Serial Killer Investigations (16 page)

Henley answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, sir.’

Mullican did his best to show no emotion during the statement that followed. But it was difficult to appear impassive. Henley was describing how he had lured some of his own best friends into Corll’s lair, witnessed their torture and rape, and then participated in their murders.

It seemed that David Brooks had been Corll’s original accomplice, as well as his lover. He had been procuring victims for Corll long before Henley came along. In fact, Henley was intended to be just another victim when he was taken along to meet Corll in 1971. But Corll soon realised that Henley would be more useful as an accomplice. He had a lot of friends, and would do anything for money. In fact, said Henley, he was pretty sure that Corll still planned to kill him sooner or later, because he had his eye on Henley’s 14-year-old brother Ronnie, and knew he would have to kill Wayne before he could get his hands on him.

The method of obtaining victims was usually much the same. Corll would drive around with Henley until they saw a likely victim, and Corll would offer him a lift. Since there was already a teenager in the car, the boy would suspect nothing. That was how Dean had picked up that 13-year-old blond kid a few days ago. Dean was parked in front of a grocery store when the kid came past on his bike. Dean called him over and told him he had found some Coke bottles in his van, and the kid could go and collect the deposit on them. The boy (it was 13-year-old James Dreymala) took the bottles and came back a few minutes later with the money. Then Dean remembered that he had a lot more Coke bottles back in his garage, and if the kid would like to come along, he could have them too. So James Dreymala allowed Dean to put his bike in the back of the van, and went back to Dean’s house on Lamar Street. The boy said he had to ring his father to ask if he could stay out, but the father refused. After the call, Dean ‘had his fun’, strangled the teenager, and then drove the body out to the boat shed to join the others.

At about this time, Mullican heard the latest report from the boat shed. Four more victims had been found in the past two hours, bringing the total up to 12. And beside one of them his genitals had been found in a plastic bag. Part of Dean’s ‘fun’ was castrating his victims.

Henley’s new confession went on for two more hours. It was rambling and often incoherent, but Mullican gathered that Henley had been present at the murder of at least nine boys. He admitted shooting one of them himself. The bullet had gone up the boy’s nose, and the boy had looked up and said: ‘Wayne, why did you shoot me?’ Henley pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger again; this time the boy died.

Had Corll buried any bodies in other places beside the boat shed? Mullican wanted to know. Oh sure, said Henley, there were some on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn and more on High Island Beach, east of Galveston.

It was now past noon, but it seemed a good idea to bring Wayne Henley and David Brooks face to face. He would then persuade Henley to show them where the bodies were buried at Lake Sam Rayburn.

When they arrived at the Houston police station, Lieutenant Breck Porter took Mullican aside. David Brooks was doing plenty of ‘confessing’, but it was all about Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. According to Brooks, he had been merely an innocent bystander.

David Brooks proved to be a tall, round-faced, long-haired youth who wore granny glasses; apparently he had recently married. He looked startled to see Wayne Henley—no one had warned him Henley was on his way. Henley stared across at his former friend. ‘David, I told ’em everything. You better do the same.’

Brooks looked defensive. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘Yes you do. And if you don’t tell everything, I’m gonna change my confession and say you was responsible for all of it.’

David Brooks said he wanted to talk to his father, and was taken out of the room. Later that day, he was told he was under arrest for being implicated in the murders. He was subdued and tearful as he was led away.

Henley, on the other hand, seemed to have been infused with a new life since his confession. On the way out to Lake Sam Rayburn—120 miles away, in the Angelina National Park—he talked non-stop, and made a number of damaging admissions. ‘I choked one of them boys until he turned blue, but Dean still had to come and finish him off.’ When a deputy asked how a decent boy like him could get involved in murder, he made the odd reply: ‘If you had a daddy that shot at you, you might do some things too.’

An hour later he was leading them into the woods on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn. He was already implicating David Brooks, although not by name. ‘We picked them up and Dean raped and killed them.’ Asked by a reporter if there had been any torture, he replied cryptically: ‘It wasn’t what you would really call torture.’ But he declined to elaborate.

