by Jack Olsen
“It sounded just like David would act,” Mrs. Hilligiest said, “and it really upset us. Now we felt like that something was holding him and preventing him from coming home.”
A psychic named Clifford Royce arrived in Houston to make a public appearance at a motel, and the Hilligiests paid their six dollars and were told to write their question. They did not bother to ask if David was alive; they knew that answer. Dorothy wrote: “When will our boy come home?”
Royce hesitated. Then he said in an apologetic tone, “I hate to tell you this, but the way I see it your boy is dead in a south Texas town.” He asked them to remain after the session, but Fred and Dorothy were already dashing for the door, too disturbed to pursue the matter.
Months went by before they got up the nerve to consult another clairvoyant, and then friends prevailed on them to visit a man who had developed a supernatural technique for locating lost children. The Hilligiests provided a large picture of David, over which the man superimposed a map and a plumb bob, and after a short period of meditation he advised them that Malley was in jail and David was safe in Dallas. The Hilligiests drove to Dallas and found nothing to bear the clairvoyant out.
Soon afterward they contacted a Dutch seer who informed them by transatlantic mail that David was lying in a hospital with amnesia, facing a window toward the south, a pathetic look on his face. Dorothy broke down when she heard the report, but soon began calling hospitals, to no avail. Still another psychic told the parents that he envisaged their son on Bourbon Street in New Orleans; a check of the famous place turned up nothing but the usual bars and clubs and jazz joints. Little blond-haired David Hilligiest would have stood out like a beacon on Bourbon Street, but no one remembered him.
For weeks after a newspaper article told about the parents’ plight and their offer of a reward, the telephone kept jangling. A caller told Mrs. Hilligiest about an ex-convict who had bragged that he knew where the boys were. The caller warned that the man was armed, angry and dangerous. Early the next morning, before most people leave for work, tiny Dorothy Hilligiest knocked on the man’s front door and demanded entrance. “I talked to him for an hour and a hife and he turned out to be nice. He denied that he knew anything about David or Malley, and he said he was tired of being accused of things he didn’t do. He said his neighbors were always getting the police on him.”
A young boy telephoned the family and said he had seen David hitchhiking toward Galveston. Dorothy said, “Do you know what David looks like?”
The boy said, “Sort of.”
“Did you go to school with David?”
The boy hung up.
A girl who sounded like a subteen telephoned and said she wanted the money in advance.
“You give me David for my thousand dollars,” Mrs. Hilligiest told her. “Do you know where he is?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl answered.
“Well, you bring my boy and I’ll give you the money.”
“No, ma’am, we don’t play that way.”
The girl bargained halfheartedly for a few minutes more and then admitted that she was joking. “Well, that’s cruel!” Dorothy said. “You just don’t do people like that!”
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I’m truly sorry.”
“Well, I’ll accept your apology,” the tolerant woman said. “But don’t do anything like this again, hear? We’ve been under too much strain already.”
There was a steady stream of reports from people who swore that they had just seen the boys. “They’re over at the Jack-in-the-Box at Twentieth and Shepherd!” a telephoner said, and the Hilligiests jumped up from the dinner table and rushed to the scene.
“I just seen ’em walking on Fourteenth Street near the grocery!” another man announced, and once again the Hilligiests were off.
A policeman’s son telephoned a report that he had seen Malley and David with two girls, but later recanted his story after Fred had wasted several days running down the lead. Mrs. Hilligiest said, “There were jillions of those calls, and they ’bout drove us crazy, but we had to take them as truth. One child would call and breathe heavily and whisper, ‘David’s not with Malley. David’s not with Malley.’ I’d say, ‘Well, where is David?’ and he’d hang up. He did this over and over.”
“But we were glad when kids called, any kids,” Fred Hilligiest said. “We thought there must be a kid someplace that knew something, and if we kep’ talking to ‘em, one of these days they’d make a slip.”
