The Machete Murderer PT 2

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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st-century lens.

Some are solved and some are cold.

Very cold.

This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Paul, have you been thinking about this case all week?

You love a good serial killer case, I know.

I actually have.

I mean, this is a fascinating case.

Yeah, it is.

Let me go ahead and do a quick summary so we can get back into it.

So,

we have

a story that's set in 1971, California, in Yuba City.

And there are a series of men who have been found brutally murdered with it looks like a meat cleaver knife.

I mean, it seems like it's cutting devices, beaten, just in terrible shape.

And they've been found in what I describe as shallow graves, but you say is pretty impressive, six foot by two to three feet deep.

And they're in orchards.

And they're almost all exclusively, you know, transients, people who work on the orchards, people who don't have families that are following up if they go missing.

And so far, we have these bodies found in two different orchards.

And the consistency is the brutality of the way they were killed, that they are transients, they're all white men.

They all seem to be sort of the same age range, I mean, 40s, 50s, and 60s.

And, you know, there are some interesting characteristics that you've picked up on.

So do you want to talk about that?

Where we've got 12 victims, one assault that happened a year before, that will be key for us.

But do you want to talk about some of the special circumstances around here that are making you come to a particular conclusion so far?

Well, I think when you take a look at all 12 cases of homicide, the victimology is the same.

You know, you have white males.

They all appear to be older.

These are not, you know, teenage boys or younger adults that are being killed.

These white males are generally transient.

They don't appear to have any real financial assets.

So, you know, robbery, financial gain as a matter of committing these crimes does not appear to be the offender's motive.

The offender is specifically utilizing orchards to dispose of the bodies, which is interesting because there could be many places, you know, that the offender could go that are much more remote, probably even easier to dispose of the bodies.

So there's something about the orchards that the offender is comfortable with, or maybe he's sending a message, you know, whatever, whatever it is.

The way all of these victims are killed appears to be reasonably consistent from one case to another.

A knife or other sharp-edged weapon, such as a meat cleaver, has been used in each instance.

There's some

beating, there's some bludgeoning.

There's also, at least in one case, you mentioned, there was strangulation.

But fundamentally,

it all appears to be within the same range of violence inflicted on these victims.

The victims' bodies are being disposed of in grave sites.

And

these are not what I would classify as the typical shallow grave.

When you say that these grave sites are three feet or three and a half feet down, the offender is having to dig that.

That takes time.

That's a lot of earth to move.

And I don't know how compact the, you know, the soil is in these locations, but in my experience, is that

once you get down 18 inches, it becomes harder and harder because the dirt becomes so compact.

Most offenders give up after about 18 inches.

In at least one case, there is evidence that the victim had been killed on the orchard.

There is, you know, a bloody area that the offender had tried to cover up.

And then there was what I imagined was either a dragged or dripped blood trail that went 15 yards over to the grave site.

And though the other cases don't seem to have that evidence, that doesn't mean that the offender didn't do that.

He may have just been better at covering up what I would call the homicide scene versus the body disposal location.

The pattern is consistent.

Some of these victims are showing their clothing, lower body clothing, their genital area being exposed.

This is where I'm keying in on, okay, there's a sexual motivation to these crimes, even though some of the victims are fully clothed.

But I've talked multiple times about how offenders either will redress their victims or allow the victims to redress before they're killed.

And then in the very first case of homicide, you have whether it be a pamphlet or some sort of document that the detective described as homosexual literature.

So, you know, I'm still not sure what to make of that.

From is this something that the offender planted or is this something that that particular victim had and

maybe there was a solicitation that occurred and the offender is a serial predator or the offender is sending a message if the offender is planting that type of literature.

But I think it goes without saying this offender is male.

This offender is attacking other males.

There's a sexual component to these homicides.

There's no financial motivation.

And all the homicide victims that have been discovered to date are white males.

Well, let's talk about the one victim who isn't white and he's the survivor and not someone who's been buried, of course, on an orchard.

And I just want to remind everybody of the details because this assault that happens at this bar cafe restaurant is something that's really key here.

So remember that happened February 25th of 1970 in the middle of the night, 1 a.m.

Jose Romero Rea was beaten in a bathroom in the Guadalajara restaurant cafe.

And, you know, so brutal and awful.

So we now go back to 1970 where that attack happened to Jose

and you know he barely survives it.

Happens in a bathroom.

It's owned by a man.

This cafe is owned by a man named Natividad Corona.

And it sounds like a Natividad is the one who called in the tip

because

according to him, the person who attacked this man, Jose, in the bathroom was Natividad's half-brother, whose name was Juan Corona.

So he's 36 years old.

He's from Mexico originally.

And he is very, very unstable, according to his brother.

So the sequence of events is that Natividad has always been sort of wary of him, even though he said, you can come live with me or live in the area where I am.

I can give you work.

He's been supportive.

But in 1955, so this is 16 years ago, Natividad petitioned for Juan to be committed to a state mental hospital.

And here's why.

After a flood that had drowned 38 people in Sutter County that year, Natividad said that Juan became paranoid and he became delusional.

