A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The 1970s also set new standards of viciousness in ordinary criminal violence. The worst crimes of
the 1970s were characterised by a brutality, an indifference to human life and suffering that had no
parallel in the criminal records of earlier centuries.
In 1971, Juan Corona, a Mexican farmer, surpassed all previous American records for mass murder.
A Japanese farmer near Yuba City, California, discovered a grave on his land; it proved to contain
the corpse of a male vagrant who had been sexually violated. Further searches in the area
uncovered another twenty-four bodies; one of them had in his pocket a receipt signed ‘Juan V.
Corona’. Most victims were vagrants or migratory workers; the motive was apparently sexual.
Corona’s brother, a known homosexual, fled back to Mexico, and Corona’s lawyers later alleged
that he was the real killer. But on the evidence of a bloody machete found in Corona’s home, and a
ledger containing some of the names of victims, Corona was sentenced to twenty-five consecutive
life terms.
In June 1972, following a supermarket robbery in Santa Barbara, California, three members of a
family named McCrary were arrested: the father, Sherman, forty-seven, his wife Carolyn, and their
nineteen-year-old son Danny. Later, their daughter Ginger was arrested, together with her husband
Carl Taylor. It emerged that the family had drifted across the country from Texas, leaving behind a
trail of robbed grocery stores and raped shop assistants. The McCrarys had made a habit of
stopping by small shops or drive-in groceries in the evening, robbing the till and, if the shop
assistant was attractive, taking her along with them. She was then raped by the three men and shot.
The family are believed to have committed more than twenty murders. The two womenfolk
apparently made no objection, regarding these rapes as the natural ‘perks’ of males who risk their
lives by robbery. Carolyn McCrary commented: ‘It may sound crazy, but I love my husband very
much.’
On 8 August 1973, a caller to the Pasadena police department, Texas, explained that he had just
killed a man. The police went to the home of thirty-four-year-old Dean Corll and found him lying
dead in the hallway, with six bullets in his body. Seventeen-year-old Wayne Henley told them that
he had murdered Corll in self-defence. Henley had brought a fifteen-year-old girl to a glue-sniffing
party. They passed out, and when they woke up found themselves tied up. Henley had ‘sweettalked’
Corll into letting him go, promising that he would rape and kill the girl while Corll, a
homosexual, raped and killed another teenage boy who was present. Henley had then grabbed a gun
with which Corll had been threatening him, and killed Corll.
Under interrogation, Henley admitted that he had procured boys for Corll, and that Corll had been
systematically raping, torturing and murdering them. The boys were chained to a plywood board,
and sometimes violated for days before being killed. Henley led the police to a boatshed in southwest
Houston, and they began digging. Seventeen corpses, wrapped in plastic bags, were
uncovered. Henley led the police to other sites where bodies were found; the final total seemed to
be thirty-one. Boys had been disappearing from the Heights area of Houston for three years.
Another youth, David Brooks, was also implicated, and he and Henley were both sentenced to life
imprisonment for their part in the murders. Corll, it emerged, was a morbidly over-sensitive
mother’s boy who had never really grown up - one recent photograph showed him holding a cuddly
toy. Corll was clearly yet another example of Freud’s dictum that if a child had the power, it would
destroy the world.
In April 1973, twenty-five-year-old Ed Kemper - six foot nine inches tall - crept into his mother’s
bedroom and killed her with a hammer; the following day he killed her friend Sara Hallett. Then he