by Jack Olsen
As the hours passed and the temperature climbed, the diggers found that they could work only in short shifts before dashing outside for air. A policeman kicked a hole in the back of the shed, but there was hardly any breeze, and the situation was only slightly improved. The trusties, mostly winos, became casualties themselves, sprawled in disarray on the parking lot, preferring the relentless Texas sun to the specter of death inside. Danny James and Larry Earls continued to dig in the galvanized-steel cauldron, along with a few other detectives who came and went as they could be spared from the office. An observer who spent the entire day at the shed said later, “The city sent out a backhoe that just wasn’t big enough, and all the work wound up being done by hand. Naturally the men got a little short on patience, and they kind of jumbled the bones around. When they came to graves with more than one body, they just divided the bones into body sacks about equally. I really couldn’t blame them.”
By day’s end, nine bodies had been removed, bringing the total to seventeen, two less than Wayne Henley had forecast for the shed. The operation was shut down for good, to the chagrin of at least one officer. “It just wasn’t done right,” he said. “We waited out there all day for good equipment, but the city of Houston is so slow. We shoulda gone down about six feet and taken every bit of dirt out, but we couldn’t do it by hand, so we just gave up. There’s still bodies in that shed, I’m sure of it.”
David Brooks and his father huddled together in an office at headquarters, and Jim Tucker dropped in on them once in a while to buoy their spirits. “What I’m worried about,” Alton Brooks said, “is the publicity. It might could hurt mah bidness.”
Tucker said, “At this point, you don’t have a whole lot to worry about, Mr. Brooks. Your son’s just given us background information, things he’s heard of. I don’t think you’re gonna get any bad publicity.”
Late in the afternoon, the head of CID, Alton Brooks’s friend J. D. Belcher, hurried into the office. The elder Brooks asked him, “Are we in a position to leave now?”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Lieutenant Belcher said, “but something’s come up.”
The father half rose from his seat, and Belcher said, “Come on, let’s go talk to Lieutenant Porter.”
As gently as possible, Breckenridge Porter broke the news that David Brooks was under arrest. He explained that Texas law provides for the arrest of anyone implicated in a felony confession, and Wayne Henley had informed on the friend of his childhood.
“Take the boy to the magistrate and get him warned,” Porter ordered Tucker.
“I don’t know what there is to live for,” David cried out, and his father patted him on the arm. A judge read the young man’s rights aloud, and then the detective said, “Let’s go, David. We’re going to jail now.”
Brooks turned to his tearful father and said, “I’ll be all right.”
Tucker asked the jailer for a private cell. “We don’t want any heroes getting after him,” he said. The jailer nodded assent. “Oh, and keep an eye on him, will you?” Tucker whispered. “He said something about suicide.”
Brooks’s belt and glasses were removed and he was locked in for the night. Just before Tucker left, the boy said wearily, “I’ll tell ya all about it tomorrow.”
Detective W. L. Young wore stark black glasses, combed his hair neatly to the side, and had about him the dignified look of the scholar. But as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, the illusion evaporated. Willie Young was pure down home, as pompous as red-eye gravy and as pedantic as Gomer Pyle. He had been a Houston policeman for sixteen years, and one of his specialties was making people comfortable. Now he was in a police car with Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and two Pasadena detectives, and they were driving at high speed toward Lake Sam Rayburn, one hundred and sixty-nine miles northeast of Houston, deep in the piney woods. Two other cars full of lawmen followed, and on the way the caravan picked up a team of Texas Rangers in Lufkin.
In the back of the first car, Willie Young was playing his customary role of “a good ol’ boy,” smiling broadly at Henley’s remarks and displaying the Terry-Thomas gap in his front incisors. Seldom in his six years with homicide had Willie encountered such a mouthy killer. Before they had even pulled away from headquarters, the boy had called out to Karl Siebeneicher and practically demanded that the detective hear his story.
