Serial Killers: Gordon Stewart Northcott

Born:  November 9, 1906 in Saskatchewan, Canada

Number of victims: 8 - 20 +

Date of murders: 1926 - 1928

Method of murder: Axe

Location: Riverside County, California




If you’ve seen the movie The Changeling, you already know the story of Gordon Stewart Northcott, a sadistic pedophile who raped and murdered a number of young boys in Riverside County, California in the 1920s.

A native of Canada, Northcott moved to California with his parents in 1924. There, he persuaded his father to buy a plot of land near Wineville, where he set up shop as a chicken farmer. However, this was just a cover for Northcott, his real interest was in abducting and raping young boys. To this extent, he enlisted the help of his teenaged nephew Sanford Clark, bringing the boy down from Canada on the pretext of working on the chicken ranch.  

Between the years 1926 and 1928, a series of abductions of young boys occurred in Los Angeles and Riverside County, California. The LAPD, riddled with corruption and incompetence at the time, made very little effort to solve the crimes, labeling the missing boys as runaways. That was until Sanford Clark was picked up as an illegal immigrant and told police about a number of boys who had been held at the farm and subsequently murdered by Northcott.

With the police closing in Northcott fled to Canada, but was arrested there on September 19, 1928. He was subsequently found guilty on three counts of murder and hanged on October 2, 1930.

Read the horrific story of Gordon Northcott and the “Wineville Chicken Coop Murders” plus 11 more fascinating stories of serial murder in American Monsters Volume One. Available now on Amazon.