by Jack Olsen
The teen-age culture in The Heights ran on pills—Seconal, Nembutal, phenobarbital, Quaalude, mostly barbiturates and tranquilizers but sometimes stimulants—washed down with beer or Coke. The children frowned on psychedelic drugs (“Too many bad trips, man!”), but marijuana was widely available, and the sniffing of acrylic paint was a popular new pastime. “You get a real quick high from acrylics,” said a fourteen-year-old connoisseur. “You spray the can in a paper bag, and you stick your nose in and huff a few times and everythang’s different. You talk funny, you don’t know where you’re at, sometimes you hear voices that ain’t talkin’. When you wake up, you huff again, and you can keep up all night. One of my friends huffed for a whole day and night and he wasn’t hurt a bit. But a twelve-year-old kid did some acrylics on Twenty-third Street and ran around tryin’ to play football and collapsed and died. I guess you can get too much of anythang.”
Acrylics rose in popularity because their possession was not a criminal offense, and because the Houston police department opened up a fierce campaign against marijuana and pills. “It got hot out there, whoo-ee!” said a Heights boy. “The pigs was all over, lookin’ for dope, shakin’ kids down and stompin’ ’em and even plantin’ dope. Jeez Christ, you could rob a bank or beat up a old lady, but if you looked like you was holdin’ dope it was your ass.”
A trucker’s son, eighteen years old, complained, “The cops would come running out of their cars with guns drawn if we didn’t stop fast enough to suit them. Their idea of a crackdown was to beat up a bunch of teen-age kids and plant dope on the hairiest ones. How could we complain? Who’s the public gonna believe, the cops or a bunch of punks from The Heights?”
Most of the children were already discontented. “We’re not all country hicks like our mothers and fathers,” said an excitable six-teen-year-old. “We’re not blind! They say, ‘Why don’t you go out and mow the lawn?’ and we say, ‘Mow the lawn? Look at the neighborhood!’ We see it for what it is, but our parents still got it mixed up with their dreams. They give us shit like, ‘Just wait till you get to college, everything’ll brighten up.’ But we know we’re not going to college. No way! Who goes to college from The Heights? Kids around here go to work as busboys, waiters, laborers; some of them get into things like carpentry, Sheetrocking, chromeplating, roofing. After twelve years in school, we want out, not in!”
The unmotivated children turned quickly to anodyne and chemical thrills, and their habits could not be kept permanently from their families. “Yeh, they know about it, and we know they know,” the boy went on, “but we still got to get along, right? We still got to live together, and you can’t be fighting and screaming every second.”
In the short span of years between the naive era when Heights boys sinned with an occasional beer and the modern era when drugs and pills and cannabis became the sine qua non of juvenile social existence, certain subtle adjustments were worked out between the age groups. The parents, already troubled and semi-defeated, tacitly agreed to settle for a show of normalcy. “We try to be polite to ’em,” a boy explained. “We dress neat, we stay clean, we bring home part of our pay, we call our mothers ‘ma’am’ and our fathers ‘sir.’ We don’t let our hair grow too awful long, ’cause that shows, and we don’t run around with a bunch of Fu Manchu drug pushers. As long as we keep up appearances and don’t embarrass everybody, we can pop all the pills and smoke all the grass we want. As long as I don’t come home talking to somebody that isn’t there, they accept me. I look normal. And they’ll accept any of my friends that looks normal. They don’t rilly have that much choice. They can see what’s going on in the United States, and they know I could get up in the morning and hitch all the way to California and they’d never see me again.”
Parents and children played their verbal con games together, each contributing his own deception to the pas de deux:
“Gee, Mama, one of the boys had a red sleeping pill down at the playground today.”
“Oh, that’s terrible, son. I’m glad our fine boy doesn’t fool around with nothing like that.”
“No’m. I just walked away like you and Daddy told me.”
The arrangement seemed neat and tidy; it was based entirely on appearances, and consonant with the cosmetic ethic of the supercity. False fronts were taken for true, artifice for reality, and a Gothic night drench of innocent corruption settled over the old neighborhood. In such gardens of expediency, strange weeds may grow.