Then, refusing to allow reporters and photographers to accompany them, he led the police to the sites of four more bodies. One of them had been buried underneath a board; it emerged later that when Henley and Corll had returned to bury another body, they had found a hand sticking out of the ground, so had reburied it with the board on top.

Before darkness made further digging impossible, two bodies had been unearthed. The latest news from the boat shed in south Houston was that the digging was now finished, and 17 bodies—or parts of bodies—had been found. The ones that had not been buried in plastic bags had decayed, so that little but bones remained. The body count so far was 19.

The following morning, it rose to 21, with the uncovering of the other two bodies at Lake Sam Rayburn. By mid-morning, the convoy of police and reporters was on its way south to High Island, where Henley insisted there were eight more bodies buried.

The search of the High Island beach turned into a circus. Three helicopters had arrived with camera crews, and the reporters almost outnumbered the crowds of morbidly fascinated spectators. Henley was in good spirits, offering to race the overweight sheriff up the beach—an offer which, in view of the ninety-degree heat, the sheriff politely declined. David Brooks, who had been brought down from Houston, was much more subdued; he sat there much of the time, his arms around his knees, refusing to speak to reporters.

Only two more bodies were found that afternoon, bringing the total up to 23. Later, four more would be unearthed on the beach. The other two mentioned by Henley were never discovered. But even a total of 27 made Dean Corll America’s worst mass murderer.

While Wayne Henley was helping the police at Lake Sam Rayburn, David Brooks was offering the first complete picture of Corll’s career of homicidal perversion in the Houston interrogation room. He still insisted that he had never taken an active part in the killings, but his questioners suspected that this was because he had sworn to his father that he was innocent of murder. Henley, who seems to have been the more truthful of the two, stated that Brooks had taken an active part in several murders. The picture that emerged left little doubt that this was true.

Meanwhile, reporters were learning all they could about the background of America’s worst mass murderer. For the most part, it proved to be surprisingly innocuous.

Dean Arnold Corll was born on Christmas Day 1939, in Waynesdale, Indiana, the first child of Arnold and Mary Corll, who were in their early twenties. But the parents were temperamentally unsuited; both were strong characters, and their quarrels could be violent. Mary adored her eldest son; Arnold—a factory worker who became an electrician—was a disciplinarian who found children tiresome. When Dean was six, the couple divorced, and Arnold was drafted into the Army Air Force. Mary bought a house trailer and drove to join her ex-husband at his base in Tennessee, but the quarrels continued and they separated again. An elderly farm couple agreed to look after the boys—Dean had a younger brother, Stanley—while Mary went out to work.

From the beginning, Dean was an oversensitive loner. Because his feelings were hurt at a birthday party when he was six, he always refused to go to other people’s houses. While Stanley played with other children, Dean stayed at home.

The Corlls made yet another attempt at reconciliation after the war, and in 1950 drove the trailer to Houston. But the marriage still failed to work out, and they parted again. At this point, it was discovered that Dean had a congenital heart ailment, and he was ordered to avoid sports. In fact it was hardly necessary; he was not the sporting type.

Life for Mary was hard; she worked while the boys went to one school after another. In 1953 she married Jake West, a travelling clock salesman by whom she had a daughter. The family moved to Vidor, Texas, a small town where, as one commentator put it, ‘the big event is for the kids to pour kerosene on the cat and set it afire’. Since he spent so much time without his parents, Dean became intensely protective of his siblings—a kind of surrogate mother.

Now a teenager, Dean took up skin diving, but had to quit when he fainted one day, and the doctor diagnosed a recurrence of the heart problem. But he was allowed to continue playing the trombone in the school band. He was always quiet, always polite, and never complained or ‘fussed’.

