Juan V. Corona, who joined the grim pantheon of America’s serial killers when he was convicted of slaughtering 25 migrant workers and burying them on farms near his home in the Sacramento Valley in California, died on Monday. He was 85.

A statement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he had died at a hospital near the state prison in Corcoran, in the south-central part of the state, where for almost a half-century he had been serving 25 concurrent life sentences for first-degree murder.

Mr. Corona’s victims were luckless drifters who moved from farm to farm, scratching out a bare existence in the valley’s orchards, groves and vineyards. No one seemed to miss these “fruit tramps,” as the locals called them, when they disappeared.

The killings came to light after a peach farmer spotted a fresh hole in one of his orchards near Yuba City on May 19, 1971. When he returned to investigate later that day, the hole had been filled in.