Anatomy of a Murder Suspect

In the shady, thickly fruited Sullivan orchards near Yuba City, Calif., Sheriff Roy Whiteaker and his deputies pressed their search--even using a light plane equipped with an infra-red camera to detect buried decomposing bodies. By week's end two more corpses had been found near the banks of the Feather River; the total stood at 25. The only suspect in the case, Juan Corona, 37, a taciturn farm-labor contractor, was arraigned in Sutler County Courthouse and charged with ten counts of murder (he will be charged with more when the remaining bodies are identified). He remained calm; in his behalf, his lawyer pleaded not guilty to each of the charges.

At first Juan Corona seemed an unlikely suspect. He is married and the father of four daughters who have achieved the Chicano dream of middle-class American respectability. His stucco-and-wood ranch-style house in Yuba City proudly boasts a front-window trophy that Corona won last year for float decoration in the annual Our Lady of Guadalupe parade. He is deeply devoted to the Roman Catholic Church and is a member of the Cursilistas, a group trying to revive religion among Chicanes. Said his distressed wife Glo-rida: "He was always a good husband. He treated us right, without violence. Such a good husband and father could never have done this."

Unhinged. Yet Corona stands accused of wantonly slaughtering at least two dozen men, some of them drifters from Marysville's Skid Row. Indeed, his history has its seamy side. He and his elder brother Natividad, a known homosexual, came to the U.S. illegally in the late 1940s. They both won U.S. resident-alien permits, however, and began to prosper. Juan became a contractor who assembled work gangs before dawn and delivered them to the local orchards; Natividad bought the seedy but popular Guadalajara Cafe in Marysville. Juan was unhinged by the Feather River flood of December 1955, which killed 40 people.

He broke down, and Natividad had him committed. Two doctors diagnosed him as schizophrenic; incredibly, he was pronounced "recovered" three months later and released.

Corona returned to his contracting job, regaining the confidence of the area orchard owners (he had the run of the Sullivan ranch, where most of the bod ies have been found). He kept to him self and taught his family to do the same. "He never bothered anyone around here," says a neighbor, Mrs.

Eleta Kelley. "Their children stayed close to the yard and were seldom al lowed on the streets." Adds another neighbor, Mrs. Wilma Huff: "The only thing kept." odd was the strange hours he No Welfare. There were other odd ities. His commitment to the church be came obsessive. He said the rosary every night with his family, went to Mass three times a week and recently went on a retreat. Curiously, although no one has ever seen him on a horse, Corona recently joined the El Charro Association, a society dedicated to promoting horsemanship in the Mexican tradition. He often went to his brother's bar at night, but never drank. Said one farm worker: "He would just sit silently and look at the rest of us." A year ago he and his brother were defendants in a civil suit stemming from a knife attack on one Jose Raya. Raya, whose lips were chopped off in the attack, won a $250,000 damage suit against Natividad, who fled the country before the judgment came down against him. No judgment was entered against Juan.

One breach in Juan's carefully erected defenses was the decline in his business brought about by increased farm mechanization. He recently applied for welfare benefits and was turned down, which acquaintances say thoroughly embittered him. Then there was the ar senal of weapons found in the Sullivan labor camp and Juan's 1971 Chevrolet van: two hunting knives, two butcher knives, a double-bladed ax, a club with possible bloodstains, pistol shells and a machete. Police also discovered empty graves that had apparently been prepared but left unfilled.

If Corona goes to trial, it would surely be the goriest--and hence the most sensational--in the nation's annals of mass murder. Whatever happens, one thing is certain: there will be no float-parade trophy this year to fill the other front window of the neat house on Richland Road. The window is occupied anyway--by a brass balance scale, the ancient symbol of justice.

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