by Jack Olsen
At twenty minutes after noon, the police cars, now joined by a group of press and television vehicles, pulled up at Nancy’s for lunch. Twenty-five minutes later, a car carrying David Brooks and detectives Jack Hamel and Jim Tucker arrived from Houston, followed by a car with Danny James and another homicide detective and four trusties, followed by a long string of vehicles belonging to the news media. After a soggy luncheon of hamburgers eaten from paper bags, the caravan headed toward the beach, two miles south. Taking directions from Henley and Brooks, the drivers followed Highway 124 to its junction with the beach road, SH 87, and then turned east along the Gulf, passing a sign that warned: “SH 87 may be subject to flooding and debris next twenty miles.”
They drove parallel to the beach, and at a signal from Henley they parked on the shoulder and walked down a sandy path through a narrow strip of salt grass to the beach. The Gulf was rinse-water brown, riding in small waves driven by a southerly breeze, coughing up Portuguese men-of-war and punch-drunk baitfish and bits of shell and flotsam. A line of rusty froth marked the upper limits of the littoral, and there were bits of plastic, various seaweeds and jellyfish cadavers, egg cartons, lengths of old rope, a Lone Star beer bottle, and a bleaching cypress stump half buried in the sand. Just outside the small breakers, chrome mullet jumped, harried by speckled trout and redfish, and a solitary fisherman cast a silver spoon.
The two prize prisoners, surrounded by officers to buffer them from the curious, said that Corll had taken them to the beach five or six months before and pointed out a place where he had buried a body by himself. Brooks said that the spot was “where the highway changes color, just beyond, and then down along the grass line.” While Henley hiked up the beach to look for another burial site, Brooks walked along the ridge that marked the boundary line between sand and salt grass. He came to a small cement block and bent over for a closer look. “I’m purty sure that’s it,” he said, “but I’d like to look some more.”
“Just take your time,” Tucker said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“I want to be sure what I’m showing you,” the blond boy said.
“Fine with us,” said Jack Hamel. “It’s a nice day for a stroll.” The temperature was in the nineties, the air was oppressively wet, and there was no shade. The detectives wore their customary uniforms of suits, shirts and ties. It was anything but a nice day for a stroll, under the circumstances, but Hamel wanted to give Brooks total leeway. In court later, it would be important that the boys had found the graves entirely on their own, without prodding or hinting or outside assistance. On such legal nuances, whole cases were won and lost, and murderers as guilty as Jack the Ripper sometimes slipped their bonds. Hamel and Tucker, the old pros, were aware of their responsibilities.
“I’m purty sure this is it,” Brooks repeated after poking around in the tall grass for a few more minutes. “But I don’t want y’all to start digging for nothing. I don’t want to disappoint you. Y’all’ve been real nice to me.”
“See?” Tucker quipped to Hamel. “Didn’t I tell you everybody likes a fat man?”
They walked back to the cement rock. “This is it,” Brooks said definitely. “I’m sure.” Under the rock, there appeared to be a caked black substance. Tucker nudged it lightly with his shoe tip and a piece broke off. The inside of the fragment was pure white.
“Lime?” Tucker asked Hamel.
“Lime,” his partner answered.
By now the group had been joined by local deputies, and one of them started digging without waiting for the trusties. In a few dips of the shovel he brought a patch of plastic into view. In a grave about two feet deep and three or four feet wide, the party found a skeleton the size of a teen-age boy’s, with strands of dark wet hair adhering to the skull. The body was entirely wrapped in plastic and tied like a package. Most of the skeleton fell apart when the outside cords were cut, but the feet were almost intact, as though a sculptor had roughed them out in clay. A coroner’s assistant said the boy might have been buried with his shoes on, creating a preservative effect. No clothes or personal effects were visible.
