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发帖数: 901 | 1 A California man who once was the nation's worst known serial killer is up
for parole, four decades after the mutilated bodies of 25 farmworkers were
unearthed in orchards north of Sacramento.
Juan Corona, 77, and has been diagnosed with dementia and mental illness. He
is making his seventh bid for parole from Corcoran State Prison in the
southern Central Valley.
None of his victims' relatives were expected to attend Monday's hearing,
which Sutter County District Attorney Carl Adams said is a sad testament to
Corona's crime, which targeted people who had few relatives.
"We have had no contact with survivors for two decades now. The people who
he killed were farm laborers who were itinerant. Most of them didn't have
relatives who could be contacted back in the '70s at the time of trial,"
Adams said.
Four of the bodies have never been identified. The bodies of 14 of Corona's
victims were never claimed by family members after they were discovered in
1971.
"Not even a single person has family here," Corona told a prison
psychologist before his parole was last denied in 2003. "They were all ready
to go to the next world."
Corona, a farm labor contractor with a history of mental illness, was
convicted of stabbing the men, hacking open their heads and burying their
remains near Yuba City, 40 miles north of Sacramento.
His attorney, Leon Harris III of Bakersfield, declined to comment before the
hearing.
His first conviction in 1973 was overturned on appeal, but he was convicted
again in 1982 and sentenced to 25 concurrent life sentences. He was not
eligible for the death penalty because California's capital punishment law
had been ruled unconstitutional at the time.
It was the worst known killing spree in U.S. history, until John Wayne Gacy
Jr. was convicted in 1980 of murdering 33 young men and boys in his Chicago
home. Gacy was executed in 1994 in Illinois.
Investigators found a machete, a meat cleaver, a double-bladed ax and a
wooden club, all stained with blood, in Corona's home, along with a ledger
book containing the names of seven of the victims.
Most of his victims were white, though several were black or Native American
. There was no known racial motivation for his crimes, Adams said.
Corona, a Mexican national and native of Jalisco, Mexico, has maintained his
innocence, though at earlier parole hearings he acted confused and told the
parole board he didn't recall much. His attorneys have argued that his
mental and physical condition makes him less dangerous.
Adams said his deterioration makes him a greater threat to himself and
others.
"He is unreliably dangerous. He's also old and not in a condition where he
can do well on the streets without prison supervision," Adams said. "
Releasing him into the public wouldn't be doing him any good or the public
any good."
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