The Worst Mass Murderer Yet
Despite their local notoriety, Knowles and Schaefer remained relatively unknown to the public at large. It was the Houston killer Dean Corll who first made the American public—and then the world—aware of the rise of a new kind of mass murderer. And although the case cannot compare in psychological interest with many others in this book, it must be discussed as a kind of gruesome historical landmark. Corll was the first serial killer to create the feeling that human depravity had reached a new depth.
Shortly after 8 a.m. on August 8, 1973, the telephone operator in the Pasadena Police Department received a call from someone with a boyish voice and a broad Texas accent. “Y’all better come on here now. Ah jes’ killed a man.” He gave the address as 2020 Lamar Drive.
Within a minute, two squad cars were on their way. Lamar Drive was in a middle-class suburb of Pasadena—a southeastern suburb of Houston—and 2020 Lamar was a small frame bungalow with an overgrown lawn. Three teenagers were sitting on the stoop by the front door: two boys and a girl. The girl, who was small and shapely, was dressed in clothes that looked even more tattered than the usual teenage outfit. All three were red-eyed, as if they had been crying. A skinny, pimply youth with an incipient blonde moustache identified himself as the one who had made the phone call. He pointed at the front door: “He’s in there.”
Lying against the wall in the corridor was the naked body of a well-built man, his face caked with blood that had flowed from a bullet wound. There were more bullet holes in his back and shoulder. The bullet in the head had failed to penetrate fully, and the end was sticking out of his skull. He was very obviously dead.
The three teenagers had identified themselves as Elmer Wayne Henley, seventeen, Timothy Kerley, sixteen, and Rhonda Williams, fifteen. Henley, the youth who had made the call, also acknowledged that he had shot his friend, whose name was Dean Arnold Corll. The teenagers were driven off to the Pasadena police headquarters. Meanwhile, an ambulance was summoned to take the corpse to the morgue, and detectives began to search the house.
It was obvious that Corll had moved in recently—the place was only half furnished. The bedroom outside which the corpse was lying contained a single bed and a small table. It smelt strongly of spray paint—the type used in “paint-sniffing” (similar to glue or other solvent sniffing). The oddest thing about the room was the transparent plastic sheeting that covered the entire carpet. And lying beside the bed was an eight-foot length of plywood with handcuffs attached to two of its corners, and nylon ropes to the other two. A long hunting knife in its scabbard lay nearby. A black box proved to contain a seventeen-inch dildo and a jar of Vaseline. It did not require the powers of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these objects were connected with some bizarre sexual ritual in which the victims were unwilling.
The new Ford van parked in the drive produced the same impression. There were navy-blue curtains that could be drawn to seal off the whole of the rear portion, a piece of carpeting on the floor, and rings and hooks attached to the walls. There was also a considerable length of nylon rope. In a large box—covered with a piece of carpet—there were strands of human hair. Another similar box in a shed had airholes drilled in its sides.
Back at the police station, Elmer Wayne Henley, nervous and chain-smoking, was explaining how he came to shoot his friend Dean Corll.
He had met Corll, he said, when he had lived in a run-down area of Houston known as the Heights. Corll, who was sixteen years his senior, had recently moved into a house that had belonged to his father; it was in Pasadena. On the previous night, he and Timothy Kerley had gone to a glue-sniffing party at Corll’s house. But in the early hours of the morning, the two boys had made some excuse to go out and collect Rhonda Williams, who had just decided to run away from home. Rhonda had been in a state of tension and misery ever since her boyfriend had vanished a year earlier.
Corll had been furious when the boys arrived back at the house with Rhonda. “You weren’t supposed to bring a girl,” he yelled, “You spoilt everything.” But after a while he seemed to control himself and regain his good humor, and the four of them settled down to paint-sniffing in the living room. Paint was sprayed into a paper bag, which was then passed around so that they could all breathe in the fumes. Within an hour, they were all stretched out unconscious on the floor.
When Wayne Henley woke up, daylight was filtering through the drawn curtains, and Corll was snapping handcuffs on his wrists; his ankles were tied together. The other two were already handcuffed and bound. As they all began to recover their senses and struggle against their bonds, Corll revealed that his good humor of a few hours ago had been deceptive. He was seething with resentment and fury. He waved the knife at them and told them he was going to kill them all. “But first I’m gonna have my fun.” Then he dragged Henley into the kitchen and rammed a revolver in his belly.
Henley decided that his only chance of escape was to “sweet talk” Corll, persuading him that he would be willing to join in the murder of the other two. It took some time, but finally Corll calmed down and removed the handcuffs. Henley would rape Rhonda while he raped Timothy Kerley. Corll went and picked up Kerley, carrying him to the bedroom like some huge spider with its prey. Then he came back and carried off Rhonda. He turned on the portable radio to its top volume to drown out any screams or protests.
When Henley went into the bedroom, Corll was naked, and was handcuffing Kerley, who was also naked, to the plywood board. Kerley, like Rhonda, was gagged. Corll handed Henley the knife and ordered him to cut off Rhonda’s clothes. Rhonda was still dazed from the paint-sniffing, and was only half-aware of what was happening. But Kerley understood and struggled violently as Corll tried to sexually assault him.
