by Jack Olsen
“Well, then, you should be glad things happened the way they did,” Siebeneicher said.
“How’s that?” the boy asked.
“Because if they hadn’t, we might be digging you out of the ground tonight.”
Henley hid his face in his hands and wailed.
Inside the shed, something caught the practiced eye of Larry Earls as the two trusties began shoveling dirt back into the emptied grave. “Hold on!” he said. “Try digging a little farther down, under where the body was.”
The prisoners dug mud that had been drenched in body fluids. They removed a few more inches and began scraping against old bones. A skeleton lay in a fetid aspic of muck.
Lieutenant Breck Porter was waiting in the office to coordinate developments in the case, and a detective telephoned him to report the second body. “Goddamn!” Porter said. “Keep diggin’! I’m comin’ right out. How’s that Mexican dragline workin’?”
The detective said that the “Mexican dragline,” Texas vernacular for laborers with shovels, was falling apart, that one of the laborers had already expressed strong misgivings and the other was suffering delirium tremens. “Try to keep ’em goin’ a little longer,” Porter said. “I’ll run by the jail and pick you up beaucoup more.”
It had grown dark, and a fire engine arrived at the shed with floodlights and a fan. Assisted by sweating detectives, the unhappy trusties began digging to the right of the first grave, closer to the center of the shed, at a spot where the sandy earth looked broken. Eight inches down they came to a layer of lime, and below the lime they found the bodies of two more teen-age boys, buried recently. One had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon. The other had been strangled with a Venetian-blind cord, still knotted in a tight noose around his neck. The mouth was open so wide that all the upper and lower teeth showed. “Poor kid,” a detective said, shaking his head slowly. “He died straining for air.”
“Straining for air,” said Larry Earls, “or screaming.”
On the parking area outside No. 11, the owner of Southwest Boat Storage had walked up. “If it’s not too much trouble,” Mayme Meynier said to Karl Siebeneicher, “could I find out what’s going on?”
The detective showed his identification and nodded toward Henley, still sitting on a patch of grass with his head tucked into his knees and his cuffed hands obscuring his face. “If that boy’s telling the truth, ma’am, there may be a lot of bodies buried in the floor of that stall,” Siebeneicher said.
Mrs. Meynier shuddered. “Why, he was the nicest person you’ll ever meet!” she said. “He had the most infectious smile you’ll ever see!”
“Yes, ma’am. You mean Corll?”
“Yes. Dean. Why, we were always talking to him. Just a week or two ago he offered to give me some plants. He’d go out of his way to visit with me.”
Siebeneicher asked how long Dean Corll had been renting the shed, and Mrs. Meynier made a hurried round-trip to her house to examine the records. “Since November 17, 1970, at twenty dollars a month,” she said, “and never a bit of trouble.” She said that one day nine cars had pulled up in front of the stall and Corll explained that he was selling a few pieces of furniture, but otherwise there had been nothing untoward. She said Corll visited the shed two or three times a week, sometimes to drop things off, sometimes to work inside. About two months earlier, he had arrived with a young helper and hauled in something “big, black and heavy,” but no one had thought anything of it. Another time Corll sat alone in his van outside the stall for an hour and a half till everyone else left. “He just waited patiently,” Mrs. Meynier said, “and then he got out and began unloading something. We figured it was something he was proud of, or something he didn’t want to show.”
There had been a faintly unpleasant odor about the shed, especially after heavy rains, and a neighborhood dog had been making a pest of itself for two years by scratching and whining at the door. The exact contents of No. 11 were unknown, but Mrs. Meynier assumed that Corll had just about filled it. For the last several months, he had been pestering her for more space.
By 9 P.M., reporters from every news outlet in Texas were converging on the scene, and Siebeneicher moved Henley to the backseat of one of the Pasadena police cars. The boy was alternating between fits of garrulity and fits of depression, and sometimes his head slumped over and his mouth hung open, as though he were comatose. Siebeneicher assumed that the young prisoner was experiencing a post-acrylic reaction, and left him in the company of a few friendly reporters. The interview began slowly, with Henley sounding like a Watergate witness, offering airy tergiversations. But after a while he seemed willing to tell the whole story.
