Dean Corll
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Dean Corll (December 24, 1939 - August 8, 1973) was a serial killer who, together with two younger accomplices named David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, committed the Houston Mass Murders in Houston, Texas. The trio are believed to be responsible for the murders of at least twenty-seven boys, the crimes only coming to light when Corll was shot dead by one of his accomplices.
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Early Life
Born on Christmas Eve, 1939 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Dean Corll was moved to Houston when he was eleven following the breakdown of his parents' marriage. He was regarded as a good student at school and well-behaved, although a heart condition kept him out of physical education.
Corll was drafted into the military in 1964, where it is thought he first realized he was homosexual, but he was given a hardship discharge the following year so that he could help his mother run her candy business. This led to him being given the nickname The Candy Man by the media when his crimes were eventually uncovered.
He eventually took over the business and invited local children round to the store for free candy and a number of local people commented that it was not normal that Corll always seemed to hang around with youngsters, in particular teenaged boys. However, this was not connected with the rash of missing youths that indicated Corll's more deadly activities in the coming years.
The Murders
In early 1970, when he was aged thirty and training to be an electrician, Corll began to abduct and murder young men and boys, the victims being raped, killed and then buried, either in Corll's boatshed or in rural areas around the city.
At some point in 1970, Corll had met a fifteen-year-old boy named David Brooks, who was once a promising "A" student but whose grades had recently begun to slip. Corll paid Brooks for sexual favors, and Brooks later claimed that he once found Corll raping two boys he had tied to a bed. Corll offered him a car in return for his silence. Brooks accepted and never saw the two boys again.
Shortly afterwards, Corll made the accquaintance of Elmer Wayne Henly, a local youth aged fourteen who came from a broken home. He had a drinking problem and soon dropped out of school to work to support his divorced mother and three younger brothers. It was thought that Corll originally planned on adding Henley to his growing list of victims, but decided against it when he realized Henley knew most of the other youths in the area. Henley soon began to help Corll lure victims and even began to take an active part in the murders.
Victims
All of the victims were young males, the youngest aged nine, the eldest twenty-one, with the majority in their teens. Most were abducted from a low-income neighborhood in Houston and many were listed by police as runaways, despite the anxious protests of parents who insisted their boys would not run away from home.
Quite often the victims were lured into getting into Corll's van with promises of making money, such as by doing errands, a ploy that often worked on youths from deprived neighborhoods. Others were promised drugs or alcohol. Henley and/or Brooks usually accompanied Corll when they went searching for victims; many teenaged boys would not get into a vehicle with a lone man, but with one or two other boys present they were apparently more willing to do so.
Discovery
At approximately three o'clock in the morning on August 8, 1973, Elmer Wayne Henley - then aged seventeen - went to Corll's house accompanied by a boy named Tim Kerley who was supposed to be the next victim. Also with them was Rhonda Williams, aged fifteen, who was Henley's girlfriend. Brooks was not present at the time.
Dean Corll was furious that Henley had brought a girl along, but eventually he calmed down and the four of them started sniffing glue and drinking. Soon Henley, Kerley and Williams all passed out and awoke to find themselves tied up and Corll waving a .22 caliber pistol around, angrily threatening to kill them all. Henley calmed Corll and the older man eventually put down the gun and released Henley. Corll then insisted that, whilst he would rape and kill Kerley, Henley would do likewise to Rhonda Williams. Henley refused and soon a row broke out between him and Corll. It ended when Henley grabbed the pistol and shot Corll six times, killing him instantly.
After releasing the other two youngsters, Henley called the police. Whilst they all waited outside the house, Henley told Kerley that "I could have gotten $200 for you," this apparently being the fee he was paid by Corll to recruit victims. In custody, Henley explained that he and David Brooks had helped procure boys for Corll, who had raped and murdered them. Police were a little skeptical at first, as they assumed they were just dealing with the one homicide - of Corll - as a result of a drug fuelled row that had turned deadly.
Henley was quite insistent, however, and police soon accepted that there was something to his claims, especially when they found a torture board at Corll's house, consisting of a large wooden board with handcuffs in each corner. There were also a number of dildos and lengths of rope, as well as an ominous looking wooden crate with what appeared to be air-holes. Human hair was found inside the crate.
Later that day, accompanied by his father, David Brooks presented himself at the police station and he was promptly questioned concerning the allegations Henley was busy making.
The police went to the boatshed located several miles South of Houston that Corll had rented for several years where Henley said that bodies of most of the victims could be found. They began digging through the soft earth and soon uncovered the body of a teenaged boy. They continued excavating and the remains of more dead boys were uncovered, several wrapped in plastic. Some had been shot, others strangled, the ligature still wrapped tightly around their necks. Some had been castrated. Eventually, seventeen corpses were uncovered at the shed.
Following Henley's directions, police excavated a number of other locations, including an area around Lake Sam Rayburn. Ten more remains were uncovered, making a total of twenty-seven victims. Henley insisted that there were three more bodies yet to be found, but these were never located.
At the time it was the worst case of serial murder (in terms of number of victims) in the America, exceeding the twenty-five slayings attributed to Juan Corona from California. The Houston Mass Murders, as they became known, hit the headlines all over the world and even the Pope commented on the atrocious nature of the crimes and offered sympathy to relatives of those who had died.
Families of the victims - including two who had lost two sons each to Corll - were understandably highly critical of the Houston Police Department who had been so quick to list the missing boys as runaways and thus not worthy of investigation.
Trials
David Brooks was quite insistent that he had no knowledge of the crimes, whilst Elmer Wayne Henley was the opposite, co-operative to the point of not only detailing the murders but soon letting it slip that he had played a more serious role than that of just the procurer of victims, admitting that on one occasion he had personally killed a boy by shooting him in the head.
Henley was charged with the murders of six of the boys and, in 1974, he was convicted and sentenced to six 99-year terms of imprisonment. He was not charged with killing Corll as this was judged to have been self-defense.
Brooks was convicted of one murder and sentenced to life.
As of 2004, both of them are in their late-forties and still behind bars. Their parole applications, which take place every three years, have all been rejected so far.
Like a number of other convicted killers, Henley has taken up painting since his incarceration. There was an outcry when he recently auctioned some of his pictures on E-Bay.
References
The Man With The Candy, Jack Olsen, 1975, Simon & Schuster ISBN: 0743212835
The New Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers, Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg, (Revised Edition 1996) Headline Book Publishing ISBN 0747253617