Knowing he was under observation, Henley pretended to rape Rhonda; in fact, he was incapable. But as Kerley thrashed and struggled violently, trying to throw off the heavy man, Henley shouted above the music: “Why don’t you let me take her outta here? She don’t want to see that.” Corll just ignored him. Henley saw his chance and jumped to his feet, grabbing the .22 pistol from the night table. “Back off, Dean! Stop it!” Corll lurched to his feet. “Go on, Wayne, kill me. Why don’t you?” As he lunged towards Henley, the boy fired; the bullet struck Corll in the head, and he staggered past, while Henley fired another shot into his shoulder. As Corll tumbled through the door and hit the wall of the corridor, Henley emptied the rest of the bullets into his back. Corll slumped down slowly to the floor, resting finally with his cheek and shoulder against the wall.
Henley found the handcuff key and released his friends—Rhonda was still unable to take in what had happened. But when she saw Corll lying in a pool of blood, she screamed. Henley calmed her, and the three of them dressed—Rhonda making do with her slashed clothes. What should they do next? Simply leave the corpse and go away? But it would be found sooner or later, and if neighbors had seen them entering or leaving the house, they would be in serious trouble. So Henley looked up the number of the Pasadena police department and rang them. As the tension relaxed, all three of them found that they were unable to stop sobbing.
It took Henley an hour and a half to make his statement. Meanwhile, Kerley was able to confirm the story. But Kerley also mentioned something that intrigued the detectives. “While we were waiting for the police, Wayne told me that if I wasn’t his friend, he could have got fifteen hundred dollars for me.”
Questioned about the plywood board and the dildo, Henley told the police that Corll liked little boys, and had been paying him to procure them for him. But why, in that case, had Henley decided to kill him? “He made one mistake,” said Henley. “He told me that I wouldn’t be the first one he’d killed. He said he’d already killed a lot of boys and buried them in the boat shed.”
The words made the detectives glance at one another. So far, they had been assuming that this was a simple case of glue-sniffing and sexual perversion, and that Corll’s threats to kill the teenagers had been intended to frighten them. Henley’s words raised a far more unpleasant suspicion. For nearly three years now, boys had been disappearing from the Heights area of Houston. Some of them were assumed to be runaways, but in the case of many, the parents had ruled it out as impossible—as, for example, in the case of a nine-year-old. Now the police had learned that Corll had lived in the Heights area until he moved to Pasadena, and one of his homes had been directly opposite that of the missing nine-year-old.
“Where is this boat shed?”
Henley said he wasn’t sure; he had been there only once. But it was somewhere in southwest Houston. He now was able to recollect three of the names that Corll had mentioned: Marty Jones, someone called Cobble, and someone called Hilligiest. Even with all these details, none of the detectives really believed that they were dealing with serial murder. It was more likely that Henley was still under the influence of the “glue.” But his story had to be checked.
Detective Sergeant Dave Mullican asked Henley: “Can you remember how to get to this boat shed?”
“I think so. It’s near Hiram Clark Road.”
The first stop was the Houston police headquarters. There Henley was shown pictures of two boys who had been missing since July 27, thirteen days earlier. Henley identified them as Charles Cobble, seventeen, and Marty Jones, eighteen. The teenagers had shared a room, and both had good school records. Neither had any reason to run away.
The Pasadena detectives—accompanied by two of their Houston colleagues—now headed south to Hiram Clark Road. Another group of detectives was ordered to collect spades and ropes, and to meet them there. It was already late afternoon when the two cars arrived at the rendezvous point. Henley now took over the navigating. In an area of open fields dotted with grazing cattle, they finally pulled up beside a barbed-wire fence on Silver Bell Street, and Henley pointed out the corrugated iron shed standing well back from the road.
Southwest Boat Storage was virtually a parking lot for boats, with twenty roofed “stalls.” The police cars drove into the compound, and Henley directed them to stall number eleven. “That’s Dean’s.”
The double doors were padlocked, and the owner, Mayme Meynier, who lived in a large house next to the compound, told them that she had no key: the renters provided their own padlocks. When they explained that Corll was dead, she gave them permission to break in.
There was no boat inside the shed, only a half-dismantled car, a bicycle, and a large iron drum. With the sun on the roof, the place was like an oven. There were a few cardboard boxes, water containers, and—ominously—two sacks of lime. Two long strips of old carpet covered the earthen floor. A large plastic bag proved to contain a mixed lot of male clothing, including a pair of red shoes.
Wayne Henley stood at the door, gazing blankly inside. Then he walked back towards the cars, sat down on the ground, and buried his head between his knees.
The first task was to move everything out of the shed. While this was being done, a detective noted the registration numbers on the car and the bicycle and radioed them to headquarters. The answer came back quickly: the car had been stolen from a used-car lot, and the bicycle belonged to thirteen-year-old James Dreymala, who had vanished less than a week ago.
The shed was now empty; the two strips of carpet were also rolled out. Mullican pointed to a swelling in the floor near the left wall, and told two “trusties”—convicts from the local jail who had been brought along to help—to start digging.
Even with the doors open, the heat was stifling. Both men were soon perspiring heavily. Six inches down in the sandy earth, they uncovered a white substance. “That’s lime,” said Mullican. “Keep digging.”
Suddenly, the shed was filled with a sickening stench; the detectives held their noses. The next carefully excavated shovelful revealed a face staring sightlessly up at them. The younger trusty dropped his spade and rushed from the shed, retching. A policeman calmly took up the spade and went on clearing the earth. Minutes later, the policemen found themselves looking down at a large plastic bag that contained the body of a boy. He looked about twelve or thirteen, and was naked. When the bag had been carefully lifted from the ground, it was obvious that the body inside had been recently buried. One of the detectives again radioed headquarters, this time to send for forensic experts.
