The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  In the course of police interrogation of Henley and Kerley, certain discrepancies began to surface in their two versions of what had happened. But, more important, in their eagerness to provide the police with damaging background material against Corll, both youths made some extraordinarily self-incriminating ad lib comments.

  Kerley claimed that Henley, after the latter had telephoned the Pasadena police, had casually stated to him that Corll would have paid a thousand dollars for him (Kerley). Kerley stated this in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, which implied he saw nothing surprising in this and knew precisely what Henley was getting at.

  Even more sensational, Henley told the police that Corll had been regularly paying him several hundred dollars a time to bring boys and youths to Corll’s various flats and houses, where Corll had raped, tortured and murdered them, then buried their bodies under the earthen floor of a corrugated iron shed some miles away.

  News of what was developing at Pasadena police headquarters was inevitably leaked to the mass media, and a milling crowd of reporters and TV crews began to assemble outside the building. Incoming telephone calls clogged the switchboard. By sunset, the police station was under state-of-siege conditions, as the coast-to-coast American networks flew their anchormen and crews into Houston. Foreign journalists were also arriving and adding to the chaos.

  Whether the two youths being interrogated were aware of just how much media coverage was being devoted to them is a matter of conjecture. However, one must assume that their professional inquisitors had a good grasp of criminal psychology and the mechanics of the teenage psyche. In which case they would have deliberately fed the two youths news of their instant fame, either overtly or obliquely (based on personal assessment of the individual’s intelligence and personality), the simple object being to transmute the inner glow of self-importance into a chain reaction of self-confidence, verbosity and self-incrimination.

  Whatever the methodology being employed — probably sympathetic and ostensibly collusive — detectives were extracting a fast, steady flow of detailed information from the two youths. This technique would have been followed until the interrogators were satisfied that the two youths were in fact not only witnesses against Corll but also willing accomplices. Aggressive questioning would then be resorted to.

  A third team of detectives was frantically delving as deep as it could into the murky past of thirty-five-year-old Dean Arnold Corll, and sorting out police files on reported missing boys and youths in and around Houston over recent years.

  Politicians who had never previously shown the least concern or interest in the high rate of boys and youths disappearing in Houston, particularly in a working-class area known as the Heights, were now queueing in front of the floodlit television cameras to display their synthetic sympathy to gullible voters.

  The police had achieved their first major priority the following day by persuading Henley to lead them to the boat shed where he alleged Corll had buried most of his victims under the floor.

  For self-preserving, tactical purposes, Henley had pretended to be rather vague about the precise location of the boat shed, and the police played along with the crude deception.

  Their next problem would be to drive Henley out of police headquarters without the horde of reporters tagging along behind. This proved to be an impossible task, and the cavalcade of police and reporters’ cars proceeded through the busy, sun-baked streets of Houston in accordance with Henley’s directions, heading southwest. On the outskirts of the city, Henley indicated a group of corrugated iron sheds, where a faded sign proclaimed ‘Southwest Boat Storage.’ He then led the police to the shed Corll rented.

  Breaking the padlock, detectives let in the light of day and surveyed the dismal interior. The place contained mostly junk iron, bits and pieces of cars and bicycles. It was difficult to imagine that this squalid dumping ground could be the site of a mass grave.

  Thoughtfully, the police had brought along a few trustee convicts to do the hard work. The convicts first cleared out all the domestic junk from the shed, then commenced to dig up the earthen floor where the police directed.

  Soon the stench of rotting flesh clogged the throats and nostrils of those crowded in the hot confined space, momentarily bringing the digging operations to a halt while police chiefs sent for sterile face masks and gas masks.

  Meanwhile, reporters were sniffing the air like nervous bloodhounds and furiously scribbling in their notebooks, while television cameras zoomed in on operations around the shed. There’s nothing like death to make the media lively.

  Digging resumed and the first carcass was delicately unearthed by a squad of forensic scientists — the naked body of a boy, aged about thirteen, wrapped inside plastic sheeting. After that, victims were being uncovered at regular intervals and carried out in body bags to waiting ambulance crews, for conveyance to the mortuary and detailed examination by forensic teams.

  Parents of missing children were arriving at the crime scene; others were frantically phoning police headquarters for information, hoping not to hear what they feared.

  The small, innocuous shed had taken on the dimensions of a disaster area. As daylight faded, a total of ten bodies had so far been discovered. Digging operations were halted till the next day.

  Henley, as evidence and pressure mounted, now helpfully admitted that he had not only procured victims for Corll but had been present when they were raped, tortured and murdered.

  It was too late for Henley to straddle the fence. The police had already concluded that Henley must have played a more active part in the murderous events, in order to have become so intimate with Corll and survived. Having procured so many victims and willingly witnessed their rape and murder, Henley obviously had enjoyed the whole experience, developed a liking for it. That being the case, he would have been drawn to participate physically in the stimulating tableaus with Corll.

  This theory was reinforced when it was discovered that Henley had also been Corll’s lover.

