KILLER PROFILES: Juan Corona - The Machete Murderer
Juan Corona Recruited Them For Farmwork, Then Attacked And Buried His Victims In An Orchard.
The locals called them “fruit tramps”, migrant workers who drifted from farm to farm eking out small wages in California’s Central Valley. When some of them disappeared, nobody even noticed.
Then one day in 1971, a Yuba City farmer came across a freshly dug hole in his peach orchard. When he returned the next day, it was filled in. Suspicious, he called the local sheriff, the site was dug up, revealing the body of a man with a split-open head and stab wounds to his chest.
Searching the orchards, authorities found more and more shallow graves. In total, 25 corpses of victims were found to be either stabbed, hacked, or shot. Some of the graves also had paperwork—deposit slips from Bank Of America and receipts for meat—traced to a single man: Juan Corona.
The Mexico-born Corona was a former farmworker with a violent temper and history of mental illness—he was diagnosed with schizophrenia after a mental breakdown in the 1950s—now working as a licensed labor contractor recruiting farmworkers.
After a police search of his home turned up a bloody machete, bloody knives, blood in his pickup, bloody clothing, and a ledger with the names of the seven known victims, Corona was arrested and charged with 25 counts of murder.
He strongly maintained his innocence, and his first trial in 1972 ended in a conviction despite missteps by prosecutors who lost evidence and delayed forensic testing. The conviction was overturned on the grounds his own defense was ineffective, and in his second trial, in 1982, his lawyers suggested the real killer was Corona’s half brother.
But Corona was convicted a second time and sentenced to life in prison. Less than a year into his sentence, he was stabbed 32 times by inmates . He lost his left eye and was left with a blade permanently lodged behind his right eye.
At a 2011 parole hearing he admitted to the murders for the first time, saying in a rambling statement that the victims were “creeps” and “winos.” Corona died in prison in 2019 at the age of 85.
