The Man With Candy (31 page)

A short, chubby man marched down the aisle and laid an ax, a rifle, a pistol and two tear-gas canisters next to the lectern, then walked back a few rows and took a seat on the aisle. An off-duty policeman, Lieutenant Joe Skipper, moved into an adjoining seat and identified himself. As another speaker began to talk, the newcomer lunged toward the stack of weapons, and Skipper wrestled him to the floor with help from a few others. A man with a highpitched voice raced to the microphone and screamed, “That’s what we’re trying to stop!
That’s what we’re trying to get off our streets!”

The intruder, biting hard on his protruding tongue, was rushed down the aisle. As he passed Dorothy Hilligiest, he said, “I came here with good intentions, ma’am. I just wanted to make a point. Be prepared, little lady. That’s my point. You can’t never be too careful. You’re got to be prepared.” He told police he just wanted to show how easy it is to kill children. The weapons had not been loaded.

“God was with us,” a preacher told the stunned audience in reverent tones, while two little cousins of the dead Baulch brothers sat in the front row and wailed with fright.

The zealot who had opened the meeting announced in a voice quivering with rage and emotion, “Folks, I wanta tell you sumpin’.
This
is what we’re gonna rid these streets of…. We just begun to fight! I don’t wantcha to be skeered, but we just begun! I’m whoppin’ mad! WE’RE GONNA MAKE THIS A SAFE PLACE TO LIVE!”

The meeting was closed with a benediction.

BETTY COBBLE, THE RED-HAIRED
mother of one of the last murder victims, went right back to her job delivering flowers. “I felt like if I were to give in to my feelings, I wouldn’t be able to get hold of myself again,” the wispy woman explained. She delivered wreaths for Ruben Watson and James Glass, two of the dead boys, “but I didn’t tell anybody who I was. I just brought the flowers in and did my job. I was glad I didn’t have to deliver any for Charles.”

The Cobbles held no services for their son; the remains of the lanky, shy boy were cremated and brought home. Betty had remembered a melancholy remark Charles had made as a child: “He said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes put in a pirates’ chest lined with blue velvet.” At a nearby tobacco shop, Vern Cobble found a handsome humidor, hand-tooled in Italy and covered in leather, and Betty looked all over town for the right shade of blue velvet and finally ordered it from Fort Worth.

In the first two weeks after the bodies were found, the upset mother lost six of her hundred-odd pounds, and the physician who treated her for chronic headache ordered her to slow down. “I seem to get tired faster,” the busy woman admitted. “My job isn’t hard, but I get out of breath. I have to deliver to hospital rooms and sometimes I get awfully tired.” She tried to discuss the loss as infrequently as possible, but the fascinated employees of the flower shop worried the subject like a hangnail. “I love the woman that runs the plice,” Mrs. Cobble said. “She’s just a real sweet elderly person, but she asked me, ‘It may be morbid, but have they found the boys’ clothes?’ I said very sternly, ‘Now listen,
if you’d watched television, you’d have seen ’em dig up the bodies, and you could have
told
that those boys were completely nekkid. Now you
know
what kind of person had a hold of ’em, so please, let’s stop talkin’ about it.’ I tried to be as blunt with her as I could.” But the questioning persisted, and Betty Cobble was forced to quit.

The taciturn postal supervisor Vern Cobble attempted his wife’s technique of plunging back into work, but he found that his professional concentration had been shattered. “Almost every night I had to take off early, and pretty soon I was just working an hour or two and leaving, too nervous, too upset,” Cobble said. For a while, he stayed home and tinkered with an old Mustang that he had bought for Charles. “I took the transmission and the clutch and everything else out of that thing twice and put it all back, just to have something to do,” he said, “but it wouldn’t help me clear my mind. I had thoughts of self-recrimination for the things I didn’t do for my son. I’d always had two or three jobs, and I didn’t have enough time to spend with him. Now I know you should spend as much time as you can with your boy, even at the expense of your job, your business, even if you have to let him go a little hungry, or you don’t have nice furniture. You can sit on an apple crate, but you can’t get a son back.”

A few weeks went by, and Vern Cobble found his mood worsening. “I felt like I was on the verge of going all to pieces,” he said. “I been holding it in and holding it in and holding it in for so long. I’m lucky that I don’t dream, but I kept hearing his voice, the telephone conversation all over again, Charles telling me he had to have a thousand dollars and sounding so upset and all.”

