by Jack Olsen
“Are you gonna tell your dad you’re leaving Houston?”
“I’ll let ‘em know.”
It was not until her son was dead that Mrs. West learned of certain other events of his last three days. He had finished talking to her on Sunday night, then called Betty Hawkins and told her that he would not be taking her to Colorado “right away,” and then telephoned the home of Arnold Corll in another part of Houston. Dean asked his father’s wife if she thought that someone would like to take over the Pasadena house.
“I don’t think so, Dean,” the woman had answered. “But why? Are you gonna leave?” Mrs. Corll, a co-worker at Houston Lightning & Power Company, knew that Dean had been upset lately; she had been doctoring him with stomach pills.
“I have to,” Dean answered, and refused to explain.
Mrs. Corll said, “Now, Dean, we’ve been real close. You know your daddy’s nervous. We can talk it over and work it out.”
“I can’t talk about it!” Corll repeated. “I’ll handle it.”
Later in the evening he drove to his father’s house and repaired a television set. No mention was made of the earlier conversation or his plans to leave the city.
On Monday morning, Mrs. Corll buzzed her stepson’s extension at work. “Well, Dean,” she said, “you had us worried to death. Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“No,” Corll said. “Everything’s under control.”
On the morning of Wednesday, August 8, she dialed him once again and was told that he had not shown up for work. She phoned the house in Pasadena. A man answered the telephone, and when the surprised woman identified herself, he said, “Lady, the only thing I can tell you is that you can’t talk to Dean because he’s dead.”
OF THE TWO YOUNG TRILBYS, languishing silently in protective confinement, there was even less to say than about the dead man. The boys of The Heights, like Wayne Henley, are unlikely to accumulate heroic case histories, nor are leftover boys like David Brooks. They are born, they go to school, they drop out, they get menial jobs, they reproduce others like themselves, and they die. Those who knew both the boys said that Brooks, lean and angular at six feet two, was dominant physically and morally. A confidential memo from a police reporter noted, “Of three, Brooks probably strongest personality…. Meaner than other two, Brooks kept .38 revolver in possession, had said that if any policeman ever walked in on parties he would shoot him.”
In his solitary cell, his belt and glasses taken against the possibility of suicide, Brooks seemed wan and forlorn, slumped on his bed, desultorily flipping the pages of a magazine while guards dropped in from other cellblocks to stare at him through the bars. When he was addressed, he jutted his head forward and lifted his sharp chin, as though hanging on every word, and smiled politely when a guard told him to “buck up.” To a suggestion that he might be inherently “bright,” Brooks mumbled something, then repeated louder, “I can’t be too bright, or I wouldn’t be in here,” and smiled weakly.
He had returned to his native Houston in 1970 at the age of fifteen, after bouncing from Houston to Beaumont to rural Louisiana in the choppy wake of a disintegrating family situation. A country sheriff had recommended that the boy be sent back to his father; David had stolen a potbelly stove, a heinous offense in the docile parish, and the sheriff wanted to exile the evil presence. Alton Brooks waited for the son he hardly knew at the station in Houston, and barely recognized him in long blond locks. He hauled the boy off to a barbershop, and at the end of the first cutting, he instructed the barber to start over. “I want a boy’s ha’rcut!” the rugged contractor demanded. The reunion was short-lived, and David went to live with his grandmother and then with the good dude, Dean Corll. As a younger child, he had been a B and C student, but at Hamilton Junior High in The Heights, where his best friend was Wayne Henley, he fell to D’s and F’s, and quit altogether at the age of fifteen. Dean Corll helped him buy a used Corvette, and the students who had looked down on him in school turned as green as the car. “It was nice!” one of them said. “I rode in it onct. He was a crazy driver! But he was kinda snotty, too, with his Vet and all.”
To most of the boys, David Brooks remained a dimly perceived figure. “He just rode up and down in his car,” one said. “He wasn’t somebody we hung around with or wanted to hang around with. He wasn’t all that nice. He didn’t talk that much. You’d just see him driving around the neighborhood in his Vet.”
Another teen-ager said beneath his breath, as though divulging the first word of an international scandal: “David didn’t believe in God.”
