by Colin Wilson
And so the murders went on into 1973: Billy Lawrence, 15, on 11 June; Homer Garcia, 15, on 7 July; Charles Cobble, 17, on 25 July, who vanished with his friend Marty Jones, 18, on the same day. The final victim was 13-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 13 August, 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 17 August, nine days later; and when she arrived at Corll’s house in the early hours of 9 August, 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 comments 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 pointing out that the Soviet government had a reputation for making dissenters disappear. All this 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 did this by night. His explanation was that he was burying spoiled candy because it drew bees and bred weevils. No one at the time 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 half-heartedly 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 26 and 27—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 11 June. 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 defence lawyer, Charles Melder, indicated that his defence 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 defence, 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 favours. Then he began raping and killing them. It was a gentle progression down a slope, like walking slowly into a pond.
Chapter Eight
The Egoists
It was when Ressler was driving to his hometown of Chicago for Christmas 1978 that he heard on the radio about the discovery of bodies in a house in Des Plaines, Illinois, a Chicago suburb close to his childhood home. He left his family with a relative and hastened to the crime scene. There he found a crowd swarming around the house that had been occupied by a building contractor, John Wayne Gacy. Among the police at the scene was a former classmate at Quantico, who quickly brought Ressler up to date on what was happening.
It seemed that police searching for a missing 15-year-old youth named Robert Piest, had heard that Piest had been to Gacy’s home to talk about a job, and then vanished.
On 11 December, Elizabeth Piest drove to the Nisson Pharmacy in Des Plaines to pick up her 15-year-old son, Robert; it was her birthday and she intended to throw a party. It was nine in the evening when she arrived, and the boy asked her to wait a few minutes while he went to see a man about a summer job that would pay $5 an hour. By 9.30, Robert had still not returned. She drove home to tell her husband and at 11.30 they rang the police to report his disappearance. The police investigated at the drug store, and noticed that the inside had been renovated recently; they inquired about the contractor, and were told that his name was Gacy, and that he could have been the man who had offered Robert the job.
The police already knew about Gacy. On 21 March a 27-year-old Chicagoan, Jeffrey Rignall, had entered into conversation with a fat man who drove a sleek Oldsmobile, and accepted an invitation to smoke a joint in the car. The man had clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over Rignall’s face, driven him to a house, and there spent several hours raping him and flogging him with whips. Rignall woke up in the dawn by the lake in Lincoln Park. In the hospital, it was discovered that he was bleeding from the rectum, and that the chloroform that had been repeatedly administered had permanently damaged his liver. The police said they were unable to help, since he knew so little about his molester, so Rignall hired a car and spent days sitting near motorway entrances looking for the black Oldsmobile.
Eventually, his patience paid off; he spotted the Oldsmobile, followed it, and noted the license plate number. It proved to belong to John Wayne Gacy. But in spite of issuing an arrest warrant, the police still delayed. It was mid-July before they picked up Gacy on a misdemeanour charge, but the case dragged on; the police felt that if Rignall had been chloroformed so much of the time, he might well be mistaken about Gacy.
Yet a check of Gacy’s background revealed that he had been sentenced to ten years in a ‘correctional institution’ in Waterloo, Iowa, ten years earlier. The charges involved handcuffing an employee and trying to sodomise him, paying a youth to perform fellatio on him, and then hiring someone to beat up the same youth when he gave evidence against Gacy. At that period, Gacy had been married and managing a fried chicken business; he was apparently a highly regarded member of the community. He had been paroled after only 18 months—described as a model prisoner—and placed on probation in Chicago. In 1971, he had been arrested for picking up a teenager and trying to force him to engage in sex. The boy failed to appear in court and the case was dismissed. Another man had accused Gacy of trying to force him to have sex at gunpoint in his house, and said that Gacy had boasted that he had already killed somebody.
The police now called at Gacy’s house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue, Des Plaines, and questioned him about Robert Piest. When inside, they raised a trapdoor leading to a crawl space under the house.
There was a heavy odour of decaying flesh, and the beam of the torch picked out bodies and human bones.
At the police station, Gacy admitted that he had killed 33 teenagers—in the course of forcing them to have sex with him—and said that 29 of these had been buried or disposed of in or around his house; the remaining four—including Robert Piest—had been disposed of in other ways; Piest had been dumped in the Des Plaines River.
Seven bodies were found in the crawl space under the house, and various parts of others. In another crawl space in another part of the house, bodies were found covered with quicklime in trenches that had been dug for them. Eight more were quickly unearthed. Gacy’s house was demolished in the search for more corpses; eventually, the remains of 28 were discovered—Gacy had lost count by one. When he had run out of burial space around his house, he had started dumping bodies in the river.