While reporters took hurried notes and poked microphones in his face, the boy told how he had met Corll through a mutual friend “a year ago last winter” and since then had stayed often at Corll’s house. He admitted that he had visited the shed more than once, that just a month earlier “me and Dean was here workin’ on the Camaro and carryin’ out dirt.”
A reporter asked how he earned his living. “Well, I was in asphalt pavin’ till the end of April,” he said with a note of pride. “Since then I been doin’ odd jobs, movin’, stripin’. I was suppose to go to work this mornin’ on one of mah jobs.”
He was asked what his family thought about his friendship with the older man. “Oh, nothin’,” the boy said. “My mama, she liked ol’ Dean a lot.” He said he had gone “huntin’ and partyin’ in East Texas over the weekend, so I didn’t see Dean then. Usually he’d come by in the afternoon and we’d go drank a beer at least every other day. Yesterday he took me to mah driver’s ed class in Bellaire. He was always doin’ nice thangs like ’at.”
Henley said that he and Corll had decided to pull up stakes and “travel together, jes’ git in the van and git lost for a spell.” The scheduled departure date was less than three weeks off. “Dean tol’ me he was in some kind of a organization that he could git a lot of money, thousands and thousands of dollars. I never rilly believed it, ’cause Dean lived poor. All he had was a old TV, no stereo, jes’ a transistor radio. He’d be broke onct a month when the bills come in.”
Henley glanced warily toward the shed and asked, “Are they still diggin’ up boys in there?” A reporter told him that the body count had reached four.
“Four?” Wayne said in a surprised voice.
“Any idea who they could be?” a television cameraman asked.
Henley appeared to think deeply. “Let’s see,” he said. “There ’uz Charles and Marty, that’s two, and David Hilligiest was missin’, that’s three, and—oh, yeh, I forgot! When David went away, back a couple years ago, he had a kid name of Malley with him. Neither one’s been seen since. Yeh, I remember Malley’s picture with David on the wanted posters.”
Shortly before 10 P.M., with four bodies unearthed and the digging proceeding in a far corner of the shed, Henley began to show marked signs of nervousness. “He’s so jumpy,” one reporter told another, “he’s afraid to be left alone in the car.”
A newspaperman peeked into the darkened vehicle. Henley was slumped over, repeating, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me! If you gotta leave me, then please send somebody else to set with me.” A few minutes later, the boy said, “When are they gonna take me back to jail? I’m gittin’ close to the edge. I gotta awful headache. I’m rilly spaced out.” The reporter noticed that his pupils were dilated, his head rolled loosely on his neck, and his speech was even more slurred than usual. Around ten o’clock, a second Pasadena team arrived and drove the shaken boy away.
Back in a corner of the shed, bare-chested trusties and detectives with handkerchiefs over their faces slowly penetrated what appeared to be a multiple grave, about six by twelve feet, topped by the characteristic layer of lime. One by one the bodies of young men came into sight, most of them in advanced states of decomposition, each wrapped neatly in its own plastic. One had been buried sitting up, two others in the fetal position, one on its back, a
nd many bones were intermingled. Detectives wearing surgical gloves knelt under the fire department floodlights and groped for bits of rotten flesh and crumbling bone, fighting nausea and hoping that they were not mixing up the final remains. Hardly a word was spoken; giant shadows danced against the serrated inner walls, and exhausted men shook their heads and wiped their eyes and tried to muffle their gasps of shock and horror with each succeeding find. They had all seen death, but none had encountered the wholesale transfiguration of rollicking boys into reeking sacks of carrion.
Near midnight, a total of eight bodies had been removed, and most of the sandy earth was still undisturbed. Lieutenant Breck Porter, his cherubic face daubed with gray mud, shouted, “Goddamn it, that’s enough!”
His men dropped their shovels, and the trusties hurried toward the open air.
