Movie puts spotlight on old Southland murder site

Clint Eastwood's new film "The Changeling" tells the story of a mother who battled the LAPD in the search for her missing son. The Depression-era tale also involves a sinister figure from the Riverside area who's the focus of a new book, "Nothing is Strange With You." Just a warning: KPCC's Steven Cuevas must reveal a major plot twist of "The Changeling" so he can share the ghoulish tale of Stewart Northcott.

Steven Cuevas: When 9-year-old Walter Collins went missing, his mother turned the search into a dramatic public crusade. She eventually met the man who took her son: Stewart Northcott, a chicken farmer from the town of Wineville.

During his short, macabre life, Northcott kidnapped and sexually abused more than 20 boys – including his own nephew, Sanford Clark. Three of the boys, he murdered.

James Jeffery Paul: He was a pedophile first. He was clearly a sadist. He killed his victims because they got in the way and knew too much.

Cuevas: Writer James Jeffery Paul spent more than a decade exhuming Northcott's life. Some of it parallels the life of Walter Collins.

Both had mothers who would do anything for their sons. But only Northcott's mother possessed the kind of love that could hide her son's unspeakable crimes.

Paul: And then he brought Walter Collins back, and after a few days, she told Stewart, "This little boy, you've kept him here too long. We've really got to get rid of him." And he said, "OK, mom. I'll shoot him." And she said, "No, no no! That'll make too much noise. Someone will hear. Use an ax."

And then she took Sanford's hand and Stewart's and said "we've got to each strike a blow so that if we're caught we'll all share equally in the guilt." And it was she who struck the death blow. It was she who killed Walter.

Cuevas: The Northcotts' little house of horrors crashed down around them when Sanford escaped and led authorities to the graves of his uncle's victims. Before they could get there, Northcott snatched the bodies from the earth and incinerated them. Police still found enough to hang him for murder.

[Car passing]

Cuevas: Wineville tried to bury its bloody past. It changed its name to Mira Loma. A handful of horse stalls and backyard poultry farmers still hold their ground against a crush of new development.

Steve Lech: Yeah, that's the original house. Where that window is with the air conditioner, that was the door...

Cuevas: The Northcott ranch was a forgotten nightmare until a Riverside County historian, Steve Lech, found it.

Lech: Well, when I looked at assessor's maps, all of these lots have been re-subdivided. This is lot whatever number, and there's a lot line going through it. And apparently it was this lot over here that was part of it.

Cuevas: The rundown, stucco colored A-frame looks much as it did 80 years ago. The occupants knew nothing of the murders – until Hollywood producers came around scouting locations for the film "The Changeling."

Naomi Alvarez: I was so like, "Oh my God, this can't be true!" Like, "Yeah. Right. Not my house!" My jaw dropped when my neighbor told me.

Cuevas: Twenty-five-year-old Naomi Alvarez lives with her husband and son in a bungalow on the Northcott ranch. Her parents bought the property and the house 20 years ago – but her dad refused to move in.

Alvarez: No, he didn't want to live in that front house. And he doesn't know why. So my dad waited a whole year to build this, so we could live here, but not in that house. So, I mean, I've never had any experience, like, you know, ghostly stuff or...

My neighbor has. Her daughter, like, saw a man in a dark suit next to her mom while she was babysitting her two boys. And she's like, (gasps) oh!

Cuevas: We find that neighbor, Betty Sanchez. She says for years, her daughter saw things in the house – like that man in the dark suit.

Sanchez: She jumped back, and she was like, afraid to say, and as she left the house, she goes, "You know what? When I was at your house, it creeped me out. I opened the door, and there was a man sitting on your couch. And he had his hair parted to the side. He stood up and he looked at me in the face, and he was smiling."

Cuevas: Sanchez was convinced the apparition was Northcott after seeing his picture in a magazine. The experience has chilled the Sanchez family to the bone, but they're trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past.

Paul: Seems strangely familiar. I almost feel I know this place.

Cuevas: For James Jeffrey Paul, this visit was a way to put flesh on the bones of a ghost story that he's lived with for years.

Paul: The bad feelings that were here... If people can really pick up on such things, I'm, I don't have that gift, and it's probably just as well that I don't. But it's, is very strange just being here and like I said I've been here so often in my head that I can picture it happening here.

Cuevas: In 1929, Stewart Northcott was convicted of killing three boys. His mother took the rap for the murder of Walter Collins – whose body was never found. Northcott went to the gallows at San Quentin prison in 1930.