He believed, Juan believed, that all people in the county had died in this flood, and they were basically coming back as zombies walking the streets.

And he reacted violently, and he was having you know fits of rage.

And so, in 56, he was committed to the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California.

Now, before we get into that, so let me get your reaction here.

So, Juan is the man who nearly killed this man, Jose, a year earlier.

And we'll find out more about Juan.

And as you can guess, yes, he has access to all of this property where these migrant workers are.

Now, the thought is it's not necessarily who did it, because I think it's pretty clear it's Juan.

It's why and what do we believe?

Because you've come up with what I think is a very fair, safe assessment of the motivations of this killer, you know, sexual in motivation.

Obviously, it's not robbery.

It's some kind of gratification.

But Juan's family and Juan and his defense attorneys are going to say, that's not it.

It's completely different.

So that's, I think, where we're headed.

But tell me what you think so far.

Okay.

Well, you know,

it's interesting because I am aware of the Juan Corona case.

I never paid attention to it.

I know the lab that I used to work for out of the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office.

They either did some work on the Corona case or had consulted on the Corona case way back when, right?

When this thing was happening, when bodies were being recovered.

But interesting.

Going back to Jose's Jose's attack, and Natividad is saying that it was Juan that did the attack.

Juan Corona did the attack on Jose in the men's restroom.

You know, that's it's it's interesting.

And you have provided the detail that, I guess, rumors had it, that Natividad was homosexual.

And so, you know, I wonder if Natividad permitted certain homosexual activities to occur occur amongst men in the restroom at that restaurant.

You know, back in the day, I've got at least two vice operations that were focused in on men's restrooms because that was sort of the hookup locations.

And so I'm kind of extrapolating backwards in time, if you will, in terms of where men could engage in sexual activity with other men.

And is there something that happened between Jose and Natividad that Juan took exception to?

Or did Juan approach Jose, you know,

whether it was out in the restaurant or he followed him back into the restroom and then things went sideways?

And then obviously, if Juan's the offender in that case, which sounds like he is, he's armed.

And that may just be part of him.

You know,

I think part of it is when did Juan come into the country?

He may have other cases down in Mexico.

And I've seen this, where you have serial predators that come up into the country and they just continue committing the same crimes they were doing down in Mexico.

But authorities up in the United States have no idea, you know, that these guys are serial predators.

So that's, you know, one of the thoughts that I have.

And then you get into the

psychiatric assessment, where now Natividad is

indicating that after this flood, flood, Sutter County, 38 people killed, that Juan became paranoid and violent.

And

generally, this would be indicative of what I would call the psychotic offender.

And the psychotic offender is truly mentally ill.

And

for

whatever their mindset is,

they are resorting to violence.

And the most notable example I can give is the vampire killer out of Sacramento, Richard Trenton Chase,

truly a psychotic offender.

And it's a horrific series of crimes that he committed.

The problem that I'm running into is the crimes in the orchards.

There is

an organized element to these crimes.

They are pre-planned.

The offender is covering up up for his crimes.

He's burying the bodies.

He's

purposely selecting victims that really aren't going to be missed.

Nobody's going to report them.

He is showing a level of mental acuity that I would not attribute to a psychotic offender.

So I call into question Natevidad's assessment.

of his half-brother.

He's not an expert.

You know, this is where I'd want a true forensic forensic psychiatrist doing an assessment of Juan to determine, is there a mental issue there?

He sounds like an organized serial predator that is completely aware of right versus wrong and is committing crimes that he wants to commit.

Well, we have several routes to go, and you tell me what's the most efficient way.

I can skip down into details from the trial that explains Natividad's activities, if that feeds it all into some sort of, I don't know, anti-homosexual rage or whatever that would be.

But, you know, he is not simply a gay man.

There's other stuff that happens.

And I can also tell you that

in 53,

1953, when Juan was 18, then he immigrated from, illegally, from Mexico to California.

So when when you were asking about Mexico, is there anything happening back in Mexico?

He was 18.

So, you know, when he came to California,

and he followed Netfedad, they were very close.

You know, we also have more bodies.

I will tell you a total of 25.

And we also have sort of the way he was busted to begin with.

He has a wife and kids.

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So it sounds like his brother had called and tipped off the police.

In 1956.

So Juan followed Natividad here in 1953 when he was 18.

So in 1956, Natividad has him committed.

He went to the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, and he was giving thorazine and shock treatment until he was quote unquote cured.

It didn't work.

Well, obviously not.

It sounds like it pissed him off even more.

Well, you know, this is where, you know, thorazine is basically a sedative, you know, and of course you see these electroshock.

treatments, you know, basically barbaric types of treatments for people that are suffering from mental health issues within these types of settings.

I've heard of the DeWitt State Hospital.

I'm not sure it still exists.

Of course, I'm very familiar with Auburn, California.

But, I mean, we are talking, this is now 15 years

before

these cases there in Yuba.

You have Natividad is the one that is basically saying Juan has got mental issues.

and the state takes him in and then starts giving him these treatments.

Right.

This is where, you know, what type of professional evaluation had actually occurred on Juan during this timeframe?