NO ONE IN THE HEIGHTS knew precisely when Dean Corll returned to the friendly venues where once he had made divinity and played billiards, or if indeed he had ever left, and no one seemed to care. When he began turning up around Twenty-seventh Street, it was in the company of Wayne Henley and David Brooks, a tall teenager with a blond Prince Valiant hairdo and finely wrought features. Corll and the two boys made an unlikely trio; by the early 1970’s, he was in his thirties, the boys in their mid-teens. They seemed to have nothing special in common. They rode around in Corll’s white Ford Econoline van or sat on Henley’s porch talking quietly and watching the passers-by.
“Dean must of rilly liked Wayne,” said the talkative teen-ager Sheila Hines. “Why, Dean was good as gold to Wayne! Wayne would say, ‘Take me here, take me there!’ and Dean would take him anywhere he wanted to go.” A carload of Heights children blew a tire twenty miles from town, and Wayne telephoned Corll and instructed him to rush a fresh tire to the scene. “Seems like Dean always jumped for David and Wayne,” Sheila said. “But none of us thought nothin’ about it at the time.”
One day David Brooks showed up in the neighborhood with a gem of priceless beauty: a green 1969 Corvette. While the other children gaped and gawked, Wayne explained in a sullen voice that “Dean bought it for him; David practically lives off Dean.” Seven-teen-year-old Bruce Pittman was intrigued by the acquisition and offhandedly asked Brooks to explain. “I just scratched pennies for years,” the taciturn blond boy answered. Bruce remained puzzled. David never seemed to hold a job; like Henley, he was a ninth-grade dropout, and he was barely seventeen himself.
The Pittman boy was inquisitive, and one day he asked his friend Henley, “Why’re you and David always hanging around an old man like Dean?” Henley quickly changed the subject, and Bruce realized he had touched a nerve. “Wayne was always decent to me, a close friend,” the boy said later. “I decided that his other friends were his own business.”
To most of the people in The Heights, the odd trio was seen only as a hawk is sometimes seen in the woods: in quick silhouette, or as a subliminal shadow, swiftly past. Individually, Corll, Henley and Brooks maintained low profiles; they were regarded as losers, ciphers in the teen-age society. As a threesome, the old mathematical precept applied: multiples of zero are zero. Corll could not even have been described as enigmatic, since no one cared enough to wonder about his modus vivendi or why he came around. The quiet, solidly built man with the dark eyes and the sharp, rabbity face seemed to crave anonymity. One young member of Henley’s local circle of friends had heard that Corll sometimes granted small loans, and made an impassioned appeal in person. “Dean sat there looking up at the ceiling, playing his radio, like he wasn’t listening,” the chagrined boy said. “He never even answered me!” Sometimes Henley or Brooks would make a cryptic remark, and Corll would grin warmly, as though sharing a secret memory. “You never knew what was behind their smiles,” a Heights boy said. “But who gave a shit?”
A girl friend of David Brooks came to know Dean Corll as well as any of the neighborhood females, and she found him cool and detached. “Dean didn’t want to get involved. He was just friendly enough to get by, to make you think he wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud, but not letting you get to know him. Nobody knew him except David and Wayne. Nobody ever talked about him or asked about him. No one would ever say, ‘Oh, have you seen Dean lately?’ Dean didn’t matter.”
If his personality did not seem overpowering to females, Corll, assisted by his two young helpmeets, found it easy to make frien
ds with boys. “I met Dean at a store one day,” said a Heights teenager, “and he told me about a party he was gonna have. If I wasn’t working I’d a gone, ’cause I thought he was real nice. He said he was gonna have some dope, some beer, just about anything we wanted.”
Another boy said, “His parties were really far out. Everybody just totally got messed up. Everybody enjoyed it a lot, and never said anything about him being strange or having anything up his sleeve, just that he was real nice.”
Not every boy in The Heights attended the affairs. Close friends of Wayne Henley, like Bruce Pittman and Johnny Reyna and Ricky Wilson, barely knew of the parties, and were seldom invited. One boy reflected later, “They seemed to invite kids they hardly knew, kids we didn’t even hang around with. Looking back, it seems odd—if you’re gonna have parties, why not invite your closest friends? But it’s just like so many other things that went down around here. They seem odd now, but at the time we didn’t give a particular shit. So Dean didn’t invite us to his dope parties? So what? We had parties of our own, every Saturday night in our cars.”