In the car, Henley told his companions that Corll had made an offer of two hundred dollars per child nearly three years earlier, “but I sat on it for a year.” Then he got into a financial bind and had to take advantage of the offer. Corll paid the first time, but never again.
“Well, I don’t rilly understand you,” Willie Young said, smiling. “I’ve heard of plenty murders where a guy’s kilt three people, that’s pretty common. But a nice guy like you involved in this many killin’s? Why, I cain’t visualize it!”
“Well, if yew had a daddy that shot at yew,” Henley said darkly, “yew might could do some thangs, too.”
Young was impressed by the boy’s stoic acceptance of his fate. “He acted like a guy that’s goin’ to the penitentiary for the fifth time,” the detective said later. “Like nature was takin’ its course. Seemed he just enjoyed the attention, ridin’ there in the car with three detectives for his buddies.”
Only one subject seemed to disturb the young killer: homosexuality. He kept emphasizing his relations with females. “I had a girl fri’nd and I spent the whole night with her! Man, I’d sure like to be able to do that jes’ one more time.” He seemed to be trying to impress the detectives with his manliness.
After a while, he began a disquisition on the physical difficulty of killing a human being. “Man, it’s hord!” he said. “It ain’t like on TV. Man, I choked one of ’em boys and he turned blue and gurgled, and I jes’ couldn’t kill him. He jes’ wouldn’t die! I went in and got Dean, and he come out and helped. Had to do two, three like ’at.”
It was late afternoon when the police cars reached Texas farm road 3185, three miles southwest of the small town of Broaddus near a summer community called Hickory Hollow. Lake Sam Rayburn, a man-made impoundment, was about two miles away, and the Corll cabin another two or three miles down the lake. At Henley’s direction, the cars made several wrong turns onto barely marked roads, losing an hour or so, and ended up on a bumpy dirt road parallel to a blacktop. Fresh rain had muddied the area, and the men got out and slogged into the darkening woods, Henley in the lead. He directed them to a mound in the middle of a small clearing about seventy yards off the road, and said tersely, “Billy’s buried there.”
A hound howled far away. “Billy who?” Young asked.
“Billy Lawrence.”
One of the detectives picked at the top of the mound and exposed a layer of leaves below a thin coating of dirt. About a foot below the leaves the officers hit a hard covering that turned their shovels aside. They pried up a board four feet square and came to a stratum of lime. Below the lime, about two feet in the earth, a large rock rested atop the chest of a rotting body wrapped in plastic.
Willie Young glanced at Henley, standing a few feet to one side. The boy seemed in distress. “If this bothers you,” Young said, “we kin go back to the road. We don’t have to stay here.”
“No,” Henley said in a choked voice, “it’ll be all rat.”
As night fell, the boy led the search party on another excursion through the woods—interrupted momentarily while a Ranger shot a rattlesnake. A second body, similarly wrapped and decomposed, was brought to the surface.
By this time, newsmen had arrived and several requested an interview. Henley spoke briefly, shielding his face from the cameras. He said, “These was jes’ some boys that Dean picked up, that I helped him git, ruther, and he raped ’em, ended up killin’ ’em, brought ’em down here and buried ’em.”
He was asked about his own role.
“I helped him pick ’em,” the boy said warily.
“What part did you play in the killing?” a TV reporter asked.
“No comment,” Henley said.
Another newsman asked the boy to explain his motivation. He said, “Dean had somethin’ over me,” but refused to elaborate.
The bodies were secured in zippered bags, and the group retired to the nearby town of San Augustine, where Henley was locked in a cell at the county jail. By this time he was acting morose and troubled, the opposite of his earlier behavior, and cried out for a doctor. Sheriff John Hoyt summoned a doctor to the jail, and the boy went to sleep under the influence of a tranquilizer and a sedative. The amiable sheriff sent out for whiskey, and the visiting detectives sat up till long past midnight, making notes and discussing the case.