Often the Hilligiests found themselves confiding in a lifelong friend of David’s who seemed to retain a sympathetic interest in the case after others had begun to act politely bored. Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., fifteen years old at the time of the disappearance, was beginning to be a sorrowful figure to his young peers on Twenty-seventh Street. A junior high school dropout, he had severe acne, disheveled hair that sometimes twisted into curly knots, round owlish eyes, and a transfixing stare like the young Edgar Allan Poe. Sometimes he appeared slightly disoriented on the streets, and sometimes he appeared plain drunk. The Hilligiests felt compassion; they knew that there had been serious family trouble and a rancorous divorce, and that Wayne once had been a sweet and mannerly child. In fact, he had been one of David’s earliest playmates. When both boys were in the preschool years, Wayne’s mother or grandmother would walk him the half block to the Hilligiests’ and drop him off to play. Promptly after one hour the child would be picked up and returned home. “I liked this,” Dorothy Hilligiest remembered. “I said, ‘Well, this is my way of doing, too.’ It showed that they cared who the boy played with.”
Soon after the disappearance in 1971, Wayne Henley called on the Hilligiests and expressed his sympathy, and after the family printed posters, he helped to distribute them around The Heights. “He put them into Hamilton and Lincoln schools for us,” Fred recalled, “and we really appreciated it. He was always so understanding. Ever’ time he’d see us, even if he was a little wobbly hisse’lf, from drugs or beer or I don’t know what, he’d say he was still looking for clues, and he said he’d be sure to pass along anything he learned. He give us a feeling that he was trying.”
In the summertime, eleven-year-old Gregory Hilligiest sometimes played with Wayne Henley’s little brother Ronnie, and one day Greg came home and told his parents he had discovered a fascinating new way to pass the time. It was called poker, and it could be played for money or fun, but of course Greg played it only for fun. “Where?” his mother asked quickly.
“Down at the Henleys’,” Greg answered. “Sometimes the big boys play with us, and then it’s really fun.”
“What big boys, Gregory?”
“Oh, Wayne and his friends. A blond-headed boy named David Brooks. The one that drives the Corvette? And that man that David used to could get candy from. Dean? Dean somebody.”
Mrs. Hilligiest was mildly concerned, but not enough to deliver an ultimatum. She knew her stern reputation around the neighborhood, and she could imagine no harm coming out of an infrequent friendly card game in the nearby home of a family they had known for fifteen years, or with the nice, polite young man who had once sold her a box of candy. “Just make sure you only play for fun, not money,” she admonished the boy.
A few days later Gregory dashed back from the Henleys’. “You know what Wayne told me?” he said in his high adolescent voice. “He said, ‘Greg, one of these days Dean and I are gonna have to take you fishin’.’”
The mother said nothing, but she made a mental note to reject any such invitations on her son’s behalf. Innocent card games might be acceptable, but she frowned on out-of-town trips unless the whole family went along.
One wet afternoon Mrs. Hilligiest dropped little Ronnie Henley off from school and Wayne was sitting on the front porch. He waved, stood up unsteadily, and called out, “Thankee, ma’am, for bringin’ mah brother home.”
“Glad to,” Mrs. Hilligiest said.
Wayne wobbled over to the car and Dorothy could tell that he was under a b
aleful influence. As though he had read her thoughts, Henley said, “Yes’m, I’ve drank a few beers, and I ’pologize.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s your business.”
“Have y’all heard anythang about David?”
“No, not a word. Have you?”
“No’m.” The boy opened the door and slid inside, out of the drizzle. “I know how yew and Mr. Hilligiest feels, ma’am,” he said. His words were not easy to follow; the Henley clan was originally from the piney woods country, culturally the hillbilliest region of Texas, and Wayne spoke with deep drawls and slurs that some (but never Dorothy Hilligiest) would have characterized as mush-mouthed, the more so when he had been drinking. “Ya know,” he went on, “I rilly, rilly feel, ya know, sorry for y’all, and mah heart jes’ goes out to yew.”
Mrs. Hilligiest thanked the boy for his sympathy.
“But ya know, ma’am”—Wayne pronounced it “may-em”—“I rilly don’t believe anythang’s happened to David.”
