http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/corona-91823-juan-task.html
The task of prosecuting Juan Corona accused of murdering 25 transient
farmworkers and burying them in orchards north of Yuba City could have
easily been handed to Sacramento.
It was a potential career-maker, and ambitious lawyers in the state
Attorney General's Office were hoping to get theignment, says Sutter
County's then-District Attorney Dave Teja.
But Teja and Sutter County Sheriff Roy Whiteaker, then only 31, were
loathe to the idea. For reasons of pride, moxie or just plain naivetι,
they chose to shoulder the challenge and damn the torpedoes.
"I was 35. I was in my prime," Teja says now. "And it's probably the
thing I'm proudest of in my career."
The small-town team, aided by detectives and other personnel on loan
from other jurisdictions, felt they had a strong circumstantial case
against Corona: signed grocery receipts found with two of the bodies,
bank statements that bore Corona's name and which also had been found at
grave sites, a ledger with a list of men's names including some of the
victims' and a cache of weapons. They believed Corona had used the
weapons to abuse and murder the men who he had picked up through his
role as a farm labor contractor.
But by showtime, the prosecution team realized it was going to be facing
enormous obstacles and a tough crowd.
"We had over a hundred witnesses and a thousand pieces of evidence and
we were fighting the press while we were trying to put that
son-of-a-bitch away," says Teja. "And they even outlawed the death
penalty in the middle of all this."
In February 1972, in the midst of their wrangling over the possibility
of a change in venue a battle the hometown team ultimately lost the
California Supreme Court had determined capital punishment to be
unconstitutional. Corona slipped through this brief window of
opportunity; the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.
Defense attorney Richard Hawk convinced the District Court of Appeals in
Sacramento that Corona couldn't get a fair trial in Sutter County.
Residents, after all, had been watching the news closely in May and June
1971, as the remains of each machete-chopped corpse was pulled from
nearby orchards. The Appeal-Democrat had been publishing front-page
stories sometimes several on the same day detailing the dig for
bodies, and the arduous task of trying to put names to the badly
disfigured and decomposed corpses, many of whom were living far from
their hometowns and alienated from their families.
Sheriff Whiteaker's publicertion that he was sure Corona was the
killer made while evidence was still being collected from crime scenes
also did not help the case against a venue change.
In this rural county of 43,000 roughly half what it is today
residents knew that they were a few degrees of separation at most from
Corona's machete blade.
"Corona's sister-in-law and I grew up together," says Teja. "Some days,
I'd be right behind Juan's truck on my way to work. Hell, I knew the
guy."
"Parents would tell their kids, 'Be good, or Juan Corona's gonna get
you,'" says Angelo Micheli, a chef at Pasquini's restaurant.
Micheli was a child during the time of Corona's arrest and trial.
Pasquini's, founded by Micheli's ancestors and owned now by his father,
John Micheli, lies within spitting distance of the former Jack ...
Ranch where 24 of Corona's victims were found.
Defense attorney Hawk
The trial held in Solano County was the second act of a blockbuster
production that began the day Hawk arrived in town.
Almost immediately, he fired the defense's psychiatrists, who seemed to
be heading toward an insanity plea for Corona. He sued county officials
for $350,000 with claims they had handled evidence improperly and
slandered Corona's name.
Hawk continually glad-handed hungry news reporters and accumulated eight
contempt citations for violating a gag order.
He encouraged Mexican-American protesters, who picketed outside the
courthouse proclaiming Corona's innocence, and he trolled for sympathy
by keeping Corona's four young daughters visible to news cameras and the
jury.
"That was really a classless thing to do," says former Appeal-Democrat
news reporter Eric Grunder.
"The oldest daughter was about 10. When the jury was coming out to get
on the bus, Hawk would line those girls up so the jury had to walk past
them," he said.
Grunder, now the opinion-page editor at The Stockton Record, covered the
investigation as well as the three-month trial that started in September
1972 and ended with a conviction in January 1973.
Long after their victory, key players for the prosecution have trouble
holding back their feelings about Hawk.
"I disliked him intensely from the beginning," says Teja.
"He was arrogant and obnoxious. He had the little-man syndrome," says
Whiteaker. "He ranted and raved and bragged that when this case was all
over, he was going to be on the Johnny Carson show."