Back in Houston, Lieutenant Breck Porter held his own briefing for the press. Boots propped on his desk, the crusty veteran leaned back and told reporters, “There’s no tellin’ how many bodies there are, ’cause where you’ve got a clown like this has been operatin’ over a period of four years—why, we know he’s been prankin’ with these teen-agers for at least that long, so no tellin’ how long this has been goin’ on, or how many that’s missin’ that’ll never be found.”
He was asked what advice he would give parents and children. “Well, we try to preach to our kids all the time,” he said, “but it’s pretty hard to tell your kids things like this ’cause in this day and time your kids know all the answers about everything, and think they do. This is the sort of thing that kin happen. Tell your kids: when you’re invited up to somebody’s apartment, you might never leave.”
The lieutenant said he doubted if the general public fully understood the nature of sex crimes. “Most people think this sex bit is perhaps like something I’d be involved in, you know? One of these wham bam thank you ma’am type things? And then you turn over and go to sleep? But it wasn’t that way. These ol’ clowns that go for these perverted-type sex acts, they go on for a period of two or three days. I’m sure there would be a certain amount of torture to the person it’s bein’ inflicted upon. It starts as a party. There’s really no violence connected, at first, just everybody have a good time. These kids wasn’t drug up there at the point of a gun or nothin’ like that. They was invited to a party. Hell, some of ’em liked it. Somebody’d take ’em home, and they didn’t want to go home, and they’d come back to the party. One of ’em came back nine times to party at Corll’s place, I understand. There was lots to eat, lots to drink, pills and marijuana, barbiturates, lacquer sniffin’, the whole bit. And then they’re crocked out, and they wake up and find themselves racked up on the board. Then the sex bit starts.”
At her neat house on Twenty-seventh Street, Mary Henley sobbed and said she could not understand. “Dean treated Wayne like a son,” she said. “And Wayne loved him like a father. I know Dean must’ve done something terrible to make him shoot him.”
WHEN JIM TUCKER ARRIVED at headquarters early Friday morning, he found that David Brooks had been moved from the basement to a fifth-floor lockup for safekeeping. “Will you get my glasses?” Brooks asked. “I’m about blind without ’em.”
Tucker picked up the boy’s personal effects and escorted him from jail for an interrogation. “Man, that was scary,” Brooks said on the way to homicide.
“What was scary?” Tucker asked.
“When I woke up this morning, there was four, five cops outside the cell peeping in at me, and some of ’em was talking nasty. I didn’t know what they was gonna do; it scairt me half to death.”
“Well, did they do anything to you?”
“No. The sergeant come over and he was super-nice.”
In Tucker’s office, the two sat in silence for several minutes. Then the detective said, “You told me you’d tell me the whole truth today.”
“I know,” Brooks said, “but I’d like to wait for my daddy first.”
For a moment, Tucker was afraid the confession might be slipping away. “Well, now listen,” he said, “you said yesterday you were gonna tell me all about this today, and I wantyou to tell me all about it.”
“I’m going to!” Brooks said emphatically. “But I’d just like to wait till my daddy gets here.”
“Are you gonna make a statement?”
“Yes, I planned on it.”
“Well, look, it’s gonna take us two, three hours. So why don’t we type it now, and anything you say, even if it’s reduced to writing, it can’t be used against you unless you sign it.” Tucker was stretching the truth, but the district attorney was pressing for the confession.
Brooks pondered the suggestion, and at last agreed. Shortly after the process had begun, Alton Brooks knocked and entered. “I want you to tell ’em the truth!” he instructed his son in front of Tucker. “We’re gonna undo this thang, and we’re gonna try to identify all those boys we kin, and get this straightened out.” He left, and David resumed talking. He said that Corll engaged in homosexual activities with “a large number” of people, and always played the active role. “He liked oral sex,” the boy said, “and he’d pay boys to come over and let him do it to them. That was his sex life. There was some boys that was involved with him for a long time; they kept coming back for more, and he kept paying ’em. But every once in a while he’d take a kid by force, and then he’d do oral sex and rectal sex and all kind of other things, and he’d wind up killing ‘em.”