Outside, the press was arriving. One radio reporter had allowed Wayne Henley to use his car telephone to call up his mother. They heard him say: “Mama, I killed Dean.” Over his own microphone the reporter heard Mrs. Henley said: “Oh Wayne, you didn’t.” From what followed, it was clear that Henley’s mother wanted to rush out to the site; a detective shook his head.
Moments later, as Henley hung up, the body was carried out from the boat shed in its plastic sheeting. Henley was clearly shaken. “It was all my fault.” “Why?” asked a detective casually. “Because I introduced him to them boys.” And the teenager went on to explain that, during the past two years, he had procured many boys for Dean Corll.
By the time the radio reporter went on the air at six o’clock, a second body had just been discovered. As it began to grow dark, a fire engine with a floodlight and two air-extractors arrived. Soon after that, two more bodies were uncovered. One had been shot in the head, the other strangled with a Venetian blind cord that was still knotted tightly around the throat.
As the news of the finds was broadcast, crowds of spectators arrived to peer over the barbed-wire fence. The air extractors blasted the smell of decaying corpses at them. One reporter had already minted a striking phrase: “There are wall to wall bodies in there.”
Detectives questioned Mrs. Meynier about her former tenant. She described him as “the nicest person you’d ever meet,” a “gentleman” with a charming smile and dimples. He had never been behind with his $5-a-week rent. But recently, she had been baffled when he told her that he wanted to rent another stall. Why should he need more space? Surely he already had plenty.
Asked how long Corll had rented the stall, she replied: “Since 1971.” The detective turned away muttering: “My God!”
Henley, meanwhile, was also telling reporters how nice Corll could be. His mother liked ol’ Dean and did not object to their friendship. But as the fourth body was carried out, he became nervous; it was obvious that he was suffering from a glue-sniffing hangover. At ten o’clock he was driven back to the police station. Two hours later, the body count had risen to eight, and the diggers were exhausted. They decided to call it a day.
Back in the Heights, many families with missing teenage sons were now watching their television screens for the printed messages that gave the latest news, and trying to convince themselves that their child could not be among those in the boat shed. But for those whose children had known Dean Corll, that was a slender hope. Now the parents found themselves wondering why they had failed to suspect Corll of being a sexual pervert. He and his mother had run a candy factory in the Heights, and Corll was popular with the children because he gave them candy. He also gave them lifts in his white Dodge van.
By midnight, a planeload of reporters from other parts of the country arrived in Houston. And from all over the world, reporters were converging on the corrugated iron boat shed. Dean Corll had been dead for only sixteen hours, but his name had already reached every part of the globe. If the number of his suspected victims was confirmed—and the detectives had a list of forty-two youngsters who had vanished since 1970—he would be America’s worst mass murderer to date. Even the nineteenth-century Chicago killer H. H. Holmes had confessed to only twenty-eight.
Two hours after the lights went out at Southwest Boat Storage on Silver Bell Street, a car containing five people drew up at the barbed-wire fence. They identified themselves to the police on guard as the Hilligiest family. Thirteen-year-old David Hilligiest had disappeared more than two years earlier, on May 30, 1971. He had set out for the local swimming pool early that afternoon, and failed to arrive there. On that same day, another local boy, George Malley Winkle, sixteen, had vanished. The Hilligiests had spent $1,100 on a private detective, but had failed to find the slightest trace of their son. Now, after telephoning police headquarters, they had learned that Wayne Henley had mentioned David Hilligiest as one of the buried victims. They begged the guard to allow them to go to the boat stall. The police explained sympathetically that that was impossible; the lights were out and the place was now locked up. They had better go home, get some sleep, and prepare for their ordeal of the next day.
At ten the next morning, after a visit from his mother and a light breakfast, Henley was again sitting opposite Mullican in the Pasadena interrogation room. The rings under his eyes made it obvious that he had slept badly.
“Tell me about the boys you procured.”
Henley explained that he had met Corll two years earlier, and that Corll had then offered him $200 each for any boys he could “bring along.” For a year he did nothing; then, when he badly needed money, decided to take up the offer. Corll had not actually paid him the full $200 for the first boy he had procured. And he had not paid subsequently.
Now Henley made his most significant admission so far: he had been present when Corll had killed some of the boys. This suddenly changed the whole situation. The police had been assuming that they were dealing with an insatiable homosexual rapist and a youth he had persuaded to help him find boys. Now it began to look as if Henley had been an active partner in the murders.
They were interrupted by the telephone. It was the Houston police headquarters. A man named Alton Brooks had turned up at the police station with his eighteen-year-old son, David, explaining that David had known Corll and wanted to talk about it. And David Brooks was now giving a statement that implicated Henley in the murders.
When Mullican hung up, he told the teenager on the other side of the desk: “That was Lieutenant Porter at Houston Homicide. He says he has a boy named David Brooks in there, and Brooks is making a statement about you and Dean Corll.”
Oddly enough, Henley looked relieved.
“That’s good. Now I can tell you the whole story.”
Mullican’s next question was: “Did you kill any of the boys yourself?”
Henley answered without hesitation: “Yes, sir.”
Mullican did his best to show no emotion during the statement that followed. But it was difficult to appear impassive. Wayne Henley was describing how he had lured some of his own best friends into Corll’s lair, witnessed their torture and rape, and then participated in their murders.
It seemed that David Brooks had been Corll’s original accomplice, as well as his lover. He had been procuring victims for Corll long before Henley came along. In fact, Henley was intended to be just another victim when he was taken along to meet Corll in 1971. But Corll soon realized that Henley would be more useful as an accomplice. He had lot of friends, and would do anything for money. In fact, said Henley, he was pretty sure that Corll still planned to kill him sooner or later, because he had his eye on Henley’s fourteen-year-old brother, Ronnie, and knew he would have to kill Wayne before he could get his hands on him.
