Chicken coops plans

It was a crime so monstrous, it led a Riverside County community to change its name.

In 1928, Gordon Stewart Northcott kidnapped several boys, keeping them as sex slaves on his parents’ chicken farm in a community known then as Wineville.

When he was done with them, Northcott butchered the boys with an axe and buried the bodies in chicken coops.

His trial at Riverside’s historic courthouse drew national coverage. Northcott was hanged for his crimes at San Quentin.

Eighty years later, a new film and book — written independently of each other — revisit the infamous case that simultaneously fascinated and repulsed the nation and came to be known as the “chicken coop murders.”

“Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood, opens nationwide today. It stars Angelina Jolie as single mother Christine Collins, whose 9-year-old son Walter Collins was one of Northcott’s victims.

The book, “Nothing Is Strange With You,” by James Jeffrey Paul, uses historical records, newspaper reports and the 3,000-page transcript of Northcott’s trial to painstakingly document the case.

Blood-Soaked Axes

In 1926, Northcott kidnapped his 14-year-old nephew Sanford Clark from his home in Saskatchewan, Canada, and brought him to the 3-acre spread in Wineville in northwest Riverside County, so named because of the grape vineyards that dotted the landscape.

Northcott beat his nephew mercilessly and sexually assaulted him on a regular basis. Criminal investigators believed Northcott molested as many as 20 boys before he began a killing spree while forcing Clark to participate in the murders.

In addition to Walter Collins, other murder victims were an unidentified Mexican teenager who was beheaded, and Pomona brothers Lewis and Nelson Winslow, 12 and 10 respectively, who disappeared on May 16, 1928.

In August 1928, authorities were tipped off by a family member to what was going on at the so-called “murder farm” in Riverside County, and they took Clark into custody.

Out of the clutches of his murderous uncle, Clark began telling an almost incomprehensible story of murder and perversion.

Investigators dispatched to dig up the farm found no bodies. Clark said quicklime and fires had been used to get rid of the remains and the bones had been dumped in the desert.

Searchers did find a finger, hand and foot bones, and personal items belonging to the boys. They also found axes soaked with human blood.

When Clark was taken into custody, Northcott and his mother, Louise Northcott, fled to their native Canada, where they were arrested and extradited back to the United States.

Northcott was executed in 1930, the same year that Wineville residents, concerned with the stigma now attached to their community, changed the town’s name to Mira Loma.

‘Changeling’

“Changeling” is set against the backdrop of the Northcott murders but concentrates on the case of victim Walter Collins and his mother, Christine Collins.

J. Michael Straczynski, 54, a journalist-turned-screenwriter, said in a telephone interview from his Encino home that he was tipped off to Christine Collins’ story by a Los Angeles City Hall source.

Walter vanished March 10, 1928. Months later, when Los Angeles Police Department investigators attempted to return a boy impersonating Walter to Christine Collins, she protested that he was not her son.

The movie takes it name from European folklore that told of fairy children being put in the place of human children.

Under pressure from the LAPD, Collins takes the boy home but returns him three weeks later with definitive proof such as dental records that the boy is not hers.

LAPD officials, more interested in a feel-good ending to the story than the truth, denounce Collins, first as an unfit mother seeking to shirk her duties and then as mentally unbalanced.

She is finally consigned to the mental ward of the county hospital.

Straczynski said he was attracted to the story because of the “raw, naked courage” Collins showed in taking on corrupt police officials.

“She was a single mother in 1928,” Straczynski said. “For this mother to stand up to the Police Department took a lot of moxie. It really impressed me.”

Straczynski said that while researching Collins’ story, he stumbled across the Northcott case.

“It was a real eye-opener to find this other huge story,” he said. “It was the biggest serial crime in Los Angeles history to that time.”

Although Northcott was ultimately convicted of three murders, Straczynski said that based on his reading of Clark’s testimony, he believes Northcott may have killed as many as 20 boys.

In fact, while on Death Row, Northcott estimated he had killed “maybe 20″ boys, but later retracted that statement.

“He was a truly evil man, someone who was deeply disturbed,” Straczynski said.

‘Nothing is Strange’

Author James Jeffrey Paul, a lifelong true crime aficionado, said he began researching his book in 1989 after finding references to the Northcott case in crime histories.

“Then I realized what a bizarre and underreported case it was,” Paul said in a telephone interview from his North Carolina home. “No one had written about it. So I decided to take it on.”

In interviews, Paul takes great care to distance “Nothing Is Strange With You” from “Changeling.” The book and movie were developed and written independently of each other, he said. The book was published last month.

Paul said he saw Northcott’s story as a “real tragedy of human emotions.”

Northcott was a pampered and overindulged child. His mother was the ultimate enabler, suggesting to her son that he use an axe to kill his victims because a gun made too much noise.

At one point, Louise Northcott confessed to all four murders, a ploy authorities dismissed as a doomed attempt to save her beloved son. In the end, she was convicted of Walter Collins’ murder and would spend close to a dozen years in prison.

“I think it was a case of a mother trying to protect her child carried to an extreme degree,” Paul said. “It was just a case of being abnormally attached and protective of him.”

Paul said that after studying the transcripts of the trial, in which Northcott acted as his own attorney, and reading Northcott’s letters, he came away with the impression of an accomplished and intelligent person.

“It seems a shame that a person of such promise was so perverted and intoxicated with the idea of choosing children to satisfy his wants,” Paul said.

Still Standing

Steve Lech, president of the Riverside Historical Society, has done a significant amount of research into the Northcott case and served as a consultant on the Eastwood film.

Using property records and historic photos, Lech has been able to locate the Northcott home, which still stands on Wineville Avenue in Mira Loma.

Lech said a “Changeling” production crew visited the site with him in 2007. In interviews, Eastwood said he had visited the home but did not talk to anyone there.

Last week Lech visited the property and for the first time met Noemi Alvarado, whose father, Ramon Benavides, bought the property about 20 years ago.

Alvarado, 24, said her father had heard someone had committed suicide on the property, but knew nothing about the “chicken coop murders.”

Alvarado said she didn’t learn about the connection until a friend called earlier this month after reading an article about the murder in a local magazine and recognized the house in historical photos.

“It’s just mind-boggling,” Alvarado said.

Phillip and Betty Sanchez own the half-acre property next door, which was part of the original Northcott chicken ranch.

Betty Sanchez said she learned of her property’s connection to the case about five years ago when the elderly friend of a neighbor said it was the site of what he called the “Wineville murders.”

That may explain “incidents” that have occurred through the years, Betty Sanchez said, including tapping on a curio cabinet and the sound of someone trying the deadbolt lock on the front door.

“About a month ago we heard someone trying to unlock the door,” she said.

Also about a month ago, her daughter saw the image of a young, slender man sitting on the couch. There have been other sightings of the same young man through the years.

Despite that, Betty Sanchez said she has no desire to move.

“We’ve been here 20 years,” she said.

Alvarado said that as the mother of a 4-year-old boy, she can’t help but think about the terror Northcott’s young victims felt while imprisoned in chicken coops on the property.

“I look at my son and I can’t imagine anything like that happening to him,” she said. “They were just little kids. It’s all so sad.”

Reach Sandra Stokley at 951-368-9647 or sstokley@PE.com

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