And how old is Juan at this point?

Is he in his early 20s?

He is 21 when he's committed to DeWitt.

Okay.

So on one hand, the paranoia aspect, you know, this is where I start wondering, is he starting to develop schizophrenia which early 20s is when you start to see some of those types of symptoms i just have trouble resolving

somebody who is suffering from schizophrenia and then 15 years later is what I would consider a very organized offender.

That's where I'm questioning the early assessment of Juan's mental health.

Well, and let me tell you about the next 15 years.

So he gets out in 56.

He got out the same year that he was committed.

After his release, he seems to get it together.

He became a licensed labor contractor.

He was hiring mostly Mexican migrant laborers to staff all of these orchards and farms.

And some of these workers had been hired to tend to the peach orchard, right?

So, you know, Juan has access, obviously.

He also contracted labor for Sullivan Ranch.

And for that job, he drove a 1971 Chevrolet panel van, yellowish color, as we suspected.

There you go.

I mean, I will tell you, of course, they say it matched the mold, the track mold.

It's sort of a moot point at this point.

Okay.

So they think that they have enough information to charge Juan Corona with this, with at least one of these crimes.

So they surprise him early morning, May 26th.

So the first body was discovered on the 19th.

So this is pretty quick.

This is seven days.

They find 27 items.

They grab him, find 27 items there.

Two foot rusty crowbar with some possible bloodstains.

A pothole digger with possible bloodstains.

Mud and hair on digging portion.

Two pairs of men's shorts in a leather bag, one with bloodstains.

Two and a half foot wooden club with possible bloodstains.

There was an axe, a hatchet, a hoe, three butcher knives, a meat cleaver, and a bolo machete.

God, I mean, this is beyond a kill kit.

They also take six nine millimeter Luger shells, some business papers, check stubs, a checkbook, and a ledger.

And the ledger, they said, will become known as the murder book.

So they pounded the van, as well as an Impala sedan.

They find red hair in the trunk, black belt, and two throw rugs, and they find red stains that they think could be blood, one sample of a red stain from the rear of the van.

They confiscate rubber boots from the van.

And I think the red hair is significant just because it doesn't belong in their car, it sounds like.

And they're trying to connect all of these victims.

At the Sullivan Ranch, they confiscate two knives.

One is an eight-inch blade stamped Tennessee toothpick.

Okay.

Has blood stains on the guard.

And then the last inch of the blade has two hooks that are designed to tear the bottom of a wound.

What I'm envisioning is

you have a blade, and then you have sort of these ancillary hooks at the base of the blade.

So, if you stab that knife all the way in, let's say you're hunting or you're committing a homicide, if you get that knife blade down in there, you're able to maybe even twist the knife.

And then those hooks are going to grab the margins, and you're, in essence, doing more damage to the wound itself, maybe to increase the lethality of that stab.

That's awful.

And then

moving on, there's a hunting knife and there is also a 9mm Browning automatic pistol.

Everything has blood on it.

Now, we haven't heard about anybody being shot yet, but it's all covered in blood.

So he gets arrested, of course.

I would say contrary to my initial assessment, you know, the fact that he's got all of this stuff, all this evidence in his possession or under his control in some capacity, it's bloody, he's not getting rid of it, he's not hiding it, it can be easily traced back to him.

That, in my mind, is, you know, suggestive of somebody that's really not thinking everything through.

And this is where I kind of go.

Technically,

it's now an antiquated model that the FBI's original behavioral analysis unit used to use, but the organized versus the disorganized offender.

And, you know, your truly psychotic offender, like a Richard Trenton Chase, is disorganized.

He's not even trying to do any type of self-preservation.

He's just wandering around and killing people.

An organized offender is somebody like a Ted Bundy, who is trying to commit crimes, is planning the crimes, is getting away with the crimes, is covering up, trying to

keep offending and not getting caught.

I would say that Juan Corona is demonstrating what's considered mixed.

He's got some disorganized aspects, all these bloody weapons and other items of physical evidence that he's not getting rid of or trying to hide or anything.

But then he is showing a level of planning

as well as

trying to cover his tracks

in terms of victim selection and disposal of the victims' bodies, etc.

So he's probably falling into this mixed offender category.

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Well, when he's arrested, his public defender arranges for him to be examined by a guy named Dr.

Joseph Catan.

So his defense attorney arranges for him to be examined by this psychiatrist who's from Los Altos.

And his name is Dr.

Joseph Canton.

He says that Juan Corona has continued to hallucinate.

And he says that Juan has schizoid personality disorder.

And other psychiatrists say that he has psychosis, schizophrenia, and paranoia.

So that's the defense.

And then, of course, the prosecutor has a whole other idea.

And this is where, with other cases, you have a true psychotic offender.

And I use the term psychotic indicating there is a real and significant mental illness going on where now you have a defense of insanity.

This person does not know right from wrong.

Those types of individuals, when they commit crimes, it's very obvious.

They are completely out of it.

There is no attempt to cover up their tracks.

That's not what we're seeing with Wall and Corona.