The method of obtaining victims was usually much the same. Corll would drive around with Henley until they saw a likely victim, and Corll would offer him a lift. Since there was already a teenager in the car, the boy would suspect nothing. That was how Dean had picked up that thirteen-year-old blond kid a few days ago. Dean was parked in front of a grocery store when the kid came past on his bike. Dean called him over and told him he had found some Coke bottles in his van, and the kid could go and collect the deposit on them. The boy (it was thirteen-year-old James Dreymala) took the bottles and came back a few minutes later with the money. Then Dean remembered that he had a lot more Coke bottles back in his garage, and if the kid would like to come along, he could have them, too. So James Dreymala allowed Dean to put his bike in the back of the van, and went back to Dean’s house on Lamar Street. The boy said he had to ring his father to ask if he could stay out, but the father refused. After the call, Dean “had his fun,” strangled the teenager, and then drove the body out to the boat shed to join the others.
At about this time, Mullican heard the latest report from the boat shed. Four more victims had been found in the past two hours, bringing the total up to twelve. And beside one of them his genitals had been found in a plastic bag. Part of Dean’s “fun” was castrating his victims.
Henley’s new confession went on for two more hours. It was rambling and often incoherent, but Mullican gathered that Henley had been present at the murder of at least nine boys. He admitted shooting one of them himself. The bullet had gone up the boy’s nose, and the boy had looked up and said: “Wayne, why did you shoot me?” Henley pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger again; this time the boy died.
Had Corll buried any bodies in other places beside the boat shed? Mullican wanted to know. Oh sure, said Henley, there were some on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn and more of them on High Island Beach, east of Galveston.
It was now past noon, but it seemed a good idea to bring Wayne Henley and David Brooks face to face. He would then persuade Henley to show them where the bodies were buried at Lake Sam Rayburn.
When they arrived at the Houston police station, Lieutenant Breck Porter took Mullican aside. David Brooks was doing plenty of “confessing,” but it was all about Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. According to Brooks, he had been merely an innocent bystander.
David Brooks proved to be a tall, round-faced, long-haired youth who wore granny glasses; apparently he had recently married. He looked startled to see Wayne Henley—no one had warned him Henley was on his way. Henley stared across at his former friend. “David, I told ’em everything. You better do the same.”
Brooks looked defensive. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do. And if you don’t tell everything, I’m gonna change my confession and say you was responsible for all of it.”
Brooks said he wanted to talk to his father, and was taken out of the room. Later that day, he was told he was under arrest for being implicated in the murders. He was subdued and tearful as he was led away.
Henley, on the other hand, seemed to have been infused with a new life since his confession. On the way out to Lake Sam Rayburn—120 miles away, in the Angelina National Park—he talked nonstop, and made a number of damaging admissions. “I choked one of them boys until he turned blue, but Dean still had to come and finish him off.” When a deputy asked how a decent boy like him could get involved in murder, he made the odd reply: “If you had a daddy that shot at you, you might do some things too.”
An hour later he was leading them into the woods on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn. He was already implicating David Brooks, although not by name. “We picked them up and Dean raped and killed them.” Asked by a reporter if there had been any torture, he replied cryptically: “It wasn’t what you would really call torture.” But he declined to elaborate.
Then, refusing to allow reporters and photographers to accompany them, he led the police to the sites of four more bodies. One of them had been buried underneath a board; it emerged later that when Henley and Corll had returned to bury another body, they had found a hand sticking out of the ground, so had reburied it with the board on top.
Before darkness made further digging impossible, two bodies had been unearthed. The latest news from the boat shed in south Houston was that the digging was now finished, and seventeen bodies—or parts of bodies—had been found. The ones that had not been buried in plastic bags had decayed, so that little but bones remained. The body count so far was nineteen.
The following morning, it rose to twenty-one, with the uncovering of the other two bodies at Lake Sam Rayburn. By mid-morning, the convoy of police and reporters was on its way south to High Island, where Henley insisted there were eight more bodies buried.
The search of the High Island beach turned into a circus. Three helicopters had arrived with camera crews, and the reporters almost outnumbered the crowds of morbidly fascinated spectators. Henley was in good spirits, offering to race the overweight sheriff up the beach—an offer which, in view of the ninety-degree heat, the sheriff politely declined. David Brooks, who had been brought down from Houston, was much more subdued; he sat there much of the time, his arms around his knees, refusing to speak to reporters.
Only two more bodies were found that afternoon, bringing the total up to twenty-three. Later, four more would be unearthed on the beach. The other two mentioned by Henley were never discovered. But even a total of twenty-seven made Dean Corll America’s worst mass murderer.
While Wayne Henley was helping the police at Lake Sam Rayburn, David Brooks was offering the first complete picture of Corll’s career of homicidal perversion in the Houston interrogation room. He still insisted that he had never taken an active part in the killings, but his questioners suspected that this was because he had sworn to his father that he was innocent of murder. Henley, who seems to have been the more truthful of the two, stated that Brooks had taken an active part in several murders. The picture that emerged left little doubt that this was true.
Meanwhile, reporters were learning all they could about the background of America’s worst mass murderer. For the most part, it proved to be surprisingly innocuous.