One day the disturbed man jumped into his car and began driving. He sped north for sixty miles, then turned around and headed for Mexico. “I stopped in Matamoros, and I walked around. I didn’t know anybody there, and they didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish, so I could just walk and think and reflect. Gradually I began to feel better. I drove about a thousand miles
in three days before I came home, and I managed to think the whole thing through. I just came to the realization that Charles was a very, very sensitive boy, and nobody could be expected to understand him all the time. I read a phrase somewhere about the sound of a different drummer, and it reminded me of Charles. He was tuned into a different generation that I couldn’t understand. And I decided there wasn’t anything I could have done about what happened, and I’d just have to pick up and go on.”

He returned to work the next evening.

Horace “Jimmy” Lawrence sat in his empty house with the roaches running along the baseboards. All the furniture was gone from the little cottage just north of The Heights. “I’m fixing to move,” Jimmy explained. “I don’t wanta be around this place no more.” He poked at his eyes with a handkerchief. “I keep going,” he said. “I put my trust in the Lard. Life has to go on. Billy wouldn’t want me to give up.” His other son telephoned, and the father began and ended the conversation with the same words, “Son, I love you.”

The dead boy’s room was undisturbed. “I wanta keep it that way till the last minute,” his father said. He picked through memorabilia: the boy’s football awards and plaques; Boy Scout merit badges for music, health, art and lifesaving; a large picture of Brigitte Bardot. He opened the drawers of a battered maple dresser to reveal an empty can of shoe polish, a silver charm bracelet, a few spent shotgun shells, two empty beer cans and a wine bottle, a
Reader’s Digest
and a small effigy of Christ on the Cross. “That’s all Billy had to his name,” Jimmy Lawrence said. “I wisht I coulda done him better.”

The reformed holdup man and newspaper mailer said he felt no malice toward the two young men in jail. “It’s not my place to pass judgment,” he explained. “Only God has that right. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lard.’ After Billy’s funeral, I went on down to see
Miz Henley. I wanted her to know I didn’t have any animosity toward her or the boys. I felt so sorry for her! I told her if they was anythang I could do to ease her burden, to feel free to call upon me, and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. Miz Henley’s mother, she broke down and cried right in front of me.”

Jimmy Lawrence smiled. “Then a funny thang happened,” he said. “I was driving through Pasadena and a policeman blew his sireen and pulled me over. He said, ‘Your sticker’s expired.’

“I said, ‘I’ve had so many problems the last few weeks I plumb forgot about that sticker.’

“He said, ‘Your name sounds awful familiar.’

“I said, ‘Well, I guess so! I been on television and radio and the newspapers for the last few weeks. My God, man, where in the world you been? My son was one of those that was murdered!’ “He said, ‘Yeh, I hear sumpin’ like that every day,’ and kep’ on writing the ticket. When he left I shook hands with him and told him I was gonna pray for him that night. I did pray for him. There’s pricks in every business.”

Billy Gene Baulch, the ex-cowboy truck driver, sat in the dim parlor of his old bungalow on Sixteenth Street and cradled his infant son in his arms. “Ain’t
nobody
gonna git this’n!” said the man who had lost two sons to murder and another to an automobile accident. “We’re gonna keep a guard posted twenty-four hours.”

His wife, Janey, took the baby and began feeding him, and Baulch told how he had been called to the coroner’s office to assist in the identifications of his sons Billy and Tony. “Bones,” he said. “That’s all they was. It’s hail to see your sons bone by bone.”

For several days, Baulch had been asking police to dig around the side and back of the shed down the street where Dean Corll had lived five years earlier. “Cops kep’ sayin’ they’d be somebody out there to do it, but they never was, so I jes’ give up on ’em. I never asked a whole lot outa the police. Hail far, cain’t they help?
It won’t help me, but it might help the rest of the people in this neighborhood, the people with missin’ sons. But the police—they jes’ don’t seem too interested.”

Three blocks away, Gerald Oncale was seething over an experience at police headquarters. “I carried pictures of Johnny up there a couple days after it all come out,” the rotund house mover said, “and I aksed this detective to show ’em to David Brooks. The detective made me sit down, didn’t search me or nothing, and when I seen ’em take Brooks by the next door there, I coulda shot him if I’d had a gun. Anyway, this detective showed the pictures and he come back out and he told me, ‘Yeh, he says they killed this punk, too.’ I guess he didn’t know I was the father.”

