Gordon Stewart Northcott turned a chicken shoe into a house with horror

Before Star killers and Gloomy sleeping cabin Terrorized California, it was the Chicken Coop killer, who called for small boys and teenagers in the 1920s Los Angeles and left a trace of pain and gore in his wake.

Gordon Stewart Northcott, 23, was hanged in the San Quentin prison in 1930 after being sentenced the year before by kidnapping, sexually abused and killed two boys and one teenager. Although he was only convicted of the three murders, Northcott is believed to have had as many as 20 victims.

Then the inhabitants of the growing Los Angeles area had no idea that a graceful killer was deceiving in their center until February 2, 1928, when the headless, naked body of a teenage boy was found in a ditch on a dusty road near the sleepy suburb La Puente.

The victim, Jose Gonzales, an 18-year-old whose mutilated residue was found covered with a chicken feed, had been shot deadly several times. He had been beheaded “probably no more than twenty -four hours before the discovery of the body”, according to Appelate court register from June 26, 1930.

Hans was the first of a string of disappearances of young boys and teenagers who began to torment the area.

A month later, in March 1928, Walter Collins, 9, disappeared from Lincoln Heights part of Los Angeles, after his mother gave him a crown to see a movie and he never returned home, according to an article in 2008 in Los Angeles Times. (Collin’s story became the subject of a frenzy media coverage and was the focus of Clint Eastwood’s Film 2008, Changelingin the lead role Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich.)

While the authorities sought tirelessly for Collins, in May 1928, two more small boys disappeared on their way home from a Model Yacht Club meeting in Pomona: Nelson and Lewis Winslow, 10 and 12.

Regardless of the authorities at that time, Northcott, who had moved from Canada to Los Angeles, had several years before, kidnapped the brothers. He took them to the family’s chicken farm in Mira Loma, in Riverside County, where he held them caught in a chicken shoe. 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 on the property “to insure his silence.”

The crime might have been unsolved if it was not for Clark’s sister, who was shocked at what her brother told her during a visit in September: that Northcott had sexually abused him and had killed four boys in the yard.

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

Northcott fled to Canada, but was arrested shortly after.

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

In a surprising movement, his mother, Sarah Louise, who said she would “do” do anything “for her son, acknowledged to have murdered Collins, according to Times. She was sentenced to life in prison.

Just before Northcott was executed, he shouted and asked not to be brought to the gallows and was blind at his request so he would not see what happened, Healdsburg Tribune reported in 1930.