by Jack Olsen
WHEN RHONDA WILLIAMS STROLLED on the streets of The Heights, impetuous young drivers slammed on their brakes and stared. At fifteen, Rhonda was petite, with an open, girlish face and chestnut hair that streamed down her back and a figure that was already close to maturity. The pretty gamine lived on Twenty-third Street, not far from Wayne Henley and the other members of the Twenty-seventh Street group, in a sagging old house out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee or almost any short story by Eudora Welty. Junk and worn-out housewares were strewn about the creaking porch, and the front door was usually agape, so that visitors simply walked in and announced their arrival, boardinghouse style.
The father, Ben Williams, disapproved of most of Rhonda’s playmates, and there was frequent bickering. Said a friend, “Whenever you visited Rhonda, old Ben’d come into the room every few minutes and say, ‘What’s that smell? WHAT’S THAT SMAYELL?’” Ben Williams had not yet come to terms with the pot-and-pill culture.
Rhonda’s mother was dead. The story in the neighborhood was that she had placed her three small daughters in the bathtub one morning and started hanging out the wash. When an hour passed, Rhonda’s six-year-old sister went outside and found her mother dead of a heart attack. For years afterward (the story went on) the children would climb into the tub and meditate about their mother, as though they could somehow reverse history by reconstructing the incident. By the time the oldest daughter was eighteen, she had borne three children. Another daughter married and moved away, and Rhonda, the youngest, endured her own tragedy—the juvenile love affair, at age fourteen, with Frank Aguirre. For months after Aguirre’s disappearance in March, 1972, the child had brooded. A year and a half later, she was still having spells of serious despondency. “That chick rilly loved that dude,” said her confidante, Sheila Hines. “That was the love that comes once in a lifetime, ya know? Romeo and Juliet, ya know? She’ll never get over it.”
Rhonda Williams traveled in a subgroup that rode in Ricky Wilson’s old sedan and consisted of Sheila, Ricky, Johnny Reyna and several others, all of them friends or former friends of Wayne Henley. The sullen young beer drinker had often joined them on nocturnal circuit rides around the sultry streets of The Heights, but lately he had become almost sedentary, sitting at home except when he disappeared with Dean Corll late in the afternoons.
Henley had not been around on the evening when Rhonda had had the accident that laid her up for a while. Ricky Wilson had been pushing another car with his own, and the playful Rhonda had insisted on sitting on the hood of his car. “Just make sure you don’t get your feet in between the cars!” Ricky had warned. Rhonda had not made sure, and several small bones were crunched.
By the stuffy night of Tuesday, August 7, two weeks after the disappearance of Charles Cobble and Marty Jones, Rhonda was growing more and more aggrieved and aggravated. Confined to the old house, her aching foot propped on its heavy splint, she brooded over the fact that no one came to comfort her. Some of her friends stayed away because Ben Williams made them nervous, and others because he had banned them from his premises. Whatever the reason, Rhonda felt discarded. An argument broke out with her father, and soon it grew loud and physical. Rhonda cried and clomped back to her room and vowed to run away.
Around midnight, she telephoned Sheila Hines and sobbed out her plans. The two agreed that whatever happened, Rhonda must avoid Sheila’s house. “This’d be the first place he’d come lookin’,” Sheila advised. Rhonda said she would not stay another night in her own house, even if she had to sleep in the streets, and broke off the conversation crying almost hysterically.
She was still red-eyed and quivering when seventeen-year-old Ricky Wilson arrived to offer consolation. But Rhonda would not be comforted. She said it appeared that none of her friends missed her, nobody cared about her. “Why, you’re the first one that’s been here in days!” she cried. “I sit here all by myself. Nobody likes me. Nobody!” She wailed louder than ever.
As they talked, shuffling sounds were heard from the front of the house, and the lonesome girl welcomed her second visitor of the post-midnight hours. Wayne Henley wobbled in with a shy smile and a wave of the hand. His brown hair was damp and awry; his acne-scarred face gleamed with beads of sweat and he reeked of beer. He walked in a sailor’s unsteady roll and flopped on the bed. In his customary gargled dialect, he said he had walked the five blocks to the Williams’ house “to see how y’uz comin’ along, see what I kin do for ya.”
