by Jack Olsen
In the first apartment we lived in at Westcott Towers I think that there were two boys killed. These were both young boys from The Heights area but I don’t know their names. Wayne accidentally shot one of them. This was about seven A.M. I was in the other room asleep when this happened. Dean told me that Wayne had just come in waving the .22 and accidentally shot one of the boys in the jaw. The bullet just went in a little and then it was just under the skin. They didn’t kill the boy right then. They killed these two boys later on that day.
Dean moved to the Princessa Apartments on Wirt and I remember him getting one boy there by himself. He wanted me to help him but I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want to mess with this one because I had someplace I wanted to go so I tried to get him mad so he would leave but he wanted to stay.
Dean grabbed the boy and within three minutes of when he grabbed him I was gone. At that time I was using Dean’s car so I was in and out all the time. After the Princessa Apartments Dean moved to Pasadena. I know of two that were killed there. One was from Baton Rouge and one was a small blond boy from South Houston. I saw the boy from South Houston for about forty-five minutes. I took him a pizza and then I left and he wanted me to come back. I wasn’t there when either of these two boys were killed. I did come in just after Dean had killed the boy from Baton Rouge, that one was a different day from the blond boy.
In all, I guess there were between twenty-five and thirty boys killed and they were buried in three different places.
I was present and helped bury many of them but not all of them. Most of them were buried at the boat stall. There were three or four buried at Sam Rayburn, I think, I am sure that there are two up there. On the first one at Sam Rayburn I helped bury them. Then the next one we took to Sam Rayburn when we got there Dean and Wayne found that the first one had come to the surface and either a foot or a hand was above the ground. When they buried this one the second time they put some type of sheet on top of him to keep him down.
The third place that they were buried was on the beach at High Island. This was right off the Winnie exit where the road goes to the beach. You turn east on the beach road and go till the pavement changes which is about a quarter or a half of a mile and the bodies are on the right-hand side of the highway about fifteen or twenty yards off of the road. I never actually buried one here but I always drove the car. I know that one of the graves had a large rock on top of it. I think that there were five or more bodies buried at this location.
The bodies at the beach are in a row down the beach for perhaps half a mile or so. I am willing to show officers where this location is and I will try to locate as many of the graves as possible.
I regret that this happened and I’m sorry for the kids’ families.
Brooks finished reading and put the statement down unsigned. “What’s the matter?” Tucker asked. “Did I get it wrong?”
“No,” the boy said. “I’d just like to talk to my father first.”
The detective ushered Alton Brooks into the room and left the two alone. After a few minutes, the father came out and said to Tucker, “I’m gonna tell you what I asked mah son, and he’s assured me. I’ve tole him to cooperate, and the only thang I wanted him to do was tell me he hadn’t taken a human life.” Tears formed in the man’s eyes and his voice broke. “He’s assured me that he hasn’t, and I believe he’s tellin’ me the truth.”
The two men walked back into the office, and with the father as a witness, David signed the statement. Alton’s shoulders began to shake. “It’s all right, Daddy,” the boy said.
“No,” Alton Brooks said, “it’s not all right, son. I wouldn’t blame some of them parents if they come up here and shot me.” David tried to offer comfort, but his father cried on.
At their motel in the small town of San Augustine, the visiting Houston detectives were roused from their beds at 6:30 A.M. by the county sheriff. “Boy, they sure git up early around here!” Willie Young complained. He had scribbled the last word of his notes barely four hours earlier.
In the town square, the detectives found a posse of ten or twelve deputies drinking coffee from thermos jugs and waiting for full daylight. Wayne Henley was eager to go, refreshed by his night of barbiturated sleep. “Hey,” he said to Willie Young, “yew ’member when I called for a doctor last evenin’? Well, I was jes’ kiddin’. I felt fine all the time. I jes’ wanted to see if y’all’d git one for me.”
The boy’s hot dark eyes glowered from under rumpled hair that covered his head in squiggly rat’s tails. The group piled into cars and pickup trucks and drove to the Angelina National Forest and the tall pines, serene and aromatic. Crickets and cicadas whirred in the weeds, and somewhere in the distance a rooster cued the dawn. Two more bodies were found, numbers twenty and twenty-one of the case, teen-age boys like the others.