Dean Arnold Corll was born on Christmas Day 1939, in Waynesdale, Indiana, the first child of Arnold and Mary Corll, who were in their early twenties. But the parents were temperamentally unsuited; both were strong characters, and their quarrels could be violent. Mary adored her eldest son; Arnold—a factory worker who became an electrician—was a disciplinarian who found children tiresome. When Dean was six, the couple divorced, and Arnold was drafted into the Army Air Force. Mary bought a house trailer and drove to join her ex-husband at his base in Tennessee, but the quarrels continued and they separated again. An elderly farm couple agreed to look after the boys—Dean had a younger brother, Stanley—while Mary went out to work.
From the beginning, Dean was an oversensitive loner. Because his feelings were hurt at a birthday party when he was six, he always refused to go to other people’s houses. While Stanley played with other children, Dean stayed at home.
The Corlls made yet another reconciliation attempt after the war, and in 1950 drove the trailer to Houston. But the marriage still failed to work out, and they parted again. At this point, it was discovered that Dean had a congenital heart ailment, and he was ordered to avoid sports. In fact it was hardly necessary; he was not the sporting type. Life for Mary was hard; she worked while the boys went to one school after another. In 1953 she married Jake West, a traveling clock salesman by whom she had a daughter. The family moved to Vidor, Texas, a small town where, as one commentator put it, “the big event is for the kids to pour kerosene on the cat and set it afire.” Since he spent so much time without his parents, Dean became intensely protective of his siblings—a kind of surrogate mother.
Now a teenager, Dean took up skin diving, but had to quit when he fainted one day, and the doctor diagnosed a recurrence of the heart problem. But he was allowed to continue playing the trombone in the school band. He was always quiet, always polite, and never complained or “fussed.”
One day, a pecan-nut salesman observed Mary’s efficiency at baking pies and asked her why she didn’t take up candy making. She liked the idea, and was soon running a candy business from their garage, with Jake West as traveling salesman and Dean as the errand boy and “gofer” (“go fer this, go fer that”). He was often overworked, but remained cheerful and uncomplaining. After his graduation from high school at the age of twenty, Dean went back to Indiana to be with Jake’s widowed mother, while the family returned to Houston. There the candy business continued to be underfunded. Two years later, when Dean moved back to Houston, he took a job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and made candy at nights. Women who worked there were awed at his industry.
In 1964, Dean Corll was drafted into the army. This seems to have been a watershed in his life, for it was the time when he first recognized that he was gay. No details are available, but it seems obvious that some homosexual affair made him realize what he had so far failed to suspect. Released from the army after eleven months—pleading that his family needed him to work in the candy business—he returned to Houston to find his mother’s second marriage in the process of dissolution. Mr. and Mrs. West had become business rivals rather than partners, and when Jake threw her out of the shop one day, Mary went off and started one of her own. Dean didn’t mind; he had never liked his stepfather.
Now living in an apartment of his own, Dean began making friends with the children of the neighborhood—notably the boys—giving away free candy. Yet when a boy who worked for the company made some kind of sexual advance, Dean was angry and upset, and pleased when his mother dismissed him. Nevertheless, a coworker noticed that another teenaged employee always made sure that he was never left alone with Dean.
Dean’s mother remained intensely protective, treating him as if he was still a teenager himself. But he was once again seeing something of his father, for whom he had great admiration.
Meanwhile, Mary now repeated her error and married yet again—this time a merchant seaman. She found him stupid and coarse, and soon began to suspect that he was psychotic. They divorced—and then remarried. He became neurotically jealous of his wife, and they separated again. But his continual attempts to force his way into the candy factory destroyed her enthusiasm for the business. When a psychic told her to move to Dallas, she took his advice, and divorced the merchant seaman yet again. And Dean, now left alone in Houston, suddenly felt that he was free to do as he liked.
Corll’s Mr. Hyde aspect had at first manifested itself simply as a powerful attraction to boys, with whom he enjoyed playing the part of an elder brother. One boy said; “He acted real nice to me. He never tried to mess with me or nothing.” But the desire was there, and Mr. Hyde began to break out when he realized that some boys would permit oral sex in exchange for money. Fourteen-year-old David Brooks was one of them. In fact, he was delighted to have an “elder brother,” and became completely emotionally dependent on Corll—so dependent that he made no attempt to denounce him when he learned that he was a killer.
This emotional dependence of David Brooks undoubtedly played a major part in the tragedy that followed. His love for Corll meant that he was willing to subjugate his will to Corll’s. And Corll, in turn, was encouraged to give way to his Mr. Hyde personality. It was a case of folie à deux, or “madness for two.”
Brooks was a lonely schoolboy when he met Dean Corll in the Heights in 1969. The two had something in common: their parents had broken up, and they were on their own. Corll’s mother had closed the candy factory she ran with her son’s help, and gone off to live in Dallas. Corll had found himself a $5-an-hour job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and moved his few possessions into a shed. Corll propositioned Brooks, and the teenager agreed to allow Corll to have oral sex for a payment of $5.
But their relationship was not purely commercial. Corll was able to give Brooks something he needed badly—affection. Brooks, in turn, worshipped Corll. “Dean was a real good dude,” and “a brilliant and generous man,” he claimed. And when he returned to Houston in 1970—escaping from his disintegrating family—Brooks began to see a great deal of Corll: during the next three years they often shared rooms for brief periods.
By that time, it seems probable that Corll had already committed his first murder. A twenty-one-year-old student from the University of Texas in Austin, Jeffrey Alan Konen, had hitchhiked to his home in Houston on September 25, 1970. He had last been seen at six o’clock in the evening, looking for another lift. It seems probable that it was Corll who picked him up, and invited him back to his apartment at 3300 Yorktown. Konen’s body was one of the last of those found—on the High Island beach—and was so decomposed that it was impossible to determine cause of death. But the fact that the body had been bound hand and foot suggested that Corll had killed Jeffrey Konen in order to commit sodomy.