  Realising that his sense of self-importance had led him into a tangled mesh of implicit confessions from which he could not extricate himself, Henley finally confessed in the course of the following months in captivity that he himself had raped and killed some of the boys, allegedly under duress, and that many of those he lured had been trusting, personal friends of his. Henley’s admissions also implicated another eighteen-year-old youth, David Brooks, who was immediately arrested and interrogated.

  Brooks broke down and admitted that he, in addition to Henley, had also been Corll’s lover since the age of fourteen, and had been procuring victims for him, some of them his friends, before Henley had joined in and started doing likewise.

  Brooks stated he had subsequently become jealous and tried to persuade Corll to kill Henley. But by that period Corll had come to rely heavily on Henley for a nonstop supply of victims. Brooks, as it were, had practically run out of friends to feed Corll.

  Astonished detectives were having difficulty in keeping up with the fluctuating scenario, and the seemingly endless list of victims both Henley and Brooks were naming or identifying from photographs in police files of missing boys and youths.

  Even harder to comprehend was the seemingly natural manner in which both Henley and Brooks had not only accepted but also heartily participated in Corll’s homicidal orgies.

  This perplexity on the part of the detectives seems to suggest their unawareness of a psychological mechanism known as folie à deux — a delusional system or insanity shared by two or more individuals, the weaker of which accepts without question the stronger’s philosophy, code of ethics and values.

  Some might say that the manner in which Hitler cast a whole nation under his spell is a supreme example of the folie à deux principle. I do not believe Henley or Brooks were conscious of this psychological mechanism, merely victims of it. Artificial inhibitions are naturally far easier to break than abide by.

  Viewed in this pragmatic light, where whole nations can fall
prey to the same delusion, there is nothing at all extraordinary or terrible in the conversion of Henley and Brooks to comparatively limited barbarism. Except to those of a suburban mentality not versed in moral relativism. I trust the observation does not lack civility.

  There are countless circumstances in which the natural inclinations of people are deceived (by social conditioning and other control devices) into believing in moral and ethical expediencies. Murder lurks in even the most outwardly civilised bosom, as I’ve already instanced.

  Those of a religious bent who invariably perceive the vicarious enjoyment of others as crimes should note that the venerated Italian theologian and scholar Saint Thomas Aquinas maintained that, in the eyes of God, a crime committed in thought is as sinful as commission of the crime itself. In an implicit or aphoristic mode, similar sentiments are to be found in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and the works of other universally respected classical writers.

  All in all the police unearthed from the corrugated iron shed a total of twenty-six bodies of youths and boys. All had been physically tortured before death, some castrated, with their sexual organs separately wrapped in plastic and buried beside them.

  Henley had also led the police to a sandy beach at High Island, where they discovered two more bodies, and to parts of the shoreline of a lake where, Henley stated, additional young boys had been buried.

  A growing storm of criticism against the Houston police, for having paid scant regard when parents had reported their children missing over the years, resulted in the counterproductive effect of making the police reluctant to widen their searches for more bodies, the discovery of which would further underline their protracted negligence.

  So the total number of deaths Corll, Henley and Brooks were responsible for will never now be known for certain.

  It is unfortunate that only second- and third-hand accounts of Corll are now available from which to compile a more detailed psychological profile. Yet, despite this, some classic ‘personality prints’ are to be found in his past, his method of killing and in his choice of victims.

  Born in Indiana, Corll is said to have had an unhappy childhood relationship with his parents, and this was perhaps exacerbated by physical ailments such as rheumatic fever, glandular dysfunction and a heart condition. At an early age he exhibited classic anti-authority traits, regularly playing truant from school, indulging in petty pilfering, and showing hypersensitivity to any form of criticism.

  Trivial and harmless traits are found in any young boy of spirit, you may agree, but which become more significant if the boy remains emotionally undeveloped and extends such immature characteristics into adult life. The childhood teddy bear which Corll remained sentimentally attached to and was photographed embracing somehow takes on a sinister dimension being cuddled in the arms of the adult Corll, as though it exerted an occult or unnatural sway over him. But perhaps there was a scientific physical reason for this emotional immaturity.

  It is a medically accepted fact that the endocrine glands have a comprehensive effect on a person’s temperament. Glandular deficiencies can distort the whole personality, causing unreasonable bouts of emotional irritability and a low attention span, generating feelings of frustration and inadequacy which would naturally influence emotional development. If such glandular deficiencies occur during the most formative years of a child, the more likely its effect on the natural evolution of personality. Detrimental feedback from social interaction would also be a contributing factor in possible malformation of emotions and intellect.

  To what extent Corll was affected would naturally have depended upon how constitutionally resilient or moral his inclinations were in the first place. If there was in Corll a natural propensity towards the perverse, it is reasonable to assume his will to resist would have been to some extent eroded by physical/mental dysfunction, perhaps causing him to rationalise and reinforce his abnormal sexual drives and sadistic fantasies.