Rhonda responded with another flood of tears. “I’m gonna die,” she said. “I’m just gonna die!”
“Don’t die, Rhonda,” Wayne said gently. “I want yew to live for a long time.”
The troubled child was touched. She hopped over to the bed and hugged Henley, then impulsively embraced Ricky Wilson. She told her two friends, “Y’all make me feel better.”
At 1:30 A.M., Wayne Henley woke up his mother to tell her he was going to spend the night with a young friend, Timothy Cordell Kerley. He stepped outside to Kerley’s car, and together with a limping Rhonda Williams, they sped down the Gulf Freeway to the suburb of Pasadena and began nosing around an intricate network of curving, darkened streets. An hour after leaving The Heights, they pulled up at a small one-story house and got out, and the black Texas night enfolded them.
At 8:24 A.M., a telephone operator at Pasadena police headquarters heard a quavery male voice say, “Y’all better come rat now. I kilt a man. The address is twenty-twenty Lamar.”
Minutes later, Pasadena police pulled up at a sun-bleached olive-and-white bungalow in a fairly young neighborhood of twenty-and thirty-thousand-dollar homes. The air was heavy with a smell like sour milk, Pasadena’s permanent impost for living off the petroleum industry. The house sat behind a postage-stamp lawn on a fraction of an acre, with a fenced backyard and the muddy Vince Bayou to its rear. Most of the landscaping was losing its vitality; the place looked like a family home after the family’s spark and drive have ebbed. Two stuporous young men and a half-dressed teen-age girl sat on the front stoop.
“In there,” one of the young men mumbled, beckoning toward the door.
The policemen stepped into the house and found the naked body of a man stretched full length on the beige carpet. The vital signs were gone; the mouth was puffed out and the face was swollen and caked with blood. There appeared to be five or six bullet holes in the chest and back. The body lay on its left side, nose to baseboard, right shoulder leaning against the wall, right foot intersecting a loose telephone cord that snaked between the toes.
The man looked about six feet tall, not fat but puffy and soft, with pale skin and flaccid musculature. His brown hair was swirled in flattened wisps and arcs, as though styled and then slept on; it was graying at the back and temples. Blood-flecked sideburns reached just short of the base of each ear. The facial features were distorted behind their hardening mask of blood, but the man seemed average in appearance, with a thick nose and wide-set eyes that stared glassily at the wall a few inches away.
The body was measured and photographed and dispatched to the morgue, the three young people were taken to Pasadena police headquarters for questioning, and teams of detectives and crime technicians began working through the house inch by inch. They found a bedroom that had been arranged as though for Satanic rites. The rug was covered with sheets of heavy-gauge clear plastic, apparently to protect against drippings. A single bed was rumpled, the covers tangled and mixed with the sheets; one pillow was on the bed and several smaller ones on the floor, as though the sleeper had flung them about in a nightmare. A blue-and-white bedspread was crumpled up alongside a seven-by-three-foot slab of thick unpainted plywood, strong and barely flexible. At the four corners of the slab, holes had been drilled; two sets of handcuffs were linked to two of the holes, and nylon ropes were threaded through the others. Each of the two ropes led to another set of handcuffs lying on the floor a few feet away. At the top of the board, there was a small orange puff-pillow and a strong, thin loop of cord
.
Off to the side, atop the plastic sheeting, lay a hunting knife and its scabbard. An open paper bag held a can of acrylic paint that gave off a faint smell reminiscent of banana oil. A military-type gas mask lay near the bed. A portable radio was rigged to a pair of dry cells, giving it increased volume and power, and a vacuum cleaner was plugged in at the wall. Men’s clothing was strewn about, and there was a wide roll of clear plastic of the same type that covered the floor.
The investigators found the house strangely empty and hollow, with only the most rudimentary furniture, and speculated that the occupant was in the process of moving out or moving in. A few books were toppled on a shelf, next to a well-thumbed copy of Human Sexuality. There were several thin glass tubes and a double-headed plastic dildo of seventeen inches. The nearly empty bedroom was decorated by a colorful poster with a Jesus-like image on it. The caption was “LOVE.”
