by Colin Wilson
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 17 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 19.
The following morning, it rose to 21, 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 23. Later, four more would be unearthed on the beach. The other two mentioned by Henley were never discovered. But even a total of 27 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 attempt at reconciliation 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 travelling 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 travelling 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 ofn20, 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 recognised that he was gay. No details are available, but it seems obvious that some homosexual affair made him realise what he had so far failed to suspect. Released from the army after 11 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 neighbourhood—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 co-worker 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 realised 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 a 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 21-year-old student from the University of Texas in Austin, Jeffrey Alan Konen, had hitchhiked to his home in Houston on 25 September 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 like 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 sodomised 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 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 go to Australia together as 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 some time 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 15 December 1970, Brooks persuaded two boys to come back to an apartment that Corll had rented on Columbia Street. They were 14-year-old James Eugene Glass, and his friend Danny Michael Yates, 15. 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, 14-year-old Donald Edward Waldrop, and 13-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 neighbours 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 29 May 1971, David Hilligiest, 13, disappeared on his way to the local swimming pool; his friend, 16-year-old George Malley Winkle, also vanished on the same 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 60 miles to the south—with some kids. They would be on their way home shortly.
That night, Mrs Malley slept badly, with a foreboding that her son was in trouble. When he failed to return, she asked young people in the neighbourhood 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, 17, another child of a broken home, went off to the movies on the afternoon of 17 August 1971, with a few dollars borrowed from his grandmother; he later rang his mother at work to say he would meet her outside the theatre 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 wa
s skinny and pimply may also have played a part in Corll’s decision to let him live. The Hilligiests’ son Greg—aged 11—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 14-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 19-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 24 February 1972, Frank Aguirre failed to return home from work, and was never seen again. He left his pay cheque 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 21 May 1972, 16-year-old Johnny Delome vanished. His body was found on High Island 14 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, 17, who was also buried at High Island. Six months later, Billy’s 15-year-old brother, Michael, would become another victim of Dean Corll. In the meantime, he had killed another two boys, Wally Jay Simoneaux, 14, and Richard Hembree, 13, on 3 October 1972. Their bodies were found together in the boat shed. Another victim of 1972 was 18-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.