David Stout

A statement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he had died at a hospital near the state prison in Corcoran, in the south-central part of the state, where for almost a half-century he had been serving 25 concurrent life sentences for first-degree murder.

Corona’s victims were luckless drifters who moved from farm to farm, scratching out a bare existence in the valley’s orchards, groves and vineyards. No one seemed to miss these “fruit tramps,” as the locals called them, when they disappeared.

The killings came to light after a peach farmer spotted a fresh hole in one of his orchards near Yuba City on May 19, 1971. When he returned to investigate later that day, the hole had been filled in.

Suspicious, the farmer called the Sutter County sheriff’s office. Deputies dug up the body of a man. He had been stabbed in the chest and his head had been split open. A search of the orchards in the vicinity revealed other graves, some freshly dug, some made weeks before.

The digging went on for days, until 25 corpses had been unearthed. The victims ranged in age from about 40 to the mid-60s. All had been hacked and stabbed. One had been shot as well.

Store receipts and bank-deposit slips found in some graves were linked to Corona, a stocky man in his late 30s who was described in 1971 as a Mexican-born resident alien. As a licensed labor contractor, he had recruited field hands from bars and other places where migrant workers gathered. His wife sometimes cooked for them.

A search of his house in Yuba City turned up a bloodstained machete and a ledger with the names of victims. Blood was found in his pickup truck.

Corona was convicted twice, a second trial having been ordered because of incompetent representation in the first.

Corona maintained his innocence for years. Then, at a parole hearing on Dec. 5, 2011, he admitted his crimes, apparently for the first time in a public forum. (He was reported to have confessed before to a prison psychologist.)

Asked if he knew why he was in prison, Corona replied, “Well, I commit all those — those dead persons, 25.”

When asked why he had killed them, he gave a rambling answer in which he called the victims “winos” and “creeps” who had been “trespassing.” It was the closest he ever came to saying why he did it. Prosecutors never offered a motive.

With a wife, Gloria, and four young daughters, Juan Vallejo Corona seemed an unlikely killer. But he had trouble in his past. A flood that killed dozens of people in Sutter County in late 1955 had apparently left him unhinged, convinced that the people around him were the ghosts of those who had drowned.

A half brother, Natividad Corona, committed him to a mental hospital in early 1956. He was released months later, after undergoing electroshock treatments for schizophrenia. For a time he seemed to have a stable life, working his way up from farm laborer to labor contractor. He went to church.

Yet he was known to be quick-tempered and a brooder. In March 1970 he began another monthslong stay in a mental hospital. The next year, with increasing mechanization hurting his business, he applied for welfare. When his application was denied, he flew into a rage, a welfare official recalled.

Then came the horrific discoveries in the orchards and the ensuing trials, which had elements of farce as well as horror and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.

The first trial began Sept. 11, 1972, in the Solano County city of Fairfield, east of San Francisco, after the defense was granted a change of venue. In the courtroom, the defendant’s wife shouted, “Good luck, Juan!” One of Corona’s sisters was later arrested, charged with obstructing the entrance to the courthouse by lying down outside it and refusing to move.

The trial was embarrassing for both sides. Prosecutors were found to have misplaced or mishandled evidence, and forensic tests that ought to have been done early on were delayed. At one point a prosecutor improperly suggested that Corona’s refusal to testify suggested that he was guilty.

The judge, who repeatedly expressed dismay at the prosecutors’ performance, reminded the jury that the burden of proof rested totally on the prosecution. Corona was convicted Jan. 18, 1973, and sentenced to life in prison. (The California Supreme Court had overturned the state’s death penalty months before the trial.)

Even after finding Corona guilty, some jurors said they were “shocked” and “flabbergasted” that his defense had presented no psychiatric evidence on his behalf. His original public defender had planned to have him plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the family retained a lawyer who spurned that approach. Later, the lawyer was found to have been angling for a book deal about the case.

In May 1978, a California appeals court overturned the conviction, declaring that Corona’s defense had been inept and compromised.

The second trial was held in Hayward, in Alameda County, near San Francisco and lasted from Feb. 22 to Sept. 23, 1982. Represented by a new defense team, Corona took the stand, insisting that he was innocent. (His wife was not there; she had divorced him in 1974.)

A defense lawyer suggested that the real killer was the half brother Natividad Corona, whom he described as an “aggressive homosexual.” Natividad Corona was an ideal scapegoat: He had owned a saloon where a customer was found in a bathroom one night in February 1970 with slashes on his head and face. And by the time of Juan Corona’s second trial, Natividad Corona had returned to Mexico and could not be located.

