Serial Killer Investigations (17 page)

What made Corll’s murderous mission so easy was the teenage drug culture of the Heights. In the claustrophobic, run-down environment, all the kids were bored and discontented; they felt they were stuck there for life. The mere suggestion of a party was enough to make their eyes light up. They all smoked pot—when they could afford it. They also popped pills—Seconal, Nembutal, Phenobarbital, Quaaludes, even aspirin, washed down with beer or Coca Cola. But because it was cheap, spray paint was the easiest way of obtaining a quick ‘high’. Although one boy collapsed and died when he tried to play football after a long paint-sniffing session, it made no difference to the others; he was merely ‘unlucky’. Moreover, the possession of spray paint was perfectly legal; and in an environment where a teenager was likely to be searched for drugs at any hour of the day, this went a long way towards making paint-sniffing the most popular form of escape.

That most of the kids were permanently broke conferred another tremendous advantage on a predatory homosexual like Corll. Allowing a ‘queer’ to perform oral sex was an easy and quick way of obtaining a few dollars. There can be no doubt that many of Corll’s victims had been back to his room several times before his demand for a more painful form of sex caused them to balk, and led to their deaths. The fact that there were a fairly high number of runaways from the Heights meant that occasional disappearances caused little stir.

The key to the Houston murders is Corll’s craving for sexual violation. At some point, oral sex ceased to satisfy him. Brooks admitted: ‘He killed them because he wanted anal sex, and they didn’t want to.’ Even Brooks himself seems to have withheld anal sex. He describes how, after he had introduced Corll to Wayne Henley, the latter knocked him unconscious as he entered Corll’s apartment; Corll then tied him to the bed and sodomised him. This would obviously have been pointless if anal sex had been a normal part of their relationship. Yet in spite of the rape, Brooks continued to worship Corll, and to participate in the murders and disposal of the bodies.

It also seems clear that Corll was in love with Henley. But Henley remained independent. Far more avaricious than Brooks, he became Corll’s accomplice for cash. In spite of Henley’s denial, there can be no doubt that Corll paid him large sums of money as a procurer. One friend of Henley’s later described how Henley had suggested that they should go to Australia together as homesteaders—Henley declared that he would provide the $1,700 each that they would need. ‘Where would you get it?’ asked his friend. ‘I already have it.’ Henley’s later assertion that Corll never paid him is almost certainly an attempt to conceal the appalling truth: that he sold his friends to Corll for $200 each.

By the end of 1970, Corll was firmly in the grip of ‘Mr Hyde’. Brooks later tried to justify the murders: ‘Most of the boys weren’t good boys. This... 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.’ This is almost certainly a repetition of something Corll said to Brooks—perhaps on many occasions.

Not long after the murder of Jeffrey Konen, Brooks walked into Corll’s Yorktown apartment unannounced, and found Corll naked. In another room there were two naked boys strapped to a plywood board. Corll demanded indignantly what Brooks was doing there, and ordered him to leave. Later, he told Brooks that he had killed both boys, and offered him a car as the price of his silence. In fact, he gave Brooks a new Corvette. The identity of these two victims has never been established, but they were probably among the bodies found on the High Island beach.

Having accepted the Corvette, Brooks was now an accomplice. He would go ‘cruising’ with Corll, offering lifts to teenaged boys. One unknown youth was picked up some time in November 1970, and taken back to Corll’s apartment. Corll raped and murdered the boy while Brooks looked on. No further details of this murder—or victim—are known.

Corll’s appetite for murder was growing. Many of the boys he once befriended in the days of the candy factory, and who had always been welcome visitors in his room, now noticed that he was becoming bad-tempered and secretive, and they stopped calling round. Many of these boys later insisted that Corll had simply been ‘nice’ to them, without any attempt to make sexual advances. Many others, like David Brooks, had undoubtedly accepted money for oral sex.

On 15 December 1970, Brooks persuaded two boys to come back to an apartment that Corll had rented on Columbia Street. They were 14-year-old James Eugene Glass, and his friend Danny Michael Yates, 15. Both had been to church with James Glass’s father, and had agreed to meet him later. Glass had already been to Corll’s apartment on a previous occasion, and had taken a great liking to Corll. This time, both boys ended on the plywood board, after which they were strangled. By this time, Corll had decided that he needed somewhere closer than High Island or Lake Sam Rayburn (where his family owned a holiday cabin), so he rented the boat shed on Silver Bell Street. The two boys were the first to be buried there.