Wayne Henley waited in the back of an unmarked police car, his arms on his knees, his head resting on his arms and moving rhythmically up and down, as though he were sobbing to himself. By this time Willie Young and his fellow officers had become accustomed to the young prisoner’s mood swings, and they let him cry himself out. After the bodies had been removed to hearses and dispatched to the county medical examiner’s office, reporters demanded interviews with the young killer. A sheriff’s deputy conferred with Henley and then beckoned for silence. “He’s perfectly willing to attempt to answer your questions,” the deputy said. “Please don’t crowd in. Take your time. Give him a little time to answer you, and don’t shoot any pictures right in his face. This is his request.”
The newsmen imploded on the car, and Henley, his eyes red and his face still damp, answered their questions in a singsong voice. It was plain that he was contemptuous of the whole process and eager to cut it short.
“Wayne, what happened here?” a reporter asked.
“Boys were buried,” Henley snapped, as if to say that the question barely deserved an answer.
“Why were they buried here?”
“Dean Corll decided he wanted to have sex with ’em. They wouldn’t let him, so he kilt ’em and brought ’em out here and buried ’em.”
“Why here, Wayne?”
“His folks had a place out here. He said his boat storage place was full.”
“How many more bodies do we have out here, Wayne?”
“None.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I’m not sure. None to mah knowledge.”
“Were you aware what was going on for the last couple of years?”
“A year ago last winter.”
“How many people did Dean tell you that he killed?”
“I cain’t total it. Twenty-four, I believe.”
“Did he pay you to bring the boys over to his house?”
“Suppose to have,” Henley said disgustedly.
“Did he ever pay you?”
“No.”
“Two hundred dollars?”
“That was the beginnin’ price.”
“Did he pay you any?”
“Some,” the boy said, contradicting himself.
“How did you meet Dean?”
“David Brooks.”
“Who else is involved that we could talk to that might shed some light on this?”
“No names anymore,” the boy said with the hauteur of a superior.
“Do you know where the bodies might be buried on High Island?”
“Approximately. I kin give ’em an area.”
“What area?”
Henley looked around, annoyed. He conveyed the impression that the press was intruding on a sacred relationship. “That’s between me and the police,” he said curtly.
“How have you been treated since you reached the San Augustine police department?” a local reporter asked.
“They’ve been great. Couldn’t ask for better.” For the first time in the interview, he sounded momentarily warm and friendly, but he quickly returned to his Olympian stance when a newsman asked how old the boys were.
&nbs
p; “Teen-agers,” he said.
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“Somew’ar,” he said, in a tone that suggested his lawyer was no more competent than the press.
“Who is he?”
“No names.”
“Wayne, are you sorry about all this?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said impatiently.
“Wayne, were the boys dead when you brought them up here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How were they killed?”
“Shot, choked.”
“With a twenty-two?”
“Twenty-two.”
By now Henley was making it plain with his brusque answers that the interview was over, but the reporters bored in.
“Were they killed in Houston and then brought up to the San Augustine area?” someone called from the rear.
“These here, Pasadena.”
“Any of them knifed?”
“No.”
“What happened previous to the killings?”
Henley sighed. “He had sex with ’em,” he said.
“Is that all? Any torture?”
“Supposedly,” he said.
“What kind of torture?”
“Mostly jes’ pickin’. It wasn’t what yew would really call torture.”
“Describe it for us.”
Henley paused. “No details,” he snapped.
“Have you made a complete statement of all you can recall?”
“As complete as I could at the time.”
“Was this under any duress?”
“Any what?” A look of confusion crossed his face.
The reporter laughed and said, “There was no pressure, no force used on you?”
“No, sir.” The boy’s voice took on a cloying tone. “These men haven’t had to force me, haven’t had to holler at me, and I haven’t had any reason to feel bad at ’em.”
Another reporter wanted to know why he had phoned his mother two nights before and told her about killing Corll.
“She deserves to know,” he said in the familiar singsong delivery.