About two hundred feet up the beach, in an area where Wayne Henley said he remembered helping to bury bodies, a small grader chiseled at a strip of sand until it uncovered a patch of white. The body below was unwrapped; it had a full set of teeth with a few gold fillings, and black hair so long that detectives theorized that this twenty-third victim might be a girl. A morgue assistant took a close look and announced that they had found another teen-age male.
The press and spectators were being restrained by policemen and deputies, and the beach scene was still relatively placid. Several times Henley started to say something to Willie Young, but each time he stopped.
“Come on, come on,” Young said smilingly. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I was thinkin’,” the boy said. “When those people git down on the beach here, some kook’s gonna kill me. All it’d take is a rifle and jes’ git off at a distance, ya know?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Young said. “Me and my buddies, we’re not about to let anybody kill you.” Together with two Pasadena detectives, he stayed close to the boy as they walked back to the police car to meet the press. While newsmen ringed the car six deep, Henley carefully kept the door between himself and the throng and said in a commanding manner that he wanted to make a few corrections for the record. Some of the newspaper accounts, he said in a drill sergeant’s delivery, contained “downright lies.” He seemed especially interested in denying that he had mentioned David Brooks to the police. “When that boy turned hisself in,” Henley said, “I had not yet made a statement. I didn’t make a statement till after he made his. So I didn’t implicate him. He hung hisself! That’s all I want to say.” As an afterthought, he growled, “I never said there were thirty people. I said twenty-four. The name’s Junior, not Elmer Wayne Henley.” He looked out over the dozens of photographers, turned his profile toward the Gulf, and issued a final command: “Git yer pictures!”
After the press conference, the two boys walked with deputies about a mile down the beach to a cedar brake, while reporters and cameramen struggled in the sand to keep up. Henley removed his shirt, exposing a tanned, scrawny chest, and took charge of the expedition. He picked up a stick from the wrack and postured and strutted for the cameras: a harlequin with acne. “Point out a grave, Wayne!” a photographer shouted.
“Yes, sir; yes, sir!” Henley said, glad to oblige. He held the stick like a dowsing rod and mugged gleefully when it seemed to pull his thin wrist downward. “Here’s yew one!”
Cameras clicked, more poses were requested, and the young man continued his histrionics, while David Brooks sat at the edge of the grass, bemused. Jim Tucker came huffing up, and Henley called out, “Hey, ya wanna run a foot race?” Tucker made a face, and the boy broke into peals of laughter.
“You enjoying yourself?” Tucker asked.
“Come on!” Henley said. “Let’s have a nice race up the beach!” The sweating detective declined the invitation.
After a while, work crews began sifting through the sand while the grader stripped a shallow ditch along the salt grass. The two boys sat on a piece of driftwood and talked to Detective Danny James. “Hot,” James commented. “I sure could use a beer.”
Henley said impassionately, “Boy, me too! Hey, whyn’t yew go buy a six-pack?”
James laughed wryly. “Sure,” he said. “That’d be just dandy. Do you know what the press’d do if I bought beer for two minor boys?”
“Yeh,” Henley said, as Brooks nodded. “I guess I do.”
“But I sure could use one,” Danny James mused.
“Me too,” Henley said again. “Man, I jes’ don’t know where I’d be today if it wasn’t for beer!”
As James pondered the various definitions of success, young Henley jumped to his feet and raced away, still bare-chested, to help his new friends from the police department. The taciturn Brooks asked for a cigaret, and, a
t James’s subtle urging, began to talk slowly. “The youngest kid Dean kilt was about nine,” he said after a while. “His daddy run a grocery across the street from where Dean was living.”
“I saw your statement,” James said after another silence. “Is it true that one kid said something after he was shot in the head?”
“You mean Johnny?” Brooks said. “Johnny Malone, Johnny Dalone, something like that. Yeh, it’s true. Billy Baulch was already laying dead in the bed, and I was sitting there talking to Johnny, trying to keep him calm, because he went wild when he seen the strangling. He knew he was fixing to go himself. Wayne snuck back and hollered, ‘Hey, Johnny!’ and when he turned around Wayne shot him in the face, and he fell over. About a minute later he raised up and he says, ‘Please, Wayne, don’t!’ Wayne had to choke him.”
