The Man With Candy

THE MAN WITH THE CANDY

Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1974 by Jack Olsen

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole of in part in any form.

Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Eve Metz

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data:

Olsen, Jack

The man with the candy; the story of the Houston mass murders.

1.  Murder-Houston, Texas Case studies.  I. Title.

HV6534.H8043   364.1′523′097641411   74-7260

ISBN: 0-7432-1283-5

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2870-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1283-0

FOR
F
LORENCE
M
AE
D
RECKSAGE
O
LSEN

I love Texas, but she drives her people crazy. I’ve wondered whether it’s the heat, or the money, or maybe both. A republic of outlaws loosely allied with the United States, Texas survives, and survives quite well by breaking the rules.

—Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty, 1973

Two of Your Sons Are Missing

IN HIS CANARY-YELLOW HOUSE
on shady Twenty-seventh Street in The Heights, a worn-out section of Houston, Fred Hilligiest got up long before the sun. A gaunt, wind-dried man of forty-nine, he striped streets for the city of Houston on weekdays and ran a small painting business in his spare time. This morning he had to be on the job at five; the Gulf sun would catch him soon enough and sear another layer of brown into his deep-lined face, as dark and dry as old parchment.

Dorothy Hilligiest, a radiant, pudgy woman with china-doll hands and a small voice to match, saw her husband off and began to work through a list of chores. In a few days, the family would begin its annual vacation to the riverside town of Kerrville and there were still errands to run—to the bank, the car wash, the grocery, the hardware store, to Sears for the last few pints of paint to finish trimming the windows. The Hilligiests worked on their house endlessly, landscaping and painting and decorating till the little bungalow gleamed like a model home on its corner lot. The fact that The Heights was generally considered run-down did not discourage the Hilligiests. A family could live in only one house at a time, and theirs was more than adequate. Others had weakened and lost heart, but Fred and Dorothy, deeply religious Catholics, intended to complete their ordained task of raising a family within these familiar walls.

Two children were already married and gone; three sons and a daughter remained, and by the time Mrs. Hilligiest returned from her first batch of errands in town, they were up and babbling about the vacation to come. It was May 29, 1971, Memorial Day weekend blazing hot in Houston. There was talk among the three boys
about going to the pool at the Bohemian lodge to perfect a few strokes they would use later at the river. On the previous year’s visit to Kerrville, they had met a couple of young water nymphs who had impressed and outswum them; this year would be different.

David, the family’s blond-haired court jester and jazz drummer, called a friend to suggest a swim, but the friend was busy. By lunchtime, David still had not been able to round up a swimming companion for himself—being thirteen, he did not relish accompanying his younger brothers—and he ate his customary skimpy meal, a hot dog and a glass of root beer. As usual, Dorothy Hilligiest worried about him. He was a small boy with delicate features, five feet three inches tall and not yet a hundred pounds in weight, and he ate like a gerbil. “Don’t worry,” Fred Hilligiest had told his wife. “He’s as strong as a li’l ol’ bull.” Sometimes the boy earned a dollar an hour working for his father’s striping company and pulled a man’s load without complaint.

After lunch, eleven-year-old Gregory and nine-year-old Stanley left for the pool, a mile away. David stayed in the house, looking to his mother “sort of lost,” and then announced, “I think I’ll go with them.”

Mrs. Hilligiest felt better; David would watch over his brothers at the pool. She heard him call “Wait up!” but then he said, “Oh, never mind,” and began walking slowly through the alley that led to Twenty-sixth Street. She made a mental note that his blue bell-bottom pants would have to be passed down to Gregory; they were at least two inches too short. The rest of his clothes fit neatly: a blue plaid shirt and nearly new tennis shoes. He was wearing his bathing suit underneath.

An hour later, the phone rang. It was Gregory, asking his mother to drive to the park and pick up him and Stanley; the pool had been too crowded. “Well, where’s David?” Mrs. Hilligiest asked.

“David?” Gregory answered. “He’s not here. He didn’t come with us.”

Mrs. Hilligiest was surprised. It was unlike any of her sons to take off without telling her where they were going. She and David had had plenty of conversations about
that.
But it was still afternoon and she decided that he must have happened on a ball game or a friend, or even gone to the pool by himself. Later he would call and put her mind at ease.

When Fred Hilligiest arrived home and flipped open the first beer of his precious evening hours, David still had not arrived, nor was he home by the time Dorothy was ready to serve dinner. Fred called the lodge and was told that his son had not signed the pool registry that afternoon. He called a few neighbors and learned that David had been seen by no one except a boy who had exchanged brief greetings with him about 2
P.M.,
right after he had left home. While dinner went cold, Fred and Dorothy perused their son’s room and found nothing out of the ordinary. His life savings of twenty dollars were in a drawer. His wallet, watch and ring were there, his clothes neatly hung in the closet. Wherever he had gone, he had planned no lengthy stay. The parents knew that something was wrong. Another thirteen-year-old might come home for dinner an hour or two late or not show up till the next day or even the next week without panicking his parents—depending on how the household was run—but an hour’s lateness by any of the Hilligiest children was cause for alarm. Dorothy and Fred began a sweep of the neighborhood, checking with anyone who might have seen the boy, and calling his name. Periodically they returned to the house, to see if he had come back or telephoned, and then resumed their search in the family’s Ford Galaxy.

