The Man With Candy (16 page)

Wayne Henley walked shakily toward a shed marked “11.” Detectives found it was tightly secured by a padlock. One of the Pasadena officers jogged down the road to the owner’s house and asked for a key. “Why do you want a key?” asked Mayme Meynier.

“The man that rents the stall was killed this morning,” the detective said. “We need to get inside.”

Mrs. Meynier said that each renter provided his own locks, and she had no idea how to open the doors.

“Well, is it okay if we break the lock?” the detective asked.

“Yes, I guess so,” the puzzled woman said.

One of the officers took a tire tool and snapped the hasp. As the tall doors creaked open, a blast of scorching air hit the assembled men like a fist. Karl Siebeneicher glanced over at Wayne Henley. “He started to take a step inside,” the mild-mannered detective said later, “but then his face just turned ashen, pale, grim. It was like he knew it was too late now; he’d given up his last options. He kind of staggered around outside the door, like he was trying to get himself together, and right then’s when I
knew
there was gonna be something in that shed. I just was
positive:
we’d found my little cousin.”

In the early-evening shadows, the detectives loosened their collars and adjusted their eyes to the cavernous interior. The sheds were fifteen feet high by twelve wide by thirty-four deep, big enough for small yachts, but there was no sign of a boat inside No. 11. The detectives poked about the insufferably hot interior and clucked together about the contents: a jumbled nest of empty
cardboard boxes, a stripped 1971 Chevrolet Camaro under a tarpaulin, a pair of acetylene torches with tanks, two ten-pound sacks of Red Top dehydrated lime, eight empty olive-drab twenty-gallon cans marked “Survival supplies, Office of Civil Defense, Department of Defense, DRINKING WATER,” two empty twenty-gallon garbage containers made of plastic, several cans of acrylic spray paint, a loose twelve-by-fifteen-foot carpet with a pile of dirt at its center, an unconnected telephone transceiver, and various tools, wires and batteries. Propped against the right wall was a child’s homemade bicycle, yellow, with one wheel larger than the other. A few feet away were two plastic bags, one containing an empty sack of lime, the other mixed male clothing, medium to small size, including a pair of mod shoes with one-inch soles.

A detective made a note of the registration numbers on the bicycle and the stripped Chevrolet and radioed them to headquarters; soon it was established that the bike belonged to a thirteen-year-old Pasadena boy who had vanished five days earlier, and the car had been stolen from a used-car lot in March.

A Houston police car arrived with two more detectives and two trusties. Siebeneicher asked the prisoners if they knew their assignment. “No,” one said.

“Well, we’re gonna have you digging for bodies,” the detective said.

The older trusty smiled patronizingly. “Like they say, old boy,” he told his colleague, “every job’s got to have a foreman.” He passed the other man a shovel.

Siebeneicher clapped both trusties firmly by the shoulders and said, “No, men, we got us an integrated team here. You’re gonna have to work together.” The two prisoners in their jail coveralls shuffled inside the doors and waited nervously for instructions. The equanimous Siebeneicher, seeing their doleful looks, took pains to tell them, “Look, we’re not picking on you, but somebody has to do it.”

Inside the left wall of the shed, behind a stack of cardboard
boxes, Houston Homicide Detective Larry Earls studied a spot where the compacted earth of the shed buckled upward, creating a star-shaped series of cracks. The heavily built Earls got on his hands and knees and peered into the earth; five or six inches down he thought he could make out a change of color. “Let’s try right here,” he said to the younger trusty, standing alongside with his shovel. “Just take it nice and easy, and if you hit something, stop.”

The other prisoner joined in, and within ten or fifteen minutes the two reluctant diggers had uncovered a layer of white. Earls took a closer look. “Lime!” he said. “Keep on digging, but slow.”

The others crowded around silently, and the only noise was the gritty rhythm of the shovels, biting away the sandy earth an inch or two at a time. A small trapezoid of brownish yellow began to appear below the lime, and a sickening stench curled into the shed, as though the diggers had suddenly breached a fumarole in a sulphur pit. Combined with the superheated enclosed air of the shed, the effect was strongly emetic. Larry Earls held his nose and scraped some dirt away with his hand. “It’s a skull,” he said quietly. “Keep digging.”