What made Corll’s murderous mission so easy was the teenage drug culture of the Heights. In the claustrophobic, run-down environment, all the kids were bored and discontented; they felt they were stuck there for life. The mere suggestion of a party was enough to make their eyes light up. They all smoked pot—when they could afford it. They also popped pills—Seconal, Nembutal, Phenobarbital, Quaaludes, even aspirin, washed down with beer or Coca-Cola. But because it was cheap, spray paint was the easiest way of obtaining a quick “high.” Although one boy collapsed and died when he tried to play football after a long paint-sniffing session, it made no difference to the others; he was merely “unlucky.” Moreover, the possession of spray paint was perfectly legal; and in an environment where a teenager was likely to be searched for drugs at any hour of the day, this went a long way towards making paint-sniffing the most popular form of escape.
That most of the kids were permanently broke conferred another tremendous advantage on a predatory homosexual such as Corll. Allowing a “queer” to perform oral sex was an easy and quick way of obtaining a few dollars. There can be no doubt that many of Corll’s victims had been back to his room several times before his demand for a more painful form of sex caused them to balk, and led to their deaths. The fact that there were a fairly high number of runaways from the Heights meant that occasional disappearances caused little stir.
The key to the Houston murders is Corll’s craving for sexual violation. At some point, oral sex ceased to satisfy him. Brooks admitted: “He killed them because he wanted anal sex, and they didn’t want to.” Even Brooks himself seems to have withheld anal sex. He describes how, after he had introduced Corll to Wayne Henley, the latter knocked him unconscious as he entered Corll’s apartment; Corll then tied him to the bed and sodomized him. This would obviously have been pointless if anal sex had been a normal part of their relationship. Yet in spite of the rape, Brooks continued to worship Corll, and to participate in the murders and disposal of the bodies.
It also seems clear that Corll was in love with Wayne Henley. But Henley remained independent. Far more avaricious than Brooks, he became Corll’s accomplice for cash. In spite of Henley’s denial, there can be no doubt that Corll paid him large sums of money as a procurer. One friend of Henley’s later described how Henley had suggested that they should move to Australia together and become homesteaders—Henley declared that he would provide the $1,700 each that they would need. “Where would you get it?” asked his friend. “I already have it.” Henley’s later assertion that Corll never paid him is almost certainly an attempt to conceal the appalling truth: that he sold his friends to Corll for $200 each.
By the end of 1970, Corll was firmly in the grip of “Mr. Hyde.” Brooks later tried to justify the murders: “Most of the boys weren’t good boys. This . . . probably sounds terrible, but most of ’em wasn’t no great loss. They was in trouble all the time, dope fiends and one thing or another.” This is almost certainly a repetition of something Corll said to Brooks—perhaps on many occasions.
Not long after the murder of Jeffrey Konen, Brooks walked into Corll’s Yorktown apartment unannounced, and found Corll naked. In another room there were two naked boys strapped to a plywood board. Corll demanded indignantly what Brooks was doing there, and ordered him to leave. Later, he told Brooks that he had killed both boys, and offered him a car as the price of his silence. In fact, he gave Brooks a new Corvette. The identity of these two victims has never been established, but they were probably among the bodies found on the High Island beach.
Having accepted the Corvette, Brooks was now an accomplice. He would go “cruising” with Corll, offering lifts to teenaged boys. One unknown youth was picked up sometime in November 1970, and taken back to Corll’s apartment. Corll raped and murdered the boy while Brooks looked on. No further details of this murder—or victim—are known.
Corll’s appetite for murder was growing. Many of the boys he once befriended in the days of the candy factory, and who had always been welcome visitors in his room, now noticed that he was becoming bad-tempered and secretive, and they stopped calling round. Many of these boys later insisted that Corll had simply been “nice” to them, without any attempt to make sexual advances. Many others, like David Brooks, had undoubtedly accepted money for oral sex.
On December 15, 1970, Brooks persuaded two boys to come back to an apartment that Corll had rented on Columbia Street. They were fourteen-year-old James Eugene Glass, and his friend Danny Michael Yates, fifteen. Both had been to church with James Glass’s father, and had agreed to meet him later. Glass had already been to Corll’s apartment on a previous occasion, and had taken a great liking to Corll. This time, both boys ended on the plywood board, after which they were strangled. By this time, Corll had decided that he needed somewhere closer than High Island or Lake Sam Rayburn (where his family owned a holiday cabin), so he rented the boat shed on Silver Bell Street. The two boys were the first to be buried there.
Corll had apparently enjoyed the double murder so much that he was eager to try it again. Six weeks later, two brothers, fourteen-year-old Donald Edward Waldrop, and thirteen-year-old Jerry Lynn Waldrop, were lured to a newly rented apartment at 3200 Mangum Road. (Corll changed apartments frequently, almost certainly to prevent curious neighbors from gossiping about his activities.) The father of the Waldrop boys was a construction worker who worked next door to Corll’s new apartment. The boys were also strangled and buried in the boat shed. Brooks admitted: “I believe I was present when they were buried.” This was typical of his general evasiveness.
On May 29, 1971, David Hilligiest, thirteen, disappeared on his way to the local swimming pool; his friend, sixteen-year-old George Malley Winkle, also vanished that day. Malley was on probation for stealing a bicycle. That same evening, just before midnight, Mrs. Malley’s telephone rang; it was her son, contacting his mother to tell her that he was in Freeport—a surfing resort sixty miles to the south—with some kids. They would be on their way home shortly.
