When nine-year-old Walter Collins vanished in 1928, his mother’s search uncovered one of America’s most chilling crimes — the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.
Discover the truth behind the impostor, a corrupt police officer, and a serial killer hiding on a California farm.
When nine-year-old Walter Collins disappeared, his mother Christine Collins knew her boy hadn’t run away.
She’s given him money for a cinema ticket on March 10 1928, but the brown-haired blue-eyed boy never came home.
Neighbours in Los Angeles, California, came forward to say they’d seen Walter with a man and woman.
A search was launched and sightings flooded in, including a claim Walter had been seen bundled up in the back of a car.
Weeks went by without concrete leads though.
And Walter wasn’t the only missing youngster.
Lewis Winslow, 12, and his brother Nelson, 10, vanished on May 16.
Then their parents received letters from the pair saying they were trying to reach South America.
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Meanwhile, in Canada, a 19-year-old woman called Jessie was growing concerned about her little brother.
Sanford Clark, just 12, had moved to Wineville, California, to help his uncle, Gordon Stewart Northcott, 19, and Gordon’s mother Sarah Louise, on their chicken farm.
Sanford wrote letters home about his new life, but something about his words didn’t feel right to Jessie,
So she travelled to California to see her little brother for herself.
As Jessie turned detective, police looking for Walter announced a major breakthrough.
Now August, the boy had now been missing for five months and public pressure to solve the case had been mounting.
Bit a miracle had happened.
Walter was found in Illinois, around 3,200km away from home.
Drawn and thin, he’d handed himself in saying he’d been kidnapped.
‘I do not think that is my son,’ she said, when she laid eyes on him.
It was the news Christine had longed for.
Keen for good publicity, officers organised a reunion between mother and son in front of cameras.
When the emotional moment came though, Christine was floored.
‘I do not think that is my son,’ she said, when she laid eyes on him.
Police insisted Walter had been changed by his terrible ordeal, and that Christine herself must be traumatised.
‘Try the boy out,’ officer J.J Jones told her.
So Christine took him home, but only grew more adamant that he was an imposter.
Friends backed her up, and getting her son’s dental records, she went back to the police.
There, Christine was accused of trying to get the state to care for her son and branded ‘cruel-hearted’ by officer Jones.
Angry the department’s triumph was being questioned, Jones had Christine locked up in psychiatric ward for five days.
But after her release, ‘Walter’ had a confession.
I am not Walter Collins, he wrote in a note. My name is Billy Fields. I said I was Walter Collins because I wanted to get into the movies in Hollywood.
In fact, the boy wasn’t Billy Fields either, he was Arthur J Hutchens from Illinois.
Bearing a strong resemblance to Walter, he was fed up of living with his stepmother and decided to try his luck.
For heartbroken Christine, the search went on.
What had happened to her son?
Meanwhile, reaching the Wineville chicken farm, Jessie Clark realised she had been right to be concerned.
Sanford was terrified of a violent Gordon.
Opening up, Sanford confided he was being sexually abused.
Jessie went back to Canada and reported that Sanford was living as an illegal immigrant in the US and was being abused by Gordon.
When officials drove up to the farm to investigate, Northcott yelled at Sanford to stall them and he and his mother went on the run.
Safe in police custody, Sanford made some harrowing claims.
His uncle was a killer.
On September 15, 1928, Sanford told officers he’d been forced to help Gordon Stewart Northcott abuse and murder three boys, identifying Walter and the missing Winslow brothers.
Letters written by Lewis and Nelson were found at the farm as well as two graves containing only pieces of bone.
Sanford said Northcott had asked the victims to come and look at chickens hatching in the coop before attacking them with an axe and disposing of bodies in quicklime.
Five days later Northcott and his mother were found in Canada.
Hauled back to Wineville to help police, Northcott confessed to five murders – those of Walter, the Winslow brothers, a Mexican boy named Alvin Gothea and one other.
But questioned formally later, he only admitted to killing Alvin.
Sanford admitted to shooting one of the boys while his uncle held him at gunpoint and was sentenced to five years, cut to 23 months.
Northcott however stood trial for the ‘Wineville Chicken Coop Murders’.
During the hearing, disturbing details about abuse and incest in the family came to light and the town became synonymous with horror.
After the 27-day trial, a jury found him guilty of the murders of Walter, Alvin, Lewis and Nelson.
The anguished father of the Winslow brothers led a lynch mob to the prison, but was persuaded by police to let justice to run its cause.
And five days later Judge George R Freeman sentenced Northcott to death.
Without Walter’s body Christine Collins struggled to accept her son was dead.
Before his execution, Northcott sent the mother a telegram appearing to confess and telling her he would share the whole truth if she met him.
When she came to face with Northcott, he suddenly said he didn’t want to see her.
‘I don’t know anything about it. I’m innocent,’ he said.
Without knowing for certain, Christine spent the rest of her life she clinging to hope that little Walter was alive somewhere.
After Northcott was hanged on Oct 2 1930, aged 23, the town of Wineville changed its name to Mira Loma in a bid to end its awful association.
The monster’s reign of terror was definitively over.