In the driveway, police found a white 1972 Ford Econoline van, rigged so that the entire rear portion could be sealed off by opaque navy-blue curtains. On the floor was a loose swatch of beige rug, and in the middle of the van was an upraised box with a drawer opening into its bottom and dark-blue padding on top, as though to provide an extra seat atop the storage space. Rings and hooks protruded from pegboard walls, and binoculars and another portable radio were found just behind the driver’s seat along with tools and maps and fifteen feet of new nylon rope.
In the fenced backyard, police opened a locked shed and found a similar box, this one with air holes cut into the sides. It was made of unpainted half-inch plywood and measured thirty-four inches high, twenty-four wide and thirty deep. It was hinged in front, and it closed with a hasp. A detective felt around inside and extracted what appeared to be a few strands of human hair. “Anybody that climbed in here,” he said, shaking his head, “he’d have to be all doubled over.” There was no sign of blood.
While police technicians continued their work, a few curious neighbors assembled on the sidewalk and talked to detectives and the press. They said that the house had been built around 1950, and that a quiet electrician named Arnold Corll, a man in his mid-fifties, had lived in the place for most of that time. “He minded his own business and he was the type of guy if you needed some help he would be willin’,” a man said.
Another added plaintively, “Mr. Corll had an unhappy life himself. He lost a wife to some disease, had a tough time. Seems like some people just don’t carry a horseshoe with ’em. And now this. He don’t need it. And he’s a good churchgoing man, too.”
Some of the neighbors pointed to the tangled vines and shrubs in the front yard and to the grass that needed mowing. “Been that way since Mr. Corll moved away a while back, and his son moved in,” a young man observed. “Before that the place was always kept up.”
“This neighborhood’s quiet, real quiet,” said another man. “You never hear a squeak out of the neighbors usually. This is something happened someplace else, not here.” Veteran detectives cast knowing looks. Murder was always something that happened someplace else.
Within a few hours, Pasadena police were able to reconstruct the last morning in the life of Dean Corll. Most of the story came from Wayne Henley, but Timothy Kerley and Rhonda Williams were able to corroborate a few points.
They had arrived at 3 A.M., and Corll had made an angry scene about Rhonda. “You weren’t supposed to bring any girl!” the irate man shouted. “Goddamn you, you ruined everything!” Henley explained that the girl had no place to go, and he was hoping that she could travel with them later. Dean was aghast, but soon he appeared to calm down and offered his guests a paper bag and a can of acrylic paint for a “huffing” party. With Corll watching intently, Wayne and Tim and Rhonda took turns spraying short bursts of paint into the bag and inhaling deeply. The hallucinatory game went on for an hour or two, until one by one they had sprawled unconscious on the rug.
Henley came to after daybreak. His ankles were bound tightly together and Dean was snapping handcuffs on his wrists. “Man, you blew it bringin’ that girl!” Corll snarled. “But I’m gonna fix you now!” Wayne glanced around. The floor was covered with plastic. Tim Kerley had been stripped, and both Kerley and the girl were trussed with nylon rope and straps.
“I’m gonna kill you all!” Corll raged. “But first I’m gonna have my fun.”
He turned the portable radio up to a high volume and dragged Henley into the kitchen. “I’ll teach you a lesson!” he screamed, and rammed a .22 caliber pistol into the young man’s belly.
Wayne gasped and begged for life. He reminded Corll of their long friendship, of the good times they had enjoyed together. He promised to torture and kill the others, if that was what Corll wanted. “I’ll do anythang yew want me to, Dean!” he whimpered. “Anythang!” At last Corll relented, removed the shackles and the ropes, and shoved him back into the bedroom.
“Cut off her clothes!” he ordered, handing over the hunting knife. The boy watched as Corll laid the small pistol on a night table and began to fumble at his own clothes and fling them about.