That's where I'm having a problem with that type of assessment.

I think Corona knows right from wrong.

Why is he burying the bodies?

Because he wants to hide what he has done.

He knows it's wrong.

I don't doubt that there's maybe there's a level of some mental health aspects, but he is not on the order of a truly disorganized psychotic offender.

Okay.

Well, let's see what the defense has to say.

First, we do have some more information from the field because they're, of course, continuing to search.

There's another tip back on the first ranch, the Peach Ranch, they had seen Corona, Juan Corona around this area.

Of course, you know, he was there, I'm sure, all the time because he's hiring workers, but they had actually seen him near the peach tree orchard around 10 o'clock one night in January of 71.

And, you know, this is like maybe really specifically kind of scoping out stuff, but also we have so many bodies, total of 25, I told you, that we don't even know when he...

would have started this.

So that might have been the first night.

We don't know.

They find two more graves belonging to a 55-year-old man and a 54-year-old man in the northern part of the peach tree orchards.

One of the two men, his body is buried with scattered trash like grass clippings, fabric, broken mirror, child stocking, glass holders, anything like that.

Now, Paul, one last thing.

There are bank deposit slips addressed to Juan Corona in this man's grave that they find June 4th.

All right.

So these are Juan Corona's.

It's his bank account.

Bank deposit slips.

That could be an accident.

Well, that would be my first thought.

You know, because you throw a body in the trunk of a Chevy van, or I shouldn't say trunk, but the back of a Chevy van, you pull the body out.

The body's been bleeding.

You know, yeah, things stuck to the bloody aspects of the body.

And those things could be bank deposit slips that I imagine Juan Corona is not the neatest individual, and the back of this van probably looked like a junkyard.

He's probably completely unaware that he's leaving basically his ID card.

You know, I'm the killer with this body.

There's a long shot chance that he purposely left those sort of as a as a taunt.

You'll never catch me.

But you basically just made law enforcement's job very easy by having your name and bank account

with the body.

So I don't know.

I think it's more accidental.

It sounds accidental because he actually seemed to have done a decent job covering it up.

You know, I mean, it was lucky that they found the shallow grave to begin with on the first one.

And it just sort of went one to the other to the other.

But he's going to be charged with first-degree murder for 25 murders.

And who knows how many others there are out there?

So the trial starts September 11th, 1972.

So listen to this.

I hadn't heard this before.

So he is with a defense attorney named Richard Hawk, who is really well known.

And he gets the public defender booted out and he steps in in exchange for Hawk, the defense attorney, being given exclusive literary and dramatic rights to Juan Corona's story.

So he gets a kick-ass lawyer, but he's selling all of his rights, which I'm sure at that point Juan was going, you can do whatever you want.

Sure.

They move the trial because Richard Hawk, the defense attorney, says there's a lot of anti-Mexican sentiment in Yuba City.

So it goes to Fairfield, California, which is 75 miles away.

I know Fairfield very well.

There you go.

Well, I imagine you know most of those places very well.

There you go.

I lived in Fairfield at one point.

Did you?

And yeah, and the town I lived in, Vaccinville, is a twin city to Fairfield.

I was in Fairfield all the time.

Oh, well, then I don't know if it's the same courthouse, but he was there.

It would be.

Well, this seems like an open and shut case.

It does to you and I.

But the prosecutor has made a lot of missteps, unfortunately.

The biggest issue is that all the evidence going into trial is circumstantial in nature, but they do not test the blood on any of Corona's knives for a match with any of the victims, even a blood typing match.

You know, they don't do any of that.

So he could have said, I killed all kinds of animals.

What are you going to do about it?

You know, and they didn't find things with him that were souvenirs, I don't think, of the victims or whatever.

So there was an issue there.

And that's what when the prosecutor is starting to get nervous.

They also don't turn in some reports to the defense.

And, you know, that becomes a problem.

There are a lot of mix-ups.

They're having a really hard problem.

And I had to talk to Allison, the researcher, about this because it was confusing to both of us.

So everybody is mislabeling these victims.

We have several John Does and they can't figure out

should we be labeling them in the order that they were found or the order that we think they were killed the circumstances or the different orchards so even though that seems kind of stupid and silly with a jury or even with a judge it's problematic because it looks so haphazard and it's confusing to people well you know this is where you know the da is going to charge murder in those cases that they feel that they can prove murder and so you have all these victims and so the question that i would be wondering because i i know nothing about how they proceeded with prosecution, is that did they charge all, what was it, 25, 26?

25 with first-degree murder.

So they have 25 first-degree murder charges, but these cases all have a spectrum of evidence from probably none to significant, like a bank deposit with Juan Corona's name and bank account on there.

Yep.

You know, so this is where, you know, maybe there was

a misstep on the prosecutor's office going, well, we know that he did all of these.

But the problem is, is that each murder has to stand by itself.

And that may be where that, I mean, when you when you charge a very, very weak murder case in a series like this, well, that gives the defense an opening.

And if they can, you know, basically undo the juror's confidence that one was involved in, let's say, John Doe number two,

then they can make an argument.