No one was ever charged in the saloon incident, although the victim sued Natividad Corona and was awarded $250,000. It is not known whether he collected.

Convicted again, Juan Corona was resentenced to life in prison, where he deteriorated mentally and physically. A decade earlier, on Dec. 1, 1973, he had suffered more than 30 wounds and lost his left eye when another inmate stabbed him in a prison hospital.

At a parole hearing in December 2011, Corona often wandered into near-incoherence. He told of being the ninth of 10 children born to a couple in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1934; of coming to the United States illegally as a boy and getting sent back to Mexico, then returning to the States legally after his half brother had settled in California.

Asked if he felt remorse, Corona gave a meandering answer, then said, “So I went and buy the machete and then OK, I started killing when I had to kill all those persons, one by one.” At another point he said he must have been “sick in my thinking.”

Corona was denied parole. There was no information about whether he had any survivors. At his parole hearing he said that his brothers and sisters were “all dead.”

There has been speculation that there may have been more victims of Corona lying undiscovered among the orchards. The bodies of 14 of his known victims were never claimed. Four were never identified.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/obituaries/juan-corona-dead.html" id="b857a24b-44bd-3f97-afd9-ded806f337f4">The New York Times</a>.

Juan V. Corona, who joined the grim pantheon of America’s serial killers when he was convicted of slaughtering 25 migrant workers and burying them on farms near his home in the Sacramento Valley in California, died Monday. He was 85.

Juan Corona, 85, Convicted as Killer of 25 Farmworkers, Dies

<h1>WASHINGTON — Janne E. Nolan, an expert on international affairs and arms-control issues who advised politicians and diplomats and lamented the reluctance of skeptics to speak out against policies they believed to be wrong, died June 26 in Washington. She was 67.</h1>

The cause was cancer, said David J. Lane, a former U.S. diplomat and friend who is now president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands in California, where world leaders gather to discuss international issues.

Nolan, who stood out as a woman in a field dominated by men, acquired her expertise through decades of scholarship and membership in numerous research organizations. She held various teaching positions and wrote nine books, including “Tyranny of Consensus: Discourse and Dissent in American National Security Policy” (2013).

By “tyranny of consensus” Nolan meant a kind of governmental ethos that derives from the unwillingness of officials to voice concerns about a policy that they thought mistaken, or even potentially disastrous, once it had been generally adopted and had acquired its own momentum.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who knew her for many years, said in a phone interview that though Nolan had been “hard-nosed about the international system,” she had also believed that decisions based purely on realpolitik, without regard for morality and ethics, were likely to be disastrous.

Nolan lamented that while America trains its military officers to obey the Constitution and to disobey orders they know to be illegal, there is no comparable training to help civilian leaders navigate the difficult terrain where “morality, strategic imperatives and self-interest” bump up against one another.

Failure to speak up and speak out has been “a source of strategic failure over and over again,” Nolan said in 2018 in a panel discussion at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where she was a research professor.

She recalled how Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, whom she knew well, had kept quiet as he continued to send troops to fight in Vietnam even after he realized that the U.S. strategy embraced by President Lyndon B. Johnson and some of his generals was fundamentally flawed. McNamara was left “wracked with guilt,” she said.

Rice said Nolan had continued to concentrate on nuclear weapons policy even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of international terrorism had made nuclear issues less pressing, perhaps less fashionable, to some in Washington.

She saw curbing the spread of nuclear weapons as “one of the great moral challenges for humankind,” Rice said. “And she was right about that.”

Rice said Nolan understood that working on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons was hard, unglamorous work, something that “you had to keep chipping away at” without hoping for an “aha” permanent solution.

Nolan articulated that belief in 1990 in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, occasioned by the arrest of six people in Britain who had been attempting to smuggle nuclear triggers to Iraq.

“Denying technology to states like Iraq may, in the end, be an exercise in delay,” she wrote, but in the end “it can buy time to develop policies that address regional ambitions and conflicts that fuel demands for weapons of mass destruction.”

Nolan was a Democrat (she was an adviser to Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado during his unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and continued to serve on his Senate staff). But, said Rice, who led the State Department under President George W. Bush, she was bipartisan in dispensing advice.

