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True Crime Historian

Torture At The Chicken Ranch

True Crime Historian

Richard O Jones

True Crime, Performing Arts, Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture

4.5720 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Awful Crimes of the Northcott Family

A missing boy returns from a cross country walkabout, but the mother says it's not him.

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In episode 47, we follow the unusual narrative of the Northcott family. They came from Canada--and who knows what atrocities they committed there--but when they came to California to practice their evil habits, they were caught, though not soon enough. As many as eight young men may have been tortured and murdered on their Wineville farm, but none of them seemed to be able to tell the truth, even when their lives depended on it. One would go to prison, and one would pay the ultimate price for their crimes, but that hardly seems enough.This is the crime that inspired the 2008 Clint Eastwood film “The Changeling” 

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Los Angeles, California, March 10th, 1928.

0:07.8

Walter Collins failed to return home from play,

0:11.7

according to his mother, Mrs. Christine Collins, a telephone operator.

0:17.1

He was last seen by a chum, William Griffith, near his home.

0:22.4

That same night, a grocer living near the Collins residence,

0:27.0

heard a boy screaming in an automobile that was speeding away.

0:31.4

This boy was with a middle-aged couple, the grocer said.

0:37.5

April 6, 1928.

0:41.8

Police today conducted a wide search for at least eight ex-convicts recently released from Folsom

0:48.4

Prison.

0:49.7

The ex-convicts were members of a prison gang which worked under the direction of W.J.S. Collins,

0:55.5

the boy's father, a convict boss at Folsom. The elder Collins, a three-time loser,

1:02.4

was believed to have incurred the enmity of the prisoners because he was required to report

1:07.8

any infractions of regulations.

1:11.2

The particular tank over which Collins had authority was filled with degenerates and

1:16.1

sub-normals.

1:18.7

Two clues which police worked on were exhausted today.

1:23.4

Hours spent in dragging the Lincoln Park Lake, during which every foot of the lake bed was covered revealed no trace of the boy

1:31.3

He last had been seen near the lake

1:35.3

The second clue was exploded when police located a man and woman who said they had driven into a Glendale gasoline station Sunday night.

1:45.4

The station attendant reported to police he saw the body of a boy in the back of the

1:50.2

automobile, but it developed that the attendant saw a boy asleep.

...

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