Well, hell, can we trust the prosecution and what they're presenting in these other cases?

Well, this is, I mean, for lack of a better term, a complete fuck-up from beginning to end.

You're right.

They have so much evidence, 25, I guess if you want to be specific, different crime scenes, you know, all these different graves.

They mix everything up.

They remove the fingertips as part of biological evidence from, I don't know if it's all the victims, but several of them.

They totally screw that up.

They can't figure out what fingertips go with what body at this point.

They lose, I know, so it gets worse.

They lose the cast of the tracks taken near the first grave site.

Remember, it was truck tracks, which to me is not make or break, but it's indicative of how sloppy this is.

And it's not going to look good for a judge and jury.

They mislabel shoe prints, sewer impresses, they mislabel those casts.

The forensic details, once they're brought into the case, don't seem particularly damning.

So what they're saying is that the cigarette butt found in one of the men's graves, they applied a little-known technique in typing dried blood to bodily fluids other than blood, like saliva.

So I did this work, you know, very early on in my career, you know, the ABO testing.

And

like for blood bank aspects, you can go ahead and do your ABO testing directly from the blood.

But when you start dealing with dried stains, you now have to do different techniques.

And if it's a blood stain, we would do what's called an absorption elution technique in order to be able to determine the ABO type.

Something like with semen, we would have to go to an absorption inhibition.

So it's without going into details, and quite frankly, I'm not sure I could get into the details because it's very esoteric.

You know, it's been too long since I've been there, but it's somewhat of an indirect way of determining the ABO type of a person who secretes their ABO substance into their semen or their saliva.

So this technique, this is, it was evolving in the 1970s.

I was doing it in 1994, you know, so it was a little bit more mature when I was doing it versus the forensic scientists who were doing it back in the day.

And, you know, quite frankly, you know, the training program, the competency aspect of what they were doing, I tell agencies today, you know, that have cases from this era, I say, you absolutely just throw out the old, what we would call conventional serology testing.

Don't worry about what they found on their ABO testing, you know,

whatever technique they used or secrete a status aspect.

Just use modern DNA if you still have evidence.

Yeah.

Well, listen to what Dr.

Ruth Guy says, and you tell me what you think.

So they have established that this is the technique they're going to use.

She said she was able to determine the ABO blood type of the smoker who they presumed is the killer.

which I don't know if that's a give me or not.

It was a butt that was found in the grave, but what if you used dirt that had the butt already in it?

Right.

She testified that she was able to determine the ABO blood type of the smoker if they were among 78% of the population known as secreters.

So the cigarette was smoked by someone who had an O-type blood, and neither the person

who was in the grave or Juan Corona had O.

They were both A.

And there was blood on the gun barrel.

You know, there was only one person who was shot.

And the blood on the gun barrel was type O

and the guy who was shot was a type A.

So they're coming up with these things and none of it points to Juan Corona, except he had the weapons.

Yes.

Well, as I just mentioned, I don't put any weight on that ABO testing at all.

And when you start talking about type O,

I mean, that throws in a whole other can of worms in terms of interpreting these types of results.

I mean, it sounds like with things being mislabeled, things being lost,

you have CSIs in over their head.

You know, this is an unusual case.

I mean, think about the number of gray sites, the number of bodies that they're finding in rapid order.

I've never worked a case like that.

And I've got more experience than most

across the nation in terms of big cases and complex cases.

And then you think about a smaller agency, you know, and often Yuba is serviced by California DOJ,

So that's the laboratory system that it's a statewide laboratory system that Yuba would be using.

And California DOJ has Kremlis and very experienced Kremlis that go out to help these smaller agencies.

So part of my assessment on what went wrong in terms of the evidence in this case, did they pull in?

the state level Kremlis on this or were they relying on Yuba Sheriff's CSIs or Yuba City CSIs?

You know, small county, small town, and they're in over their heads.

But even if you bring in the state, you're kind of inventing as you go along.

You know, so you could be very experienced, doesn't necessarily excuse some of the mislabeling or loss of evidence.

You know, that shouldn't happen.

I think right now, this is where trying to assess the prosecution's case, case, it's getting to where they were dealing with what they had back in the 1970s and to present to a jury, you know, this innovative ABO testing off of saliva from cigarette butts that I will tell you probably was not adequately validated compared to how scientific methodologies in forensic labs are validated today.

I just put no weight on it, you know, and secreter status, golden stay stay killer.

I went to the very first task force meeting back in 2011 when we reconvened down in Santa Barbara.

And I told them, all these guys that were eliminated based on secretor status back in the 1970s, throw it out.

Let's track them down again and get.

a sample that we can do modern DNA on.

So that's, you know, that's, that's what's, you know, kind of catching my attention.

I mean, I think there's, you know, there's no question that Juan Corona is the killer in this case.

It's now, okay, what did the investigative aspect do right?

What did they do wrong?

How strong was the people's case against Juan Corona?

And how did the defense, you know, attack that case, that strategy?

What was the defense's strategy?

Okay, here we go.

The prosecutor cannot give a motive.