  Even innocent fantasies can transform themselves into fixed delusions. If subconscious imprinting of morbid delusional fantasies is allowed to go unchecked it is likely to develop into psychosis, affectively diminishing powers of discretion and discrimination.

  Without the development of a normal conscience, the unquestioning human mind, being impure by nature and naturally bewitched by the exciting dark side of life, would be inclined to transform obsessive sexual fantasies into action, and there would be no reason to exclude murder, the most fascinating crime of all, from the agenda.

  It goes without saying that there are of course many people who suffer debilitating illnesses in childhood and do not develop into serial killers. But, impartially, is that argument supposed to diminish the possible factor of mitigation re: those that it does turn into killers? We are examining possible cause and effect in an individual and factual context, not idealistic abstractions and random variables.

  Army records show that Corll became an overt homosexual while in the service, deliberately flaunting his propensities but not sufficiently so as to be dishonourably discharged — which, considering his antagonism towards authority, was perhaps his real strategic aim. It is intriguing to speculate that he might have started playing the role of homosexual simply to get out of the army, then, finding the experience sexually or emotionally satisfying, ended up actually becoming the role. At any rate, he was discharged from the army after less than a year, on medical grounds, and returned to Houston.

  Curiously, only then did he suddenly begin trying to hide the fact that he was homosexual. In fact, after Corll was dead and his crimes known to all, none of his neighbours or the parents of boys he murdered who knew him had a bad word to say about him, describing him as a ‘kind and generous man.’

  When his mother got a divorce and went to live in Dallas, Corll was quite literally a kid alone in a candy shop; all his appetites and secret fantasies could now be hedonistically indulged. There was no one to check or censure him, pry into his affairs. Psychologically, we can reasonably assume this was a pivotal factor, where dark obsessions could be turned into reality. The factory would become his personal, private kingdom where he ruled supreme.

  Corll was finally coming to life, a life suddenly full of energy and vitality, sexual fantasies flourishing like exotic mushrooms in his inner darkness.

  A new order of creative destruction was about to be brought into being. His whole existence now had purpose and meaning. He had never felt more alive now that he was actively planning the destruction of others. By taking lives he would enrich his own, making up for wasted time in the wilderness of other people’s moral delusions and legal impositions.

  Approaching the age of thirty, Corll now sought to surround himself almost exclusively with groups of youths and young boys, seeming to shine in their company. It is entirely possible that his motive in doing so was not entirely sexual. Most normal adults find the company of the young a refreshing change from the far too serious adult world. It invigorates and reminds one of happier golden days. We draw raw energy, spiritual stimulation and delight from the relative innocence and spontaneity of the young. So I perceive this tendency as evidence of a distinct dichotomy in Corll’s personality.

  As I suggested in my chapter on John Wayne Gacy, the majority of ordinary people often fail to realise that crime is no more a full-time occupation than any other profession, but simply another means to an end. The law-abiding, or socially engineered, choose to bask in the happy delusion that they are morally superior to the criminal, yet these same paragons, apparently innocently enjoying the lithe movements of a pretty girl walking past, are of course vicariously stripping and pillaging her simultaneously. In short, we are all voyeurs and surreptitious criminals at heart.

  It is human nature to long for the forbidden then resentfully and jealously punish those who have actually sampled it.

  Should you question the truth or validity of this general proposition, official statistics show that 95% of murders and sexual abuse crimes are committed by mem
bers of the victim’s own family, or relatives and friends of the family. Only 5% of victims are murdered or sexually abused by strangers.

  The popular mass media, primarily for commercial reasons, understandably gives scant coverage to such embarrassing analytical statistics. It would make their readers or viewers feel morally uncomfortable, guiltily glancing at one another in the sanctity of the home, and blaming the media for their dilemma. That is bad for business! Much more profitable to divert, expediently and sensationally, all public attention onto the 5%, especially the small fraction of that 5% who are serial killers.

  This lucrative, selective social engineering by the media industry, especially the tabloids, enables the general public to indulge itself ritualistically in ostentatious paroxysms of self-righteous indignation. So perhaps Oscar Wilde was in error when opining that the only thing lower than a prostitute is a prison warder. Tabloid reporters must surely be in the running.

  More often than not it is foolish to try to kid a kidder. There are no saints in this world, only liars, lunatics and journalists.

  However, to say that all people possess this dual personality, the Mr Hyde within, does not posit that they all have the capacity to translate their criminal inclinations into action. That incapacity is where the crucial disparity between them and the criminal almost exclusively lies, not in moral integrity or superior intellect.

  The realm of absolute possibility is desired by all but sought out only by the few, who grow to accept it as the norm, leaving the others to dream on.

  While a part of Corll spontaneously enjoyed youthful company, another part was actively savouring this realm of absolute possibility, in his case their sexual abuse and torture. The two perceptions running parallel, each complementing and heightening enjoyment of the other.

  It often feels good to feel bad, most honest people will admit. The remaining dispute is simply one of degree, personal taste and interpretation.