by Jack Olsen
“The word’s out on the national wires,” Hamel said. “Every mother in the USA is checkin’ to see if we found her son.”
Tucker clapped his forehead. The office was already shorthanded; August was a popular vacation month as well as a time when officers liked to use up their compensatory days for previous overtime. Two “early” teams were out working the overnight shootings, and the few available detectives in the office had been assigned to return to the shed and search for more bodies, but the jangling telephones had pinned them down. “We better take a few calls while we wait on CID,” Hamel said, and for the next hour the two detectives handled the pathetic entreaties of grieving parents who were convinced that their sons lay dead in Houston. It was a relief when Lieutenant Porter hauled them off to the superspooks.
On the way, Porter explained that a certain David Brooks had come in to make a statement about the mass murders. Brooks was eighteen years old and claimed to have valuable information on Dean Corll. “Kid’s here with his whole damned family,” Porter told the two detectives. “He lives separate from the others, and in the middle of the night he called his brother and said he was involved in this case to x degree, and the brother called the daddy jes’ in a panic, said, ‘You’ve got to git over here right away,’ and the daddy rushed over and they called Belcher and here we are.”
“Belcher” was Lieutenant J. D., head of CID and a personal friend of the Brooks family. The tight-lipped little group was assembled in his private office discussing the case. Hamel and Tucker entered and saw an ascetic-looking young man with a sharp straight nose and blond bobbed hair and webbed sandals on his feet. The boy spoke almost inaudibly, seeming very ill at ease, but the father, a dark, weathered man with a strong southern accent, was saying, “So I tole mah son, you kin work for me in mah asphalt bidness, but not with that long hair. So they went out and cut it, him and Henley both, and I let ’em work for a while, till it grew out agin and I wouldn’t have ’em around no more.”
Lieutenant Belcher interrupted to brief the newcomers. He said young Brooks had told them he had lived with Dean Corll off and on for three years, but had never seen any evidence of crimes. Corll had worked as a relay tester at a power station and seemed steady and dependable. He was a pleasant roommate, undemanding and quiet. “He sorta kept to himself,” the boy put in. “Minded his own business and didn’t bother nobody. I just don’t understand all this murder talk. That’s not the Dean I knew.”
Tucker and Hamel exchanged a quick glance, and as usual they were of a single mind. “We knew we were listening to pure unregistered bull,” Tucker said later. “After you conduct a certain number of interrogations, you can spot lying a mile off. This kid was talking in front of his father and his brother, and that’s not the best way to get at the truth. We knew we had to get him outa there.”
Lieutenant Belcher, trying to be courteous, suggested that Brooks’s statement be taken right there in the CID office, to avoid reporters in the halls. Hamel and Tucker promised to sneak the young man in and out of homicide without exposing him to the press. “Nobody knows his face,” Hamel said. “We’ll just barge right through.”
After four years as a team, the two detectives had a well-worn routine for interrogations. They eschewed the “good cop and bad cop” technique because, as Hamel put it, “Neither one of us can pass for the bad cop; we’re both pushovers.” Instead, they usually began their questioning together, in a low key, with Hamel probing gently at weak spots and Tucker engaging in his customary light banter, as though the two detectives and the suspect were just three old friends having a nice chat. When the questioning gained momentum, Hamel would slip away and Tucker would turn to his typewriter and begin pounding out the formal statement. If the process bogged down, or the suspect became recalcitrant, Hamel would re-enter the room, usually with striking effect. “I don’t know the psychological reason it works,” Hamel said, “but there’s somethin’ about comin’ in and out that makes a guy get to the truth. Works for us, anyhow.”
There would be a special difficulty in dealing with David Brooks. Technically the young man was offering only a “witness statement”; he was not a suspect in the case, and the legal presumption was that he was simply being a responsible citizen and trying to assist the police. Under the circumstances he could not be pressured in any way. If he contradicted himself, the contradiction would stand; if he engaged in obvious falsehood, the falsehood would go into the record. He could not be cajoled or intimidated. “And one other little thang,” Jack Hamel noted. “He was brought in by his daddy to a lieutenant who’s a personal friend. The whole thang, see?” David Brooks would be handled with care.