So he closes by basically saying that a team of 10 psychiatrists could work years on a man who has done something just like this and still not not come up with the answer.

We know juries love theory shit like that.

We don't know what happened.

Yeah, but I want to point out, I mean, at the time of this case, the term serial killer had never been used.

So this is where, you know, they had the term lust killer, you know, going back at least to the 1950s where, you know, investigators.

uh understood that there was a type of predator out there that was sexually motivated but now in this particular case, where

I mean, it's obvious to me, but for them, you know, they couldn't go after the evidence.

Let's say you have these men whose genitalia are exposed and everything else.

It'd be a simple collection technique and doing DNA and showing, oh, there was sexual interaction between Juan Corona and this victim.

But they didn't have that and they didn't understand truly what the serial predator was until you had, you know, the FBI's, this is the John Douglas, Bob Ressler, Dr.

Ann Burgess, and I've got all their books behind me.

You know, this is where authorities just really didn't understand the serial predator in the early 1970s.

And so for a prosecutor to say, well, we don't know what the motive is, it's obvious what the motive is.

You know, there's a sexual component, there's a fantasy component, and there may have been a mission-oriented component with Juan Corona.

Well, let me tell you, the defense really goes after Juan Corona's brother.

Okay.

So this is a switch up here.

So, you know, Nut Tibodad was the one who turned in or tipped the sheriff off that his brother had just attacked this man terribly in his cafe a year earlier.

So here's what the defense says.

And this is a smart strategy.

The number one thing is they said this prosecutor has no idea what he's doing.

They're incompetent.

And, you know, there were some witnesses who said some of these men were definitely getting into Juan Corona's truck, except the witnesses were off with the color.

And he had a couple of different kinds of vehicles.

So, you know, they meticulously went through each witness and essentially discredited what the witnesses said.

And of course, the fingertip mix-ups and everything else.

But here's the big thing.

The new information that they had not heard yet was that they are taking the suspicion off of Juan and putting it on Natividad.

And what they say is because several victims' pants were down and their penises were exposed, the defense attorney Hawk says the killer was what's called passivo homosexual.

And there is an expert who is going to take the stand who's an expert on homosexuality who's a doctor.

And this is what Mr.

Hawk says.

The expert, Evelyn Hooker, who's this doctor, will tell you that there is nothing, the ultimate act of humiliation, degradation to a Mexican man, the ultimate act of losing his machismo, is to play the role of the female in a sexual encounter.

She will tell you that these men are driven by masochistic tendencies, either to have pain inflicted upon them or be degraded, that underneath all of this masochistic tendency is a boiling, bellowing rage, and that it is not uncommon for all of the passivo homosexual to suddenly turn in a homicidal rage to destroy or mutilate the man that he has just had intercourse with.

And then he says in what is a, I'm sure to be a classic line, the same expert will also tell you that Juan Corona is hopelessly heterosexual.

Now, the question is, we're pretty certain that Juan Corona is responsible for this.

Is he setting his brother up?

Or is there something like what we've been talking about, a very, you know, conscious or subconscious element of sexual whatever about Juan Corona?

So which one is it?

You know, first,

everything that this

Dr.

Hooker, Evelyn Hooker,

when you take the totality of the series and what's going on, that just does not line up with what we know today as the predator.

There's, you know, questions that I would have that, you know, I know we don't have answers to.

However,

when I think about all the details that I can recollect that you've told me, this completely falls in line with a predator that is actively seeking out victims of a certain type and is sexually interacting with them at some level that we don't know what that level is because they didn't.

collect the evidence and didn't document appropriately for what today's standards would be

to say that Juan Corona is heterosexual and to make a defense, well, therefore, he's not responsible for this sexual humiliation of these white men victims.

I mean, that's from my perspective, that's ludicrous.

Basically, you have a predator that is seeking self-gratification.

That self-gratification includes a sexual component, includes the violence component, it includes the idea of being able to get away with these crimes, committing these crimes

on locations that the predator has familiarity with.

Juan Crona has an anchor point

in these orchards from a geographic profiling standpoint.

He's choosing victims that he knows he can victimize and kill, and nobody's going to basically report anybody missing.

No loved ones are out there because of these, you know, the transient nature of who these victims are.

I mean, he's just showing all the classic characteristics of an organized offender.

As I mentioned before, I think he's mixed.

There's some disorganized aspects to him, but he is out there committing crimes for self-gratification and wants to continue to commit these crimes.

Well, here's what's interesting to me about the defense.

You know, they don't go down the mental illness road because Hawke believes, the defense attorney believes that, you know, this obviously is admitting that he did something wrong.

So he thought this is a more viable defense.

So what he says, I'm going to try to shorthand this.

So Hawk essentially says, accuses Natividad Corona of just about everything under the sun.

And I don't know what's verified and what's not.

I do know that he was a member of the Guadalajara police in the 50s, but he was dismissed for fraud and homosexuality.

In 1968, he had contracted syphilis,

and these charges follow Natifidad to the cafe that he owned, because there was an anonymous writer to the Alcohol Beverage Commission that said that Natividad will corrupt any minor who enters this restaurant.