Dorothy was touched. The neighborhood was full of people who were beginning to think the Hilligiests were slightly dotty to press so stubborn a search at a time when teen-agers were deserting their homes and flocking into communes and hitchhiking all over the continent without so much as a twinge of remorse about the generation they had left behind. Why must the Hilligiests act as though their own son would never have done such a thing, as though he were something special? But this deeply troubled half-drunken boy, with his disarmingly wispy moustache and his sad dark eyes, was doing his best to provide solace, and Dorothy appreciated it. “Well, Wayne,” she said softly, “I believe that in this length of time we should have heard something about David. I’ve always felt like that somebody in this Heights knows what happened. The answer’ll show up someday.”
“Well, ya know I put out the reward posters,” Henley said. “Quite a few of them. But David could still be rat around here. Sometimes the parents cain’t see the kids and the kids cain’t see the parents.”
“I don’t think he’s in Houston anywhere,” Dorothy said, “’cause somebody would tell us something. It’s been a long time now, Wayne. Whatever’s happened to him, kids are afraid to talk. The more time goes on, the more I think something bad musta happened.”
“Well, yes’m, but he could be rat under yer nose, too, and yew woultn’t even know it.”
“I hope that’s right,” Mrs. Hilligiest said. She patted his skinny arm. “I just hope that’s the way it is.”
RUBEN WATSON, A PALE TEEN-AGER with Cupid’s-bow lips and medium-long hair parted in the middle with geometrical precision, lived three blocks east of Heights Boulevard and a mile south of the Hilligiests and the Winkles. Like many boys in the waning neighborhood, he came from a broken home, and he had had his share of difficulties with juvenile authorities. But as the summer of 1971 began, the seventeen-year-old boy seemed to be maturing. His grandmother had bought him a new stereo and a whole new set of clothes, and for the moment he seemed content.
On Tuesday, August 17, eighty days after David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle had disappeared, Ruben asked his grandmother for money to go to an afternoon movie. She gave him two dollars and seventy-five cents to spend and a few extra dimes in case he had to use a pay phone. A short while later, the boy called his mother at work and told her he would see her at home when she got off at seven-thirty. Then he vanished from the earth.
Winter came and went, and one night an ambitious young man of eighteen years completed his shift at Long John Silver’s restaurant on Yale Street. Frank Aguirre, slightly walleyed, with crow-black hair, was determined to finish high school, and he had just two months to go. He worked steadily, invested some of his money in a 1967 Rambler and put the rest aside. His girl friend, Rhonda Williams, was only fourteen, but the serious young man had already proposed marriage. His mother told him they were both too immature and urged him to finish school first and get a job. Frank accepted the advice and worked harder than ever.
On this evening of March 24, 1972, nearly ten months after the disappearance of Malley Winkle and David Hilligiest, Frank called home and reported that he would arrive by 10 P.M. AS usual, he tried to allay his mother’s anxieties. “He would always let me know where he was and would knock on my door to let me know when he got home at night because he knew I would worry about him,” she said. But that night he failed to knock, and the next morning he was still not home.
Young Aguirre and his family had lived earlier on Twenty-eighth Street, close to the Hilligiests and the Winkles and Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and the boy had kept up his friendships in the area. Now the same teen-age children who had been pondering the disappearance of the others talked about the newest departure. As before, there was immediate disdain for the runaway theory. “What could Frank do anyplace else that he couldn’t do here?” asked seventeen-year-old Johnny Reyna. “And besides, him and Rhonda was gonna get married.”
Rhonda Williams herself, a cherub with the face and figure of an early Brigitte Bardot, had waited inconsolably for word from her fiance, but there was neither message nor letter nor phone call. “Somethin’ has to be wrong,” the tearful girl told her friends.
A boy talked about Frank: “I used to borrow money from him and the next day he’d want it back. Why would a guy like that leave town without picking up his paycheck at Long John’s? Why would a guy like that leave his car on the parking lot without ever coming back to get it?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said a precocious girl named Sheila Hines, one of the leaders of the neighborhood teen society, and Rhonda’s best friend. Sheila pronounced final judgment on the matter: “Frank didn’t run away. Frank couldn’t do nothin’ like that to Rhonda. Somethin’ funny’s goin’ on.”
