Juan Corona: 'Overwhelmingly' guilty

In 1978, Juan V. Corona's conviction for the murder of 25 transient farm workers was overturned by a state appellate court. Corona, the court concluded, had been inadequately defended by Concord-based attorney Richard Hawk.

Hawk, who was cited 19 times for contempt while acting as Corona's attorney, had made a "farce and a mockery" of procedure, according to the decision. He had failed to call any witnesses, to consider an insanity defense, or present a formal case of any kind on his client's behalf.

Furthermore, Hawk had been more interested in cashing in on a book about the case than he was in defending Corona.

"Burden of Proof," published in 1973 — shortly after the first trial ended — listed its author as Ed Cray, an attorney who had assisted Hawk through the trial. It sold only 20,000 copies, according to an Oakland Tribune article printed just after the second trial got under way in 1982.

But at the time Hawk was supposed to be defending Corona, says Sutter County District Attorney Carl Adams, "he would have known the book would be worth more if he (Corona) was convicted than if he was acquitted."

"That," Adams says, "sort of infected everything."

Hawk told an interviewer from the Oakland Tribune in late February 1982 that he had become a born-again Christian, and admitted that he had taken Corona's case "because I wanted to be famous."

In spite of Corona's inadequate defense, however, the state appeals court noted in its decision to retry him that circumstantial evidence presented at the trial in Solano County did point "overwhelmingly" to the labor contractor's guilt.

Richard Hawk has since died, as have several other attorneys and key players associated with the two Corona trials.

Inconsistent testimony

Adams, who took office in July 1982 — less than four months after the start of the second trial — says extra precautions were taken to relocate as many witnesses as possible from the first trial, to make sure they all were re-interviewed and that their initial testimony was carefully reviewed.

Colusa County Judge Richard Patton, who had presided over the first trial, would do so again.

Patton had accused Hawk of using Corona's brother, Natividad, in an attempt during the first trial to divert focus away from the accused.

Natividad owned the Guadalajara Cafe on First Street in Marysville during the time that a customer, Jose Romero Raya, was brutally attacked there with a machete in 1970.

Raya was permanently disfigured and suffered brain damage as a result of the attack. He initially told the police he never saw who assaulted him.

Later, he accused Natividad and won a $250,000 civil judgment against the bar owner. But he never collected a dime. Natividad is believed to have fled to Mexico to avoid paying Raya. He died there in June 1973.

Later, Raya pointed to Juan Corona as being the man who had butchered him in the cafe's bathroom.

The inconsistent testimony rendered the attack at the Guadalajara Cafe a draw between defenders and prosecutors.

But Raya's name appeared in a ledger recovered by Sutter County detectives during a search of Juan Corona's Richland Road house on May 26, 1971.

Several other names corresponded to identified bodies pulled from beneath the JL Sullivan Ranch in May and June of that year.

To this day, four of those 25 bodies found have not been identified.

Publicity challenges

From the beginning, the second trial was fraught with complications.

As in the first case, pre-trial publicity led to a change of venue — this time to Alameda County.

The 16 regular and alternate jurors in Hayward would ultimately sit through more than seven months of testimony from psychologists, blood test, fingerprint and handwriting experts. The witness lists totaled 175 — mostly for the prosecution.

In addition to reports that jurors stretched, slept, read, worked on crossword puzzles and even whistled during the lengthy proceedings, defense attorneys complained about "hissing" from the jury.

But in the end, evidence surrounding Corona's ledger proved impossible to refute effectively. In September 1982, the unhappy jury convicted Corona.

By then, two more books about the murders had been published, including "Too Much Blood" by Bill Talbitzer, and "The Road to Yuba City: A Journey into the Juan Corona Murders," by Tracy Kidder, who was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for another work. A fourth Corona book, by Victor Villasenor, would be published in 1997.

Numerous Web sites have exaggerated the scope of sex-related evidence in the Corona case. Current claims assert that Corona molested or raped all of his victims and that pornographic literature and photos were found with the bodies. Sex crimes never were part of the charges against the labor contractor, and former Sutter County Sheriff Roy Whiteaker says claims about pornography being found with corpses is patently false.

More victims suspected

Former Sutter County District Attorney Dave Teja says he suspects Corona killed at least 43 men. Resistance on the part of law enforcement authorities in nearby jurisdictions to allow for searches, he says, prevented a genuine accounting of victims.

"They told me, 'we don't want you to bring your damn dog-and-pony show up here,'" Teja says of sheriffs in at least two other counties.

"They didn't want us to find anything there, plain and simple," he says.

He did hear from authorities in Tehama County early on in the case. Just as the body count was climbing into double digits, Sutter County authorities received a call about a body that had been found in the Sacramento River a year earlier.

The body had all the trademark signs to indicate the man had been a Corona victim, according to Teja.

"A fisherman found the body floating on his back," Teja says. "There was sand on his front and there was grass growing out of his armpits."

He had been hacked with a machete or cleaver of some kind.

In his pocket was a pay stub, according to Teja.

The body could not be linked definitively to Corona, though the accused had, in fact, worked as a labor contractor to olive orchards north of Sutter County.

After the first trial, Teja says, a couple living south of Lake Oroville called and reported a suspicious incident.

Their dogs had been upset by something they smelled in a walnut orchard nearby and could not be quieted. Teja's informal investigation found a depression in the ground "typical of a grave."

It was too hard to dig, he says.

"And there wasn't any point because we knew what their attitude was," he says of law enforcement officials. "But there were bodies in Butte County, I'm positive."

'Nothing to live for'

A modest plaque installed at the Sutter Cemetery during the first Juan Corona trial memorializes 14 victims whose bodies were not claimed. The word "unknown" appears four times in the list of names.

The legacy of Corona's unfortunate victims includes a state law that was initiated locally and passed by state legislators in the wake of the Corona trials. It helps small counties like Sutter pay for prosecution of big cases without bankrupting themselves.

The total bill for the Juan Corona case came to $5 million.

During an interview in 1982, Adams says he told Dan Rather that prosecuting Corona, "had cost $100 for every man, woman, and child in the county."

Caps on spending for criminal cases now frees counties from all but a fixed sum, which is determined by a property assessment formula. The state now picks up the rest of the prosecution's tab.

Though Corona has asserted his innocence all along, Adams says transcripts from Corona's last parole hearing included some comments he found interesting.

"Those people had nothing to live for," says Adams, paraphrasing Corona's statement. "They were all ready to go on to the next life."

"It was not quite a confession," says Adams, "but it says he knows something about the victims."

Corona has been denied parole four times, and currently awaits his fifth hearing. That hearing had been originally scheduled for December 2009, but has been postponed twice. Now 76, he is expected to go before the parole board this summer.

An Associated Press article published after his last hearing in August 1998 reported that Corona suffers from Alzheimer's disease, "and remains fascinated by knives."

He had been disciplined four times since a prior hearing in 1993, "once for carrying scissors and another time for taping an Exacto blade to his toothbrush."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com.