John Gacy was born 17 March 1942, in Chicago; his mother was Danish, his father Polish. He went to business college, became a shoe salesman, and married a co-worker whose parents owned a fried chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa.
Gacy was a member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was known as an affable man who badly wanted to be liked, and who tried to buy popularity with generosity. He was also known as a liar and a boaster—in short, a thoroughly unstable character. Married life came to an end with his imprisonment, and his wife divorced him. (They had a son and a daughter.) In prison, Gacy worked hard, avoided homosexuals, and obtained parole.
In 1972 he married a second time, and started in business as a contractor. But his new wife found his violent tempers a strain. His sexual performance was also infrequent. And then there was the peculiar odour that hung about the house...
In 1976 the couple divorced. Gacy continued indefatigably to try to rise in the world and to impress people—when he became involved with the local Democrats, he had cards printed identifying himself as a precinct captain. In 1978 he was photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
He used the contracting business to contact young males. One of these was John Butkovich, who vanished on l August 1975; he may have been the first victim. He had quarrelled with Gacy about pay; Gacy was notoriously cheap, and refused to pay his employees for travelling time to the jobs. It was probably the stench of John Butkovich’s decomposing corpse that filled the house during the last year of Gacy’s second marriage.
Greg Godzik came to work for Gacy in 1976; on 11 December he disappeared. A few weeks later, on 20 January 1977, a friend of Godzik’s, John Szyc, vanished; he also knew Gacy. There were many others. Billy Carrol disappeared on 10 June 1976, and in the previous month, three other boys, Randall Reffett, Samuel Stapleton, and Michael Bonnin vanished. Rick Johnston was dropped off by his mother at a rock concert on 6 August and was never seen again.
Once Gacy was separated from his second wife, there was nothing to stop him from inviting young men to his house. Some of these, such as a male prostitute named Jaimie, were handcuffed and violently sodomised, but allowed to leave—with payment. The boys who resisted were killed. A nine-year-old boy who was known as a procurer was driven off in the black Oldsmobile and never seen again. The Oldsmobile became familiar in the Newtown district of Chicago, where homosexuals could be picked up in bars or on the pavement. And the disappearances continued, until the killing of the thirty-third victim, Robert Piest, finally brought police with a search warrant to the house.
Ressler watched the development of the investigation with interest. On 6 February 1980, Gacy’s trial began in Chicago. His plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was rejected, and he was found guilty on 13 March and sentenced to death. Ressler then requested a meeting with him, and Gacy agreed to see him, together with some associates from the Behavioral Science Unit. He proved to be a short, pudgy man with a double chin and a moustache.
Gacy claimed to recognise him from childhood, when they had lived a few streets apart, and could not only recall delivering
groceries to the Ressler home, but even some unusual flowerpots outside.
He was friendly and communicative, obviously feeling that he and Ressler were on an equal intellectual footing. He was convinced that the police, psychiatrists and courts were fools who did not understand him. Ressler by now knew enough about interviewing serial killers to remain objective and not show any sign of disapproval.
He told Gacy he suspected that there had been far more victims than the 33 he was accused of killing—that since he had travelled widely in the US, he could have ‘trawled the homosexual transient districts for victims anywhere’. Gacy neither admitted nor denied this.
His position was a strange one. Against all logic, he insisted that he was innocent. Moreover, he indignantly denied that he was homosexual. He talked contemptuously about ‘worthless little queers and punks’. As to why he had used boys for sex, Gacy explained that he had been a hard-working businessman who found is easier to seek out quick sex with a male—getting a woman into bed required wining and dining and ‘romancing’ her.
Gacy’s view of himself was that he was a ‘nice guy’, helpful, decent, and heterosexual. But he was virtually a multiple personality, who had inside him another Gacy, ‘Bad Jack’, who committed murder and left ‘Good John’ to dispose of the corpses. Dr Marvyn Ziporyn, the psychiatrist at Gacy’s prison (and the author of a book on Richard Speck, Born to Raise Hell) read Gacy’s letters to various correspondents—Gacy was an indefatigable letter-writer—and wrote an analysis in which he said that Gacy was a classic sociopath, a man whose huge ego ‘exists solely to satisfy his own appetite...’ His answer to the question ‘What is one allowed to do?’ is ‘Whatever one can get away with’. His answer to ‘What is good?’ was ‘Whatever is good for me’. He was also, Ziporyn said, a classic control freak, trying to control his correspondents even from the death cell. Certainly, like Gerard Shaefer and Dean Corll, he was also totally involved in his own ego.