Death in the Orchards

The sheriff's deputies were digging at the four-foot level when they unearthed a human toe; soon they had dug up the whole body. Then last week a farm hand working on a nearby ranch spotted a suspicious-looking mound. The sheriff's men went back to work and quickly came up with a second corpse. That touched off a thorough search of the orchard country around Yuba City, Calif., a normally placid town (pop. 13,986) on the Feather River 45 miles north of Sacramento. Using shovels and finally a tractor with a scoop, the deputies turned up body after body; by late last week, continuing a crescendo of horror, they had found 21 bodies--mostly of middle-aged white itinerant farm workers, all of them apparently hacked to death with a heavy knife like a machete.

Police arrested a Mexican-born farm-labor contractor named Juan Corona, 37, married and the father of four daughters, but they were by no means sure that they had come to the end of the trail of bodies. They evidently discovered some of the corpses by checking out X marks on a crude map found in Corona's Bible. "I don't know where it's going to stop," said Sutter County Sheriff Roy Whiteaker. "We'll keep digging until we quit finding bodies." That could take some time. In Tehama County, 70 miles to the north, Sheriff Lyle Williams said the Yuba City murders strongly resembled the unsolved slaying of an unidentified man who had been dead about three months when his body turned up on a bank of the Sacramento River in January 1970. Corona had been in the area with a work crew in the late fall of 1969.

Grisly Mess. The grim series of discoveries in Yuba City began one morning two weeks ago, when Goro Kagehiro, a Japanese-American grower who has orchards just north of town, glanced down between two rows of peach trees and noticed a freshly dug hole about the size of a grave. When he returned that evening, the hole had been completely covered up. Uneasy, he came back next day with the deputies, who soon found the first dead man. What followed turned into a grisly mess that outranks the more gruesome mass murders of the recent American past: the 1966 killing of 16 by Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower sniper; the gunning down of 13 people in Camden, N.J., by berserk Howard Unruh in 1949; the murder of eight student nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck five years ago. The Yuba City murders, like the 1969 Sharon Tate killings, had a special dimension of monstrosity. The murders were apparently executed systematically over a two-month period, so it was not simply a matter of a man gone suddenly berserk. Sheriff Whiteaker said of Corona: "We are sure that he committed the murders."

Exemplary Father. The public case against Corona left many questions unanswered. The dead men were believed to be drifters, some from as far away as Baton Rouge, La., and Atlanta. Corona specialized in recruiting short-term farm-labor crews principally from among the Skid Row winos of Yuba City or neighboring Marysville. Corona collected them in an old blue school bus with his name lettered on the side; the first victim reported missing, Sigrid Beierman, also known as Pete Peterson, was last seen about six weeks ago being driven away by a Mexican labor contractor.

Although Corona had no criminal record in Sutter County, in 1956 he spent three months in De Witt State Hospital, a nearby mental institution, after being committed by his brother Natividad; two doctors tentatively diagnosed his illness as schizophrenia. He was released as "cured." A year ago, he and Natividad were defendants in a civil suit filed in Yuba County by one Jose Raya; Raya won $250,000 in damages against Natividad for an attack, apparently with a machete. No judgment was entered against Juan. Police believe Natividad fled to Mexico two months ago. The Rev. Joseph Bishop of St. Isidore's Church, who said he has known Juan Corona for six years, called him "an exemplary father and a fine Christian."

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