American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The kids of 1968 are Midland Park’s elderly residents today, still haunted and traumatized more than fifty years later. Some of the girls who had been at practice that evening with her wondered for the rest of their lives how close they had come to sharing her fate. It was one of those “when people started locking their doors” and “keeping kids at home” moments for Midland Park.

  And worse. For fifty years, accusations were directed at some boys in town, that they had gang-raped and strangled Jackie. (She had been sexually assaulted but not raped.) Those teenage boys are now in their sixties and seventies and have lived their entire lives under suspicion, fingers pointed at them and tongues wagging for fifty years.

  These three murders were among the some fifty-eight unsolved sexual murders of teenage girls and women in New Jersey between 1963 and 1980; I’ve methodically cataloged and mapped them on my website www.newjerseygirlmurders.com in an attempt to determine which ones might belong to the “perfect murders” Cottingham claims he committed before he was apprehended literally “red-handed,” torturing a teenage sex worker in a New Jersey motel where he had previously killed at least two other women. Cottingham commuted daily between New York and New Jersey, sometimes taking victims across the state line. He had uncles who lived in Long Island, New York. He was an avid gambler and occasionally flew to Las Vegas before gambling was legalized in Atlantic City in 1978, and on occasion he drove to Florida through multiple states to visit his retired parents there. Pennsylvania was just across the state line from New Jersey. In the string of murders we know for sure he committed between 1967 and 1980, not once did Cottingham come to police attention as a suspect or was he connected by police in any way to any of the victims at the time of their murders. He remained entirely invisible for at least thirteen years until the day of his sudden arrest in May 1980, when his victim’s desperate screams brought police to his motel room door. Today, cold case investigators in New Jersey and New York are sifting through two decades of unsolved sexual murders that might belong to Cottingham.

  Cottingham is perhaps one of the more prolific serial killers in American history, and the one who succeeded killing the longest completely undetected and unconnected, not even as an anonymous “unsub”—unknown subject—in FBI profiler parlance. Of course, in the 1960s when he started and the 1970s when he wildly escalated, the FBI was not in the serial killer profiling business. Nobody was.

  Even though Cottingham has been locked up for the last forty years, another part of him is still out there doing his control thing in the form of what he calls his “perfect murders”—the unseen and unsolved murders that have left open wounds among the living. These are the ones he was never linked to, the ones that cops don’t “like him for.” Or the murders that nobody even knew had happened, the ones hidden among the thousands of teenage girls and young women who simply vanished over the two decades. Or the thousands found by the side of the interstates from New Jersey all the way down to Tampa, Florida, dumped in bushy ravines or in shallow graves or floating in rivers, who were never identified, let alone the cause of death determined. Nobody even knows if anybody knows they are missing; the so-called missing missing.

  The fifty-eight I counted are only the ones we knew happened in New Jersey. I rejoice that I can take three names off that list, Jackie Harp, Irene Blase and Denise Falasca, but there are so many more to go.

  As I continue meeting with and questioning Cottingham, as I identify new victims that were never linked to him, I realize that “my serial killer” also comes with “my victims.” Cold case investigations are excruciatingly difficult to describe let alone solve; it’s like trying to catch up to the source of the distant light from a long-dead star. Evidence has been lost or expired, witnesses are mostly dead and gone and sometimes even the perpetrator is dead—but the pain just keeps shining on forever across the span of light-years. Cold case cops often talk of “truth” and “resolution” as opposed to “justice” and “closure.” For families, there is never closure, only resolution at best. I have no idea if I am in the middle or at the end of this unfolding story, and sometimes in the middle of the night I suddenly awake in fear that perhaps I am only at its beginning.

  The Planting Season, 1950–1969

  From 1950 to 1969, some 225 serial killers appeared in the United States, but at the time, we were aware of only a handful, like Ed Gein, Harvey Glatman, Albert DeSalvo or Jerry Brudos.59 Charles Manson was in a cult category of his own. None of them were called serial killers, and they were not recognized as belonging to a particular species or category of killer, although various terms had been suggested, like “multiple murderers,” “pattern killers,” “mass killers,” “thrill killers,” “recreational murderers” and “stranger-on-stranger murderers.” None of these labels stuck because they could never quite fit case to case, and because nobody offered any kind of better definition of what they were. Each serial killer remained an individual “stand-alone” enigma—a monster all by himself. Amid the pervasive violence of the late 1960s, we were hardly aware of them and could not imagine anything worse than what we were already experiencing. But things were about to get worse.

  As the decade closed, on December 18, 1969, Clarnell’s boy, Edmund Kemper, turned twenty-one and was released from Atascadero, certified cured of whatever compulsions had driven him to kill his grandparents. Later, Kemper would recall that in Atascadero, “I found out that I really killed my grandmother because I wanted to kill my mother.” Maybe that’s true, or maybe that’s Kemper’s wishful thinking with hindsight. Six young women were going to be murdered before Kemper was ready to do what he says he found out he really wanted to do.

