A Chicken Coop Became a House of Horrors — and a Terrified Boy Was Forced to Do the Unthinkable

Before the Zodiac Killer and the Grim Sleeper terrorized California, there was the Chicken Coop Murderer, who preyed upon little boys and teens in 1920s Los Angeles, leaving a trail of pain and gore in his wake.

Gordon Stewart Northcott, 23, was hanged in San Quentin Prison in 1930 after being convicted the year before of kidnapping, sexually abusing and killing two boys and a teenager. Though he was only convicted of the three murders, Northcott is believed to have had as many as 20 victims.

Back then, residents of the burgeoning Los Angeles area had no idea a merciless killer was lurking in their midst until Feb. 2, 1928, when the headless, naked body of a teenage boy was found in a ditch on a dusty road near the sleepy suburb of La Puente. 

The victim, Jose Gonzales, an 18-year-old whose mutilated remains were found covered with a chicken feed sack, had been fatally shot multiple times. He had been beheaded “probably not more than twenty-four hours prior to the discovery of the body,” according to appellate court records from June 26, 1930.

His was the first of a string of disappearances of young boys and teens that began to plague the area.

One month later, in March 1928, Walter Collins, 9, of the Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles, went missing after his mother gave him a dime to see a movie and he never returned home, according to a 2008 article in the Los Angeles Times. (Collins’ story became the subject of frenzied media coverage, and was the focus of Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich.)

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

Unbeknownst to authorities at the time, Northcott, who had moved from Canada to Los Angeles several years before, had kidnapped the brothers. He took them to his family’s chicken farm in Mira Loma, in Riverside County, where he held them captive in a chicken coop. After raping the brothers over 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 crimes might have gone unsolved were it not for Clark’s sister, who was shocked at what her brother told her during a visit that September: that Northcott had been sexually abusing him and had killed four boys on the farm.

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She notified their mother in Canada, who called the authorities.

Northcott fled to Canada, but was arrested soon after.

In December 1928, Northcott was charged with murdering Gonzales, the Winslow brothers and Collins. He was convicted of killing all but Collins.

In a surprise move, his mother, Sarah Louise, who said she would “do anything” for her son, confessed to murdering Collins, according to the Times. She was sentenced to life in prison.

Just before Northcott was executed, he cried and begged not to be taken to the gallows and was blindfolded at his request so he wouldn’t see what was happening, the Healdsburg Tribune reported in 1930.