“Must take a lotta strength,” James said innocently.
“Oh, Wayne’s strong, all right,” Brooks said. “So was Dean. That Dean, he was powerful strong! When we’d come down here to bury a body, I’d stay in the car, and ol’ Dean, he’d put two shovels under one arm and a body under the other and just walk right on down to the beach, like he was carrying a fishing rod or something.”
After another hour had passed without any new discoveries, the party moved several more miles along the beach to a place where Henley said two boys had been buried in 1972. By 4 P.M., nothing more had turned up, despite Henley’s protestations that there were at least six bodies buried on High Island, and the detectives put their prisoners into the police cars and headed back toward Houston, leaving several hundred spectators discussing what they had seen.
A woman was in tears. “It makes a mother really be thankful for the grace that God has given ’em, ’cause it could be mine layin’ right there,” she said. “I have a son almost fourteen. Thank God! But I’m so sad for the family. For the others that has done it, Lord forgive ’em, ’cause they didn’t know what they’re doing. Oh, God, how sad that is!” She started to cry aloud.
A middle-aged man said he had lived on High Island all his life, and he had every intention of enjoying the beach just as he had in the past. “The beach didn’t do this,” he said in a sermonizing manner. “It was them newcomers from Houston.”
Two boys of twelve or thirteen exchanged observations. “It stunk like crazy!” one of them said. “Just bones, and you could see his ha’r. Looked like a Messican.”
“Awful!” the other boy said. “I seen it dug up. It had hair, and a little bit of flesh on his arms. This was the first dead body I ever seen. I hope I don’t see no more.”
In Houston that afternoon, Dean Arnold Corll was buried in Grand View Memorial Park. While his father and mother and a few dozen others looked on, a Methodist preacher offered words of consolation. “No matter how much we love our children,” he said, “we must let them go and not feel guilty for what they make of their lives. Now we deliver this man unto God’s judgment and also his mercy and grace. And I commend the family to the same mercy and grace because they must now live with the things that will be said. The greatest heroism is just going on and remembering that Christ came to the world to love those whom others despised.”
The service lasted less than fifteen minutes. There was no music. The American flag that draped the coffin was folded and presented to the bereaved father.
A native of France, Charles Cuin, shook his head and expressed bafflement after the ritual. Cuin told reporters he had been naturalized for only three months, and he was still learning American ways. “I can’t understand,” he said. “You bury this guy and put an American flag on his casket like everything is normal?”
That evening there was a torrent of hot words in Houston. When Jack Hamel and Jim Tucker returned to headquarters from their enervating day in the sun, a young assistant district attorney asked them, “Why did you give out the Brooks confession?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tucker said, his usual good spirits failing him.
“Well, somebody gave it to the press!” the prosecutor insisted.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Tucker said. “I gave it to the lieutenant, and he promised it wouldn’t be released, and then I left for High Island.”
When the assistant DA persisted, Tucker brushed him aside and snapped, “I’m tired. Get outa my way!”
As the two detectives walked into the homicide office, they noticed extra teams answering telephone calls. The usually orderly office looked like a stock brokerage on a hectic afternoon.
“What’s happenin’?” Hamel asked a detective.
“The Brooks confession got out. Everybody recognizes his missing kid in it. There was a call from Hawaii. One from Canada. And they’re all sore. They want to know why we didn’t inform ’em.”
A few minutes later, the beleaguered Tucker found himself in debate with another representative of the district attorney’s office.
“Listen,” the DA’s man said, “we have a lot of bodies, but we don’t have Brooks connected with any one of ‘em. We’ve got to have Brooks identify at least one body himself, or else we can’t file charges on him.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of!” Tucker said. “That’s the other way around from the usual way. We’ve got bodies that these boys directed us to, and they said they were present when these bodies were killed. What more do you need?”
