The Man With Candy (28 page)

Colburn’s jealousy quickly led to open warfare, with his wife moving in and out of the house voluntarily and involuntarily, sneaking back to recover her personal possessions, and trying to disentangle herself from the relationship. “Once when I was gone he sent me eight batches of flowers and told me I’d have the most beautiful funeral you ever saw if I died,
or else get home!
He talked about having me committed to an insane asylum. So
I
had
him
picked up for a mental examination, ‘cause he’d told me he was a regular paranoid schizophrenic. They didn’t keep him twenty-four hours! He called me up and he said, ‘Look, I appreciate what you tried to do for me, but now you’ve got to have
your
mental examination. I’m not gonna put you in a county hospital, I’m gonna put you in a private one, and after you’ve had your shock treatments you can come home.’ I hid in the candy shop for six weeks!”

In Mrs. West’s re-creation, Walt Colburn was doggedly chasing other women even while he was trying to frighten her into coming back to his home. “Every time I’d leave he’d run over to the computer and set up another date. One day I called the woman at the computer and told her what I thought was going on, and she said he’d already come in that morning and fixed up a date for that night. Well, Dean had a Dodge van then, with a walkie-talkie and everything, and we drove over to Walt’s house and saw him heading out of the garage in his car, all dressed up. We followed him right to the house of his date. He pulled out his notebook and he looked and he run up and down the steps and he looked some more, but nobody answered the door. The next morning he called me up and he said, ‘Aren’t you gonna come home?’

“I said, ‘You mean after you got stood up last night?’

“He said, ‘How’d you know that?’

“I said, ‘Well, I followed you! That’s how I know it!’”

The candy business turned sour under the heavy personal stresses,
and Dean was forced to take a trainee’s job with Houston Lighting & Power Company to supplement the family’s declining income. At night he would whip up five or six batches of candy to keep the place solvent. Sometimes he would cross the trail of his erstwhile stepfather on the way to work in the morning, “and then Dean’d call me and say, ‘Mother, I run back into Walt today, and he had his girl friend with him,’” said Mrs. West. “But Dean never fussed at Walt; he was real calm about it. Walt’d say, ‘Dean, why don’t you make your mother come home to me?’ Dean’d say, ‘Well, Walt, you know my mother’s not gonna put up with the way you’re doing.’ Just as calm? Dean thought Walt was nuts, and he wanted me to get away from him, but we didn’t know how.”

Gradually the Corll Candy Company became a fortress, to protect the petite woman from her husband. Dean installed a heavy lock and a buzzer system for opening it, and at night thick stone slabs were wedged into position to keep anyone from shooting through the door. “We had to do it ‘cause Walt was always trying to break in,” Mrs. West said. “The police were no help at all. I called ‘em and they gave me some lip. So I said, ‘Well, if I can’t get any protection from the police, I’ll get me a gun,’ and I went to a gunshop and bought a twenty-two pistol.”

When Colburn discovered that he was firmly shut out of his wife’s life, he began leaving messages on the telephone recorder system. Dean became upset at the misuse of his equipment and told a co-worker, “Some day I’m gonna kill that guy!” After Colburn parked his car outside the front door one midnight, Corll said, “I ought to go out there and shoot holes in the back of his car, or take a couple of shots at him.”

Early one morning, around 2 or 3
A.M.,
the angry seafarer knocked on the front door of the factory and demanded his wife. “The night crew had already gone home,” said Ruby Jenkins, “and we were hanging around finishing up orders, me and Mary and Dean and my husband Richard. Mary had gone over to Walt’s
house earlier to get some of her things, and he was screaming that she’d stolen something from him and he was gonna beat hell out of her. Then he began hollering that Dean was a queer, and Mary got furious. She hollered back, and then she said, ‘Get the gun, Dean, and just kill him!’ She wasn’t afraid. She kept telling Dean, ‘Get the gun!
Get the gun! Kill him! Kill him!’
Walt finally went away, but he kept coming back for three or four days, and Mary told Dean, ‘Do something! We’re gonna have to get rid of him!’”