“We’re stinkin’ like a buncha Goddamn skunks,” Porter said. “Let’s quit till tomorrow.”
A uniformed guard was posted at the door, the floodlights were doused, and one by one the police and fire vehicles pulled away toward the distant glow of Houston.
Just before leaving for his nighttime job at the post office, Vern Cobble had heard fragments of a radio report about bodies in a shed in southwest Houston. At first, he failed to associate the news with his son and Marty Ray Jones, now missing for two weeks. But as he slogged through the evening’s routine at the post office, he found himself thinking back on the announcer’s words. He realized that there might be full details on television at ten, and he wanted to make sure that his wife was spared the ordeal of watching. He called homicide for the latest information, and a detective told him that bodies were indeed coming out of the earth and that Charles Cobble and Marty Ray Jones were believed to be two of them. “Well, how in the world do you know that?” Vern asked in a weak voice.
“We have good information,” the detective answered.
“Any doubt?”
“Hardly any.”
It was five minutes after ten when Cobble dialed home and told his wife, “I’m feeling a little sick.”
“What’s the matter?” Betty asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vern lied. “Just a little upset. I’ll come on home in a while.”
“Have you seen the news?”
“Don’t watch it!” Cobble blurted out.
“I’ve already watched it,” Betty said. “Do you think it’s them?”
Vern hesitated, then said slowly, “Yes, it’s them. They’re sure it’s them.”
Betty said she had known the truth the instant the bag of clothes had been held up on the TV screen. “One of the shirts was the same color as one Charles wore a lot. I saw somethin’ white, and Charles always wore that one with the sea gull on it, remember? Then I heard them say that one of the victims was the cousin of a homicide detective. Who else could that be but Marty?”
When Vern Cobble put down the phone, he found that he could hardly stand. His eyes brimmed with tears and his hands danced helplessly. For an instant he imagined that he was dreaming, that he was about to wake up and regain control of himself, but just as suddenly he realized that he was wide awake and Charles was dead. He slumped to the floor and nearly lost consciousness. The night foreman, Roosevelt Ross, rushed over. “Charles is dead,” Cobble murmured, and Ross lifted him to his feet and half carried him to an enclosed office. Two postal inspectors were inside. “Would you please get out of this office?” Ross asked.
The men hesitated.
“I said ‘Get out!’” the foreman shouted, and the inspectors scurried through the door. The nurse was called and the stricken Vern Cobble was placed under sedation.
That afternoon, the Hilligiest family had gone to the funeral of Dorothy’s sister, and the close couple sat up in the evening chatting and exchanging memories of the dead woman. As usual, Fred had to be at work at sunup, striping another parking lot before heavy traffic began, and at 10 P.M. he went to bed. Dorothy was sitting alone, mourning her newest loss, when the telephone rang. “Mrs. Hilligiest,” a friend said, “have you heard the news? They found bodies buried out at a boat shed.”
“No,” Dorothy said calmly. She had endured the finding of bodies before, and none had turned out to be David’s. “We were just sitting up talking,” she said. “We missed the ten o’clock news.”
“Well, I thought I’d let you know,” the friend said. “Just in case, you know?”
Mrs. Hilligiest said thanks, and put the telephone down, saying to herself, “They surely didn’t find David buried in a boat shed. No, things like that just don’t happen. You read ’em, but they don’t happen to you. When they find David, we’ll be the first to know, not the last.” She repeated the comforting phrases, and at last succeeded in convincing herself that there was nothing to worry about, that the daylight hours would bring relief.
She began undressing, listening to Fred’s deep, even breathing. Thoughts of her sister ran together with thoughts of her son. She tiptoed to the telephone and called a television newsroom, and a busy editor suggested that she check with Houston homicide. She redialed and heard another harassed voice say, “Lieutenant Porter speakin’.”
Dorothy asked if there was anything new on the case of her missing son. Porter said, “Mrs. Hilligiest, it’s very possible that one of these kids they dug up is your boy. I have his file here now.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Ol’ Henley told us.”
“Who?”
