by Jack Olsen
Hamel, a thirty-six-year-old self-styled “country boy” who had recently scored first on the examination for lieutenant, heard the rest of the story and announced that it was nothing to get dandered about. Homicide detectives, he explained patiently, must accustom themselves to wild tales, and anyway it was close to the end of the shift. His partner, Jim Tucker, twenty-nine and chubby and jocular, said that for once he had to agree with his elderly partner. Tucker said he had planned to leave a few minutes early to shop for an anniversary present for his wife, and he saw no compelling reason to hang around headquarters waiting for Pasadena’s latest opium dream to unfold. “We haven’t done anything all day,” he said. “If we’re gonna get something, I’d rather get it early and get it over with.”
The team of Hamel and Tucker, Mr. Bones and Mr. Beef behind their backs (and sometimes in front), was deceptively skilled, particularly at the technique of interrogation. Sometimes they seemed to outbumble television’s lackadaisical Lieutenant Columbo, but there was always method, artfully concealed. They joked and needled and ragged, bestowed their smiles and handshakes impartially on brother officers and odious murderers, and caught their flies with honey. Now they pounced on young James, the handsome clotheshorse of the homicide division.
“Say, Danny,” Hamel said, “you remember your last murder case? Your only murder case? The one where your pardner was on vacation and I came along to he’p?”
James nodded.
“Well, this time you’re strictly on your own,” Hamel said with feigned abruptness. “I know you’re alone again today, but that’s not my problem. You took the call, you make the killin’!”
James said the case would probably fizzle out anyway. “I’m skeptical,” he said with the insouciance of two months’ experience as a detective. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Well, jes’ hold on there a minute!” Hamel said, changing tactics. “You never know about these thangs. You better saddle up your pony and git ready to ride. You might have a beeg one this time.”
Danny James looked at his watch. It was nearly 3 P.M., an hour before the end of the shift, and soon he would pick up his wife, a fingerprint classifier, and drive home to their daily reunion with two children. He enjoyed his job, but he enjoyed the reunion, too.
Inside his windowed office overlooking the bullpen where the three detectives bantered, Lieutenant Breckenridge Porter answered his phone. A Pasadena detective was calling, passing along the latest word on the killing. “What killin’?” Porter asked. A potbellied cigar-chomping veteran with thirty-one years of experience, he had heard nothing about the case. “Now holt on there a second, ol’ buddy,” he said. “Take it from the top.” The middle-aged Porter knew how a tale should be told; his aunt was Katherine Anne Porter, the novelist and short-story writer. Now he leaned back with his cowboy boots on the desk and his balding gray head nestled against the telephone and heard about “bodies buried in a shed in Houston.”
At the end, the caller added, “Oh, say, our boy Henley’s mentioned something about Corll killing a fella name of Cobble. By any chance would you check your files and see if you got something on Cobble?”
Porter sat upright. “Hell,” he said, “damn right I do! Shee-it, yeh! I got a file rat cheer on my desk. We been workin’ on it ’cause it smacked of a little violence. Somethin’ screwball about it.”
“Well, listen, Lieutenant,” the Pasadena detective went on, “this Corll’s supposed to’ve killed this Cobble, and there’s something about a kid named David Hilligiest, too. H-I-L-L-I-G-I-E-S-T. Henley says Corll talked about burying ’em all in the same place.”
Porter said, “Bear’s ass!”—one of his favorite expletives—and beckoned his entire available staff into his office. Jack Hamel, Jim Tucker and Danny James all remembered the case of Cobble and Jones. Marty Ray Jones’s cousin, Karl Siebeneicher, was a fellow detective in homicide, and another pair of homicide detectives had begun to interest themselves in the case a week or so earlier. And almost everybody in the division had dealt with Vern Cobble at least once since the boys’ disappearance. The man had visited the office every day or two, buttonholing detectives and pleading for action.
“Those two kids had been in a little dope business, so we didn’t think it was worth checking,” Danny James said. “We figured they were holed up someplace, working out a way to raise money.”