Mary West painfully acknowledged the trying period in her life. “When Walt was giving me all this trouble and I had him under a peace bond, he’d drive around the shop blowing his horn, and he came up to pound on the door one day and tried to get in, and I made him get out, and I told Dean, I’m gonna shoot that man!’ Dean said, ‘Mother, if you don’t have any more control than that, I’m gonna take the gun away from you.’ And he gave me bricks to throw at Walt—a bunch of bricks that I kept by the front door. So how could people say now that Dean’s a murderer? Why, if Dean was ever gonna be a problem to anybody, it woulda been to Walt.”

All this time, the frightened woman was seeking the guidance of psychics, and one of them recommended that she leave Houston for good. Mrs. West was reluctant, but the clairvoyant convinced her that there was no choice. She went to Dallas, two hundred and fifty miles north, and on the advice of another seer won her fifth divorce. It was June, 1968, and three days later Dean helped pack her worldly possessions into a Chevrolet, and Mary West drove out of Texas “to get as far from Walt Colburn as I could.” Her son closed the doors of the company and buried the last remnants of spoiled candy. He was twenty-eight, and completely on his own for the first time in his life.

Like a man starting life anew, Dean Corll moved to a shed on Sixteenth Street, across the street from the Cooley Elementary School, installed black lighting and television and stereo and a
foolproof alarm system, and began playing pranks like locking teen-age boys into handcuffs. One may guess that he had already passed into homicidal mania, but there is no hard evidence. David Brooks had entered the scene, but only as a towheaded sixthgrader studying depravity at five or ten dollars a lesson. Apart from the usual stream of schoolboys, including Johnny Delome and Billy and Tony Baulch, Corll seemed to develop only a few friends, most of them six or eight years his junior. They found him companionable, and even after his death, they retained warm memories.

“I knew Dean was gay,” said one, “but he never bothered me. We lived together for a while in a one-bedroom furnished apartment, and he had his bed and I had mine. I’ve always known Dean was kind of weird, and had crazy ideas and did crazy things, but he was always a good dude. He always helped me every time I needed it, and he never expected nothin’ for it.”

Said another, “Dean was straight. Straight haircut, straight lifestyle. He never got into drugs. He smoked a little weed, and that’s about it. If he wanted to get high, he’d drink, and that’s as far as he went. And he didn’t drink much, ‘cause he’d go stoned asleep.”

Like the Dean of the candymaking days, he remained a joker, but his tolerance of the banter of others seemed to diminish. “He never liked to talk about himself,” a friend said, “but he told me he played trombone in high school, and we always thought it was funny and we ribbed him about it. He’s got mad at us a lotta times. He got so mad, where I just can’t believe that he’d kill somebody because if he’d of killed
them,
then he’d of killed us, ‘cause that’s how mad he got when we kidded him.”

Others noticed that Corll, as he approached thirty, became increasingly thin-skinned about his age, and deftly turned away questions about his early years, as though such revelations might give away a secret. “He wanted to be with younger people,” an acquaintance said, “and he wanted to pretend that he was just another kid, like us.”

He moved frequently, sometimes as often as five or six times a year, but almost always within a few minutes’ drive of The Heights. He jumped from single rooms to town houses to small efficiencies to garden apartments and finally to his father’s cottage in Pasadena, some twenty or twenty-five different addresses over a fiveyear period. After his death, Mary West offered an explanation: “He moved because kids would follow him and he would just pick up and move, instead of fighting with ‘em. He’d get a smaller room where they didn’t have room for the kids. He always tried to avoid people without hurting their feelings.”

Others had a different theory. “Corll moved around so much because of constant parties and neighbor complaints,” a police report said. When bullet holes turned up in one of his apartment doors, it was replaced without question, and when he moved a few weeks later, a steel slab was found bolted to the inside of the panel. No one bothered to seek an explanation. Sometimes he paid up his rent and left a forwarding address, sometimes not. His credit rating, never triple-A, slumped sharply.