  Two weeks after Kemper’s release, the 1970s began.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Big Surge: The Baby Boomer Serial Killers Come of Age 1970–1979

  We serial killers are your sons,

  we are your husbands,

  we are everywhere.

  Ted Bundy

  In the next ten years during the 1970s, 605 serial killers were going to be identified, twice the number of the previous twenty years. In the 1980s, there would be 768 more, and in the 1990s, 669 more. A total of 2,042 new serial killers appeared in a thirty-year “epidemic” period: 88 percent of known American serial killers in the twentieth century. It would take a 2,042-page book to briefly summarize each case on a single page. It is beyond my scope here to even summarize some of the more “prominent” cases of the decade in the way I have been able to do so far for the 1930s to 1960s. How and when did it all go so virally epidemic?

  When the steadily rising wave of serial killers finally crested, it came crashing in with a case that had a spectacularly unprecedented number of victims. There had been nothing like it in America since 1927, when the serial killing necrophile Earle Nelson, “the Dark Strangler” or “the Gorilla Man,” was apprehended after murdering and raping twenty-two to twenty-five female victims in a two-year migratory murder trek across the United States and into Canada.*

  Juan Corona, “The Yuba City Peach Orchard Killer,” Yuba City, California, 1971

  On May 19, 1971, a peach farmer near Yuba City, California, led a Sutter County deputy sheriff to a large, mysterious filled-in hole on his orchard. Over the next few days, police would dig up an extraordinary twenty-four corpses, stabbed and hacked across their skulls with a machete, and a twenty-fifth with a gunshot wound. The case was very quickly closed within a week with the arrest of thirty-seven-year-old Juan Corona, a Mexican farm labor contractor in Northern California who had been providing laborers to the peach farmer. Witness statements and pocket litter recovered from the bodies linked Corona to the victims. If there was a “ground zero” in the “serial killer epidemic” to come, then Juan Corona fits the bill (with unfortunate irony these days).

  Twenty-five was an astounding number of murders. It was immediately clear that they were not all killed at once. They were mostly killed one by one
but in a short period of time from February to May 1971. Today we might describe Corona as a “spree serial killer” murdering in separate incidents but with an unusual rapidity, perhaps without a “cooling off” period between each murder, like, for example, Andrew Cunanan or the “DC Beltway Snipers,” John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.

  The Corona story was shocking and perplexing for people in 1971. The enormity of that many murders. Unheard of. People asked naively if he killed them one by one; had nobody noticed when it was happening? Were they all buried in the same place? What do we call this kind of monstrosity? If he didn’t kill them all at once, it’s not “mass murder.” This was something new, even if it really wasn’t.

  But once the body count was settled at twenty-five, we very quickly lost interest in the Juan Corona murders, and like the Kitty Genovese murder, there was a kind of spin and turn this story took in its parable telling. Firstly, the basic assumption was that the victims were Mexican immigrant farm laborers—some perhaps even illegal. That immediately put a damper on any interest the newspaper-reading and TV-watching public might have had. Obviously. The victims were actually all white except for two: an African American and a Native American. None were Mexican.1 They were mostly middle-aged—the youngest was forty, the oldest sixty-seven. Twenty-one victims were successfully identified. They were the last of the Depression-era generation of rail-riding migrant working tramps—“boomer hobos”—some coming annually like migratory birds all the way from northern states to work the California harvests. But had that been known, it wouldn’t have changed anything as far as the general public was concerned; among “respectable” Americans, these tramps would have been as less-dead as Mexican migrants.

  But there was even more to it.

  “Homosexual Overkill”

  It was alleged that a victim was found with gay pornography in his pocket, and the sheriff’s office reported that some of the victims had their pants pulled down to their ankles or zipped open with their genitals exposed.2 The victims appeared mostly to have been killed by one or two stab wounds, but their heads, throats and chests were subjected to multiple machete blows beyond what was needed to kill them. Excessive mutilation or multiple stabbing or repeated shooting is referred to by police as “overkill,” and police considered it a frequent characteristic of gay interpersonal murders.3

  Even today in policing, gay serial murder is categorized in its special deviant place, with overkill claimed as a “typical” characteristic of gay murder, serial or otherwise. As former NYPD homicide detective Vernon Geberth wrote in his often-used procedural textbook, Practical Homicide Investigation (now in its fifth edition published in 2015):

  It has been my experience that male homosexual homicides involving interpersonal violence often present patterns of injuries that can best be described as overkill. These injuries are often directed to the throat, chest, and abdomen of the victims. It has been suggested, but not empirically proven, that the assault to the throat takes place because of the sexual significance of the mouth and throat in male homosexual “love-making.” . . . The psychological significance in an attack to the throat in male homosexual homicides manifest the destruction of this “substitute sex organ” which engulfs the penis. Anal intercourse is often thought to be the most prevalent sexual behavior between men. However [a 1978 study] found that fellatio was the most common mode of sexual expression.4

  The Sutter County Sheriff’s Office treated the Yuba City murders as sex crimes, as psycho-homosexual murders. Juan Corona fit the bill perfectly because he had a history of both mental illness and issues with gays, including his own brother José Natividad Corona, who was gay. That would suit Corona’s defense too, who pointed out that Juan was married and had four children and accused his gay brother, Natividad, as the “obvious” suspect for these pathologically homosexual murders.