(Rice said that she and Nolan became good friends in the early 1980s, when they were among four women studying international security at Stanford University on fellowships. Acutely aware that they were outnumbered by male scholars, Rice said, the four called themselves “the fellowettes.”)

Nolan was for a time chairwoman of the Presidential Advisory Board on U.S. Arms and Technology Policy. She was also a member of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, which investigated terror attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, and a congressional panel that assessed ballistic missile threats.

Janne Emilie Nolan was born Dec. 28, 1951, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, to American citizens, James and Margaret (Claughton) Nolan. Her mother was known as Maggi Nolan when she was the society reporter for the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune.

Her parents divorced when Janne (pronounced “jan”) was 4. Three years later, Maggi Nolan moved with Janne and her sister, Cathy, from Paris to London. When Janne was 12, the three moved to the United States.

She received a bachelor’s degree in political science and foreign languages from Antioch College in Ohio, a master’s in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Stanford University, and a doctorate in international economics from Tufts University.

Her academic posts also included professorships at Georgetown University, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.

Her marriage to Barry Blechman ended in divorce. Her survivors include a daughter, Emilie Blechman, and her sister, Cathy Nolan.

Rice said that Nolan had been able to form opinions about mistakes in U.S. policy, as she perceived them, while remembering that policies are made and carried out by human beings and that hindsight is easy.

In the 2018 discussion at George Washington University, Nolan refrained from saying that the Vietnam War stood in memory as a national tragedy. But she suggested that for McNamara, with his unwillingness to challenge the White House consensus on the war, it was certainly a personal one.

“Your conscience,” she said, “is a living, breathing organism that you cannot mess with too many times before you become a broken person.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/politics/janne-e-nolan-dead.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Janne E. Nolan, principled adviser on world affairs, is dead at 67

The cause was cancer, said David J. Lane, a former U.S. diplomat and friend who is now president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands in California, where world leaders gather to discuss international issues.

His death, at a hospital, was confirmed Monday by his wife, author Sylvia Jukes Morris. He lived in Kent, Connecticut.

Morris’ “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1980. He followed that with two other well-received books on the 26th president, “Theodore Rex” (2001) and “Colonel Roosevelt” (2010).

But “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” is the work for which he is best known. Published in 1999 to much anticipation (he had been working on it for 14 years), it was told from the viewpoint of a fictional Edmund Morris, who accompanies the future president from his Illinois boyhood to the White House and beyond.

“I quite understand that readers will have to adjust, at first, to what amounts to a new biographical style,” Morris wrote on the website of Random House, his publisher. “But the revelations of this style, which derive directly from Ronald Reagan’s own way of looking at his life, are I think rewarding enough to convince them that one of the most interesting characters in recent American history looms here like a colossus.”

Some critics found Morris’ approach fitting for a president — and former actor — who occasionally confused reality with cinema. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times, praised “Dutch” as highly readable, with passages that were “exciting and at times, even inspiring.”

But some historians and commentators were disdainful. Columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and writer Joan Didion accused Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.

For his part Morris readily agreed with those who said he did not deserve to be called a historian. In an interview on C-SPAN several years ago, he said he was not particularly interested in politics and government. Rather, he said, he was interested in “character, narrative, the strangeness of reality.”

The furor over “Dutch” may have hurt the book’s sales, which fell off after an initial spurt. Later, in addition to the second and third books on Roosevelt, he wrote biographies of Beethoven (2005) and Thomas Edison (to be published in October).

Arthur Edmund Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 27, 1940, to Eric and May Morris, who were South Africans. He studied literature, art and music at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He moved to Britain in 1964 and worked there as a copywriter in an American advertising agency.

He married Sylvia Jukes, an English teacher at the time, in 1966. They moved to the United States in 1968. In addition to her, Morris is survived by a brother, Eric, and a sister, Judy Davidowitz.

This article originally appeared in <a id="3b43fb8b-4d0e-3fac-a39e-eaed89f0a69a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/obituaries/edmund-morris-reagan-biographer-who-upset-conventions-dies-at-78.html">The New York Times</a>.

Edmund Morris, Reagan biographer who upset conventions, dies at 78

Edmund Morris, who wrote an acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt but is best known for his life of Ronald Reagan, in which the author inserted himself as a fictional narrator, a device that baffled and angered some historians, died Friday in Danbury, Connecticut. He was 78.

Her family, in a statement on Facebook, said the cause was pneumonia. The statement also said that Tauscher had survived esophageal cancer in 2010.