After he turned thirty, old friends noticed an abrupt personality change. Before then, he had had his quirks and idiosyncrasies, but always with an underlying humor and good spirit. “But then I’d see Dean and he’d be in a real bad mood toward me,” one friend remembered. “He’d just want certain people around him and that’s all.” The certain people included David Brooks and two or three other juvenile delinquents. “We’d go over to see him and he’d really be in a bad mood,” another old friend said, “and we’d take it that he didn’t want us around. That’s when I started thinking something was up. I’ve only seen him five or six times in the last few years because of that.” On one of those infrequent visits, Dean was “just gazing off like he was thinking about something,” too preoccupied even to offer a greeting. The first known victim of the mass murders was killed in September of 1970, when Corll was thirty; perhaps there was a connection between the murder
and his startling change of mood. Letters to his mother, rare and semiliterate, afforded no clues except a hint of morosity, a suggestion that his life was not always a cabaret. At Christmastime, 1970, just before the Waldrop brothers were killed, he wrote:

I plan on taking an early vacation next year just to get it over with. This year I was sick one week and did nothing the other…. My job is a drag. Just nothing … to do. I don’t know where your will could be but I don’t have it I am sure. Dad has never said anything about the money. He is happy I thank with Mary [Arnold Corll’s third wife] … I sure hope the candy business works out good and feel sure it will. I don’t write very often, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

The repetitiveness of his job, his mother said, was the subject of constant complaining. “He never did like it. It didn’t keep him busy.” His colleagues at the power station hardly knew him; he punched the time clock, tested his relays and left as unobtrusively as he arrived. After his death, fellow workers were hard pressed to remember anything of significance: “He was a fairly stable-minded person….” “I knew him just to work with. Pretty nice fella.” “I never saw him get into fights, never saw him mad.” “I liked him. He was just one of the fellas you worked with.” He was vanilla.

Mary West did not see her son for the last five years of his life. “As far as I could tell, everything was okay,” she said. “Sometimes he called—he never liked to write—and the only time that he seemed disturbed was when he had a water pocket in his testicles, a hydrocele, I think they call it, about a year ago. He was real worried about it ‘cause he didn’t know how to pay the hospital bill.”

Betty Hawkins, who still saw her old boy friend every month or so, remembered that Corll was in constant pain from the hydrocele, “and he wasn’t the type to complain.” He told her that it had begun as a dull ache several months earlier. “He kept thinking it’d get better or go away,” the young divorcée recalled, “or that he
was imagining things. It finally got so bad he had to have the operation.”

In the last year of his life, Corll seemed to confine his social activities to a single venue: The Heights, with its swarms of lower-and middle-class boys. To parents, he gave the universal impression of a clean-cut young man who loved children, a scoutmaster type, a church youth director. “He ate Easter dinner with us,” said Mrs. Wayne Henley, Sr. “He worked on my car. He loved to play with the kids.” She remembered him mainly as a man who “loved to be around kids and prattle with them about cars or fishing.” She noticed a single peculiarity: “He didn’t act like aman his age…. His eyes would flash when I joked about his age. He couldn’t take being kidded about that.” Mary Henley’s mother, Christine Weed, was of the same mind about the family’s frequent guest. “Dean talked like a sixteen-year-old kid,” the pleasant woman said. “He was a smart one. He seemed to love everything and everybody.”

When Arnold Corll bought a new home and Dean moved into the old bungalow in Pasadena in the spring of 1973, he quickly established an acceptable image in the classic suburban neighborhood with its tract houses and lawns of St. Augustine grass spotted with oleanders and chinaberry blossoms. He did not precisely fit in—“an occasional hippie type of individual would come to the house with long hair,” a neighbor observed disdainfully—but Corll himself wore his hair short, dressed conservatively, and was always polite and helpful. On weekends, neighbors noticed, he would usually leave on Saturday morning and come back Sunday night. So did most of the others in the highly mobile area. The newcomer was welcomed.

During the final months, Dean Corll kept in contact with Betty Hawkins, phoning her every few weeks. “This was unusual for him-up to then mostly I called
him,”
said the young woman. For the first time, Dean was drinking heavily, and his system had begun
to show the effects. “Early in July,” Betty Hawkins said, “he told me on the phone that he drank a whole bottle of bourbon. I said, ‘Well, you know you have high blood pressure, Dean, and you’ve been complaining about stomach pain. Drinking’s the worst thing you can do!’

“He said, ‘Yeh, I know it.’ He sounded like he’d drunk quite a bit. And other times he’d say that he was feeling pretty good, that he’d drunk a lot. This was not the Dean I knew. The Dean I knew was always in complete control.”