Parents of Heights boys were equally uninvolved in Dean Corll’s affairs. Said a father, “We did think he was a little old to be hangin’ with kids. He looked maybe twenty-five or twenty-six; we didn’t know he was really older’n that. But he was clean-cut, a nice polite young man, no hairs on his face or nothing radical. Didn’t cuss or act bad, and he’d help you out if you needed him, push your car or help you charge your battery, things like that. He was vanilla is what he was. What’s wrong with vanilla?” The appearance was acceptable. He had no beard.
Dozens of local boys found themselves bedazzled by such blandishments as “a ride in my van,” “a real groovy party,” “a fishing trip to the piney woods,” “wine and whiskey and beer,” especially since many of them cherished memories of the same kindly man stuffing candy into their pockets at the Helms Elementary School. Certain people were just put on earth to help others. “We thought that’s the way he got his kicks,” a boy said.
For a time, the parties were held in Dean’s apartment in Westcott Towers, a few blocks from The Heights. David and Wayne seemed to have the run of the small Corll apartment. A Westcott resident named Johnny Jones gained the impression that his next-door neighbors were two teen-age boys and an adult man, since Brooks and Henley were there so often. “One time the guy with the long hair, Brooks, he brought over two girls,” Jones said, “and I told my wife, ‘Look, they’re making the old guy leave,’ ’cause the old guy left, and he looked kinda bad about it. He came back when the girls left.”
One afternoon Johnny Jones arrived home just as a screaming fire engine raced by the building. “Everybody next door ran out. There was two girls and two or three boys in there. They was scared it was the cops, but they laughed when it was the fire department.”
Soon Jones became aware that the oldest member of the group spent hours on the balcony, scanning the streets with binoculars. “I’d come home in the evening and he’d be standing there looking down the street, the same guy all the time, tall, medium build, dark hair.” On a Saturday afternoon Jones peered at the parking lot and saw three people fondling a medium-sized boa constrictor. Fascinated, he watched David Brooks stroke the snake, raise it to his lips and kiss it. “I don’t know,” the astonished man told his wife. “They don’t seem like homosexuals to me, but they’re sure weird. Anybody that’d kiss a snake …”
Early one morning, between two and four, Jones and his wife were awakened by loud noises from the next balcony. “We heard a lot of screaming, and somebody was beating their head against the wall and a guy hollering, ‘Stop him! Stop him!’ But you know, I never got out of my bed. I just thought somebody was tripping out on drugs and his friend was trying to help him or something.”
Not long after, a maid at Westcott Towers complained to the manager, “I can’t clean that apartment yet. I have to air it out first.” A few days later, the place was vacant.
THE THREADBARE HOUSE at the corner of Fifteenth and Tulane, a mile south of the Hilligiests and the Winkles, had a permanent look of fatigue. The two-story frame building had been propped ad libitum on corner pilings that kept it from subsiding into the sand and muck of the yard. The paint was flaking; a Matterhorn of bald tires and metal junk lay at streetside; the broken rear axle of a truck collected rust in a garland of empty oilcans; and three elderly automobiles leaned on one another in the back, junked on the spot after their owner had flagged the last wracking cough out of them. A 1963 Mack truck with an open bed idled on the lawn, its Diesel engine shuddering and puffing like a wet bear; on the truck’s doors someone had lettered, in the style of Halloween soap writing, G ONCALE 869 4247.
Gerald Oncale was a free-lance house mover who lived on leftovers, the jobs that larger firms disdained, and he knew that his combined home and business headquarters and truck pool did little to uphold the value of the carefully landscaped dwellings on the rest of the block. “I wisht I had time to worry about it,” he said, “but all I do is work.” He pronounced it “woik,” as the word is pronounced in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, where Oncale was brought up. His labor force lounged about, taking a break. A slack-jawed white man puffed on an acrid cigar; two bony blacks in dirty undershirts sprawled almost flat under a dripping oak. Everyone seemed oblivious to the rain, falling with fury on the scene. Poor and vulnerable, they suffered larger pains.
“Johnny is my son,” Gerald Oncale was saying. “I married my wife Eunice when the boy was nine months old, and I raised him just like my own flesh and blood. Johnny used to beg his mother, ‘Let me change my name to Oncale,’ but we made him keep it Delome.”
