In March 1928, nine-year-old Walter Collins disappeared from his home in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles after his mother gave him money to go to a movie. When he failed to return by nightfall, Christine Collins contacted the Los Angeles Police Department, but was told there was nothing officers could do that evening. The case came at a time when the LAPD was already facing public criticism over rising crime rates and accusations of corruption. Walter’s father, an inmate serving time for robbery, suggested that an enemy he had made while working as a prison kitchen disciplinarian might have been involved.
A gas station attendant in Glendale also reported seeing the body of a boy wrapped in newspaper in the back of a car driven by a foreign couple. Both he and another witness identified Walter from a photo, but police were never able to trace the vehicle. Two months after Walter vanished, brothers Nelson and Lewis Winslow, aged 10 and 12, disappeared while walking home in Pomona. Weeks earlier, the headless body of a missing boy named Alvin Gotta had been found.
Police did not connect the cases. The Winslow parents later received letters from the boys claiming they were heading to Mexico and would return once they were famous. In August 1928, five months after Walter’s disappearance, police in Illinois detained a boy who initially gave a false name before claiming he was Walter Collins. Mrs.
Collins was informed her son had been found, and the LAPD arranged for the boy’s return to Los Angeles amid heavy media attention. But when Christine saw him, she told officers it was not her son. Police ignored her concern, and Captain J. J.
Jones advised her to take the boy home and try him out for a while. Christine sought proof from Walter’s dentist, who confirmed the boy’s teeth did not match Walter’s dental records. Still, the LAPD refused to acknowledge the discrepancy. Facing intense press scrutiny over incompetence and corruption, Captain Jones had Christine committed to the psychiatric ward at Los Angeles General Hospital using a policy that allowed police to detain those they considered troublemakers.
She was released ten days later, after the boy admitted he was not Walter. The boy’s real name was Arthur Hutchins. He was 12 years old and had claimed to be Walter after being told he resembled the missing child. His biological mother had died, and he wanted to escape his stepmother.
Police contacted his stepmother, who took him back to Illinois. Following her release, Christine filed a lawsuit against the LAPD, won, and was awarded $10,800. Jones was ordered to pay, though he never did. The case took a dark turn later that year.
In August 1928, a Canadian woman named Winifred Clark contacted U. S. authorities about her 15-year-old son, Sanford Wesley Clark, who was living with her brother, Gordon Northcott, on a chicken ranch in Wineville, California. Sanford’s sister had visited the ranch and reported strange and unsettling behavior from their uncle.
On August 31, 1928, immigration officers arrived at the ranch and took Sanford into custody. Northcott fled, warning his nephew to stall the officers or he would shoot him. During questioning, Sanford told police he had been physically abused and that his uncle had abducted, tortured, and murdered other boys, including Walter Collins and the Winslow brothers. He described how Northcott would take boys into an incubator room to see chicks hatching before killing them with an ax and burying them in quicklime.
He also named Alvin Gotta as another victim. A search of the ranch uncovered graves containing bone fragments, along with axes and farm equipment stained with blood and human hair. Pathologists determined the remains belonged to male children. Letters the boys had supposedly written to their parents, reassuring them they were alive, were also found.
Sanford identified the victims from photographs and claimed Northcott’s mother, Sarah, was also involved. When police dug at grave sites Sanford pointed out, they found the bodies had already been moved. Gordon Northcott was arrested in British Columbia in September 1928, and his mother was taken into custody in Alberta. U.
S. officials bypassed formal extradition and transported both back across the border. At the ranch, Gordon verbally confessed to five murders, including those of Walter Collins, the Winslow brothers, and Alvin Gotta, but he would only sign a written confession for Gotta’s murder. Sarah Northcott confessed to killing Walter Collins, saying she delivered the final blow and buried him near the chicken coop.
She was sentenced without trial to life imprisonment but was paroled after 12 years and died in 1944. At Gordon’s trial in January 1929, Sanford testified that his grandmother had decided which boys would be killed. Authorities speculated Northcott may have killed as many as 20 boys, but he was charged only for the murders of the Winslow brothers and Alvin Gotta. In February 1929, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
He was hanged on October 2, 1930. Christine Collins went to the prison to speak with him, and he denied killing her son. Christine never accepted that Walter was dead. Her hopes were raised when another boy, once presumed to be one of Northcott’s victims, surfaced five years later claiming he had escaped from the ranch.
Sanford had never reported an escape, but Christine continued searching for Walter until she died in December 1964 at the age of 75. Sanford returned to Canada after two years in reform school, married, adopted two sons, and became a respected citizen. Arthur Hutchins returned to Illinois, then later moved back to California, where he worked as a horse trainer and jockey. He died in 1954.
The town of Wineville changed its name to Mira Loma in 1930 in an attempt to distance itself from the crimes. In 2008, Clint Eastwood directed a film inspired by Christine Collins’s story, starring Angelina Jolie, titled Changeling.