That night, Mrs. Winkle slept badly, with a foreboding that her son was in trouble. When he failed to return, she asked young people in the neighborhood if they had seen him, and learned that he had climbed into a white van, together with David Hilligiest.
The frantic parents spent weeks following up every possible lead. They had posters printed, offering a $1,000 reward, and friendly truckers distributed them all over southern Texas. So did a lifelong friend of David Hilligiest’s—Elmer Wayne Henley, another child of a broken home. He tried to comfort the Hilligiests by telling them that he was sure nothing had happened to David. A psychic who was consulted by the Hilligiests disagreed: he plunged them into despair by telling them that their son was dead.
Ruben Watson, seventeen, another child of a broken home, went off to the movies on the afternoon of August 17, 1971, with a few dollars borrowed from his grandmother; he later rang his mother at work to say he would meet her outside the theater at 7:30. He never arrived. Brooks later admitted being present when Ruben was murdered.
By this time, Wayne Henley had entered the picture. He had become friendly with David Brooks, and Brooks had introduced him to Dean Corll. Henley was intended as a victim, but Corll seems to have decided that he would be more useful as a pimp. The fact that Henley was skinny and pimply may also have played a part in Corll’s decision to let him live. The Hilligiests’ son Greg—aged eleven—came home one day to say that he had been playing an exciting game called poker with Wayne Henley, David Brooks, and an older friend of Henley’s who made candy. Dorothy Hilligiest knew the man who made candy—in the previous year, she had gone looking for David, and found him at the candy factory with Malley, Winkle, and the round-faced man who owned the place. Mrs. Hilligiest had bought a box of candy from him before she took David away.
Another friend of Henley’s was fourteen-year-old Rhonda Williams, who was as anxious to escape the Heights as most of its other teenagers. Since she had been sexually assaulted as a child, her attitude to sex was inhibited and circumspect. Like so many Heights teenagers, she was part of a one-parent family—her mother had collapsed and died of a heart attack as she was hanging out the washing. Rhonda craved affection and security, and she seemed to have found it when she met nineteen-year-old Frank Aguirre. He was slightly cross-eyed, but serious-minded, and was already saving money—from his job in a restaurant—to marry Rhonda. But on February 24, 1972, Frank Aguirre failed to return home from work, and was never seen again. He left his paycheck uncollected. Rhonda was shattered and went into nervous depression for a year; she was only just beginning to recover on that evening in August 1973 when she informed Wayne Henley that she had decided to run away from home, and Henley took her to Dean Corll’s house in Pasadena to stay the night.
On May 21, 1972, sixteen-year-old Johnny Delome vanished. His body was found on High Island fourteen months later; he had been shot as well as strangled. Johnny Delome must have been the youth that Henley shot up the nose, and then in the head. He was killed at the same time as Billy Baulch, seventeen, who was also buried at High Island. Six months later, Billy’s fifteen-year-old brother, Michael, would become another victim of Dean Corll. In the meantime, he had killed another two boys, Wally Jay Simoneaux, fourteen, and Richard Hembree, thirteen, on October 3, 1972. Their bodies were found together in the boat shed. Another victim of 1972 was eighteen-year-old Mark Scott, whose body was one of those that was never identified; Brooks stated that he was also one of Corll’s victims.
And so the murders went on into 1973: Billy Lawrence, fifteen, on June 11; Homer Garcia, fifteen, on July 7; Charles Cobble, seventeen, on July 25, who vanished with his friend Marty Jones, eighteen, on the same day. The final victim was thirteen-year-old James Dreymala, lured to Corll’s Pasadena house to collect Coke bottles, and buried in the boat shed. There were undoubtedly other victims in 1973, possibly as many as nine. Brooks said that Corll’s youngest victim was a nine-year-old boy.
On Monday, August 13, five days after the death of Dean Corll, a grand jury began to hear evidence against Henley and Brooks. The first witnesses were Rhonda Williams and Tim Kerley, the two who had almost become Corll’s latest victims. It was clear that Kerley had been invited to Corll’s house by Henley in order to be raped and murdered—this is what Henley meant when he told Kerley that he could have got $1,500. He was exaggerating, but was otherwise telling the truth. And when Corll had snarled, “You’ve spoilt everything,” he meant that the arrival of Rhonda Williams now made it impossible to murder Kerley. At that moment, it seems, he thought of a solution that would enable him to “have his fun”: kill all three teenagers.
Rhonda Williams, it emerged, had decided to run away with Henley, whom she now regarded as her boyfriend. In fact, Corll knew all about the arrangement and had no objection—he himself was planning to move to Colorado, where his mother was living, and to take Henley and Rhonda with him. The fact that he also planned to take an old flame of his pre-homosexual days, Betty Hawkins, as well as her two children, suggests that Corll had decided to give up killing teenagers. But Rhonda had arranged to run away on August 17, nine days later; and when she arrived at Corll’s house in the early hours of August 9, he felt deprived of his night of pleasure.
After listening to the evidence of various teenage witnesses, the jury indicted Henley and Brooks on murder charges. Henley was charged with taking part in the killing of Billy Lawrence, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Johnny Delome, Frank Aguirre, and Homer Garcia; Brooks for his part in the murders of James Glass, Ruben Watson, Billy Lawrence, and Johnny Delome. Efforts by the lawyers to have bail set were turned down.
