Juan Corona: The Machete Murderer

[00:00:17] Hey everyone, my name is Nikki Young and this is Serial Napper, an international true crime podcast. I'm back with another true crime story to lull you to sleep or perhaps to give you nightmares. The date was May 19th, 1971. A Japanese peach farmer was perusing his orchard located in

[00:00:38] Yuba City, California. Suddenly, he spotted something really unusual. A large 7-foot long hole that was approximately half a foot deep which looked like an improvised dugout gravesite. His was private property, meaning no one was supposed to be digging on his land. Without

[00:00:58] any witnesses to report the purpose of this large hole, he decided to return the following day to see if it was still there. When he returned to the orchard the next afternoon, this large hole had been filled in. Someone

[00:01:13] had returned and it appeared as if something had been buried there. So, the peach farmer called the authorities to investigate. What the police would uncover would spark an investigation into the worst known serial killer in the US at that time. But few know his name today, Juan Corona.

[00:01:34] So let's jump right in. The discovery of what looked like a makeshift gravesite caught the attention of the Japanese peach farmer right away. And thankfully, it did because investigators were able to move in on a suspected serial killer very quickly. After getting the call from the farm, the

[00:01:54] police attended the orchard and specialists carefully removed the dirt from the hole. Brushing the dirt away revealed the body of an adult male, a man named Kenneth Whitaker who was only known by locals as a drifter.

[00:02:09] The body was in terrible condition. Whoever had killed Kenneth had done so with extreme violence. His head had been split with a machete and it appeared as if he had been stabbed to death. Investigators would discover sexually explicit material in his back pocket that

[00:02:28] featured nude men. At the medical examiner's office, it was later revealed that Kenneth had also been sexually assaulted before he died. He had been sodomized. News about this body discovered on the peach orchard spread to other Yuba City farmers.

[00:02:46] As they began inspecting their lands more carefully, additional graves would be uncovered. I spoke with Jane who was a local and still in elementary school at the time when the bodies were found. She remembers the news spreading very quickly within her community.

[00:03:05] I was 11 years old. This was in the spring of 1971 and I was in, I had just started, I was in the last part of fifth grade I think, or maybe early sixth grade. It was somewhere

[00:03:21] around there. And my best friend, it was actually, I actually like knew of it unknowingly from the very beginning because my best friend lived on a ranch in Sutter County, which is

[00:03:34] the county that where the body, all the bodies were found. And of course they knew all the other ranchers. So she came to school one day and she said, hey, you know what? Something really weird happened with this particular rancher that her family knew. And it was a

[00:03:51] gossip kind of thing that was going around all the ranches. Each of these gravesites that were uncovered on other farms looked exactly like the first gravesite that was found. It was long enough to hold an adult male and just deep enough

[00:04:06] to cover a body. These freshly dug graves contained the bodies of middle-aged and senior men around the ages of 47 to 64 years old. Many of them had also had their heads sliced with a machete and then they had been stabbed to death. They had also been sodomized before

[00:04:25] they were killed. All would be found buried face up with their arms stretched upwards above their heads. They also had their shirts pulled up over their faces as if the killer didn't want to look at them while they were carrying out their evil deed. One of the bodies

[00:04:43] uncovered was that of Charles Fleming, another vagrant who had lived a transient lifestyle following the direction of wherever he could find work and a pillow to lay his head on. Whoever had killed these men had used the machete to make a cross-like wound to the

[00:05:00] back of their heads, followed by a fury of stab wounds to the chest. Another body that would be discovered in a shallow grave on a local farm was that of Melford Sample, and what authorities would discover in his pocket would break this case wide open. It was a

[00:05:19] receipt from a nearby meat market with the name Juan Corona written on it. Now while they were looking for this individual, they began to uncover several more bodies and more receipts with the name Juan Corona found on the bodies, including two crumpled up Bank

[00:05:37] of America deposit slips that were literally printed with Corona's name and address on them. Now authorities had to figure out who this Juan Corona was and what his connection to the murdered men was. Thankfully, it wasn't going to be all that difficult to find him, especially considering

[00:05:55] his address was printed on some of these receipts. But who was Juan Corona? Juan was born in February of 1934 in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. He had a slew of siblings. His father Sebastian and his mother Candida had 10 children altogether, but Juan also had three half-siblings from

[00:06:18] his father's first marriage. When his older half-brother named Natividad migrated to California to find work because there weren't any jobs in Mexico, it gave Juan the idea to move to America too. Six years after his older brother left for the States, Juan decided to drop

[00:06:37] out of high school and to cross the border illegally into California. As an illegal alien, and I honestly despise that term, Juan would pick up odd jobs here and there working on farms where he could be paid cash under the table. Many of these farms of Sacramento relied