The interrogation had proceeded for only ten minutes when Hamel left the little room. The telephones were ringing more wildly than ever. There were only about seven units working on the day shift; three were on the street, and the others were drowning in phone calls. Hamel rolled up his sleeves and went to work. Occasionally he stuck his nose into the interrogation room, and each time it seemed to him that the taciturn young witness was holding back. “It smelled,” Hamel said. “It really did. I’d go in there and hear him talk about livin’ with a guy that done killed at least eight boys, and the two of ’em were supposed to be real close, Brooks and Corll, and yet he didn’t know a single thang about the killin’s? It added up to more bull, not quite as much bull as he’d been throwin’ in front of his father and brother, but bull jes’ the same.”
Tucker, alternately listening to the boy and transferring pertinent information to his typewriter, had the same feeling. Brooks told how he had met Dean Corll six years before, when the boy was in the sixth grade and Corll was managing a candy factory across from Helms Elementary School. “He’d give us kids candy and rides on his motorcycle,” Brooks said. The two of them, the preadolescent student and the twenty-seven-year-old businessman, became special friends, until the Brooks family broke up and David moved with his mother to Beaumont, eighty-five miles away, for a three-year stay. “But all that time I kept coming back to Houston to visit,” the boy told Tucker, “and whenever I did I’d go see Dean.” A sexual relationship developed at the urging of the older man. “It was always Dean doing something to me, never me doing nothing to Dean,” David emphasized, drawing a distinction that was apparently important to him. For his willingness to allow Corll to commit what Texas statutes call “oral sodomy,” the child was paid five or ten dollars. But there was no talk about recruiting other boys, or murder.
As the questioning went on through the morning, Brooks seemed to loosen up, and even began exchanging jollities with the easygoing Tucker. “Everybody loves a fat man,” as the detective was fond of saying. His genial disposition was useful in interrogations, and his willingness to kid himself often evoked a similar self-denigration in interviewees, leading to quicker and better confessions.
But David Brooks was stubborn. Despite the beginnings of a rapport, he steadfastly refused to admit that he knew anything about the killings. Of course, there had been a few unpleasant moments with his older roommate. After Brooks had introduced Corll to Wayne Henley, Corll and Henley began ganging up on him. One day Wayne slugged him when he walked into the apartment, and then Dean strapped him on the bed and committed repeated acts of rectal sodomy.
“So you moved out and never went back, right?” Tucker said, anticipating the answer.
“No, we stayed friends,” Brooks said. “But after that I was always afraid of him, and we had a lot of fights.”
“Well, listen, Dave,” Tucker said sympathetically, leaning forward as though the fate of mankind depended on the answer, “why on earth did you ever go back to live with a guy like that?”
The boy was unable to answer plausibly. Hamel re-entered and listened quietly while Tucker led Brooks over the same ground. Then the partners stopped for a strategy session. “Parts of it sound true,” Tucker said outside, “but the rest doesn’t ring.”
“Well, it’s his statement,” Hamel said. “
If he’s lyin’, he’s lyin’ is all.”
Tucker resumed his solicitous inquiries. “Dave,” he said, “did you ever see anything to suggest that Corll was bothering other kids?”
Brooks paused. He seemed to want to answer, but found his memory hazy. “Oh, yeh!” he said, as though a single vivid scene had flashed into his brain. “Once I saw Wayne and Dean playing with a young boy, showing him a handcuff trick, and when they got him cuffed, they tied him hand and foot.”
A few minutes later, the blond young man said that he and Dean had shared an apartment near the County Orphanage. “I come home and Dean had two li’l ol’ boys tied to a board in the living room and they was all three of ’em naked,” he said. “Dean jumped up and said, ‘I’m just having some fun,’ and he promised me a car if I kept quiet.”
Hamel came in and sat down. “Do you know if Dean killed those two boys?” Tucker asked.
Brooks hesitated again. “Yeh,” he said. “Later on he admitted he kilt ’em, and he bought me a Corvette.”