Tauscher made her mark not only on national politics and diplomacy but also, before that, on Wall Street, where she was an investment banker and bond trader for 14 years, at firms including Bear Stearns and Drexel Burnham Lambert. At 25, she was one of the first women to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, where she served from 1977 to 1979, and the youngest woman ever. She was also an officer on the American Stock Exchange.

She ventured into politics in 1992 as co-chairwoman of the first Senate campaign of her friend Dianne Feinstein, in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Pete Wilson, who had been elected governor. Two years later, she was co-chairwoman of Sen. Feinstein’s successful campaign for election to a full term.

Tauscher was elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 to represent a newly created district in the San Francisco area. In a decidedly conservative district with more registered Republicans than Democrats, she was an underdog against the strongly conservative Republican incumbent, William P. Baker.

Tauscher campaigned in favor of access to abortion and increased spending on education. At the same time, she pledged to work against wasteful spending. Perhaps most crucial, she was in favor of gun-control legislation, while Baker had voted to repeal a federal ban on assault weapons.

That vote, The East Bay Times of Walnut Creek, California, noted Tuesday, worked against Baker when a constituent, whose wife was among eight people killed by a gunman, campaigned on behalf of Tauscher.

After her victory, Tauscher said: “My message throughout this campaign was one of moderation and common sense. I want to go back to Washington and stand in the middle — where most Americans stand.”

She won her next two elections by more comfortable margins. Beginning in 2002, after her district had been redrawn by the California Legislature to the benefit of Democrats, she was re-elected easily.

During her first term, she was assigned to the National Security Committee, later renamed the Armed Services Committee. She eventually became chairwoman of the panel’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Her interest in nuclear weapons and arms control was attributable in part to the presence in her district of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a center of nuclear weapons research; the California campus of Sandia National Laboratories; and Travis Air Force Base.

In Congress, she often demonstrated that she was not in lock step with her fellow Democrats. Sometimes she sounded like a Republican, as when she spoke in favor of cutting taxes, especially the estate tax and the so-called marriage penalty, which can occur when two people with equal or similar incomes marry, causing them to pay more in taxes than if they had remained single.

But she opposed the $1.6 trillion tax cut that President George W. Bush proposed, which Congress approved, in 2001.

When Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California ran for Democratic minority whip in 2001, Tauscher backed her more moderate rival, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.

In 2003, she voted to support the war against Iraq, though she became skeptical after several postwar visits to the country convinced her that efforts to build a new country after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were not going well.

Tauscher resigned her House seat on June 26, 2009, when she was confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, a post to which she was appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Tauscher played a key role in achieving the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010, which placed limits on bombers, launchers and submarines as well as nuclear warheads. The treaty, which expires in 2021, sent U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals to their lowest levels in nearly 60 years.

She served as undersecretary until 2012.

“She made America and the world safer through her work on arms control at the State Department,” Clinton said in a statement after Tauscher died.

Ellen O’Kane was born in Newark, New Jersey, on Nov. 15, 1951, the oldest of four children of a grocer and his wife, a secretary, and grew up in Harrison, New Jersey. She received a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from Seton Hall University in 1974.

After she prospered on Wall Street, she created the Tauscher Foundation, which donated $200,000 to elementary schools in California and Texas to buy computer equipment for students, according to her House of Representatives biography. She also founded a service to screen prospective child-care providers.

Survivors include a daughter, Katherine, from her marriage to William Tauscher, which ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to James Cieslak. Complete information on survivors was not available.

Asked in 2013 if she was comfortable with a Democratic Party whose philosophy was to the left of hers and becoming more so, Tauscher said: “I don’t want to move my left to the center. I want my left to stay where they are. But I want them to know that we need a center.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8cd05b7d-0954-332a-ad93-795cb6ab5641" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/obituaries/ellen-tauscher-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Ellen Tauscher, congresswoman and diplomat, is dead at 67

Ellen Tauscher, a centrist Democrat from California who served in Congress for 13 years before becoming a diplomat in the Obama administration, where she helped negotiate a treaty with Russia that limited missiles and nuclear warheads, died Monday in Palo Alto, California. She was 67.

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David Stout

Articles written by the author

Juan Corona, 85, Convicted as Killer of 25 Farmworkers, Dies

Janne E. Nolan, principled adviser on world affairs, is dead at 67

Edmund Morris, Reagan biographer who upset conventions, dies at 78

Ellen Tauscher, congresswoman and diplomat, is dead at 67