The boy who had stolen a stove in Louisiana continued to steal in Houston. He burglarized a pharmacy and shoplifted in supermarkets, and presumably played a role in the theft of the 1971 Camaro that was found stripped in the back of Dean Corll’s rented shed. His marriage, at seventeen, baffled his outspoken father. “I don’t understand thangs like that,” Alton Brooks said. “How could he be foolin’ around with a man and then get a girl pregnant? It’s the influence that Corll had over him. You can do a lot to a boy if you get control of him when he’s ten years old.”
A childhood girl friend tried to express the essence of the enigma called David Owen Brooks. “He always prided himself on not being able to have girls figure him out,” she told a radio interviewer. “If he’d say something to me, I’d say, ‘I know,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you don’t know. You don’t know me, you can’t figure me out. Nobody can figure me out.’” It was a small point of honor in his narrow life, but the only one he had.
Wayne Henley, a child of a broken home like David Brooks and so many of the murder victims, at least enjoyed the advantage of living in a single neighborhood with a fixed set of family members for most of his life. His mother Mary was as faithful, to her son as the other Mary who was busy sending letters and granting interviews in Manitou Springs, Colorado. “Wayne’s got a cold,” Mary Henley complained as she departed from a visit to the jail, “and he hasn’t even got anything to wipe his nose with. He hasn’t got adequate clothes, he’s not fed enough, and he’s hungry, and I just want him taken care of, that’s all.” Jailers chortled, and the poor woman cried.
Along Twenty-seventh Street in The Heights, Mary Henley was known as a strict, righteous woman who worked hard for her four sons and tried to keep them out of trouble. “She was stricter with Wayne than most other parents,” Henley’s good friend Bruce Pittman said. And young Ricky Wilson added, “She was tough about us bringing anything into the house. Her and Wayne’s grandmother, Miz Weed, they’d stand at the door, pattin’ us down. ‘You got anything on you?’ She never would let anybody smoke grass in there. They musta patted me down a hundert times, and I don’t even use the stuff.”
Mrs. Henley was still too close to the memory of her ex-husband to allow her sons to dissipate in the home. Elmer Wayne Henley, Sr., had been a troublemaker and wife-beater when he was drunk and a rustic gentleman when he was sober. At the height of the family’s domestic warfare, according to neighborhood legend, the father had stationed himself on the front porch with a pistol, waiting for his wife, and pegged a shot that nearly hit his son Wayne. Now he was safely remarried, but the police blotter still recorded his name from time to time.
The oldest son, Wayne, had been a superior student before the family discord, scoring four A’s and two B’s on a typical report card in the seventh grade. His IQ ranged between 110 and 120, and his test grades were consistently in the top quarter of his class. But after the father left, Wayne accepted his role as man of the house, and simultaneously took on two part-time jobs to help support the family. His grades dropped fast, and he left school in the ninth grade. He was still admired at Hamilton by some who knew his unfortunate background. “Wayne came by to see me and asked me how his younger brothers were doing,” a beaming school official said. “He had a good haircut, and he seemed much more mature than when he was a student.”
For a while, the boy and his Bible were never parted, not even in public. At sixteen
, he laid plans to join the Navy and send his mother an allotment. He went back and forth to the enlistment center for tests, and affixed a sticker to his grandmother’s car: “SAILORS HAVE MORE FUN.” When the Navy rejected him, a neighbor said, “It just knocked him over.” Not long after, he was arrested for breaking and entering, and again for assault with a deadly weapon. He drank beer heavily and ran around with Dean Corll. “He’d give the impression of not being entirely with you,” a friend recalled. “He was off away someplace in his head. Spaced out on beer maybe.”
There were a few Heights boys who entertained conjecture about the sexual orientation of David Brooks, but no one doubted Wayne Henley’s heterosexuality. “He had a lot of chicks,” Bruce Pittman said. “He was almost engaged to one girl, and he must have had a crush on Rhonda Williams, ‘cause he talked about her a lot. He messed around with too many chicks to be a homosexual.”