“Do you have any idea of other boys he might have killed?” Hamel asked.
“When Dean had a place on Schuler, he was hanging around with Mark Scott, and before that he was with Ruben Watson,” Brooks said. “They both disappeared. Maybe he kilt ’em. I wouldn’t know. If there was killing, Wayne and Dean did it. I do remember a boy named Billy Ridinger that they were talking about killing, and I talked ’em out of it. He was strapped on the board, but they let him go.”
Hamel spoke up. “David,” he said in his calm voice, “are you sure you don’t want to tell us the whole truth?”
“I am telling the truth,” the boy said, averting his eyes.
At that point in a normal interrogation, Hamel and Tucker would have applied verbal pressure. It was clear to both men that the boy was involved in the murders, but they agreed there was nothing they could do to force a confession. “It’s his statement,” Hamel told Tucker outside. “Let him go ahead and say what he wants. Jes’ take it all down. Later on if somethin’ comes up to disprove it, we’ll git into it again.”
“Ol’ Fastfingers” returned to his typewriter.
At the little jail in suburban Pasadena, Wayne Henley spoke to his mother for the first time since their radiotelephone discussion the evening before. Mary Henley, haggard from a night without sleep, told her son that his three brothers loved him and wanted him to come home.
“Mama,” the boy complained, “I’m sick.” He said he had been kept in a windowless cell, and the experience had left him with a feeling of panic. “I’d ruther they tie me up to a tree than put me in a closed room without windows,” he told his mother. “And I ’bout froze without a blanket.”
The conversation ended with an exchange that left the mother in tears:
“Mama, I’ve tol’ ’em everythang.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“Just everythang.”
“Oh, Wayne!”
“Mama, be happy for me, ’cause now, at last, I kin live.”
Pasadena authorities were convinced that the pimply boy with the thin moustache had held nothing back in a long talk with detectives that morning. He said that he had procured teen-age males for Corll and that Corll sexually assaulted them and sometimes killed them, depending on his frame of mind. Sometimes the boys were tortured by inserting glass rods or dildoes into their body openings; a few were castrated. Henley admitted assisting in eight murders, and said he knew of sixteen others. The third and fourth bodies found in the boat shed, he said, were Charles Cobble and Marty Ray Jones. He said Corll shot the Cobble boy and then both of them strangled Jones. He said he reckoned there were nineteen bodies in the shed, several more on a remote Gulf Coast beach, and another four or five near the Corll family’s summer cottage at Lake Sam Rayburn, a four-hour drive to the north. He said that Corll’s appetites had seemed to increase lately; “if we coulda got him one boy a day he’d a been happy.”
The Pasadena detectives decided to confirm the Lake Sam Rayburn connection right away, and stowed their prisoner in the back of an unmarked car for the familiar trip to pick up observers from Houston homicide. They found the entrance to Houston police headquarters swarming with reporters, and ordered Henley to squat on the floor of the car, out of sight. Detective Jim Tucker was summoned outside for a brief discussion. “Henley’s confessed,” a Pasadena detective told him, “and he’s indicating that the Brooks boy’s pretty heavily involved in this.”
“Yeh,” Tucker said. “We kinda suspicioned that.”
Brooks was upstairs perusing his typed “witness statement” before signing it, and Tucker did not want to reopen the interrogation unless necessary. “Hey, I got an idea,” Tucker said. “Let’s confront Brooks and Henley!” The Pasadena detectives gave their consent.
To avoid the press, the party took the back steps two at a time, by-passing reporters watching the elevators. By the time they had run up three flights, “Ol’ Fastfingers” was winded. Wayne Henley said, “Hey, man, why cain’t yew keep up?”
“I’m fat and tired, that’s why!” Tucker exclaimed.
“Yew mean yew’re outa wind already?” Henley said, smiling mischievously.
“I just can’t talk to you now,” Tucker panted. “Lemme catch my breath. This is killing me!”
At the top of the fourth flight, Henley said, “What’s the matter with yew, man? Yew must be outa shape. I rilly enjoyed that run!”
“Say, what are you enjoying?” the aggravated Tucker asked. “The run or the attention?”
