Gordon Stewart Northcott converted a chicken coop into a house of horrors

Before Zodiac murderer and the Sleep bleak He terrified California, was the chicken murderer, who took advantage of young children and adolescents in Los Angeles of the fifties, leaving a trace of pain and blood in his path.

Gordon Stewart Northcott, 23, was hung in San Quentin prison in 1930 after being sentenced the previous year to kidnap, abuse sexually and kill two children and a teenager. Although it was only convicted of the three murders, it is believed that Northcott had up to 20 victims.

At that time, the residents of the flourishing Los Angeles area had no idea that a ruthless murderer was on the side of them until February 2, 1928, when the naked and head of a teenage child was found in a ditch in a dusty road near the quiet suburb of La Puente.

The victim, José Gonzales, an 18 -year -old whose mutilated remains were found covered with a chicken feeding bag, had received a fatal shot several times. He had been beheaded “probably no more than twenty -four hours before the discovery of the body”, according to Records of the Court of Appeals of June 26, 1930.

His was the first of a series of disappearances of children and adolescents who began to affect the area.

A month later, in March 1928, Walter Collins, 9, of the Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles, disappeared after his mother gave him a penny to see a film and never returned home, according to an article in 2008 in the Los Angeles Times. (Collins’ story became the issue of frantic media coverage, and it was the focus of the 2008 film of Clint Eastwood, Changingstarring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich.)

While the authorities tirelessly sought Collins, in May 1928, two more young children disappeared in their way home from a Yacht Club model meeting in Pomona: Nelson and Lewis Winslow, 10 and 12.

Without the knowledge of the authorities at that time, Northcott, who had moved from Canada to Los Angeles several years before, had kidnapped the brothers. He took them to his family’s chicken farm in Mira Loma, in Riverside County, where he kept them captive in a chicken coop. After raping the brothers for a period of ten days, he killed one of them with an ax.

Northcott forced his nephew, Sanford Clark, 11, to kill the other brother with an ax and help him bury the bodies of the property “to ensure his silence.”

The crimes could have been unsolved if it were not for Clark’s sister, who was surprised by what his brother told him during a visit to September: that Northcott had been sexually abusing it and had killed four children on the farm.

Do you want to keep up with the last crime coverage? Enroll in PEOPLEThe true true crime bulletin To break the news of the crime, the coverage of the current trial and the details of unsolved intriguing cases.

She notified her mother in Canada, who called the authorities.

Northcott fled to Canada, but was arrested shortly after.

In December 1928, Northcott was accused of killing Gonzales, Winslow Brothers and Collins. He was convicted of killing everyone except Collins.

In a surprise movement, his mother, Sarah Louise, who said “would do anything” for his son, confessed to murder Collins, according to the Times. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Just before Northcott was executed, he cried and begged not to take him to the gallows and received his eyes bandaged at the request so that he did not see what was happening, the Tribune of Healdsburg reported in 1930.