The initial verdict was overturned because the defense had not included Corona’s known schizophrenia as a mitigating factor, but he was convicted again at the retrial in 1982. He was convicted of hacking 25 laborers to death. This led to the discovery of more workers’ bodies and clues that trailed back to Corona, who ran a business hiring out farm hands. In 1971, the body of a migrant farm laborer was found in a shallow grave in a peach orchard. He remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Canadian authorities extradited him and he was convicted of 11 murders. We’re pretty cold-hearted.” So said Hong-Kong-born Charles Ng, who, with his accomplice Leonard Lake, killed at least 11 people and possibly as many as 25 at a rented a cabin in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.īy the time police discovered crushed and burned human bone fragments and personal effects of the victims, Ng had fled to Canada. “You can cry and stuff like the rest of them, but it won’t do you any good. (Although Bonin was the most notorious of the three, two other men, Patrick Kearney and Randy Steven Kraft, shared the name “The Freeway Killer.” The three men were not connected.) 2. He was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison in 1996. He was convicted of 10 murders in Los Angeles and four more in Orange County. Over the course of 19, Vietnam veteran Bonin went on to rape, torture, and kill at least 21 boys and young men, dumping the bodies near high-traffic roads and earning his nickname.Ī tip from an arrested car thief led police to Bonin. His genitals, which had been cut off, were found in a nearby field. He had been cut and stabbed in multiple places and strangled. The boy was wearing only a t-shirt, socks, and shoes. In 1979, the mutilated body of a 13-year-old boy was found in Agoura, in Los Angeles County. The following killers in California monopolized news broadcasts and terrorized residents. California serial killers, seven stand out as particularly vicious.