The younger trusty lifted another load of dirt and then clutched his stomach. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do this,” he said, and bolted for the fresh air. No one gave chase. There were other officers outside, guarding Henley, and anyway, city jail trusties presented the lowest possible escape risk. Probably the young digger was in trouble for unpaid parking tickets or a family squabble. It was easy to see what the older trusty had been jailed for, as he leaned popeyed and quivering against his spade. Intoxication was a common cause of city jail imprisonment.

The robust Larry Earls picked up the other shovel and began removing dirt below the skull, exposing the pale verdigris chest of a very small man or a boy in clear plastic. The young trusty apologized and rejoined the operation. With three men now digging, they soon uncovered the naked body of a blond boy, twelve or thirteen years old, encased in plastic and lying on his back. Loops
of masking tape pinched tightly into the covering at the neck, waist and ankles. The body looked as though it had been in the ground about a week.

Just outside the two large doors of the shed, Wayne Henley sat on the ground in his Pasadena jail attire and his handcuffs. Karl Siebeneicher tapped the boy on the arm with a pack of cigarets. “Thanks,” Henley said. “What’s yer name?”

“Karl,” the detective said. “Just Karl.” Siebeneicher believed in keeping life simple. Whenever the phone rang back at headquarters, he would answer, “Homicide. Karl.” His business cards bore his picture as well as his name, “so that all those folks that can’t say my name’ll at least know what I look like. Just trying to be helpful.”

Now he was trying to be helpful to the young killer, and he crouched down to hear what the boy was saying through his tears. “I wanna use the phone,” Henley said. “I wanna call mah mama ’fore she hears all this on the radio.”

Siebeneicher looked around. The nearest telephone would be in Mrs. Meynier’s house, about a hundred yards away, and the nearest pay phone farther than that. “I’d like to help you,” he told the weeping boy, “but we’ve got to stay right here.”

A newspaper reporter stepped up and said, “There’s a phone over there,” beckoning toward a television news car belonging to Jack Cato of KPRC-TV, Houston.

A small voice, one of Wayne’s younger brothers, answered the call, and Henley said, “Is Mama there?”

“Who?” his brother asked. The radiotelephone distorted voices.

“Mama.” Wayne mouthed the word whiningly: MAWoo-ma.

A female, slightly on the defensive, said, “Who’s this?”

“This is Wayne,” the boy said.

“Yes, this is Mama, baby.” Now her voice was calm and motherly.

Henley sounded confused, as though there were no words for what he had to tell his mother. “Mama?” he said again.

“Yes.”

“I kilt Dean.” His voice was strangled and labored.

“Wayne?” his mother said uncomprehendingly.

“Ma’am?”

“Oh, Wayne, you
didn’t!”

“Yep,” the boy said, and quickly corrected himself. “Yes’m.”

“Oh, God!” Mary Henley said. “Where are you?”

“I’m—” He stopped and listened to his mother’s sobs. “It’s all rat,” he said.

Mrs. Henley cried, “Wayne—”

“It’s all rat!”
the boy shouted into the phone. And then softly, “It’s all rat.”

“Where
are
you?”

“I’m out at his war’house.”

“Where?”

“Out at that war’house he keeps.”

“Kin I come out there?”

Henley looked questioningly at Siebeneicher. “Yeh,” the boy said into the phone. “Yes—”

“No!” the detective said.

“She cain’t?” Henley asked, and Siebeneicher shook his head emphatically. Nothing could be less useful at the impromptu burial site than an upset mother.

Henley turned back to the phone and said in a consoling tone, “No, yew cain’t come.” His mother cried louder. “I’m with the police, Mama,” he said by way of explanation.

“When kin I see you?”

“This evening’,” the boy said. “I’m gonna let ya go, Mama.”

Mary Henley sobbed. “Okay, baby.”

The body in its plastic shroud was being carried out, and Henley resumed his position on the ground, facing away from the shed, his head in his hands and his shoulders jerking spasmodically.
He began mumbling, and Siebeneicher bent down to listen. “I knew Marty, and Marty’s there,” the boy intoned. “And David, I grew up with him and he lived next door. And I went to school with Charles.”

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Siebeneicher said.

“It’s mah fault,” Henley said. “I cain’t help but feel guilty, like I done kilt those boys myself. I caused ’em to be daid. I led ’em strite to Dean.” Siebeneicher decided to let the boy “run his head”; many a murder case had been solved by the musings of a guilt-stricken suspect. While attendants busied themselves zipping the victim’s small body into a bag, Wayne Henley rambled on. He told how he had known Corll for two years, how he had introduced many Heights boys to the sex murderer, and how he might even have been marked for death himself.