  Mex-Cal Border Story, 1940s–1960s

  Juan Corona was born in 1934 in the Jalisco-Guadalajara region of Western Mexico.

  His brother Natividad arrived in the United States in 1944 as a legal immigrant and settled in Marysville, across the Feather River from Yuba City. Juan entered the US legally in May 1953 to join Natividad and two other brothers as well in the Yuba-Marysville area. In December 1955, the region was hit by a catastrophic flood that killed over seventy people. Juan worked recovering and burying some of the dead and apparently became unbalanced, convinced that some type of apocalypse had killed everybody. Natividad had Juan committed to a psychiatric facility where he was diagnosed as suffering from “schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type” and given a series of twenty-four electroconvulsive treatments and then promptly deported back to Mexico.

  Schizophrenic is often mistaken for the term “schizoid split personality.” Schizophrenia is a debilitating organic mental illness that can be accompanied by paranoid delusions, hallucinations and other forms of disordered thought and perception. Sometimes its symptoms can come and go episodically. Schizophrenics are more frequently a danger to themselves rather than to other people.

  Juan Corona’s schizophrenic episode and deportation did not stop him from returning to the United States in 1962 with a green card. No further trouble was reported. He married, had four daughters and established a relatively successful and lucrative farm labor contracting business. He had no problem getting a bank mortgage in 1968 to purchase a family home in Yuba City, and most people did not think there was anything odd about him. While his workers complained that Corona didn’t pay enough, about the cleanliness of his work camps and the condition of the big yellow school bus he transported them in, nobody accused him of mistreating or cheating his workers.5

  There was one murky incident in 1970, however, when twenty-one-year-old José Romero Raya was found unconscious in a washroom in a tavern in Marysville owned by Juan’s brother Natividad. Raya had been molested and disfigured by several machete wounds to his face and skull, similar to the ones that would be found later on the peach orchard bodies. Raya survived and successfully sued Natividad for $250,000 in personal injury and punitive damages as the owner of the premises, but Natividad himself was never charged criminally in the assault. Who committed the assault remained a mystery. There was gossip that Natividad had been covering up for his episodically schizophrenic younger brother, Juan. In any case, Natividad fled to Mexico after the judgment had been entered against him and died there in 1973 in the midst of the case, making it even more convenient for the defense to claim he was the real murderer of the twenty-five victims.

  Corona offered little to no explanation as to where he had been when confronted in the courtroom with the chronology of the twenty-five murders. He was convicted on January 18, 1973, in all twenty-five murders and sentenced to life. His defense was so flawed that Corona was given a second trial but convicted again. Sutter County prosecutors believed that Corona had killed at least forty-three victims in total, some in other, surrounding counties, but stated that authorities there refused to cooperate because they did not want the “road show” in their jurisdiction.

  Juan Corona died in prison at the age of eighty-five on March 4, 2019, without us ever coming to fully understand why he killed all those men, other than in madness.

  Dean Corll, “The Candy Man,” Houston, Texas, 1970–1973

  No sooner had the public gotten their heads around the twenty-five Juan Corona murders than news broke in August 1973 of twenty-seven murders in Houston, Texas. The case was bizarre even by today’s standards. Again, police were completely unaware that a serial killer had been on the loose for several years until they received a phone call from seventeen-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., reporting that he had just shot and killed thirty-three-year-old Dean Corll, a former vice president of a recently defunct family candy company, Corll Candies.

  When police arrived, they found Corll curled up naked on the floor of his bungalow with six gunshot wounds. Wayne confessed that he and another boy, eighteen-year-old
David Owen Brooks, had been helping Corll lure and abduct male youths who Corll would horrifically torture for days, rape and kill. He showed police an eight-by-two-foot plywood “torture board” with holes drilled into it to pass through chains and ligatures and a toolbox filled with torture implements and dildos. Wayne stated he would collect between $10 and $200 for each boy he brought to Corll, as did his friend Brooks. Wayne admitted to also participating in the abduction and killing of some of the boys and burying them and led police to a series of locations where within the week an astonishing twenty-seven bodies were unearthed of teenage boys and youths between the ages of thirteen and twenty, many of them neighborhood acquaintances and friends of Brooks and Henley.

  The Houston Mass Murders, as it came to be known, with its twenty-seven victims, topped in numbers the Juan Corona and the Earle Nelson murders. It was now the largest number of confirmed victims in a serial killing case in recent modern American history. Again, the public was at first astonished as to how twenty-seven teenage boys, some as young as thirteen, could vanish in a community over a short period of several years without anybody raising the alarm. In fact, people had been looking for their missing sons and begging Houston Police to investigate their disappearances but were being ignored.

  The Candy Factory and the Lost Boys of Houston Heights