Jack Hamel said, “We tried to write the Cobble father off, ’cause we felt like his hippy son had done pulled the hippy thing. You know how these kids’ll git away from home and call back and swear they need a thousand dollars or they’re never gonna see daylight again? His daddy’d come in here and set down and tell us that him and his brother-in-law’d talked to ever’body they could possibly talk to, gone ever’place they could possibly go to, and then he’d say, ‘I don’t know what you can do, but why don’t you do something?’ So I’d say, ‘Well, we will! What do you suggest?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Thangs like ’at. So we just left it there.”
“Yeh,” his partner Tucker said. “It seemed like another one of those cases of ‘My darling child is gone with his hippy friends and we’d like you to find him.’ What can we do on that?”
The lieutenant ordered Danny James to ask Missing Persons and Juvenile for a check on David Hilligiest. A few minutes later James reported that there was a substantial file. The thirteen-year-old boy had disappeared in May of 1971, and the parents had pressed the search every day for over two years.
Lieutenant Porter called Pasadena back and said he would provide assistance whenever they were ready to begin digging, and the Pasadena dispatcher said detectives were en route to Houston police headquarters with their prisoner. “Y’all kin go on home,” Porter told Hamel, Tucker and James. “We got enough men comin’ in to handle it.”
By four o’clock, only three of the scheduled six homicide detectives had arrived for the evening shift; the others were either on vacation or taking off for previous overtime. Two day-shift detectives heard about the case and volunteered. One was Larry Earls, a hard-driving thirty-year-old who doubled as a private security guard, and the other was Karl Siebeneicher, at thirty-one a master’s degree candidate and operator of two business ventures on the side. When the Pasadena team arrived with the manacled Wayne Henley, Siebeneicher showed pictures of the two missing boys to the young suspect.
“Know these guys?” the detective asked pleasantly.
“Yeh,” Henley said quickly. “That’s Marty Jones and Charles Cobble.”
Henley offered no further comment, and Siebeneicher did not inform him that he was Marty Ray Jones’s cousin. A few days earlier, he had learned for the first time that his young cousin was missing, and had gone into the files to study the case. Now he told himself that there must be some tangible connection between Henley and the two missing boys. Was murder the connecting link? He climbed into the Pasadena car along with two Pasadena detectives and the taciturn Henley, and they headed south in the direction of the Astrodome. Larry Earls and another detective would stop by city jail to pick up trusties and equipment for a digging operation and meet the others later at the shed.
Henley directed the driver to an isolated intersection about nine miles south of downtown Houston, to a region of small industries, sheds, fields, falling-down barns, and wildcat housing developments. He pointed to a power plant sticking up from the scrubby coastal plains like a miniature metropolis and said, “That’s where ol’ Dean worked. He tested relays, or sumpin’ like that.”
A mile farther south, the undercover police car drove slowly through a neighborhood of modest homes and small businesses to a rutted shell road with the inappropriate name of Silver Bell. The narrow lane dead-ended alongside an L-shaped array of unpainted sheds made of galvanized steel and bearing the name Southwest Boat Storage. It was nearly six o’clock on the summer evening; the fierce sun was slipping down toward the horizon, and a few sprigs of morning-glory hung from a fence and shone like sapphires in th
e afternoon light. In front of the sheds was a crushed-shell parking area, partly covered with grass and prickly weeds. To the east, beyond the dead end, thick tangles of scrub and tropical vines were matted beneath the high-tension power lines that led to the late Dean Corll’s place of employment a mile or so to the north.
Wayne Henley walked shakily toward a shed marked “11.” Detectives found it was tightly secured by a padlock. One of the Pasadena officers jogged down the road to the owner’s house and asked for a key. “Why do you want a key?” asked Mayme Meynier.
“The man that rents the stall was killed this morning,” the detective said. “We need to get inside.”
Mrs. Meynier said that each renter provided his own locks, and she had no idea how to open the doors.
“Well, is it okay if we break the lock?” the detective asked.
“Yes, I guess so,” the puzzled woman said.