Hawk's primary claim was that Corona had been framed by the real killer
or killers, who heerted might have been Corona's brother, Natividad
Corona, or the work of a deviant . cult.
Corona's brother, who was openly ..., had been accused in 1970 of an
assault at the Guadalajara Cafι in Marysville (now the Silver Dollar
Saloon), which he owned. The attack had left 20-year-old Jose Romero
Raya permanently disfigured.
Raya won a $250,000 settlement against the bar owner, but by then
Natividad Corona had fled for Mexico.
Many of the victims pulled from the ... Ranch had been found with
their pants down or their genitals exposed. Both Teja and Whiteaker
believe that Corona .d them. They had no proof of this.
"I think he .ually molested them," said Whiteaker. "That was the
logical conclusion. There were too many like that (all or partly
exposed) for it to be an accidental situation."
As for the theory that Natividad Corona a man who had a reputation for
cruelty might have committed the murders, both Teja and Whiteaker say
it is entirely without merit.
"There was never any evidence that Natividad was involved. He was not
even present never around," says Whiteaker. "There was nothing they
could go on other than the fact he was homo.ual."
And Raya's attack, both men say, bore the signature marks of a Juan
Corona crime.
"It was related," says Whiteaker. "There's no question about it."
For good measure, Corona's flamboyant and freewheeling defense lawyer
threw in accusations of racial prejudice: Corona came to the United
States from Mexico in the 1950s and his victims were nearly all white.
Hawk also accused police of planting blood evidence in a van the
defendant had used to transport his laborers through Marysville, Yuba
City and into the orchards north of town.
Goal: Overwhelm the jury
The prosecution's primary tactic was to overwhelm the jury with
circumstantial evidence and with the sheer brutality and magnitude of
the 25 murders.
"It was like throwing a bunch of cow manure against the wall," says
Teja, "and hoping some of it sticks in the jury's mind."
But they made plenty of mistakes, including a misplaced plaster cast of
a tire mark found at the scene where the first body had been found on
May 20, 1971.
The impression made from the tracks turned out to have been somewhere in
the bowels of the Sheriff's Department building, Grunder says. It was
brought out toward the end of the trial, much to the consternation of
the defense lawyers and Richard Patton, the Colusa County district judge
who presided over the case.
Thus, Corona's guilty verdict came as something of a shock, according to
a 1973 Time magazine article.
Among the prosecution's follies, according to the story, were a "failure
to check for fingerprints, mislabeled evidence that Judge Patton once
exclaimed 'almost approaches dereliction of duty'
One prosecutor even
admitted that he had 'reasonable doubt,' then took it back,'" the
article reads.
But Hawk, who had promised a laundry list of witnesses and evidence to
support Corona's innocence, failed to produce any. That failure is what
led the jury toward Corona's guilt, says Teja.
"After all that, he (Hawk) just said, 'The defense rests,'" Teja
recalls. "We were stunned."
The talkative attorney still has an office on Plumas Street right next
to Whiteaker's Guns & Ammo Outlet.
Upon request, he rattles off a seemingly endless string of anecdotes
from those long months when Corona's conviction was all he and his local
law-enforcement team could think about.
"There were so many bizarre little things that happened in that case,"
Teja says. Corona's family, including several siblings and his mother,
sat in the courthouse through the trial. One day, one of Corona's
sisters tried to push Teja down the courthouse stairs.
Another day, Teja says, "She tried to run over me."
The day's proceedings had ended, and Teja was stepping off the curb,
headed for a parking lot across the street from the courthouse in
Fairfield.
"I could hear a car gunning and I looked up," Teja says, "and there she
is coming at me with a car full of Coronas."
Grunder's arsenal of anecdotes includes an epilogue to the trial and
the biggest news story the reporter had or would ever cover.
On the day the verdict was read, several reporters, including Grunder,
went to a nearby bar to celebrate the trial's end. Hawk went in to join
them as it was his habit to do.
Hawk bought them drinks. But he had apparently worn out his welcome in
Fairfield: a long list of citations for having violated a gag order had
come due.
Before Hawk could take a drink, Grunder says, "Police came in, put him
in handcuffs and took him away." |
