Juan Corona Vallejo (February 7, 1934 – March 4, 2019) was a Mexican serial killer who was convicted of the murders of 25 migrant farm workers found buried in peach orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County, California, in 1971.
Juan Corona was born in San Antonio de los Moran, Ayutla, Jalisco, Mexico, on February 7, 1934.
[4] His half-brother, José Natividad Corona Sánchez, later attacked a man with a machete-like weapon in Marysville and after losing the lawsuit, fled back to his native Mexico.
[8][9] In 1962, Corona was given a green card and returned to the United States legally, where he was regarded as a hard worker with schizophrenic episodes and a violent temper.
[3] On May 19, 1971, a farm owner who had used Corona to contract field workers noticed a freshly dug hole in his peach orchard,[11] which was filled the next day.
[15] In the early morning hours of May 26, 1971, police entered Corona's Yuba City home with a search warrant and arrested him.
All of Corona's victims were middle-aged Caucasian male drifters between the ages of 47 and 64 (except three); most of them had criminal records, and all but one were stabbed or slashed with a knife or machete.
Corona was provided legal aid and assigned a public defender, Roy Van den Heuvel, who hired several psychiatrists to perform a psychological evaluation.
Although the sheriff, Roy Whiteaker, said the prisoner was in no apparent or immediate danger from his fellow townsmen, Corona was moved to the new and larger county jail in Marysville on May 30, 1971, for "security reasons.
[20] In return for his legal representation, an agreement was made granting Hawk exclusive literary and dramatic property rights to the defendant's life story, including the proceedings against him.
Shortly after taking over the defense, and even before seeing Corona's medical record or reading any of the reports, Hawk decided against having him plead not guilty by reason of insanity and fired the psychiatrists.
[21] Corona complained of chest pain from his cell in Yuba City on June 18 and was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with having had a mild heart attack.
The California Supreme Court voided the death penalty in the state on February 18, 1972, ruling it unconstitutional, cruel, and unusual.
The jury deliberated for 45 hours and returned a verdict on January 18, 1973, finding Corona guilty of first-degree murder on all 25 counts charged.
[27] The judge, Richard Patton, sentenced Corona to 25 terms of life imprisonment, to run consecutively, without the possibility of parole.
Corona was again convicted of the crimes on September 23, 1982, and returned to prison after the strategy failed to persuade the jury, which deliberated for 54 hours over a two-week period, of his innocence.
Afterward, the foreman told the press that the most incriminating piece of evidence against Corona was his work ledger, for which the labor contractor had "no reasonable explanation.