One of the officers took a tire tool and snapped the hasp. As the tall doors creaked open, a blast of scorching air hit the assembled men like a fist. Karl Siebeneicher glanced over at Wayne Henley. “He started to take a step inside,” the mild-mannered detective said later, “but then his face just turned ashen, pale, grim. It was like he knew it was too late now; he’d given up his last options. He kind of staggered around outside the door, like he was trying to get himself together, and right then’s when I knew there was gonna be something in that shed. I just was positive: we’d found my little cousin.”
In the early-evening shadows, the detectives loosened their collars and adjusted their eyes to the cavernous interior. The sheds were fifteen feet high by twelve wide by thirty-four deep, big enough for small yachts, but there was no sign of a boat inside No. 11. The detectives poked about the insufferably hot interior and clucked together about the contents: a jumbled nest of empty cardboard boxes, a stripped 1971 Chevrolet Camaro under a tarpaulin, a pair of acetylene torches with tanks, two ten-pound sacks of Red Top dehydrated lime, eight empty olive-drab twenty-gallon cans marked “Survival supplies, Office of Civil Defense, Department of Defense, DRINKING WATER,” two empty twenty-gallon garbage containers made of plastic, several cans of acrylic spray paint, a loose twelve-by-fifteen-foot carpet with a pile of dirt at its center, an unconnected telephone transceiver, and various tools, wires and batteries. Propped against the right wall was a child’s homemade bicycle, yellow, with one wheel larger than the other. A few feet away were two plastic bags, one containing an empty sack of lime, the other mixed male clothing, medium to small size, including a pair of mod shoes with one-inch soles.
A detective made a note of the registration numbers on the bicycle and the stripped Chevrolet and radioed them to headquarters; soon it was established that the bike belonged to a thirteen-year-old Pasadena boy who had vanished five days earlier, and the car had been stolen from a used-car lot in March.
A Houston police car arrived with two more detectives and two trusties. Siebeneicher asked the prisoners if they knew their assignment. “No,” one said.
“Well, we’re gonna have you digging for bodies,” the detective said.
The older trusty smiled patronizingly. “Like they say, old boy,” he told his colleague, “every job’s got to have a foreman.” He passed the other man a shovel.
Siebeneicher clapped both trusties firmly by the shoulders and said, “No, men, we got us an integrated team here. You’re gonna have to work together.” The two prisoners in their jail coveralls shuffled inside the doors and waited nervously for instructions. The equanimous Siebeneicher, seeing their doleful looks, took pains to tell them, “Look, we’re not picking on you, but somebody has to do it.”
Inside the left wall of the shed, behind a stack of cardboard boxes, Houston Homicide Detective Larry Earls studied a spot where the compacted earth of the shed buckled upward, creating a star-shaped series of cracks. The heavily built Earls got on his hands and knees and peered into the earth; five or six inches down he thought he could make out a change of color. “Let’s try right here,” he said to the younger trusty, standing alongside with his shovel. “Just take it nice and easy, and if you hit something, stop.”
The other prisoner joined in, and within ten or fifteen minutes the two reluctant diggers had uncovered a layer of white. Earls took a closer look. “Lime!” he said. “Keep on digging, but slow.”
The others crowded around silently, and the only noise was the gritty rhythm of the shovels, biting away the sandy earth an inch or two at a time. A small trapezoid of brownish yellow began to appear below the lime, and a sickening stench curled into the shed, as though the diggers had suddenly breached a fumarole in a sulphur pit. Combined with the superheated enclosed air of the shed, the effect was strongly emetic. Larry Earls held his nose and scraped some dirt away with his hand. “It’s a skull,” he said quietly. “Keep digging.”
The younger trusty lifted another load of dirt and then clutched his stomach. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do this,” he said, and bolted for the fresh air. No one gave chase. There were other officers outside, guarding Henley, and anyway, city jail trusties presented the lowest possible escape risk. Probably the young digger was in trouble for unpaid parking tickets or a family squabble. It was easy to see what the older trusty had been jailed for, as he leaned popeyed and quivering against his spade. Intoxication was a common cause of city jail imprisonment.