“He’d always invite my daughter Mary,” said a neighborhood mother. “He say, ‘Mary, how ‘bout goin’ to the lake?’ And Mary say, ‘No.’ And he’d start askin’ me, ‘Would you let her go, Mama?’ I’d say, ‘No, you take me and I’ll go with you.’ Now Mary says, ‘Mother, it’s good I didn’t went with Wayne.’”
Close residents like the Hilligiests were flabbergasted when the case broke and Henley was arrested. “I knowed Wayne all his life,” said an elderly woman, “and he always seemed like a good kid, and he never did believe in no murders or nothin’ like that. He’d never even hurt a cat or a dog. I believe that if he had anythin’ to do with the killin’ he was under so much dope he didn’t know what he was doin’.”
Hers was the general view. All up and down Twenty-seventh Street, there was not a soul who would say that Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., had ever believed in murder, until he became involved in several dozen of them.
*For a time there was a sign at the city limits: “NIGGER, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF TOWN BY SUNDOWN.”
*Not his real name.
Beyond the Borderline
FOR A TIME, there was a new outspokenness against homosexuals, as though homosexuality were an early phase of the dread disorder that consumed Dean Corll, and an impending epidemic of sex crimes could only be forestalled by harassing young men who wore eye shadow and tight pants. A spokesman for Houston’s extensive gay community pleaded for understanding before the city council. “That the person believed responsible was an alleged homosexual is only incidental,” he read from a prepared statement. “It could just as easily have been the bodies of young girls that were unearthed.” The young man posed a reductio ad absurdum: If the victims had been females, would there have been city-wide campaigning against heterosexuality? Slowly the wave of prejudice subsided, but not before it spread to Dallas, where police broke up an escort service that catered to homosexuals.*
The governor of Texas took official notice of the case in a public appeal to runaway teens to perform “a simple act of charity” by getting in touch with their parents, and broadcasters repeated the request at regular intervals. The police department was still being pestered by parents; a typical call came from a mother in Virginia who said her son had been traveling with a carnival and had dropped from sight when it reached Houston in May. She was convinced beyond doubt that Dean Corll had murdered her son, and telephoned daily to see if the body had been found.
The Vatican’s daily L’Osservatore Romano discussed the case under an asterisk, symbol of Paul VI’s personal interest. Headlined “ORRORE,” the editorial warned that “we are in the domain of sadism and demonism. This is beyond the borderline of crime because it is beyond the borderline of reason. What wicked force can produce such a degradation—we were about to say dissolution—of man?” The newspaper characterized Dean Corll as infra-human. “One kills to the point of such cruel and inhuman aberrations because one is no longer a man, but an evil force. The two monsters—sex and drugs—have generated a new and different being—monstrous and demonic.” Some interpreted the Vatican’s statement as a logical follow-up to a speech in which the Pope had warned that moral corruption was placing the world under the “dominance of Satan.”
Izvestia, voice of the Soviet government, pointed to the “indifference” and the “murderous bureaucracy” of the Houston police department. The city’s people had become “alienated,” the newspaper commented, and “the inaction of the police is the most astounding aspect of this story.”
Chief Herman Short took no public notice of the Vatican response, but he unleashed a characteristically forceful counterattack at Izvestia. “This is about the silliest thing I can think of,” Short said, noting that he was not obliged by his job to satisfy the Soviets. “I wonder if they’d like to write a little story about the number of people the government has killed over there, taking their property and annihilating them. I don’t believe we’ve had anything like that happen in Houston in the last several days.”
The homicide division worked to tie up loose ends, but not every detective’s heart was in the case. Said one of them, with scattershot accuracy, “These kids, most of them, knew what they were getting into. They were male whores out for some quick money.” Another grumbled, “Those kids were what you call little turds, most of ’em. Several had police records. Several had nutty parents.” The overstressed officers were using their favorite survival technique, making judgments about the social value of the dead, and gauging their work schedules accordingly. A Heights boy who had been interviewed just after the killings was quoted frequently. “Wayne Henley kept asking me if I could contact any boys that really wouldn’t be missed too much,” the teen-ager had said. “He wanted boys that their folks won’t raise no fuss.” Their prejudices confirmed by such statements, the investigators turned quickly to other matters. “Look,” one plain-spoken detective said, “I got live cases to work on, where the murderer’s at large right now, and might could kill again. Why should I fuck with this Corll thing?”