He sweet talks them and gets them drunk.

And in 71, that year, he was accused by the Jalisco police of kidnapping and possibly murdering a young boy.

boy.

The defense says that Natividad is the one who killed all of these people when he was in a rage caused by the syphilis that he had.

So this is what they're trying to do.

They're saying Juan Caron is a family man.

He's got a wife and four daughters.

He goes to church every week.

He's a good boss, according to everybody.

Now, here's one issue, Paul.

Jose, the man who was almost killed, right, by Juan, he changes his story.

I have no idea, multiple times.

He actually says that Nativodad was his attacker in 1970.

It wasn't his brother Juan.

And just as Nativodad had tried to frame, you know, his brother, the defense said he was happy to have him take the fall again.

And so this is all Nativodad's doing.

Well, I think it's interesting.

You know, and this is where

today we could answer this question.

Yeah.

So Natividad, it's very possible

that he has committed some violent acts against males, maybe young males.

And his half-brother,

Juan, is also committing homicidal acts against men.

Criminalities does seem to run in families.

We've seen this over and over and over again.

Any law enforcement agency, you go into them and say, okay,

who's responsible for a majority of your crimes in your city?

And you'll see they'll point out select families and go, this family is the biggest pain in the ass in this jurisdiction.

And it's the grandfather, it's the father, it's the son, it's the grandkid.

They're all committing crimes.

You know, in terms of Natividad having a criminal past, it does not give me any pause about.

you know, Juan's involvement in the crimes that he's been charged with.

And now you think about, okay, let's let's take, let's do a little bit of offender profiling.

You know, did Natividad have the same connections to the orchards that Juan has?

Does Natividad have the same connection to the victims that Juan has?

All the bloody weapons and everything else.

Who had possession of those?

Was it in Natividad's possession?

Was it Juan's possession?

Did Natividad have access to Juan's, you know, wherever these weapons were located at?

You know, so I think as we go down and try to evaluate all the cases between

these two relatives, Natividad and Juan,

things seem to stack up on Juan and not on Natividad.

Now, maybe there's an argument that Natividad, being maybe a very organized, intelligent offender, is over time constantly trying to set up Juan, you know, and is doing everything he can to have the case go against Juan.

It just doesn't seem like that would be the situation.

You know, I think the defense was smart to point fingers at Natividad because that is going to cause the jury to go, huh?

You know, and who knows about, you know, the attack in Natividad's restaurant.

You know, maybe Natividad did that attack, but it doesn't, you know, negate Juan's association.

with these other homicide cases out in the orchards.

And think about what's actually documented, which is Juan going to a mental health facility years earlier.

I mean, it's not like Natividad put him in in 69 or even 70.

This was, I think it was 53, so long ago for delusional thoughts and then acting out violently.

And that's documented.

He is in this facility.

So there are records that show that.

Well, it's showing, you know, it most certainly is showing Juan's past, but you still have to prove the case.

You know, these murder charges.

I mean, these cases need, you have to have the evidence that is contemporaneous with each of those cases.

You can't say, well, this guy was in a mental health facility 15 years ago.

So therefore, he's responsible for these murders.

You have to have the evidence for those murders in order to prove the case.

Now, maybe during sentencing, you know, the jury would hear about Juan's past, both pros and cons in terms of why his sentence should be longer or shorter, depending on prosecution versus defense.

And that's just where, you know, right now, I'm not doubting Juan's involvement in the homicides.

But if there is any controversy over that, and I don't know if there is or not, you know, if they still have the evidence, I think it would be easy to prove with modern technology.

Well, there didn't appear to be controversy in 1972 when he went on trial because he was convicted on all 25 counts.

Not quite case closed because of something I mentioned earlier.

Just so we know, Hawk, the defense attorney, was really annoying to me.

And he was good to know.

He was sentenced to six months in jail in 73, a year later for tax evasion.

So there you go.

You know,

I know that name, Richard Hawk, and I'm not sure it's because of the Corona case or if there's something else that he got involved with.

But that one, that Richard Hawk sounds familiar to me.

It probably does.

He said later on, I only took the case because I wanted to be famous.

Okay.

Great.

It's just what you want in a defense attorney.

So there are appeals that happen.

And in 78, an appeals court, California appeals court says that Richard Hawk gave him an incompetent defense because they said, what about the insanity defense?

What about mental, you know, incompetency?

And they said that, you know, Hawk made a big mistake.

And of course, Hawk said, well, you know, you got to pick your horse and ride it.

So this is what the appeal court says.

The trial counsel for appellant failed to raise the obvious alternative defenses of mental incompetence and diminished capacity or legal insanity.

The trial counsel failed to present any meaningful defense at all.

After a lengthy trial lasting several months, in which the prosecutor produced more than 100 lay and expert witnesses and put an immense amount of wealth of documentary evidence forward, the defense counsel failed to call a single witness on his client's behalf and submitted the case basically upon the evidence produced by the prosecution.

I don't know.

He shot a shot.

Well, all he did was cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses.

Yeah.