All together, the Oncales had six children, three from Eunice’s first marriage and three from the union with Oncale, and they were reared impartially. A Heights house mover and handyman would never be rich, but there was always the good, simple food that Eunice Oncale had learned to cook back in Crowley, Louisiana, in the beans-and-rice country. She was a tiny woman with striking gray eyes, a thin pinched face and short black hair with white flecks; at forty-one, she was as petite as her husband was round. Gerald, a year younger, loved country food and beer, as his bulbous stomach attested. Too busy for fripperies, he usually needed a shave. His watery blue eyes seemed to fill his pop-bottle-thick lenses, and there were semipermanent calluses and grease stains on his gnarled hands and fingers. Gerald Oncale was as much a work machine as a hydraulic lift or a D-8 Cat; he regarded anything but labor as unmanly and time-consuming. His library consisted of a stack of TV Guides, and his talk usually revolved about such problems as the number of jacks involved in moving a three-story house from one part of Houston to the other.
“Johnny didn’t like school,” Eunice Oncale said. “He’d rather get out and work, like Gerald. He was always slow in learning; he failed his first year at Hamilton Junior High. When he wanted to quit, I told him, ‘You’re not gonna quit just to run the streets!’ He said, ‘Mom, you know I won’t do nothing like that. I’m gonna work.’ And he did, too, at a bakery. The people there liked him so much, well, one of the older men told Johnny if he went back and finished school he’d guarantee him a hundred dollars a week. That’s how likable Johnny was. He’d never run off, not our Johnny.”
“He bought clothes, never owed a debt,” the boy’s stepfather said. “He bought him a black light and paid for it with his own cash money, and he paid cash for a ten-speed. Johnny was a ve’y responsible kid.”
The parents seldom discussed certain behavioral problems that surfaced when Johnny Delome was sixteen; they regarded them as transitory and petty, and as soon as the boy returned they would clear up the misunderstanding between generations. “It distoibed me that he was throwing his money around for the first time in his life,” Gerald Oncale said. “One day he drew six weeks’ pay that he’d saved up and went out and spent it. He hung around with a boy down the next street named Billy Baulch, a kid that didn’t woik, and I could imagine where the money wa
s going so fast. I said, ‘Son, why do you want to spend your money like that?’ I thought maybe he was buying dope for others, ’cause I knew Johnny would never use dope himself. One day I asked him flat out not to run with the Baulch kid no more, and Johnny got mad. Well, I was mad, too! Every time I’d come home and say, ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Eunice’d say, ‘He just went to Billy’s for a few minutes.’ He wouldn’t stay home, and I’d tell Eunice, ‘Don’t let him go! I don’t want him down there,’ but she’d let him go anyway.”
One May morning, Johnny Delome was walking out the back door when Gerald noticed that the boy’s stark black hair was hanging over his ears. “Son!” he called. “Don’t leave just yet. We’re gonna get a haircut in a while.”
Later in the day, Eunice reported that Johnny was gone.
“Whattaya mean, ‘gone’?” Gerald said.
“He moved in with my sister.”
“Just like that? You let him move out?”
“Well, he didn’t wanna get his hair cut.”
Gerald Oncale was furious. “So you let him leave ’cause he didn’t want to get a haircut?” he said. He stomped outside in disgust.
Eunice Oncale’s sister lived a mile from the Oncale house. On Sunday, May 21, 1972, almost exactly a year after David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle had disappeared, she returned to her home to find that her nephew and his bike were gone.
At eleven that same Sunday morning, Johnny Delome bounced into the sparsely furnished living room of the Baulch residence on Sixteenth Street, three blocks from his own house. “Do you want breakfast, Johnny?” asked a smiling woman with brown hair bunned and tied against her head.
“I sure do, Mom,” the boy said. “I’m starving to death.” Johnny regularly called Janey Baulch “Mom,” and had even discussed moving in with the Baulches, but he was nervous about broaching the idea to Gerald Oncale, and the Baulches would not accept him without parental permission. Young Billy “Little Bill” Baulch, seventeen years old, a ruddy-complexioned boy with wavy hair the color of wheat, joined his pal after breakfast and the two decided to take a walk.