Ruby Jenkins, the candy-apple lady, brooded for days about Corll and his busy shovel, and finally told police what she knew. “They couldn’t have been more bored,” the woman said. “They sent a couple of detectives and a digging machine out to the shed on Twenty-second to meet me, and they found about forty reasons to tear up a few feet of dirt and then quit. There was concrete in most of the places were Dean used to dig, and a detective kept saying, ‘Lady, this is old cement. There couldn’t be any bodies under here. Lady, you’re just plain wrong!’ So I walked away. An NBC man came running up and said, ‘Hey, they’re not listening to you. May I interview you?’ and I said, ‘I have nothing else of importance.’ I was so embarrassed! Just before I left, one of the detectives asked if there’d been anything between my ex-husband and Dean Corll. I was shocked! I couldn’t believe my ears! In the first place, my ex-husband was about as straight and masculine as a man could be, about as queer as a one-dollar bill, and anyway what did that have to do with anything? But this detective, he kept insisting, ‘Was your ex funny? I mean, was he funny?’ I said, ‘How do you mean, funny? Had a sense of humor?’ He said, ‘No, was he queer?’ I said, ‘Well, I never saw any queer tendencies about him. Of course, I’m not an authority on queers,’ and I drove off.”
Officers working the street were plainly taking their cue from superiors back at headquarters. “1 don’t know if we found all the bodies or not,” the droll Breckenridge Porter said. “Probably not. Probably won’t ever. What difference does it make? Other’n it may be some satisfaction to the parents of missin’ kids, where they been missin’ for three, four years.” Thousands of Houston youngsters were missing and completely out of touch with parents and/or friends, and many of them came from The Heights and its environs.
“There’s other bodies somewhere,” said Lieutenant Porter thoughtfully. “I have no idee where, and we’ll never know. I cain’t even prove it, but it’s my opinion. We could be diggin’ for the next two years if we had enough men. But then we wouldn’t be keepin’ up with the homicides that are goin’ on now. The only reason we
can say the case goes back three years is Henley and Brooks have been in it for three years, but perhaps back prior to three years maybe there was another Henley or Brooks? And now they’re dead? They’re now where Henley and Brooks woulda wound up, and almost did. We’ll never know.”
Charles Melder, Henley’s lawyer, echoed Porter in a chilling aside to newsmen. “Corll himself might have killed, far as I know, two hundred or three hundred or four hundred boys, you see?”
Students of the case recalled Brooks’s statement that Dean Corll had once “hung around” with Mark Scott and Ruben Watson, both of whom had juvenile records and both of whom had been murdered. Was it possible that Corll had used such boys as accomplices, then destroyed them to break the chain of evidence, and later laid the same plans for Henley and Brooks? If so, the slaughter could have continued far into the future, just as it might have reached far backward in time. As Breckenridge Porter emphasized, “No one will ever know,” especially with the homicide division showing only a feeble interest. A county grand jury took official notice that the police investigation lacked “professional imagination, thoroughness and professional coordination.”
Chief Short shot back: “Silly!”
In The Heights, the panic lasted a few weeks. “The children are scairt to git out at night,” an overwrought father complained. “They’re spooked! They don’t know who to trust, they don’t know who to speak to. The park out there has been empty the last three or four nights. The city turns the lights on, but they won’t use it now.”
Sheila Hines spoke for the children who lived around Twenty-seventh Street. “Everyone’s pretty scairt, ya know? A lot of the dudes are worried, ’cause like if ya couldn’t trust Wayne, who could ya trust? We knew Wayne all our lives.”
“My child woulda got into that van, any child woulda got in,” said a frightened mother. “If they were walking down the street and a kid came by that they went to school with and had known all their lives, why of course they’d have gone with ’em! That is the greatest tragedy about this: the fact that you can’t trust the people you know, and you can’t even trust the children that your children are running around with.”