Weeks went by before the final remains of Oncale’s stepson Johnny Delome were identified to the medical examiner’s satisfaction. When word came, Gerald was in the process of jacking down a house that he had moved, and “it had to be on the ground for me to get the money, and if I didn’t have the money, Johnny didn’t get buried.” He worked on the house till 9
P.M.,
then drove all night with his wife, Eunice, to Crowley, Louisiana, where the family traditionally buried its dead. “My granddaddy willed a plot to the whole family,” Mrs. Oncale explained. “He said we’re all so poor, if we don’t have someplace of our own we won’t have anyplace to be laid away, so he left us two acres. It’s real nice out there in the country, fresh breeze and all.”

Still without sleep, Gerald Oncale rushed to the funeral home in Crowley. “I wanna see his body,” the burly man said.

“Why?” a funeral director asked.

“I don’t think it’s my boy. Now if I could see the hair, even though it changed color, I could visualize what his head looked like, and if I could see his teeth, it would satisfy me whether it was Johnny.”

The mortician pulled out a three-foot plastic sack that had been
shipped the previous day from Houston. He told Oncale, “Let me open it and see what condition he’s in. I never did open it; I just took their word that there’s a body in there. I wouldn’t want you to see something you’re not in shape to see.” A few minutes later, the funeral director told the determined stepfather, “You can come in and look.”

Gerald Oncale entered the embalming room and gasped. “There was just bones scattered around,” he said later. “The jawbone was cut off right under the nose. No jawbone. No hair. There was a little bullet hole right in the forehead.
No
hair and
no
jawbone! No teeth at all.”

He said nothing through the services and the burial (“for my wife’s sake”), and then hurried back home to earn money to continue the search for Johnny Delome. “I’ll never stop,” the big man said, “and ain’t nobody gonna stop me, either. That decrepit buncha bones was
not
my boy. My boy’s woiking someplace and he’s alive and well and I’m gonna find him or he’s gonna come back home,
one.
Lemme tell yeh: I dreamed about Johnny, and that means something. His mother was sitting in my pickup truck, and Johnny come from behind a building. I said, ‘Johnny, what do you want?’ Eunice got out of the truck and hugged him and she said, ‘Won’t you come home?’ and Johnny said, ‘Well, I’ll come home if you promise not to beat hell outa me.’ That was the end. And that dream means we’ll be seeing Johnny soon.”

On Twenty-sixth Street, in the bungalow she had paneled for her two fatherless sons, Geraldine Winkle had also been dreaming. “One dream I was trying to catch Malley,” she said. “I was running with all my might, almost got to him a few times, almost grabbed him, and he kept going further. One time he turned to me in a dream and he said, ‘Mother, I just wisht you’d leave me alone. I have my own life to lead.’ That broke my heart! But I felt
better when I woke up, ’cause I know what kind of son I raised, and he’s got to be in heaven.”

One of Mrs. Winkle’s sisters came down from Illinois after Malley’s death was confirmed, and the two sat up till late at night sipping drinks and talking over old times and trying to adjust to the finality of the loss. One morning the sister was awakened before dawn by screams. “They’re digging in the front yard!” Gerry Winkle cried in her sleep. “THEY’RE DIGGING IN THE FRONT YARD!” The sister took the frightened woman in her arms and held her till she stopped shaking.

Fred and Dorothy Hilligiest thought they had listened to every one of their son David’s homemade tape recordings, seeking clues to his disappearance, but one day they found an unmarked cassette with Bobby Vinton singing “If I Had My Life to Live Over,” and David singing along in the background and brushing lightly on his drums. “It sounded so cute,” Mrs. Hilligiest said. “He’d sing in that little adolescent voice with the break in it, and then he’d make a sound like Donald Duck, and at the end he said, ‘That’s me, all right!’ He was always joking around.” The family played the tape again and again.

The bodies of David Hilligiest and Gregory Malley Winkle had been sent accidentally to Atlanta, Georgia, where they were buried as Jerry and Donald Waldrop, and it was several weeks before the error was discovered. “The medical examiner had a mighty tough job sorting those boys out,” Fred Hilligiest said understandingly. “You can excuse a mistake or two.”