Source: Image by K. Ramsland We’ve just gotten through the glut of documentaries for the 40th anniversary of Ted Bundy’s trial and conviction. Now we have a significant 50th anniversary in serial killer culture. It’s likely to pass with little notice, yet it’s a case for our times as we scrutinize the ways in which bias marginalizes specific communities.
On May 19, 1971, near Yuba City, California, a farmer noticed a hole the size of a grave in his peach orchard. He returned that night to find it filled in. Assuming trespassers had buried trash, he summoned police. It turned out to be a shallow grave for Kenneth Whiteacre, stabbed in the chest, bashed in the skull, and slashed across the back of the head. From literature found with the body, police assumed the man was gay and had just encountered the wrong guy. After a superficial autopsy with no test for evidence of sexual assault, they learned that some of the head wounds had occurred postmortem.
Soon a second grave turned up nearby. Like Whiteacre, the dead man was also a drifter who’d gained transient employment. During a wider search, a deputy spotted a pathway into a weedy area that revealed soil subsidence. They dug and turned up receipts from the Yuba City market, dated four days earlier and signed by Juan V. Corona. Further down was another corpse, bludgeoned in the head and slashed with a sharp weapon. This man, too, had been hired for seasonal farm labor. A team came in to keep digging.
According to journalist Tracy Kidder, the diggers made bets about how many they’d find. No one even came close. Over the next few days, nine male corpses were unearthed, all killed in the same manner. They were buried face-up, with their arms extended over their heads. Near a prune orchard, searchers found sixteen more. The genitals of some were exposed and others had no trousers or their trousers around their ankles.
The remains were laid out to create a timeline based on decomposition. It appeared that the murders had begun in February. All 25 men had been bludgeoned and stabbed and one was shot. Kidder writes that most were white. The youngest was 40, the oldest 68. All but four were identified.
The police questioned the labor contractor, Juan Corona. He was 37, popular, and a family man. He seemed an unlikely suspect. Blood in his car told a different story. In his home and office were butcher knives, a pistol of the right caliber, a machete—and a ledger that listed laborers included seven of the dead men. Corona was arrested. Witnesses confirmed seeing some of the victims with Corona near the time they’d vanished.
The discovery was a grim gateway to what some criminologists now call an epidemic. “If there was a ‘ground zero’ in the serial killer epidemic to come,” says crime historian Peter Vronsky, “then Juan Corona fits the bill.” Despite the astounding victim toll, the press quickly lost interest. “The basic assumption was that the victims were Mexican immigrant farm laborers,” Vronsky writes. “That immediately put a damper on any interest the newspaper-reading and TV-watching public might have had.” It didn’t help that these men were further labeled as hobos, vagrants, and homosexuals – society’s throwaways. Media coverage was brief. These victims seemed not to matter.
Despite Corona’s reputation as a decent family man, he’d undergone psychiatric care, including shock treatments, for a psychotic breakdown in 1955. A flood in the area had killed 74 people and he’d developed a paranoid delusion about ghosts and the apocalypse. Since his brother was gay, an “explanation” arose that the unstable Corona had issues with gay men and had reacted violently to men he’d hired who were gay. Nothing was done to verify this assumption. Corona might just as easily have bludgeoned, raped, and mutilated these men at random to satisfy a craving he despised and then eliminated witnesses. Assumptions channeled the investigation straight into tunnel vision.
After a trial in which Corona’s brother was unsuccessfully posed as an alternative suspect, the jury convicted Corona and gave him a record 25 life sentences. A retrial in 1982 produced the same result. Corona supposedly admitted his acts to a Mexican consular official, claiming to have been sick, “and a sick man cannot be judged by the same standards as other men.”
As Vronksy notes, Corona’s four-month spree appears to have launched the so-called Golden Age of serial killers. Over the next two decades, the number of “stranger killers” rose exponentially. After Corona came Houston’s “Candy Man” with a slightly higher victim toll. By 1973, Edmund Kemper had slaughtered six coeds among his eight victims in Santa Cruz, concurrent with spree killer Herbert Mullin’s psychotic mission that snuffed thirteen lives. The “Son of Sam” killings in New York, mid-decade, targeted girls and couples, and Ted Bundy, B.T.K., the Hillside Stranglers, the Dating Game Killer, the Killer Clown, and the Golden State Killer (to name a few) were all active.
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Don't Regret Your Vote: Avoid the One-and-Done Bias Corona died in prison on March 4, 2019. His fatal deeds remain obscure. A half-century later, we still see police and media withhold resources and attention for victims from society’s fringe populations.