History of Infamous Cases of Mass Murder Part 3

About infamous cases of mass murder, history and facts of killers like Herbert Mullin and John Gilbert Graham.

INFAMOUS CASES OF MASS MURDER

JOHN GILBERT GRAHAM

On Nov. 1, 1955, Graham placed a time bomb containing 25 sticks of dynamite in the luggage of his mother, Mrs. Daisy King, at her Denver home. About 1 1/2 hours later, the bomb exploded in a DC-6B airliner, killing Mrs. King and 43 others on board. The plane had taken off half an hour late and was only 10 minutes out of Denver's Stapleton Airport when it crashed in flames. Graham soon became the prime suspect, because so few people had boarded at Denver. Twenty-three years old, he had never forgiven his mother's neglect of him as a child. He was indicted for all 44 deaths and executed in the gas chamber at Colorado State Penitentiary in 1956, after refusing to appeal his sentence.

JUAN CORONA

In a Yuba City, Calif., courtroom on Jan. 18, 1973, Juan Corona, a labor contractor, was convicted on 25 counts of first-degree homicide. The victims, all transient laborers, ages 40 to 68, were unearthed in orchards and along a riverbed by sheriff's deputies; some of them were discovered after Corona's arrest. All of the bodies had been mutilated with a machetelike weapon. Corona's attorney raised charges of jury tampering, but his request for a retrial was denied. Corona, now serving a life sentence in Soledad Prison, continues to insist on his complete innocence.

HERBERT MULLIN

During the four months prior to Feb. 13, 1973, Mullin killed three women, four men, and six boys (four of them teenagers) in the Santa Cruz Mountains of northern California. His motive was to prevent a major earthquake popularly predicted for early 1973. Although the San Andreas fault passes through the area, there were no scientific grounds for the prediction. Voted by his 1965 high school class the most likely to succeed, Mullin journeyed to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, where he experimented with LSD. Declared legally sane, he was tried in 1973 and found guilty of 10 counts of murder, two in the first degree. He was then 26 years old.

DEAN CORLL, ELMER HENLEY, and DAVID BROOKS

On Aug. 7, 1973, 17-year-old Henley shot and killed 33-year-old Corll in self-defense at an acrylic-sniffing party in Corll's Houston home. Henley called the police. It soon became clear that both Henley and Brooks were Corll's accomplices in at least 27 sadistic homosexual murders. The two had been paid from $5 to $10 for each adolescent boy they procured for Corll, who tortured, assaulted, and killed the boys after getting them high on acrylics or marijuana. The bodies were sprinkled with lime, wrapped in plastic, and buried at various sites (17 were found in a boat shed). Henley was convicted on nine counts of murder and sentenced to 594 years. Brooks, convicted on one count, was given life imprisonment.

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