time before the parole board.

    Juan Corona said he murdered and mutilated 25 farmworkers four decades ago because they were trespassing in the orchards north of Sacramento, said Sutter County Assistant District Attorney Jana McClung.

    Parole officials decided Corona can try again in five years, McClung said after the two-hour hearing. It was Corona’s seventh bid for parole from Corcoran State Prison.

    Corona previously made incriminating statements to a prison psychologist.

    However, “this is the first time that I’m aware of that he made that admission to the full board. He said it was trespassing and they were winos,” McClung said. “He just doesn’t seem to realize that what he did was wrong.”

    Corona, 77, has been diagnosed with dementia and mental illness.

    No family members of his victims attended the hearing. Prosecutors said Corona targeted victims who had few relatives and likely wouldn’t be missed.

    “We have had no contact with survivors for two decades now,” District Attorney Carl Adams said before the hearing. “The people who he killed were farm laborers who were itinerant. Most of them didn’t have relatives who could be contacted back in the ‘70s at the time of trial.”

    Four of the bodies have never been identified. The bodies of 14 of Corona’s victims were never claimed by family members after they were discovered in 1971.

    Corona, a farm labor contractor with a history of mental illness, was convicted of stabbing the men, hacking open their heads and burying their remains near Yuba City, 40 miles north of Sacramento.

    He told the parole board he stabbed his first victim with a kitchen knife, shot his second, and killed the rest with a machete, McClung said. However, there is no record of any of his victims being shot, she said, raising questions about whether there was another possible victim or if the shooting was a product of Corona’s fading mind.

    “He got a five-year denial. ... Part of it was because he at least discussed some of the underlying facts with regard to the commitment offense,” said his attorney, Leon Harris III of Bakersfield, declining further comment.

    Corona walked unaided into the hearing, but his dementia was evident during his comments, McClung said.

    “He was a little bit all over the road,” she said. “He did start rambling a little bit.”

    Corona’s first conviction in 1973 was overturned on appeal, but he was convicted again in 1982 and sentenced to 25 concurrent life sentences. He was not eligible for the death penalty because California’s capital punishment law had been ruled unconstitutional at the time.

    It was the most deadly killing spree in U.S. history, until John Wayne Gacy Jr. was convicted in 1980 of murdering 33 young men and boys in his Chicago home. Gacy was executed in 1994 in Illinois.

    Investigators found a machete, a meat cleaver, a double-bladed ax and a wooden club, all stained with blood, in Corona’s home, along with a ledger book containing the names of seven of the victims.

    Corona is a Mexican national and native of Jalisco, Mexico.

    His attorney argued that his age and lack of recent violent acts means he should be paroled, said McClung, who countered that his dementia and apparent lack of understanding and remorse means he is still dangerous.

    “The concern could be, would he go out and do this again, because he doesn’t seem to have an understanding of what he did the first time,” she said.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...DVO_story.html

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    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Juan Corona, California’s most prolific serial killer, dies of natural causes

    Juan Vallejo Corona, California’s most prolific serial killer, died of natural causes Monday morning in a hospital, more than four decades after he hacked to death 25 farmworkers and buried most of them in a prune orchard near Yuba City in Sutter County, prison officials announced.

    Corona, 85, was serving 25 concurrent life sentences after being convicted of 25 counts of 1st-degree murder. There was no death penalty in California when he was sentenced in 1973.

    Corona was denied parole 8 times since 1984 and was next eligible for a hearing in 2021. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced his death Monday and released his most recent mug shot from California State Prison-Corcoran, showing a frail old man with a droopy left eye caused by a 1973 stabbing attack at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville that nearly killed him.

    In May 1971, authorities found 25 mutilated bodies of male, middle-aged farmworkers in orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County. Many of the victims lived on a Marysville skid row and were considered “fruit tramps,” men who would follow the orchard harvests finding work.

    Police recovered a machete and other sharp weapons from Corona’s house at the labor camp he supervised, where he hired many of the men he would later kill. Corona’s family described him as a man with a violent temper, whom they had to tie with rope to calm down. He had been committed to a mental hospital years before the murders, believing that everyone in Yuba City had drowned during the catastrophic 1955 flood that killed 37 people — and that he lived in a land of ghosts.

    Corona was tried in Colusa County and found guilty in January 1973. 5 years later, his conviction was overturned by an appellate court and he won a new trial. His second trial was held in Alameda County, and he was again convicted of all 25 murders in 1982.

    Authorities have said over the years that Corona’s body count could be higher, and his name is likely to be brought up when a body is uncovered in Sutter County.

    Corona was born in Mexico. After receiving shock therapy treatment at the mental hospital, he was released and deported to his native country before he returned to California with a green card. He got married and started a family in Yuba City, raising 4 daughters.

    The case broke in 1971 after a farmer found a hole dug in his peach orchard and suspected someone had been burying trash. Instead, a body was found, and then more in a neighboring orchard. Many of the men had machete gashes to the backs of their heads in the shape of a cross.

    In his 2nd-to-last parole hearing in 2011, Corona admitted killing the men, saying they were trespassing.

    A Sutter County cemetery has a tombstone over the unclaimed bodies of 14 of the 25 victims. 4 of the men were never identified. It reads: “Here lie 14 men of the sod, four of them known only to God.”

    (source: San Francisco Chronicle)
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