“The run,” Henley said quickly.
When his heart stopped pounding, Tucker turned to one of the Pasadena detectives and muttered, “It made the fat fella tired, but it didn’t make that boy tired. But that boy’s had a lot of exercise. I never dug a grave.”
David Brooks was sitting in an office in the corner of the homicide division. Henley was steered through the door, and Brooks looked up as though startled. “David,” Henley said, “I made a statement, and I tol’ the whole story, and I thank yew should, too.”
Brooks acted puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I already told ’em.”
“Well, yew might as well tell the truth, ’cause I done tol’ ’em mah part and I tol’ ’em yer part, and yew wouldn’t believe how much better I feel.”
“Well, I’m gonna stay with my statement,” Brooks said. “I don’t have nothing else to say about it.”
A gleam came into Henley’s eye, and he said, “Well, David, then I’m gonna change mah story and say yew done it all!”
Brooks ignored the remark and handed Tucker his signed statement. He said he would like to talk to his father. After the blond boy was led to another office to await Alton Brooks’s arrival, Henley said, “I was only jokin’. I’m glad I got it all stritened out now, and I’m not gonna change nothin’.” He told Tucker that he had been feeling “poorly” the night before, but that his disposition and his health had improved since his confession. “I rilly feel better,” he said, sounding almost happy about the whole sequence of events. “It’s unbelievable how good I feel!”
After Henley was returned to the Pasadena car for the drive to Lake Sam Rayburn, Tucker told his partner, “Jack, I never saw anybody feeling so good about a confession. He was cheerful, clowning, performing for everybody.”
“Yeh,” Hamel said. “I saw him goin’ out. He was jes’ havin’ a blast.”
Danny James, the rookie homicide detective, begged Breckenridge Porter to assign him to the case he had missed the day before, and the lieutenant said, “Okay, brother, if you wanna go out to that shed and help dig, you’re welcome to it.” James drove home on the way to the Southwest Boat Storage and changed into faded jeans and T-shirt, both expendable. “I didn’t want to ruin my suit,” the homicide division’s fashion plate explained.
Late in the morning, a few newsmen and detectives were standing around the entrance to the shed talking. Larry Earls and another detectiv
e pulled up with a team of trusties, and after a few minutes Earls said, “I asked for heavy digging equipment from the city, but we might as well start in with shovels.”
One of the trusties stuck a spade squarely in the middle of the sandy floor and looked at Earls questioningly. “Sure, why not?” Earls said. “The way we hear, one place is as good as another.”
“Yeh,” Danny James said. “The way we hear, it’s wall-to-wall bodies.”
By noon, the party had disinterred another pair of young boys, wrapped in plastic, covered in lime, and almost entirely skeletonized. Then two more bodies were recovered from individual graves, and another pair in the far left corner. The last two bore identification cards marked Donald and Jerry Waldrop, fifteen and thirteen years old, hospitalization cards in the same names, and two cigaret lighters.
As more bodies came into view, it became almost impossible to separate one victim from another. “We had to reach in with our hands and separate little bitty bits of bone from crushed shell and muck, and then pitch them up into bags,” Larry Earls said later. “We were pulling hair out of the mud in chunks, working in mud made out of dirt and rotten blood. It was caked on our shoes. It got into our clothes. It was awful.”
The officers found the first evidence of sexual mutilation. A small plastic bag lay alongside one body; inside were a penis and testicles. The rest of the body had decomposed, but the airtight sack had preserved the genitalia. Another boy’s penis was gnawed nearly in two. Almost all the victims had been gagged and wrapped in plastic, and heavy twine or Venetian-blind cord was cinched about most of the necks. Several had been shot, their hands tied behind their backs. One had a caved-in chest; it appeared that he had been kicked to death. Most of the victims seemed to have been in their early teens, but there were a few exceptions. Danny James winced as he extracted a pair of muddy pants that were no more than a foot and a half long, suitable for a boy of nine or ten years. The eighth body of the day, found near the entrance, was intact in a striped swimsuit, undershorts and black cowboy boots.