Gordon Stewart Northcott and The Changeling

The Wineville Chicken Murders, or, as they are also known, the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, were a series of murders of at least nine young boys that took place on a chicken ranch on the outskirts of the town now known as Mira Loma in Riverside County, California.

No entire corpses were ever found, as the bodies were allegedly dissolved in quicklime and the bones dumped in the desert. Evidence of the dastardly deeds, in the form of body parts and bloody implements of death, was, however, located in the ranch's chicken coops. The killing spree lasted from 1928 thru 1930 and ended with the arrest and, ultimately, execution on October 2^nd 1930, of Gordon Stewart Northcott as well as with the arrest, trial, conviction after pleading guilty, and imprisonment for life, of his grandmother, Sarah Louise Northcott. It is interesting to note that it was Sarah Northcutt and not her grandson who pleaded guilty to murdering one of the missing boys, Walter Collins.

Northcott's and his grandmother's apprehension was due mainly to the confessions of his teenaged nephew, Sanford Clark, whom he also abused but who ultimately escaped the fate of the murdered boys. Sanford made these accusations during the course of his being investigated on a deportation charge instituted by his sister, Jessie Clark of Saskatoon, Canada, who grew alarmed about the treatment Sanford appeared to be receiving at the ranch.

Three further aspects of this case also deserve mention: the Los Angeles Police Department's return of one of the missing boys to a stricken mother (which would have been a good thing except that it was the wrong boy), the subsequent incarceration in the psychiatric ward of the LA County Hospital of said stricken mother after she refused to accept the substitute boy as her own son and the consequent exposure of a level of incompetence within the LAPD that had previously only been hinted at. The missing boy was Walter Collins Jr and his mother, Christine Collins, and this almost forgotten piece of history reclaimed the spotlight with the recent release of the motion picture "Changeling", which starred Angelina Jolie as the put upon Mrs Collins.

To return to our story: the LAPD, taking no notice of Christine Collins' initial assertion that the boy whom they had located and recovered with such fanfare was not her Walter, persuaded her to "try the boy out". Christine agreed but, after becoming convinced that the boy was indeed not Walter, presented evidence as such to the police, who, in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, promptly had her committed to a mental institution under a Code 12 internment. At that time, a person was committed or jailed under Code 12 because they were deemed difficult or an inconvenience...but if being given the wrong child is not an excuse for "being an inconvenience" then one must wander what is!

Some time later, the boy himself confessed to not being Walter and the LAPD subsequently released Christine Collins, who then filed a lawsuit against the officer who had had her committed. She won the case but was never able to collect the money from the now-retired police officer. She did, however, have the satisfaction of seeing the use of the Code 12 internment fall into disfavor.

But she never did find any trace of her son, Walter.

And what questionable comfort she might have gained from knowing Walter to be dead was also taken away from her when Northcott called her to prison to speak to her but then refused to say a word about what, if anything, he and his grandmother had done to Walter.

Sources:
Gordon Stewart Northcott: The Wineville Chicken Murders Crime and Investigation Network
Wineville Chicken Coop Murders Wineville Chicken Coop Murders Wikipedia
Larry Harnisch The Daily Mirror Changeling Los Angeles Times The Daily Mirror Blogs