“Well, then, you should be glad things happened the way they did,” Siebeneicher said.

“How’s that?” the boy asked.

“Because if they hadn’t, we might be digging you out of the ground tonight.”

Henley hid his face in his hands and wailed.

Inside the shed, something caught the practiced eye of Larry Earls as the two trusties began shoveling dirt back into the emptied grave. “Hold on!” he said. “Try digging a little farther down, under where the body was.”

The prisoners dug mud that had been drenched in body fluids. They removed a few more inches and began scraping against old bones. A skeleton lay in a fetid aspic of muck.

Lieutenant Breck Porter was waiting in the office to coordinate developments in the case, and a detective telephoned him to report the second body. “Goddamn!” Porter said. “Keep diggin’! I’m comin’ right out. How’s that Mexican dragline workin’?”

The detective said that the “Mexican dragline,” Texas vernacular for laborers with shovels, was falling apart, that one of the laborers
had already expressed strong misgivings and the other was suffering delirium tremens. “Try to keep ’em goin’ a little longer,” Porter said. “I’ll run by the jail and pick you up
beaucoup
more.”

It had grown dark, and a fire engine arrived at the shed with floodlights and a fan. Assisted by sweating detectives, the unhappy trusties began digging to the right of the first grave, closer to the center of the shed, at a spot where the sandy earth looked broken. Eight inches down they came to a layer of lime, and below the lime they found the bodies of two more teen-age boys, buried recently. One had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon. The other had been strangled with a Venetian-blind cord, still knotted in a tight noose around his neck. The mouth was open so wide that all the upper and lower teeth showed. “Poor kid,” a detective said, shaking his head slowly. “He died straining for air.”

“Straining for air,” said Larry Earls, “or screaming.”

On the parking area outside No. 11, the owner of Southwest Boat Storage had walked up. “If it’s not too much trouble,” Mayme Meynier said to Karl Siebeneicher, “could I find out what’s going on?”

The detective showed his identification and nodded toward Henley, still sitting on a patch of grass with his head tucked into his knees and his cuffed hands obscuring his face. “If that boy’s telling the truth, ma’am, there may be a lot of bodies buried in the floor of that stall,” Siebeneicher said.

Mrs. Meynier shuddered. “Why, he was the nicest person you’ll ever meet!” she said. “He had the most infectious smile you’ll ever see!”

“Yes, ma’am. You mean Corll?”

“Yes. Dean. Why, we were always talking to him. Just a week or two ago he offered to give me some plants. He’d go out of his way to visit with me.”

Siebeneicher asked how long Dean Corll had been renting the shed, and Mrs. Meynier made a hurried round-trip to her house to examine the records. “Since November 17, 1970, at twenty dollars
a month,” she said, “and never a bit of trouble.” She said that one day nine cars had pulled up in front of the stall and Corll explained that he was selling a few pieces of furniture, but otherwise there had been nothing untoward. She said Corll visited the shed two or three times a week, sometimes to drop things off, sometimes to work inside. About two months earlier, he had arrived with a young helper and hauled in something “big, black and heavy,” but no one had thought anything of it. Another time Corll sat alone in his van outside the stall for an hour and a half till everyone else left. “He just waited patiently,” Mrs. Meynier said, “and then he got out and began unloading something. We figured it was something he was proud of, or something he didn’t want to show.”

There had been a faintly unpleasant odor about the shed, especially after heavy rains, and a neighborhood dog had been making a pest of itself for two years by scratching and whining at the door. The exact contents of No. 11 were unknown, but Mrs. Meynier assumed that Corll had just about filled it. For the last several months, he had been pestering her for more space.

By 9
P.M.,
reporters from every news outlet in Texas were converging on the scene, and Siebeneicher moved Henley to the backseat of one of the Pasadena police cars. The boy was alternating between fits of garrulity and fits of depression, and sometimes his head slumped over and his mouth hung open, as though he were comatose. Siebeneicher assumed that the young prisoner was experiencing a post-acrylic reaction, and left him in the company of a few friendly reporters. The interview began slowly, with Henley sounding like a Watergate witness, offering airy tergiversations. But after a while he seemed willing to tell the whole story.