As Henley carefully worked on Rhonda’s clothes, he watched out of the corner of his eyes. Corll rolled the naked Kerley over on his stomach and spread-eagled him against the plywood board, securing him by ropes and two pairs of handcuffs. Then he turned to the unconscious girl and strapped her on her back with canvas and nylon ropes. “You take the girl,” he told Henley, “and I’ll mess with Tim.”
Wayne stalled. The undressed Corll climbed atop Kerley. Rhonda lifted her head heavily and stared through unfocusing eyes at the scene. “Hey, Dean!” Henley shouted. “Why don’t yew let me take the chick outa here? She don’t wanna see that!”
When Corll ignored him, the agitated boy grabbed the pistol from the night table and shouted above the radio, “Back off now! Stop!”
Corll jumped to his feet and lurched toward Henley. “Kill me, Wayne,” he said. “Kill me!” The boy backed away, but the powerfully built man charged after him. When they were only a foot or two apart, Corll said, “You won’t do it!” Henley pulled the trigger, and pulled it again and again until his friend had toppled against the baseboard.
He returned to the bedroom and began releasing the others. Kerley was semiconscious, only vaguely aware of what was happening. When the tape was removed from Rhonda’s mouth, she giggled and said, “Oh, quit playin’, Wayne!” Using the walls for support, she hopped around on her one good foot and tripped full length over the body, staining her hands with blood and still not comprehending. In the dim light of the curtained house she inspected her hands and wondered how they had become covered with catsup. She pushed herself up and saw the glazed eyes of Dean Corll, and began screaming. Henley calmed her and helped her to her feet, and after he called police, the three waited on the front porch, as far as possible from the dead man.
During the long interrogation at Pasadena headquarters, Tim Kerley told police that Henley had made a strange statement while they waited. “He told me, ‘If you wasn’t my friend, I coulda got fifteen hundred dollars for you,’” Kerley said. The statement seemed meaningless for the moment, an acrylic non sequitur, but the skilled Pasadena detectives used it to open a line of private questioning with Henley. It turned out that the boy was already on probation, for carrying a pistol, and he seemed eager to cooperate. Ingratiatingly, he told how he had thought of fleeing the scene of the shooting, “but I jes’ decided I better set there and wait for y’all.”
“Who’s this Dean Corll?” a detective asked.
Henley explained that his old friend was a thief, among other things. The plastic on the floor and the acrylic paints had come from Houston Lighting & Power Company, where Corll worked as a relay tester. The seats in his Ford van had been stripped from a stolen Chevrolet Camaro.
Slowly the detectives steered Henley around to the nature of the early-morning rites at Corll’s house. Why the dildo, the handcuffs, the rectangular plywood board with its four holes and handcuffs and neat thin loop of cord and or
ange pillow at the top? Henley told the detectives that Corll “likes little boys,” and had been paying him for their procurement, sometimes generously, sometimes with promises or IOU’s. He said that Corll had made a slip that morning while issuing his fiery threats. “He said I wouldn’t be the first one he kilt,” Henley told the detectives. “He said he’d already kilt a few boys and buried them in a boat shed.”
The interrogators asked where the boat shed was, and Wayne told them that Dean had once taken him to a rented shed in south-west Houston; the two of them had carried out dirt in twenty-gallon cans. He said he thought he could find it again.
AT TWO-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON, Houston Detective Daniel James was sitting in the homicide office on the third floor of headquarters when the telephone rang with a message from Pasadena. Automatically the young officer scribbled notes:
Dean Corll Dead man
Wayne Henley Killer
Timothy Kerley Boy
Rhonda Williams Girl
The caller said that Wayne Henley had spoken of “bodies” buried in a shed somewhere in southwest Houston, but added that the young killer had been involved in an all-night “bagging” party and might still be under the influence. At the moment, no one was taking him seriously.
Danny James, twenty-seven years old, was a rookie detective; he had worked on one murder to date, but he had learned a few lessons about “confessions,” especially the kind that come from huffers and pill freaks. “It’s just another kook,” he said to himself. He turned to detectives Jack Hamel and Jim Tucker and said pro forma, “Pasadena says they’ve got a killing and information’s come from it that there’s gonna be a bunch of killings, or several anyway, and it’s gonna come over here into Houston.”