“Identifications,” the DA’s assistant said. “Brooks has to say that’s so-and-so, and we killed him.”
“Well, what’s in a name?” Tucker said. “You can go to court and change your name.”
“Look, we need another statement from Brooks, and we need it now.”
“Ol’ Fastfingers” lost the argument. He trudged back to the jail and checked out David Brooks, busy talking to his father. “David,” he said, “I know you’re tired, and I am too, but we have to talk some more.” He paraded the boy before a magistrate for another declaration of his legal rights, and afterward Alton Brooks told the detective, “Mah boy lived mostly with Dean Corll and his mother, and I didn’t get to see much of him. But no matter what happens, I’ll be here with mah son. This is a terrible thang that brings us together, but I feel closer now than I ever did before.”
Tucker took the boy into a private office and showed him a picture of Billy Lawrence, given to the police several weeks earlier by an aunt who was worried about his absence. “Recognize him?” Tucker asked.
“Yeh,” Brooks said. “He’s one of the kids that was kilt. I don’t know his name, but I remember the whole thing.”
Brooks initialed the photograph for identification, and then he and Tucker sat up till late in the evening preparing a statement. Around eleven o’clock, the fastest typist in homicide handed a typewritten sheet to Brooks and told him to read it for accuracy. A few minutes later, the boy gave the paper back and said, “I can’t sign this.”
“What’s the matter?” the dismayed Tucker said.
“Down here,” David said. “Look. Where I’m talking about the boys getting kilt, and I say, ‘I just didn’t like to do it myself.’ That’s not right.”
“Well, what is right?”
“Put down ‘I just wouldn’t do it myself,’” the boy instructed. “And put down ‘And I never did do it myself.’”
Tucker X’ed out the offending passage and inserted the proper words, and Brooks initialed the corrections and signed his name. The detective reread the evening’s work:
About July 10th, 1973, I tried to call Dean’s house, Dean Corll, and it was a long time before I could get him or anyone to answer. Finally, Wayne answered and I asked him if they had anyone there and he said yes. I asked him “It’s not a friend, is it?” and he said “Sort of.” He wouldn’t tell me who it was so I went over there just to see who it was. He was still alive when I got there but he was tied to the bed. I recognized him only as a friend of Wayne’s.
The boy wasn’t doing anything but lying there when I got there. He didn’t have any clot
hes on. I don’t remember them calling him by name but I have just now been shown a picture of him which I will initial with this date and time and it is the same boy I have been talking about. In fact, I have seen this same picture before at Dean’s house.
I was tired so I went to bed in the opposite bedroom. Before I did go to bed I took Wayne home. Then I went back to Dean’s house and went to bed. The boy was still alive but Dean was awake because I remember he let me in. The next morning I went back to get Wayne and Dean was supposed to pay me ten dollars for doing this but he never did. That is, the ten dollars was for taking Wayne home the night before.
I’m not sure about the time but I think it was the next evening when Wayne’s mother called, insisting Wayne come home but he told her no, that he was going to the lake for a couple of days. The boy was still alive. We left about six P.M. to go to the lake and I know he was dead and in a box when we left so I must have been there when he was killed because I didn’t leave to go anywhere before we left for the lake. However, I do not remember how he was killed. I don’t know if I saw it or not. It didn’t bother me to see it. I saw it done many times. I just wouldn’t do it myself. And I never did do it myself.
We left for the lake about six P.M., and got there about nine-thirty or quarter to ten. We then went fishing. Wayne and me. This was after we slept. We fished from about six-thirty A.M. to ten A.M. Dean told us he had already picked a spot and started digging, but he actually hadn’t done very much.
When Wayne and I got back from fishing, we ate and I went to sleep. I slept until about five P.M. and then Dean and I dug the grave. Wayne was keeping lookout in the van. The spot was by a trench near a dirt road. It was probably a few miles from Lake Sam Rayburn itself.