Corll had apparently enjoyed the double murder so much that he was eager to try it again. Six weeks later, two brothers, 14-year-old Donald Edward Waldrop, and 13-year-old Jerry Lynn Waldrop, were lured to a newly rented apartment at 3200 Mangum Road. (Corll changed apartments frequently, almost certainly to prevent curious neighbours from gossiping about his activities.) The father of the Waldrop boys was a construction worker who worked next door to Corll’s new apartment. The boys were also strangled and buried in the boat shed. Brooks admitted: ‘I believe I was present when they were buried.’ This was typical of his general evasiveness.

On 29 May 1971, David Hilligiest, 13, disappeared on his way to the local swimming pool; his friend, 16-year-old George Malley Winkle, also vanished on the same day. Malley was on probation for stealing a bicycle. That same evening, just before midnight, Mrs Malley’s telephone rang; it was her son, contacting his mother to tell her that he was in Freeport—a surfing resort 60 miles to the south—with some kids. They would be on their way home shortly.

That night, Mrs Malley slept badly, with a foreboding that her son was in trouble. When he failed to return, she asked young people in the neighbourhood if they had seen him, and learned that he had climbed into a white van, together with David Hilligiest.

The frantic parents spent weeks following up every possible lead. They had posters printed, offering a $1,000 reward, and friendly truckers distributed them all over southern Texas. So did a lifelong friend of David Hilligiest’s—Elmer Wayne Henley, another child of a broken home. He tried to comfort the Hilligiests by telling them that he was sure nothing had happened to David. A psychic who was consulted by the Hilligiests disagreed: he plunged them into despair by telling them that their son was dead.

Ruben Watson, 17, another child of a broken home, went off to the movies on the afternoon of 17 August 1971, with a few dollars borrowed from his grandmother; he later rang his mother at work to say he would meet her outside the theatre at 7.30. He never arrived. Brooks later admitted being present when Ruben was murdered.

By this time, Wayne Henley had entered the picture. He had become friendly with David Brooks, and Brooks had introduced him to Dean Corll. Henley was intended as a victim, but Corll seems to have decided that he would be more useful as a pimp. The fact that Henley was skinny and pimply may also have played a part in Corll’s decision to let him live. The Hilligiests’ son Greg—aged 11—came home one day to say that he had been playing an exciting game called poker with Wayne Henley, David Brooks, and an older friend of Henley’s who made candy. Dorothy Hilligiest knew the man who made candy—in the previous year, she had gone looking for David, and found him at the candy factory with Malley, Winkle, and the round-faced man who owned the place. Mrs Hilligiest had bought a box of candy from him before she took David away.

Another friend of Henley’s was 14-year-old Rhonda Williams, who was as anxious to escape the Heights as most of its other teenagers. Since she had been sexually assaulted as a child, her attitude to sex was inhibited and circumspect. Like so many Heights teenagers, she was part of a one-parent family—her mother had collapsed and died of a heart attack as she was hanging out the washing. Rhonda craved affection and security, and she seemed to have found it when she met 19-year-old Frank Aguirre. He was slightly cross-eyed, but serious-minded, and was already saving money—from his job in a restaurant—to marry Rhonda. But on 24 February 1972, Frank Aguirre failed to return home from work, and was never seen again. He left his pay cheque uncollected. Rhonda was shattered and went into nervous depression for a year; she was only just beginning to recover on that evening in August 1973 when she informed Wayne Henley that she had decided to run away from home, and Henley took her to Dean Corll’s house in Pasadena to stay the night.

On 21 May 1972, 16-year-old Johnny Delome vanished. His body was found on High Island 14 months later; he had been shot as well as strangled. Johnny Delome must have been the youth that Henley shot up the nose, and then in the head. He was killed at the same time as Billy Baulch, 17, who was also buried at High Island. Six months later, Billy’s 15-year-old brother, Michael, would become another victim of Dean Corll. In the meantime, he had killed another two boys, Wally Jay Simoneaux, 14, and Richard Hembree, 13, on 3 October 1972. Their bodies were found together in the boat shed. Another victim of 1972 was 18-year-old Mark Scott, whose body was one of those that was never identified; Brooks stated that he was also one of Corll’s victims.