Houston was stunned by the events of the past week, and criticism of the police department was bitter and uninhibited. The main complaint of the parents of missing teenagers was that they had been unable to get the police to take the slightest interest; they were told that their children were runaways. Police Chief Herman Short counterattacked clumsily by publicly stating that there had been no connection between the missing teenagers—implying that there would have been little for the police to investigate. The statements of Henley and Brooks—indicating that most of the victims knew one another—flatly contradicted this assertion. Short went on to say that the murders indicated that parents should pay closer attention to the comings and goings of their teenagers, a remark that drew outraged rebuttals from parents such as Dorothy Hilligiest, whose children had simply vanished on their way to or from some normal and innocent activity. Short also expressed fury at the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, which had referred to the “murderous bureaucracy” of the Houston police department; he pointed out that the Soviet government had a reputation for making dissenters “disappear.” All of his blustering failed to impress the public or the politicians, and Short resigned three months later, after the municipal elections.
There was also criticism of the attitude of the police towards the search for additional bodies. One of Corll’s ex-employees, Ruby Jenkins, had mentioned the interesting fact that, during the last years of the candy factory’s existence, Corll was often seen handling a shovel and digging holes. He dug under the floor of his private room in the factory—known jokingly as the “pouting room,” because he often retired there to sulk—and then cemented over the excavation. He also dug holes near the rear wall of the factory, and on a space that later became a parking lot. He always dug by night. His explanation was that he was burying spoiled candy because it drew bees and bred weevils. No one questioned this curious explanation, or asked him what was wrong with placing the spoiled candy in a plastic bag and dropping it in the trashcan. “He had this big roll of plastic sheet, four or five foot wide, and he had sacks of cement and some other stuff back in his pouting room.” Clearly, this was something that required investigating. But when the police came along to look at the spots indicated by Ruby Jenkins, they dug only halfheartedly in a few places, and soon gave up. “Lady, this is old cement. There couldn’t be any bodies there.”
After the finding of bodies number twenty-six and twenty-seven—on High Island beach, tied together—the search for more was dropped, even though Henley insisted that another two were buried there. Another curious feature of this final discovery was that there were two extra bones—an arm bone and a pelvis—in the grave, plainly indicating a twenty-eighth victim.
Lieutenant Porter received two calls about bodies on the same morning. A Mr. and Mrs. Abernathy had been camping on Galveston Island—about fifty miles down the coast from High Island—when they saw two men carrying a long bundle over the dunes. Another man had been camping on east Galveston beach when he saw a white car and another car parked near a hole in the beach; a long plastic bundle the size of a body lay beside the hole. There were also three men. The camper identified two from photographs as Dean Corll and Wayne Henley. The third man had long blond hair—like David Brooks. As the campers sat looking at this curious scene in their own car, Henley advanced on them with a menacing expression, and they drove off.
These two events took place in March and June 1973. In fact, the first 1973 victim identified (from the Lake Sam Rayburn burial site) was Billy Lawrence, who vanished on June 11. It seems unlikely that a man who had been killing as regularly as Corll would allow a seven-month period to elapse between victims (the last known victim of 1972 is Michael Baulch, Billy Baulch’s younger brother). The unidentified victims found in the boat shed had obviously been buried much earlier, probably in 1971.
The Galveston authorities flatly declined to allow the Houston police to follow up this lead, refusing to permit digging on their beach. Meanwhile, the police switchboard in Houston continued to handle hundreds of enquiries about missing teenagers—one mother, whose son had been working with a circus, and had vanished in Houston, was certain that he was one of Corll’s victims. In most of these cases, the police were forced to state that they were unable to help.
When Brooks and Henley appeared for their arraignment, there was a heavy guard of armed police—dozens of threatening phone calls had been received from all over Texas. Henley’s defense lawyer, Charles Melder, indicated that his defense would be one of insanity. Brooks’s attorney, Ted Musick, said that he would follow the same line. At the same time, the district attorney announced that each of the accused would be tried on one charge only: Henley for the murder of Charles Cobble, and Brooks for that of Billy Lawrence.
Since Corll was already dead, and the two accused had confessed, the trial itself was something of an anticlimax. Its venue was changed, on the insistence of the lawyers, and it opened at San Antonio, Texas, in July 1974, before Judge Preston Dial. Predictably, the jury rejected the insanity defense, and Henley was convicted on nine counts (not including the shooting of Dean Corll), drawing a total sentence of 594 years. Brooks was convicted on only one count, and received life imprisonment. Henley appealed in 1979, and was convicted for a second time.
It is easy to understand the sense of shock produced by the Corll murders, and the feeling that Corll was a sadistic monster, the kind we would expect to encounter in a horror movie. But this book must have demonstrated that nothing is ever as simple as that. Some are psychotic, such as Mullin and Frazier and Chase. Some are violently oversexed, such as the Boston Strangler. Some are inspired by hatred of woman, such as the Yorkshire Ripper and Son of Sam. Some regard themselves as social rebels, such as Manson. But some, such as Corll and Shaefer, emerge simply as spoiled brats, who felt that having their own way was a law of nature, and felt no compunction about killing for a few hours of sexual pleasure. (The Chicago builder John Wayne Gacy—see the next chapter—was another such.) Corll remained emotionally a child—this aspect of his personality is caught in a photograph that shows him holding a teddy bear.
In fact, as do so many serial killers, Corll drifted into it by slow steps—as a man becomes a drug addict or an alcoholic. He wanted young boys; he bought their sexual favors. Then he began raping and killing them. It was a gentle progression down a slope, like walking slowly into a pond.