The robust Larry Earls picked up the other shovel and began removing dirt below the skull, exposing the pale verdigris chest of a very small man or a boy in clear plastic. The young trusty apologized and rejoined the operation. With three men now digging, they soon uncovered the naked body of a blond boy, twelve or thirteen years old, encased in plastic and lying on his back. Loops of masking tape pinched tightly into the covering at the neck, waist and ankles. The body looked as though it had been in the ground about a week.
Just outside the two large doors of the shed, Wayne Henley sat on the ground in his Pasadena jail attire and his handcuffs. Karl Siebeneicher tapped the boy on the arm with a pack of cigarets. “Thanks,” Henley said. “What’s yer name?”
“Karl,” the detective said. “Just Karl.” Siebeneicher believed in keeping life simple. Whenever the phone rang back at headquarters, he would answer, “Homicide. Karl.” His business cards bore his picture as well as his name, “so that all those folks that can’t say my name’ll at least know what I look like. Just trying to be helpful.”
Now he was trying to be helpful to the young killer, and he crouched down to hear what the boy was saying through his tears. “I wanna use the phone,” Henley said. “I wanna call mah mama ’fore she hears all this on the radio.”
Siebeneicher looked around. The nearest telephone would be in Mrs. Meynier’s house, about a hundred yards away, and the nearest pay phone farther than that. “I’d like to help you,” he told the weeping boy, “but we’ve got to stay right here.”
A newspaper reporter stepped up and said, “There’s a phone over there,” beckoning toward a television news car belonging to Jack Cato of KPRC-TV, Houston.
A small voice, one of Wayne’s younger brothers, answered the call, and Henley said, “Is Mama there?”
“Who?” his brother asked. The radiotelephone distorted voices.
“Mama.” Wayne mouthed the word whiningly: MAWoo-ma.
A female, slightly on the defensive, said, “Who’s this?”
“This is Wayne,” the boy said.
“Yes, this is Mama, baby.” Now her voice was calm and motherly.
Henley sounded confused, as though there were no words for what he had to tell his mother. “Mama?” he said again.
“Yes.”
“I kilt Dean.” His voice was strangled and labored.
“Wayne?” his mother said uncomprehendingly.
“Ma’am?”
“Oh, Wayne, you didn’t!”
“Yep,” the boy said, and quickly corrected himself. “Yes’m.”
“Oh, God!” Mary Henley said. “Where are yo
u?”
“I’m—” He stopped and listened to his mother’s sobs. “It’s all rat,” he said.
Mrs. Henley cried, “Wayne—”
“It’s all rat!” the boy shouted into the phone. And then softly, “It’s all rat.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m out at his war’house.”
“Where?”
“Out at that war’house he keeps.”
“Kin I come out there?”
Henley looked questioningly at Siebeneicher. “Yeh,” the boy said into the phone. “Yes—”
“No!” the detective said.
“She cain’t?” Henley asked, and Siebeneicher shook his head emphatically. Nothing could be less useful at the impromptu burial site than an upset mother.
Henley turned back to the phone and said in a consoling tone, “No, yew cain’t come.” His mother cried louder. “I’m with the police, Mama,” he said by way of explanation.
“When kin I see you?”
“This evening’,” the boy said. “I’m gonna let ya go, Mama.”
Mary Henley sobbed. “Okay, baby.”
The body in its plastic shroud was being carried out, and Henley resumed his position on the ground, facing away from the shed, his head in his hands and his shoulders jerking spasmodically. He began mumbling, and Siebeneicher bent down to listen. “I knew Marty, and Marty’s there,” the boy intoned. “And David, I grew up with him and he lived next door. And I went to school with Charles.”
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Siebeneicher said.
“It’s mah fault,” Henley said. “I cain’t help but feel guilty, like I done kilt those boys myself. I caused ’em to be daid. I led ’em strite to Dean.” Siebeneicher decided to let the boy “run his head”; many a murder case had been solved by the musings of a guilt-stricken suspect. While attendants busied themselves zipping the victim’s small body into a bag, Wayne Henley rambled on. He told how he had known Corll for two years, how he had introduced many Heights boys to the sex murderer, and how he might even have been marked for death himself.