“Elmer Wayne Henley, Junior. The boy that shot Dean Corll and started the whole thing unravelin’. Him and this Corll, they been prankin’ now for two, three years.”
“Wayne Henley?” Dorothy Hilligiest exclaimed. “Why, he’s our little neighbor boy!”
“Yes, ma’am. Lived on Twenty-seventh Street.”
“Well, what’s happening out there?” the shocked woman asked.
“It looks like a homosexual thing,” Lieutenant Porter said. “We haven’t even figured it out ourself yet, but it looks like these clowns were molestin’ young boys and then killin’ ’em. Are you alone, Mrs. Hilligiest?”
“My husband’s here.”
“Well, good. We were fixin’ to send someone out to tell you, but since we’ve talked I kin save the trip.”
The lieutenant asked for a full description of the clothes David and Malley Winkle had been wearing, and the names of their dentists, and promised to call again with more information.
Dorothy Hilligiest telephoned the news to Geraldine Winkle’s house a block away, then woke up her husband and told him it appeared their long wait was over. At two-thirty in the morning, the doubly bereaved couple sat comforting each other in their living room, wondering where to turn next. “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” the husband said angrily. “We’re gonna go on down there and see for ourse’ves!”
They drove for thirty minutes to the southern edge of Houston, but they were soon lost in a maze of twisting suburban streets and ancient farm roads and superhighways and dead ends. They were cruising aimlessly when a police car sped by with its roof light pulsating bright blue. Fred spun his car and followed on a hunch. A few minutes later both cars pulled up in front of the L-shaped shed, silhouetted low and squat against the stars. Hilligiest asked for information, and the policemen explained that they were just relieving the other guards and knew nothing themselves.
Dorothy and Fred peered toward the black outline of the sheds, but all they could make out was an opening where the two big doors had been swung open, and a uniformed policeman puffing on the stub of a cigaret. “Can we go in?” they called out, and the policeman said he was sorry, but he had his orders. The unhappy couple drove back home and made coffee for another all-night vigil. The years had prepared them.
BEFORE HE HAD DRIVEN HALFWAY to headquarters Thursday morning, Detective James Tucker heard portents of a bad day. Not that the previous night had produced any rich memories; he had fidgeted around the living room while fellow detectives worked the most specta
cular crime in Houston’s history, a case that he could have been working himself, except for an easygoing lieutenant who had let him off early. Now, he supposed, he would be permitted the privilege of cleaning up the paper work. Detective Tucker, formerly Clerk Tucker of the police records office, was the fastest typist in homicide, and much in demand when tedious details mounted up. “Yes, sir,” he complained to himself as he headed toward headquarters, “they’ll surely have plenty of work for Ol’ Fastfingers this morning.”
The car radio told him that eight bodies had been dug from the shed so far. Momentarily, he tinkered with the idea of driving straight to the scene and announcing that he had been assigned, but the homicide division was not yet an anarchy—although it sometimes seemed so—and he drove on toward the downtown office. The newscaster went on to say that Houston officers had shot and killed two men the night before, another dark cloud on the coming day. The hours following such unfortunate events were always hectic, with statements and counterstatements in triplicate and quadruplicate and witnesses trooping in and out and assistant district attorneys demanding all sorts of information, including the shoe sizes of the victims and the drinking habits of the officers involved.
“Some days it doesn’t pay to breathe,” he told his partner, Jack Hamel, when they met in the office.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Hamel said. “They’ll be callin’ us over to CID any minute. Gotta take a statement from somebody.”
CID was the intelligence center of the police department, the unit that kept track of radicals, subversives, “Comsymps” and other potential blots on the commonweal. Other policemen called the CID agents “superspooks.” “That’s the place where they have a voice-activated door,” a detective described it. “You have to use a code to get in. You say something like ‘F-23’ and the door opens. A strange group of folks! None of ’em have names. They all have numbers. Weird!”
Jim Tucker glanced around the homicide bullpen and noticed that every light on the telephone consoles was blinking and several detectives were answering calls frenetically. “What’s going on?” Tucker asked.