So,

you know, yeah, maybe there is a

valid, you know, valid incompetence, you know, for Juan Corona, you know, in terms of the initial trial.

Did he get retried?

Was it remanded?

Listen to this.

So, yes, he was going to get a retrial.

In the interim, he has a heart attack in prison, and he is stabbed 32 times by inmates at the California medical facility in Vacaville.

He loses sight and one eye, survives it, obviously.

He allegedly confesses to three murders, not of transient workers, and then recants.

And then he does go on trial.

In 82, there's a second trial in Hayward, California.

The defense does not argue mental incompetence.

They, again, do the same thing.

And this isn't hawk this time.

They say that Natividad, who is dead at this point, has carried out the killings and a rage related to his homosexuality.

At least we're past the syphilis part.

This time, Juan takes the stand.

He claims his innocence, but he's again convicted.

25 concurrent life sentences, and he dies in 2019.

It's very, not very long ago.

No, yeah, I didn't realize that.

Yeah.

The CMF, vacaville was my rear neighbor for part of my life

well he was there

well so is ed kemper so is charles man oh my gosh you know this was sort of the clearinghouse for anybody that potentially had some mental issues i mean you have many many of the serial killers initially went to cmf vacaville to be evaluated before they ended up being distributed into the prison system that was appropriate for their their housing.

So, you know, Juan Corona would have been my rear neighbor for

part of my life for sure.

I think it would be interesting to evaluate the physical evidence today with modern technology just to see

what's going on.

I really don't have any questions that Juan Corona, you know, about Juan Corona and his involvement in these 25 cases.

Natividad, I think, is potentially just being used as a scapegoat.

And he may have his own criminal history that could include significant violence.

But, you know, I just, I'm not seeing how Natividad could set Juan up at the level of, you know, whether you call it circumstantial or not.

I mean, it's a pretty significant case against Juan Corona.

And

I think I'm pretty satisfied that the right guy was serving time for these 25 murders.

So he was in for 46 years.

Yeah.

Sometimes I think, okay, what do we take away from this case?

And I actually am not quite sure, except the constant reminder to me that there are people who fall through the cracks.

Like, I didn't even tell you this.

One of the victims, his wife was notified, your ex-husband's dead.

What do we do with the body?

And she said, I don't care.

So, I mean, that I think was a very common theme, with the exception of maybe one or two of these men, 25 people.

And then Jose, I don't know what Jose's thinking, flipping.

I mean, maybe you're right.

Maybe Net Tividad is a suspect in that.

I don't know.

Well, I think with Jose,

you think about the,

I mean, traumatic brain injury, TBI.

In terms of memory recall, you know, individuals that suffer that, it's difficult to put a lot of veracity on their memory because it's been shown.

They just either they completely have amnesia.

They go, I last remember, let's say with Jose, I last remember opening the bathroom door, you know, and then he's, you know, attacked, you know, a minute later or two minutes later, he has no memory because of the traumatic brain injury.

So it's kind of tough to say, okay, he changed the story and now it's Natividad.

That's that it's his attacker.

I don't think I would put a lot of weight on that.

I think, you know, my takeaway, and it really, I think you're right, is, I mean, you think about this, you have 25 men.

This is where, you know, most of the cases that I've dealt with involving serial predators are women and children.

And now you do see where you do have a vulnerable male victim, this transient population that Juan Corona was able to take advantage of.

And he was able to kill a lot of men.

I don't know exactly the time span, but it's within a year or two years,

you know, in terms of those cases that are ending up in the orchard.

Who knows what, you know, what other cases he was involved with.

You know, so it doesn't matter who you are in terms of your own characteristics.

You know, you can become a victim if a predator targets you.

And you just have to be aware of that and take steps to try to avoid

making yourself vulnerable.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And as a subset of that, I would say I'm thrilled that the alternate suspect, Natividad, and his homosexuality seem to play no part in two different trials, where it absolutely could have in the 70s and 1982.

So at least that didn't work.

But yeah, I mean, this case, I know you like serial killer cases, but it, and they're not for entertainment for me.

It is for figuring these kinds of things out.

You know, how do you get away with something?

What is what are we doing as a society to fail people so that there is somebody who can come as a predator and take advantage of these people?

And we find out every week, I think.

Yeah, no, and that's just it.

There is a, what's that term, white soft underbelly, if you will, that predators can focus in on, you know, and nobody pays attention.

And the reality is, is since the 1970s, with all the security changes and technology advancements, you know, it's a lot harder for offenders to go after victims that have strong associations within society, whether it be with family or they work or whatever else.

And I always say predators go to where the prey's at.

And where's the prey?

It's the prey.

The prey is those people that if something happens to them, Nobody notices.

Well, next week, let's see what ends up happening.

It'll be, I'm sure, a very different case.

But, you know, and hopefully we'll be going back.

I need to go backwards a little bit, I think.

Take a break from the 70s.

This is a lot of 70s for me.

But next week, we'll have something totally new, so I'm looking forward to it, Paul Holes.

As always, Kate, thank you very much for this.

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Research by Allison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Toliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Deco the Criminal Mind, is available now.

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