One day, a pecan-nut salesman observed Mary’s efficiency at baking pies and asked her why she didn’t take up candy making. She liked the idea, and was soon running a candy business from their garage, with Jake West as travelling salesman and Dean as the errand boy and ‘gofer’ (‘go fer this, go fer that’). He was often overworked, but remained cheerful and uncomplaining. After his graduation from high school at the age ofn20, Dean went back to Indiana to be with Jake’s widowed mother, while the family returned to Houston. There the candy business continued to be underfunded. Two years later, when Dean moved back to Houston, he took a job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and made candy at nights. Women who worked there were awed at his industry.

In 1964, Dean Corll was drafted into the army. This seems to have been a watershed in his life, for it was the time when he first recognised that he was gay. No details are available, but it seems obvious that some homosexual affair made him realise what he had so far failed to suspect. Released from the army after 11 months—pleading that his family needed him to work in the candy business—he returned to Houston to find his mother’s second marriage in the process of dissolution. Mr and Mrs West had become business rivals rather than partners, and when Jake threw her out of the shop one day, Mary went off and started one of her own. Dean didn’t mind; he had never liked his stepfather.

Now living in an apartment of his own, Dean began making friends with the children of the neighbourhood—notably the boys—giving away free candy. Yet when a boy who worked for the company made some kind of sexual advance, Dean was angry and upset, and pleased when his mother dismissed him. Nevertheless, a co-worker noticed that another teenaged employee always made sure that he was never left alone with Dean.

Dean’s mother remained intensely protective, treating him as if he was still a teenager himself. But he was once again seeing something of his father, for whom he had great admiration.

Meanwhile, Mary now repeated her error and married yet again—this time a merchant seaman. She found him stupid and coarse, and soon began to suspect that he was psychotic. They divorced—and then remarried. He became neurotically jealous of his wife, and they separated again. But his continual attempts to force his way into the candy factory destroyed her enthusiasm for the business. When a psychic told her to move to Dallas, she took his advice, and divorced the merchant seaman yet again. And Dean, now left alone in Houston, suddenly felt that he was free to do as he liked.

Corll’s Mr Hyde aspect had at first manifested itself simply as a powerful attraction to boys, with whom he enjoyed playing the part of an elder brother. One boy said; ‘He acted real nice to me. He never tried to mess with me or nothing.’ But the desire was there, and Mr Hyde began to break out when he realised that some boys would permit oral sex in exchange for money. Fourteen-year-old David Brooks was one of them. In fact, he was delighted to have an ‘elder brother’, and became completely emotionally dependent on Corll—so dependent that he made no attempt to denounce him when he learned that he was a killer.

This emotional dependence of David Brooks undoubtedly played a major part in the tragedy that followed. His love for Corll meant that he was willing to subjugate his will to Corll’s. And Corll, in turn, was encouraged to give way to his Mr Hyde personality. It was a case of
folie a deux,
or ‘madness for two’.

Brooks was a lonely schoolboy when he met Dean Corll in the Heights in 1969. The two had something in common: their parents had broken up, and they were on their own. Corll’s mother had closed the candy factory she ran with her son’s help, and gone off to live in Dallas. Corll had found himself a $5-an-hour job with the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and moved his few possessions into a shed. Corll propositioned Brooks, and the teenager agreed to allow Corll to have oral sex for a payment of $5.

But their relationship was not purely commercial. Corll was able to give Brooks something he needed badly—affection. Brooks, in turn, worshipped Corll. ‘Dean was a real good dude,’ and ‘a brilliant and generous man,’ he claimed. And when he returned to Houston in 1970—escaping from his disintegrating family—Brooks began to see a great deal of Corll: during the next three years they often shared rooms for brief periods.

By that time, it seems probable that Corll had already committed his first murder. A 21-year-old student from the University of Texas in Austin, Jeffrey Alan Konen, had hitchhiked to his home in Houston on 25 September 1970. He had last been seen at six o’clock in the evening, looking for another lift. It seems probable that it was Corll who picked him up, and invited him back to his apartment at 3300 Yorktown. Konen’s body was one of the last of those found—on the High Island beach—and was so decomposed that it was impossible to determine cause of death. But the fact that the body had been bound hand and foot suggested that Corll had killed Jeffrey Konen in order to commit sodomy.