Juan Corona died, "The machete killer": he killed 25 farmers and was diagnosed with schizophrenia

Juan Corona, a farm worker who was nicknamed the "machete killer" for killing 25 migrant workers in California – the crimes that made him the worst serial killer in the history of the United States at the time of his conviction in 1973 – He died on March 4 at the age of 85 years.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that Mr. Corona He died in a hospital located outside a Corcoran state prison, where he served 25 life sentences. No cause of death was reported, but he was reported to have dementia.

The murders of Mr. Corona rocked the peaceful farming town of Yuba, California, a community of 14,000 people about 100 miles northeast of San Francisco, where Mr. Corona, from Mexico, lived with his wife and four daughters. His job was to recruit thousands of agricultural workers, many of them are Mexicans, to work in the fields.

The murders were discovered after a fisherman, Goro Kagehiro, who hired Mr. Corona to provide the workers in the field, noticed a hole about 4 feet deep, 5 feet long and 2 feet wide in their Sutter County Orchard on May 19, 1971.

Under the ground was the body of the worker Kenneth Whitacre. Six days later, a second body was found in a shallow grave on a nearby ranch, and a third body was found near the Feather River. Near the third agency, a Commissioner recovered two meat market receipts under the name Juan V. Corona. After the officers unearthed six more bodiesMr. Corona, then aged 37, was arrested on May 26, 1971.

Within a week, the bodies of 25 men were exhumed. All but one, they were hit in the head with a machete or a knifeand many had been stabbed in the upper body. A victim had been shot. All the victims had been hired under Mr. Corona's employment contract or had been seen with him.

In 1987, Mr. Corona was denied parole on eight occasions. When the police searched Mr. Corona's house and truck, they found a machete with a razor blade. 18 inches, a knife for cutting meat, a double blade ax and a wooden stick. There was also a large book containing a list of 34 temporary workers, including several victims. Despite the statements of innocence of Mr. Corona, Prosecutors have called the book of accounts a "list of deceased persons".

Judge Richard E. Patton stated in the 1973 trial that he was "really dismayed" and "almost incredulous" at the awkward process, which has been accused of mistreating the evidence. "At this point," said Patton, "it seems like the research was inept, the preparation ineffective and the inadequate treatment. "

But a lot of circumstantial evidence has been presented against Mr. Corona, and was convicted of 25 counts of murder. A state appellate court quashed his conviction in 1978 on the grounds that his lawyer had committed "joke and mockery" of the trial and was even more incompetent than the prosecution. No defense witnesses were called during the trial.

Less than a year after entering a state prison in Vacaville, Mr. Corona was stabbed 32 times by detaineesHe lost his left eye and a sword lodged permanently behind his right eye. He had three heart attacks while he was incarcerated. His wife, the former Gloria Moreno, divorced in 1974.

In the second trial of Mr. Corona, in 1982, a defense team tried to blame his brother Natividad, who disappeared in Mexico and who was supposed to be dead. Mr. Corona's lawyer stated that the brother had "a rage of mania" "the frustration of a morbid baduality".

Mr. Corona testified at his second trial and denied the charges. The jury heard from more than 200 witnesses during the seven-month proceedings, which cost the state more than $ 5 million. The result was the same as that of the first trial, nine years earlier.: Mr. Corona was convicted of the 25 counts of murder.

Juan Vallejo Corona was born in Autlán, Mexico, on February 7, 1934. He moved from Jalisco, Mexico, to Sutter County with two older brothers in the early 1950s.. He received psychiatric treatment after reporting seeing ghosts.

Mr. Corona was the most prolific mbad murderer known until John Wayne Gacy Jr. was convicted in 1980 of murdering 33 men and boys. He buried most of them under his home in Des Plaines, Illinois. Gacy was executed in 1994 in Illinois, but Mr. Corona was not punishable by death because California's capital punishment law was declared unconstitutional at the time of his trial.

According to news published in 2011, Mr. Corona told a psychiatrist that he had killed these men because he believed that they were "crazy" and that they had entered illegally. Sutter County Assistant US Attorney General, Jana McClung, discussed admission at a prisoner's parole hearing that year and noted that the descriptions of two victims of Mr. Corona did not exactly match the details of the bodies found in shallow pits in 1971.

"I do not know if that means there are others out there"said McClung.