And so the murders went on into 1973: Billy Lawrence, 15, on 11 June; Homer Garcia, 15, on 7 July; Charles Cobble, 17, on 25 July, who vanished with his friend Marty Jones, 18, on the same day. The final victim was 13-year-old James Dreymala, lured to Corll’s Pasadena house to collect Coke bottles, and buried in the boat shed. There were undoubtedly other victims in 1973, possibly as many as nine. Brooks said that Corll’s youngest victim was a nine-year-old boy.

On Monday 13 August, five days after the death of Dean Corll, a grand jury began to hear evidence against Henley and Brooks. The first witnesses were Rhonda Williams and Tim Kerley, the two who had almost become Corll’s latest victims. It was clear that Kerley had been invited to Corll’s house by Henley in order to be raped and murdered—this is what Henley meant when he told Kerley that he could have got $1,500. He was exaggerating, but was otherwise telling the truth. And when Corll had snarled, ‘You’ve spoilt everything,’ he meant that the arrival of Rhonda Williams now made it impossible to murder Kerley. At that moment, it seems, he thought of a solution that would enable him to ‘have his fun’: kill all three teenagers.

Rhonda Williams, it emerged, had decided to run away with Henley, whom she now regarded as her boyfriend. In fact, Corll knew all about the arrangement and had no objection—he himself was planning to move to Colorado, where his mother was living, and to take Henley and Rhonda with him. The fact that he also planned to take an old flame of his pre-homosexual days, Betty Hawkins, as well as her two children, suggests that Corll had decided to give up killing teenagers. But Rhonda had arranged to run away on 17 August, nine days later; and when she arrived at Corll’s house in the early hours of 9 August, he felt deprived of his night of pleasure.

After listening to the evidence of various teenage witnesses, the jury indicted Henley and Brooks on murder charges. Henley was charged with taking part in the killing of Billy Lawrence, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Johnny Delome, Frank Aguirre and Homer Garcia; Brooks for his part in the murders of James Glass, Ruben Watson, Billy Lawrence, and Johnny Delome. Efforts by the lawyers to have bail set were turned down.

Houston was stunned by the events of the past week, and criticism of the police department was bitter and uninhibited. The main complaint of the parents of missing teenagers was that they had been unable to get the police to take the slightest interest; they were told that their children were runaways. Police Chief Herman Short counterattacked clumsily by publicly stating that there had been no connection between the missing teenagers—implying that there would have been little for the police to investigate. The statements of Henley and Brooks—indicating that most of the victims knew one another—flatly contradicted this assertion. Short went on to say that the murders indicated that parents should pay closer attention to the comings and goings of their teenagers, a remark that drew outraged comments from parents such as Dorothy Hilligiest, whose children had simply vanished on their way to or from some normal and innocent activity. Short also expressed fury at the Soviet newspaper
Izvestia,
which had referred to the ‘murderous bureaucracy’ of the Houston police department; he pointing out that the Soviet government had a reputation for making dissenters disappear. All this failed to impress the public or the politicians, and Short resigned three months later, after the municipal elections.

There was also criticism of the attitude of the police towards the search for additional bodies. One of Corll’s ex-employees, Ruby Jenkins, had mentioned the interesting fact that, during the last years of the candy factory’s existence, Corll was often seen handling a shovel and digging holes. He dug under the floor of his private room in the factory—known jokingly as the ‘pouting room’, because he often retired there to sulk—and then cemented over the excavation. He also dug holes near the rear wall of the factory, and on a space that later became a parking lot. He always did this by night. His explanation was that he was burying spoiled candy because it drew bees and bred weevils. No one at the time questioned this curious explanation, or asked him what was wrong with placing the spoiled candy in a plastic bag and dropping it in the trashcan. ‘He had this big roll of plastic sheet, four or five foot wide, and he had sacks of cement and some other stuff back in his pouting room.’ Clearly, this was something that required investigating. But when the police came along to look at the spots indicated by Ruby Jenkins, they dug only half-heartedly in a few places, and soon gave up. ‘Lady, this is old cement. There couldn’t be any bodies there.’