At three in the morning, they began checking hospitals, but there was no record of the boy. At sunup, Dorothy Hilligiest called the police to ask for a city-wide lookout. The sleepy voice on the other end of the line told her not to worry, that David was probably
staying overnight with a friend. “Boys do that all the time,” she was told.

“No, sir!” Mrs. Hilligiest said firmly. “That cain’t be. Our chil’ren have never been allowed to stay overnight without permission. We
always
know where they are, even in the daytime. It’s just not David’s nature to worry us like this.”

The policeman advised her that times had changed, that boys were running away from the best of homes nowadays, and said he would have to list David in the runaway classification. No, there would be no official search for the child, but if he was spotted during school hours, he would be stopped and questioned. That was all the law allowed. A runaway was not a criminal.

Mrs. Hilligiest was aghast. In her anguished mind, she had imagined teams of detectives coming to the neighborhood, running down every clue, checking out every tip, and squads of uniformed policemen swarming the streets in an effort to retrieve something so precious as a son. “That’s
all
you’ll do?” she asked, incredulous. “You won’t come look for him?”

“No, ma’am,” the policeman said. “That’s not our procedure.” He explained that there was only a light crew on duty this Sunday morning, and when Dorothy insisted that at least a few of them be spared, he advised her to call back the next day.

She was crying when she put down the phone. “David’s a human being!” she told Fred, himself red-eyed and exhausted from worry. “He’s a
child!
And they won’t even look for him.”

Neither of the Hilligiests could sleep. They fed the other children as they arose, and then climbed back into the family car and cruised the narrow streets of The Heights, calling David’s name at every corner, peering down the alleyways of small factories a few blocks from their home, inquiring in pizza parlors and fried-chicken restaurants as they opened, interrogating neighbors on the way home from church. It was late in the day before they picked up their first clue: David had been seen the afternoon before with a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Gregory Malley Winkle.

The widow Selma Geraldine “Gerry” Winkle lived with her two sons in a five-thousand-dollar orange-sided frame house with walls akimbo, like most walls in The Heights. She was a tall brunette of forty-nine, with thin patrician nose and glowing skin that she anointed with cream every night before going to sleep. “People always laughed and teased me about it,” she told her close friends, “but I just can’t sleep without creamin’ it off.”

Mrs. Winkle had been a sailor’s wife, following her husband all the way to the Philippines, bearing his children and seeing the world like the old song about the Navy. A treasured snapshot showed her in Oriental pajamas, lifting a few inches of pant leg to expose a slender ankle. “Oh, don’t look at that!” she told friends, laughing girlishly. A larger picture, improved by delicate tinting, showed Harold “Wink” Winkle, first-class petty officer, U.S.N., in a wide grin and a sailor suit. That was before he was gripped by Huntington’s chorea, a crippling nervous disorder that kept him bedridden and spasmodically suicidal for five years, a nightmare that ended for Gerry Winkle in divorce. “Wink” Winkle died soon after, and bitter relatives disowned his former wife. By that time there were two sons, Malley and Benjamin, and Mrs. Winkle went to work emptying bedpans and scrubbing floors in a Houston hospital while she studied to become a practical nurse.

On a total income that never exceeded two dollars and thirty-one cents an hour, plus an occasional part-time job when she could find one, Geraldine Winkle struggled to bring up her two lively boys. When she made a down payment on the house on Twenty-sixth Street in 1965, most of the paint was flaked off and the insides were riddled with rot. She scraped and repainted, shingled the roof, paneled the tiny rooms with ash, and installed homey touches: a false fireplace with stacked logs, bowls of artificial flowers and wax roses, a gold mirror bracketed by scarlet candles in gilt sconces. She wanted the house to be attractive to her sons, to contain them happily while she worked at the hospital from early afternoon till nearly midnight. She was mother and father.
“When it was time for discipline, I’d say, ‘This is comin’ straight from your daddy, ’cause he’s not here to do it himself.’ When I spanked them, I was their daddy, and when I cooked their meals, I loved them as their mother.” Sometimes she worried about how the simple house looked to her sons’ friends, till one day Malley, barely in his teens, reassured her. Proudly she recited the quote to friends: “‘Mother, I wish you’d stop worrying. I’m proud to bring children in this house ’cause you’ve always got the smell of something good in the oven and a nice clean house. In some of my friends’ places, everything is upside down and you can’t even find the beds ’cause of the junk on ’em.’”

Slowly Malley had taken over the role of the family’s male protector, watching after his little brother Ben and trying to help his mother with the finances. From the age of ten, he worked: first on a paper route, then as a busboy, a janitor, a handyman mowing lawns and washing windows, anything that would produce a few dollars for his mother. He left comforting notes: