Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  David Owen Brooks

  David was the son of Alton Brooks, a successful paving contractor. Dean had first met David when the boy was only twelve and Dean was twenty-seven, but they lost touch when the Brooks’ marriage began to disintegrate and David was moved around the country to live with various relatives.

  At one stage, after stealing a stove in Louisiana, he was taken from his mother and returned to his Houston-based father whom he hadn’t seen for years, but the first thing the man did was force the long-haired teenager to get a short-back-and-sides. David felt completely powerless now that even his appearance wasn’t his own. All that he owned were his thoughts and as a result he began to tell his girlfriends that none of them really knew him or knew what he was thinking. They probably didn’t as he had a higher IQ than most of the local children and often got good grades at school.

  When living with his father didn’t work out, he was sent to live with his grandfather, then his grandmother. When he was fourteen he moved back to the Heights and lived briefly with his mother. There, Dean offered him money to be his sexual partner. Brooks was heterosexual but desperate for cash to buy status symbols so he accepted the offer, rationalising that it wasn’t really homosexual sex if Dean did everything to him and he didn’t reciprocate. This suited Dean who liked to be the active sexual partner, the one in charge.

  But during the day, the youthful David was the one in charge. The teenager could call the shots, telling Dean what to get him to drink, to eat and to get high. He also enjoyed going on fishing trips in Dean’s van whilst the other local boys sat on their porches and longed for a more exciting life.

  David now became best friends with a teenager called Wayne Henley who attended the same school. He started to hang around with Henley’s crowd at night and his grades dropped markedly. He continued to steal, breaking into a chemists for drugs and stealing from grocery stores. He would offer these drugs for free to younger children. Luckily some told their parents who warned them off.

  At fifteen the would-be drug dealer dropped out of school and began living with Dean. The teenager had grown his hair long again and gotten himself a girlfriend. He’d grown to six-foot two so presumably had little sexual appeal for the paedophile Corll, but Dean wanted to keep David around, as David was a magnet for younger boys. The fifteen-year-old had a strong personality, albeit a sadistic one, and was happy to buy a young boy a pizza then take him to Dean’s house, knowing that Dean would talk him into having sex. In return for procuring these children, David got to live off Dean. As a result, Dean was frequently broke.

  But the arrangement suited both parties so it continued until David Brooks returned to the house unexpectedly one day to find a naked Dean Corll sodomising two boys who he’d stripped and bound to a homemade torture board. David would later say that this didn’t shock him, but that Dean was clearly shaken at having a witness to the crime. The older man untied the boys and offered to help David buy a car if he’d forget what he’d seen – and envious Heights youngsters soon saw the sixteen-year-old driving a green Corvette.

  It was clear to David from the start that this wasn’t consensual sadomasochistic sex as Dean had nailed a metal sheet to the inside of his door so that no one could bore their way out. The torture board was also designed for maximum restraint with holes and handcuffs in the top to hold the victim’s wrists and lower holes with rope to bind the victim’s feet. And, to make sure that the rape victim couldn’t scream the house down, Dean bought several gags. He even wired up a security system so that he’d be alerted if anyone approached his property.

  The rapes continued, with the victims – who’d happily sniffed glue or gotten drunk before the event – being set free after their ordeal. None of them reported the sexual assaults, though Dean Corll took some precaution by moving house frequently so that his victims couldn’t find him. He also moved again and again when neighbours complained about him partying with boys late into the night. Once, when Brooks and Corll were in the house, neighbours were woken by a young boy screaming and banging on the wall and an older man shouting ‘Stop him!’ But they assumed that someone was merely tripping out on drugs.

  The reality was much more ugly, for David Brooks had started procuring younger children for his friend to rape. Dean Corll terrorised and violated boy after boy but it still wasn’t enough to assuage his rage. He had a lowly job which he loathed, no real friends, no creative outlet. He was approaching thirty and had nothing to show for it. His home was rented and he often had to sell his possessions to fund David Brooks’ lifestyle. He still hid his sexuality from his family, so his increasingly sporadic relationship with them was built on a lie.

  Now he noticed the first signs of ageing – lines around his eyes and thinning hair – but Dean Corll couldn’t afford to age gracefully. After all, his persona around young boys was that of a Peter Pan. They wanted a youthful Dean who could party all night with them, not a man who resembled their dad.

  Dean Corll had played at being a young boy’s friend and when this hadn’t brought him emotional relief he’d become a rapist. Now that too was no longer enough. He looked at the board where he’d bound his rape victims and imagined what it would be like to torture them repeatedly, to ensure they never left.

  Almost thirty-one, he’d had enough of sadistic sexual fantasy and rape and was ready to put his macabre dreams into action. For the first time he’d be important, noticed, have the power to grant life or death. The obedient mother’s boy and the doting sugar daddy to David Brooks was about to become a tyrant who made his helpless victims scream and beg.

  The first known victim

  There’s some uncertainty about the fate of the two boys whom David Brooks found tied to the torture board, as at first he said Dean had let them go, but later he stated that he believed Dean had killed them. But in September 1970 a teenage male hitchhiker became Corll’s first known victim. Corll gave him a lift, took him back to his flat and plied him with drink or drugs until he was semi-conscious. He was then stripped naked and strapped to the torture board.

  The luckless youth was raped – and when Dean Corll was bored with raping him, the torture started. A thin glass tube was inserted into his penis and a large dildo forced into his rectum. The teenager was tightly gagged to muffle his screams. Later in the proceedings Corll would break the glass tube whilst it was still lodged inside his victim’s urethra. When he tired of the boy’s visible torment, he strangled him to death.

  Other victims

  David Brooks continued to procure boys for Dean, only now he knew that their ordeal wouldn’t end with rape. He lured acquaintances to the house and remained for many of the resultant torture sessions. Some of these sessions lasted four or five days. He was, incredibly, indifferent to the victims’ suffering but would later claim that he stopped short of killing any of the boys. He became more and more involved with his girlfriend so decided to take a lesser role in the proceedings: by age seventeen he would marry and have a baby. Handing on the pot of gold, he introduced Dean to his former school friend Wayne Henley, a hard drinking fifteen-year-old who he knew was desperate for cash.

  Elmer Wayne Henley

  Wayne – he would always be known by this, his middle name – was born in 1956 to Mary and Elmer Wayne Henley senior. The couple already had one son and after Wayne they’d go on to have two more.

  He was a well-mannered little boy who was often taken to the playground by his grandmother, and he had a loving mother who welcomed his friends around. She was known as a strict and righteous woman but she loved her four sons and they loved her too.

  Little Wayne initially did well at school, having an IQ between 110 and 120, which is well above average. But he often returned from class to find his father beating his mother, as when Wayne’s father got drunk he became a troublemaker. He had a criminal record which stretched back years. When his marriage started to break up, he waited on the porch with a shotgun, determined to murder his wife. But the shot went wide and almost hit
Wayne instead.

  Wayne’s parents divorced and times were hard so Wayne took two part-time jobs to help his mother. His grades fell rapidly and he dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

  He was a religious boy who carried his Bible everywhere. He hoped to join the Navy at sixteen but failed the tests and was visibly devastated. Keen to make money to impress his girlfriends – and clearly finding it easy to emulate his father’s violence – he turned to crime instead. He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, though it was David Brooks who permanently carried a gun.

  Wayne got a job laying asphalt but he was bored. At sixteen he was arrested for breaking and entering. He grew a thin moustache, smoked and drank and tried to act old before his time, almost getting engaged to one of his girlfriends. Only his thin body and teenage acne showed his true age.

  The late Jack Olsen, who wrote a book about the case, would brilliantly sum up boys like Henley and Brooks in a single sentence. ‘They are born, they go to school, they drop out, they get menial jobs, they reproduce others like themselves, and they die.’ It’s a chillingly accurate insight into people born into a poverty of expectation where life amounts to little more than a boring day job, evenings spent slumped in front of the television and alcohol used liberally to keep the boredom at bay.

  Wayne Henley had led this kind of life, but now he had a benefactor in the form of Dean Corll to whom David Brooks had introduced him. Dean clearly lusted after Wayne’s slender body – and Wayne was willing to go along with this, as were many of the impoverished teens living in the Heights.

  Corrupted to kill

  At first, Wayne thought he’d struck gold in meeting Dean. The older man ferried him and his friends around in Dean’s Ford Econoline van, bought them beers and marijuana. Admittedly Wayne wasn’t allowed to bring any of his girlfriends along to these drinking sessions, but that seemed a small price to pay for a free high.

  But Dean soon made it clear that he wanted his new lover to lure young schoolboys to his house to rape and eventually kill them. At first, Henley said no but then his finances worsened and Dean offered him two hundred dollars, a lot of money in the Seventies. Wayne thought some more about the offer and realised that he’d not only make a lot of cash but would manage to ward off Dean’s sexual advances for a few days whilst Dean enjoyed himself with his victim. Wayne wanted to see Dean as a father figure but felt ashamed of their bedroom acts.

  Dean continued to ask Wayne to find him a boy and Wayne eventually caved in. He started to hang out at a fried chicken bar where the local school pupils congregated, and offered them drink and drugs if they came back to his friend Dean’s house.

  Boy after boy disappeared – but the police told their parents that they were runaways. This was partially corroborated when Dean Corll made them write letters to their families saying that they’d found work on a ship or in a faraway town. (Catherine Birnie, profiled in Women Who Kill, made her victims do the exact same thing.) One boy called his parents sounding very frightened, but before they could ascertain where he was they heard a man’s voice and the line went dead.

  Wayne’s friends noticed that he didn’t invite any of them to Dean’s parties, preferring to take along boys that he hardly knew. One victim was found at the school where Wayne took his driving lessons. Another was a friend of a friend. These boys were happy to go with Wayne to Dean’s house where they enjoyed cocaine and glue-sniffing sessions. They saw the thin young man and his older friend as altruists until they lost consciousness…

  The victim would revive to find himself strapped, face inwards, to the specially constructed plywood board. Dean would then rape him repeatedly and violate him with the variously-sized glass tubes. Wayne also got in on the act, pulling out the boy’s pubic hairs. David Brooks occasionally called round to find Corll and Henley torturing one of their prisoners, though he’d claim that he watched but didn’t join in.

  Cruelly, Wayne remained in touch with the parents of some missing boys and helped them distribute posters. The parents had no idea that he’d already helped to kill their sons and had buried the bodies in Dean’s boat shed.

  The torture worsens

  But pushing an oversized dildo into a victim’s rectum can’t make up for more than thirty years of repression. Hearing a boy scream can’t compensate for all of the years when you were emotionally scarred. As such, Dean Corll had to think up greater and greater excesses in order to assuage his blood lust – and he took to castrating his victims with a knife.

  At least one victim had his testicles bitten off and it’s telling that during this period Dean Corll was especially anxious about his own genitalia as he’d developed a water pocket in his scrotum which caused him increasing pain. He told a female friend that he couldn’t afford to have this hydrocele treated, but it’s more likely that he was fearful of the operation. He delayed until he was in agony then had the hydrocele removed.

  His cruelty to his victims continued. One boy was viciously kicked to death whilst others were injured with bullets, sometimes being kept alive for several days.

  The killing spree escalates

  Dean Corll needed these torture murders to provide him with everything he lacked – self-esteem, the gratification he couldn’t find through his boring job, revenge at those who had punished him throughout his childhood. But he found, as most serial killers do, that the good feelings lasted for a shorter and shorter time. As a result he started to encourage Wayne to bring him two victims rather than one. Some of these duos were friends, others were brothers. He would torture them repeatedly then make one of the boys watch whilst his mate or sibling was slowly killed.

  Dean also began to abuse younger victims as his need for satisfaction increased: most of his prey had been in their mid-teens but now he tortured and killed a nine-year-old boy who lived across the road.

  Wayne Henley noted that Dean’s blood lust was up, that he now asked for more and more victims. He believed that Dean would only be happy when he brought him a new boy every day.

  The men continued to kill with the utmost brutality. One day Wayne fired a gun as he entered Dean’s room and it accidentally hit one of their torture-victims in the jaw. David Brooks witnessed the macabre incident. Unperturbed, Dean Corll continued to torture the badly injured boy for the rest of the day.

  David Brooks leaves

  By 1973, David had moved away from Dean’s neighbourhood, married another teenager and impregnated her. This now left Wayne as Dean Corll’s sole procurer, and the strain began to tell. In March 1973, he told his friends that he was never coming back to the Heights again and he travelled to Mount Pleasant to live with his dad, got a job in a gas station and resolved to put the past behind him. But within a month relations had soured and he returned to his mother’s house, soon returning to Dean Corll’s outwardly affable company.

  Wayne’s mother thought that Wayne treated Dean like a father, and Wayne told friends that he was more like a brother – but in reality he lurched between being sexually abused himself or finding Dean younger boys to sexually assault.

  The constant killing was taking its toll on the younger man, who now begged a friend to go to Australia with him, offering to pay the friend’s boat fare. He was drinking more heavily than ever and his speech was often slurred. He also asked older friends and relatives to accompany him to Dean’s parties, clearly realising that the man could not kill in front of witnesses. He was sufficiently desperate to visit the local Methodist minister twice, talking about unhappy aspects of his family life.

  In April he quit his job in asphalt paving and thereafter took casual employment. But he usually had money in his pocket, money provided by Dean.

  Burn out

  By thirty-three Dean was drinking as heavily as Wayne and had developed high blood pressure, unusual for a man of his age who was only slightly overweight and active. Acquaintances noticed that he was becoming increasingly agitated and he talked about getting married to a long-term female friend and having a
child. Then he changed his mind after phoning his mother who he hadn’t seen for five years. During a later phone-call he told her that he was contemplating suicide, but her religion made her believe in reincarnation and she told him that suicide was pointless as he’d have to go through the same lessons again in another life.

  Deciding to teach yet another luckless boy a lesson, Dean asked Wayne to procure him a new male victim, but Wayne did the unthinkable and brought both a boy and a girl to Dean’s house.

  Dean is murdered

  It was 8th August 1973 when Wayne brought his friends to Dean’s party. Wayne fancied the girl, Rhonda, and had promised to help her run away from home. But Dean insisted on all-male parties and was so enraged at seeing the girl that he threatened to shoot them all dead.

  Eventually he pretended to calm down and suggested they all sniff paint and get high. The teenagers did so, but when they lost consciousness Dean Corll tied them all up. Wayne revived to find himself strapped to the hellish plywood board. Dean was threatening to torture all three of them to death.

  Wayne Henley now used all of the information he knew about Dean Corll to plead for his life. He reminded Corll of what they’d been through together and suggested the torture session would be much more inventive if two of them were doing the torturing. Eventually Dean agreed to this on the proviso that Wayne raped the still semi-conscious Rhonda – who was tied up in the bedroom – whilst the other boy was strapped to a second torture board.