Brooks said that the plywood board was used to hold the boys in position while Corll abused and murdered them. “Once they went on the board, they were as good as dead,” the young man said. “It was all over but the shouting and the crying. Most of the boys weren’t good boys. This is probably a cruel way to put it, it probably sounds terrible, but most of ’em wasn’t no great loss. They was in trouble all the time, dope fiends and one thing or another. I remember one kid, we all agreed after he was dead that he was a super-bad kid, and his people wasn’t gonna miss him no way.”
The talk went on for several hours, and gradually “Ol’ Fastfingers” produced several pages of typed confession. “I want you to read this carefully before you sign it,” Tucker said. “If there’s anything I got twisted up or backwards or anything, you just tell me, and we’ll correct it. But if it’s right, I want you to sign right here.”
Brooks picked up the pages and read :
The first killing that I remember happened when Dean was living at the Yorktown town house. There were two boys there and I left before they were killed. But Dean told me that he had killed them afterwards. I don’t know where they were buried or what their names were. The first few that Dean killed were supposed to have been sent off somewhere in California.
The first killing that I remember being present at was on 6363 San Felipe. That boy was Ruben Haney (Watson). Dean and I were the only people involved in that one. But Dean did the killing, and I was just present when it happened.
I also remember two boys who were killed at the Place One apartments on Mangum. They were brothers and their father worked next door where they were building some more apartments. I was present when Dean killed them by strangling them but again I did not participate. I believe that I was present when they were buried, but I don’t remember where they were buried. The youngest of these two boys is the youngest that was killed I think.
I remember one boy who was killed on Columbia at Dean’s house. This was just before Wayne Henley came into the picture. Dean kept this boy around the house for about four days before he killed him. I don’t remember his name but we picked him up on Eleventh and Rutland. I think I helped bury this boy also, but I don’t remember where it was. This was about two years ago. It really upset Dean to have to kill this boy because he really liked him.
A boy by the name of Glass was also killed at the Columbia address. I had taken him home one time, but he wouldn’t get out because he wanted to go back to Dean’s. I took him back and Dean ended up killing him.
Now that I think about it I’m not sure whether it was Glass that I took home or another boy. But I believe that it was Glass.
It was during the t
ime that we were living on Columbia Street that Wayne Henley got involved. Wayne took part in getting the boys at first and then later he took an active part in the killings. Wayne seemed to enjoy causing pain and he was especially sadistic at the Schuler address.
Most of the killings that occurred after Wayne came into the picture involved all three of us. I still did not take part in the actual killing but nearly always all three of us were there.
I was present when Mark Scott was killed at the Schuler street address. I had told yesterday in my witness statement about Mark Scott being at the Schuler house but I did not say that I was present, which I was. Mark had a knife and he tried to get Dean. He swung at him with a knife and caught Dean’s shirt and barely broke the skin. He still had one hand tied and Dean grabbed the hand with the knife. Wayne ran out of the room and got a pistol, and Mark just gave up. Wayne killed Mark Scott and I think that he strangled him. Mark was either buried at the beach or the boathouse.
There was another boy killed at the Schuler house, actually there were two at this time. A boy named Billy Baulch and a Johnny and I think that his last name was Malone. Wayne strangled Billy and he said “Hey Johnny” and when Johnny looked up Wayne shot him in the forehead with a .22 automatic. The bullet came out of his ear and he raised up and about three minutes later he said, “Wayne, please don’t.” Then Wayne strangled him, and Dean helped.
It was while we were living on Schuler that Wayne and Dean got me down and started to kill me. I begged Dean not to kill me and he finally let me go. I told about this in my witness statement and that part of my statement was absolutely true. It was also at this address that they got Billy Ridinger and what I said in my witness statement was true about him. I took care of him while he was there and I believe the only reason he is alive now is because I begged them not to kill him.
Wayne and Dean got one boy by themselves while we were on Schuler. It was a tall, skinny guy. I just happened to walk in the house and there he was. I left before they killed this one.