[00:06:55] on the cheap labor provided by Mexican migrants in order to get their toughest jobs done efficiently and on a budget, meaning there was a lot of work to go around. It's basically exploitation. Juan would meet a young woman named Gabriela, and he married her shortly after they began

[00:07:14] dating because her parents were putting pressure on him to close the deal. But they were doomed from the beginning, and they split up after only three months of marriage. And then in December of 1955, there was a huge natural disaster that mentally destroyed Juan. A levee

[00:07:34] had broken at Feather Rivers, causing a flood that killed 38 people, many of them being Mexican migrant workers just like Juan. When this disaster occurred, something inside of Juan's brain snapped. He began to tell anyone who would listen that he was seeing ghosts,

[00:07:54] ghosts of the migrant workers who had been killed. Before all of this started, this was back in the 1950s after there was this big flood, long before my time. But in the 50s, there was a big flood that hit Yuba City and it

[00:08:11] killed a bunch of people. And Juan was going around town telling everybody that everybody was a ghost, they were all dead, everybody in the town was a ghost and making crazy statements. He did time in a mental institution, so we know that he had mental health issues.

[00:08:28] It got so bad that in January of the following year, Juan's brother had him committed to a mental institution. It was here that he was officially diagnosed as being schizophrenic with severe paranoia. He spent three months at this mental facility where he went through

[00:08:45] treatments like shock therapy. Then he was released and deported back to Mexico, because again, he was in the US illegally. Juan wasn't going to give up on his American dream, so after spending some time back in Mexico, he successfully applied to migrate back to the US, legally this

[00:09:04] time. He returned to the Yuba area and he began taking on whatever labor he could, working at fruit farms in the area. A few years later, Juan met and married his second wife, Gloria Moreno.

[00:09:19] The couple would go on to have four daughters together. It has been said that Juan was aggressive and violent with his family, especially his wife, maybe because he was living a double life. It was fairly well known within the community that Juan enjoyed the company of other

[00:09:38] men. He continued to try to put on this masculine front in order to fool everyone, but the consensus was that he wasn't straight. After years of working the difficult job as a farm laborer,

[00:09:52] Juan decided that he wanted more out of life. He began to take night classes to learn English so that he could get a leg up, and he began to network, make connections, and climb the pecking

[00:10:04] order of other migrant workers. Instead of continuing to work hard labor, he became a licensed labor contractor, meaning he canvassed Mexican migrant workers on behalf of local fruit farmers all around Yuba. He was well known within the migrant community and the farmer community,

[00:10:23] and now he was known to the police who were investigating his connection to the men who were found murdered and buried on all of these local fruit farms. Knowing how to speak and understand a new language can be an invaluable tool when traveling,

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[00:11:30] for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash RS10 today. Investigators would learn that this was not the first time that Juan Corona was implicated in a violent crime. In May of 1970, a few months after being institutionalized

[00:11:49] for a second time after having a schizophrenic episode, Juan was a suspect in a vicious attack that happened at his brother's cafe. A young Mexican man was sexually assaulted and then attacked with a machete in the restroom of Natividad's cafe. Juan Corona was a suspect

[00:12:09] right off the bat. He was at the cafe at the time of the attack, but he was never charged with any offenses. There was just as much suspicion that his brother Natividad had actually

[00:12:22] been the attacker. This victim would go on to sue Juan's brother and the owner of the cafe, Natividad, winning $250,000, not a whole lot of money for what he went through, considering it was so vicious that he was nearly scalped. Juan's brother basically fled the country

[00:12:43] and moved back to Mexico to avoid having to pay anything to the victim. When the police learned that Juan was connected to this other attack, which was also involving an axe, obviously it piqued their interest. On May 26, 1971, Juan Corona was arrested on suspicion of murdering the migrant

[00:13:03] workers found in those shallow graves. They performed a search of his home where they located a treasure trove of damning evidence, including an 18-inch machete, a pistol, knives, a shovel that looked like it had been used recently, and a notebook that contained the names of 34 men

[00:13:26] alongside a set of dates. They also searched his property for more possible grave sites and bodies. By the time they wrapped up their investigation, the police found a total of 25 bodies of murdered men that all appeared to be connected. After he was arrested, he would plead not guilty,

[00:13:48] and his wife fully supported him at the time, believing that her husband was innocent. Jane remembers the community rallying around the family before the nitty-gritty details came to light. They just so happened to attend the same church.

[00:14:05] Well, everybody felt very sorry for his wife. His wife, Gloria, they had four daughters. One of the daughters was actually in my second and third grade classes, although she was not at our school by the

[00:14:18] time the murders came out. So the church community did like kind of close ranks around Gloria and try to protect her, and she eventually divorced Juan. The prosecution painted a very clear picture. Juan was an angry, violent man who was leading

[00:14:37] a double life. He was married to a woman, and he had four children. But he was really interested in men. Through his job working to recruit migrant workers, he had the perfect setup in order to

[00:14:52] carry out his twisted fantasies. He figured that migrant workers wouldn't really be missed, so no one would think to go to the authorities to report them as missing. It was alleged that this is exactly how he found all of his victims.