THE TEEN-AGE BOYS OF THE HEIGHTS were called names like Vernon, Greg, Marty, Ricky, Lamar, Ronnie or Wayne, less often old standards like John, James, William or Frank. There were hardly any Jonathans or Seans, Brads or Terences; these were considered too suburban, too precious. Every year a few old-fashioned names like Elmer, Chester, Homer and Ruben were preserved in birth records for another generation, and newborns were still tagged with agglutinations like Marty Ray, Johnny Ray and Frankie Ray, or Jim Bob, Jackie Lee and Billy Joe.
Most Heights boys dressed as plainly as their names, the common factor being a lack of funds. In schools like Alexander Hamilton Junior High, at the northern end of Heights Boulevard, the boys were as drab as the fifty-year-old building. Flashy dressers in platform soles and mod shirts and pimpish floppy hats were regarded as effeminate; teachers gave close attention to length of hair and considered a boy well attired if he wore clean jeans, Hush-puppy shoes or sneakers and a T-shirt with no more than a few holes. Form followed function, and function was the first consideration in all matters.
The boys of The Heights were more likely to express individuality in their bicycles, ranging from homemade models put together with spare parts and salvaged wire up to Peugeot ten-speed racers at a hundred and fifty dollars the copy. Some of the older boys had motor scooters and “choppers,” long stretched-out motorcycles, and at the top of the teen-age society were aristocrats with old Fords and Chevrolets (called “Shivs”), clunker Buicks and Chryslers worth a few hundred dollars on used-car lots, or a rare Corvette or foreign sports car, usually on its last wheels and kept rolling only by the most sedulous attentions.
These creaking vehicles served as the rallying points of a highly mobile neighborhood youth culture. “On Saturday night we usually get in Vernon’s car and cruise down Yale to Houston Avenue,” a sixteen-year-old boy related. “There’d be maybe four or five of us, mostly boys, sometimes a girl if she was all right. We’d go over to Shepherd and all the way out towards Alabama, where there’s movies and drive-ins and a lot of kids. We’d just keep repeating that same drive over and over. All the people we know around here, if you want to meet ’em on Saturday night you just ride around like that, and in ten, fifteen minutes you’ll pass ’em all, and then you
pull up and rap. ‘Hey, what’re y’all gonna do tonight?’ Stuff like that. Somebody’d say, ‘Come on, we cain’t sit here and talk all night,’ and we’d drive to the reservoir, seventeen miles out on the Katy Freeway, and sit around and talk some more and maybe have a beer and a red, but the sheriff wants you away from there by ten, so maybe we’d drive back to the freeway and race and drag and harse around. There’s no speed cops to worry about. At midnight, we’d go to a movie, the Beatles, the Stones, Frankenstein, Godzilla, and pop a few more pills, and when the movie let out around two, we’d do some more cruising, see who was up, try to think of something else to do, and maybe pop a couple more pills and get a bite to eat. Usually we’d be nodding out on the backseat by then, and we’d go home around four or five in the morning nice and quiet and sleep till three.”
Among the parents, there was a shortage of beneficent martinets like the Hilligiests, not because of disregard or callousness, but because life had simply worn most of them out. At heart, most Heights’ parents were unpretentious country folk, engaged in a life-or-death struggle for existence in an alien place at a hectic time; they were in the city but not of it. The desideratum of their days was to snap open a can of Lone Star beer and watch Hee Haw or Hawaii Five-O or their own counterpart in the borough of Queens, Archie Bunker. Adversity had most of them by the throat; they reared their children as Geraldine Winkle did, improvising all the way, madly searching for trustworthy, low-cost baby-sitters and the money to pay them, keeping one eye open and one eye closed and praying to God that nothing went wrong. Like Mrs. Winkle, they recited reassuring litanies (“I raised Malley right, I was mother and father to him, I taught him right from wrong”), and like Mrs. Winkle they sometimes came home to find that the child was in jail, or gone for good.
