Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label, Crime of the Century.

But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist, an author, and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. Jose Diaz had no aspiration to be an agent of societal change.

He was just a 22-year-old trying to live his life. That meant his

goals were much more grounded in the now. The son of Mexican refugees, he grew up among the

working poor in Los Angeles, struggling through the depression like everyone else did, constrained

by the kind of racial segregation that

existed in the South. But he didn't live in the South. He lived in California. And Los Angeles

was very clear about where his kind had to live and where they could work. But that life was

still better than the one the Diaz family had endured in earlier years

in the state of Durango, where there was little to eat and a lot to be afraid of. At least here,

there was food. Jose's family had left Mexico in the 1920s amid violent political unrest. They found

life across the border safer.

Here they became itinerant farm workers, moving seasonally through California to where

the work was, harvesting vegetables in the Central Valley and picking oranges and strawberries

around L.A., all to feed the rest of the nation that lay to the east.

But a decade later, times were hard everywhere.

Jose lived with his family in southeast Los Angeles County,

...