[00:15:10] Juan Corona was initially assigned a public defender who built his case on his mental state at the time of the killings. He was going to be bringing in several psychiatrists who would testify as expert witnesses. However, shortly after he was assigned to the case, he was replaced

[00:15:27] by a private attorney named Richard Hawk. Hawk agreed to take on Juan's case in exchange for the rights to his story. He wanted to be able to write books and make movies off of Juan's story,

[00:15:41] and he skipped right over the mental health stuff. The fact that Juan was schizophrenic and had gone through all of this traumatic shock therapy, it didn't seem to matter. He wasn't interested in making a case for Juan's innocence by reason of insanity. He was interested in a book

[00:15:58] deal, so he didn't even bother to mention the schizophrenia. He was, all around, a terrible lawyer. The prosecution? Well, they weren't much better. They had a solid case against Juan that pointed to him being the killer, yet they wound up misplacing and mishandling important evidence.

[00:16:19] It was an embarrassment, but ultimately, Juan was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole. Years later, his conviction was overturned, and he was granted a new trial because it was determined that his lawyer was basically

[00:16:39] inept. Which, fair enough. In his second trial, Juan Corona declared his innocence. His defense lawyer pointed to an alternative suspect as the killer, Juan's brother Natividad, who had been implicated in that previous axe attack. It was a pretty weak defense. The

[00:16:59] prosecution had receipts and weapons with blood, physical evidence that couldn't really be denied. But the defense? They argued that Natividad planted the receipts on the bodies in order to frame his little brother. I mean, what kind of idiot would leave such damning evidence behind

[00:17:19] at a crime scene? It had to be a setup, according to the defense. There were also multiple eyewitnesses who reported seeing the victims with Juan Corona. But he and his brother? They often ran in the same

[00:17:33] circles. That's one of the questions that came up, whether those things were planted to deliberately implicate him. That was something that came up especially in the second trial, where they tried to claim that Natividad was involved and not Juan. Yeah, I mean,

[00:17:52] that could have just been carelessness. Obviously, this guy was out there killing people regularly, and after the 21st victim may have gotten a little careless when he buried people, it was just like there was just a really obvious circumstantial evidence in his

[00:18:11] van, such as blood-soaked clothing and stuff like that. So I really can't say I'm kind of divided about it myself. In a second trial, he would be found guilty once again and re-sentenced to life in prison

[00:18:28] with no possibility of parole. Juan Corona had killed at least 25 migrant workers. They were all middle-aged to elderly with very little money. They relied on Juan because he found them work and he housed them on his own ranch. He took advantage of these men,

[00:18:48] knowing that people wouldn't necessarily notice them missing right away. The bodies of 14 of his victims were never claimed. Four were never identified. He sexually assaulted them and then violently killed them before disposing of them in shallow graves. They were vulnerable, and Juan,

[00:19:09] he saw that as an opportunity. At the time, he earned the title of being the worst-known serial killer in the U.S. It is believed that there is a high probability of more victims who have yet to

[00:19:22] be found or identified. About 10 years ago before he died, or maybe a little bit before then, Dave Teja, who was the prosecutor for Juan's first trial, he said he believes that there were many more bodies in different counties, but that the authorities in different counties didn't want to,

[00:19:46] you know, spend their budget trying looking for them because there were already all these ones in Sutter County that they were going to send Corona to the chair for. Juan had a tough time behind bars. His mental and physical health went downhill after he was attacked in prison,

[00:20:04] stabbed more than 30 times, resulting in him losing his eye. He was up for parole in December 2011, but it was clear that he had very little remorse for his actions, so he was denied. He

[00:20:18] would die behind bars on March 4th, 2019 from natural causes at the age of 85. Before his death, allegedly, he would admit to what he had done, but he explained that, quote, a sick man can't be judged by the same standards as other men.

[00:20:39] That's it for me tonight. If you want to reach out, you can find me on Facebook at Serial Napper. I also have a Serial Napper true crime discussion group. It's called Serial Society,

[00:20:50] and I'll have the link in my show notes. I would love to chat with you about this case and any other case that I cover and whatever else is going on in true crime. You can find my audio on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:21:03] I post all my episodes in video format over on YouTube, so go check it out. I'm also over on X, formerly known as Twitter, at Serial underscore Napper, and I post things on TikTok. Serial Napper Nick, and that's all one word.

[00:21:16] Until next time, sweet dreams, stay kind, especially in the comments. Bye.