The reporter pressed the point. “She acted like she sort of knew the situation,” he said. “She wasn’t too surprised.”
Henley’s voice rose in annoyance. “That’s between me and her!” he said. “It’s none of yer business.”
“And your brothers were aware, too, weren’t they?” another newsman insisted.
“That’s none of yer business either!” Henley snorted.
“Wayne,” someone asked in a softer voice, “how do you feel about this whole ordeal?”
“Pretty grotesque.”
“What do you mean by that?” the same reporter asked.
Henley’s dark eyes blazed. “Do yew read the dictionary?” he said churlishly.
The reporter said, “No, I don’t—”
“Wayne,” another interrupted quickly, “you been carrying this around with you for a long time. Didn’t you almost crack several times?”
“Yep,” the boy said softly.
“How come this time?”
“This time,” he said in a voice quaking with self-pity, “I just haven’t felt like I was gonna be able to hold mah sanity much longer.”
“What provoked you that night for you to decide to tell it all?”
“I jes’ think I owe these people this much,” he answered piously, “to let ’em know what’s happened to their boys.”
“How do you feel about it now?”
Henley seemed genuinely disturbed by the question. “I don’t know how to put it,” he said.
“These boys out here, are they from the Houston area?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you and the other gentleman pick them all up and take ’em to this house, or did the other fellow get some of them?”
“He got some.”
“But you took most of them?”
“Oh, he was with us.”
“What did you tell these boys when you took them there?”
“Gonna go visit, party a li’l”
“Did you have any girls?”
“No.”
‘Is it true he got mad because you brought a girl that last time?”
“Yes. I brought the girl to keep her while she run away. There was no bad intentions to her.” Detectives nodded. Henley had told them several times earlier that he wanted to correct any false impressions about Rhonda’s behavior, that she was a good, moral person and his own motivation had been strictly to help her.
“But this is the first time you took a girl, right?” a newsman asked.
“I’ve taken girls there before. I’ve never tried to keep one there.” Something amused him, and he laughed.
“Why was he angry this time?”
“I wasn’t suppose to brought her till the seventeenth.”
“What was gonna happen on the seventeenth?”
“That’s when she decided that’s when she wanted to run away. She said the seventeenth, the week afterwards. I don’t know whar’ she picked the date.”
“Wayne,” a dogged reporter broke in, beckoning toward the pine forest, “are there more bodies in there?”
“In whar’?”
“In the woods.”
“Not to mah knowledge.”
“Who would know, Wayne?”
“Dean Corll.”
“Anybody else?”
He reverted to the clipped delivery. “No more names.”
“Did you ever bring your brothers over to Dean’s house?”
“No. My li’l brother Paul had been there at Westcott in Houston mebbe onct, mebbe twice.”
“What kind of man was Dean?”
“Dean was a nice—He was reserved, quiet, enjoyed hisself. The man that did these killin’s was somethin’ else.”
“Your mother said he was like a father to you. Is that the way you depict him?”
Henley pondered the question. “Ummmmm, no, it was more of a brother-type person, somebody I could talk to.”
“Apparently you respected Dean.”
“At one time,” he said in the manner of a person who has been seriously let down by a friend.
“Then why did you kill him?”
The boy answered in a higher pitch, as though defending himself against an outrageous charge. “I was tired of him doin’ thangs like that, and it was either me or him rat then.”
“Did you ever try to talk him out of this?”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“Oh, he would go so far and then he’d drop it. A little bit later he’d come up again.” Reporters guessed that Henley meant Corll would come up to The Heights again, looking for boys.
“Do you think that sometimes he was a different person? How did he change? What caused the change sometimes?”
“He had a lust for blood,” Henley said slowly.
“When you didn’t get paid after bringing the boys there, why didn’t you stop?”
There was a long silence, and the boy said, “No comment.”
“Wayne, how often were there parties?”
“Whenever we’d git ready to.” He was beginning to sound bored and truculent once more. But when a reporter asked how the parties were financed, his voice took on a note of self-satisfaction. “Dean didn’t necessarily finance all these parties,” he said. “Now David Brooks lived most of his life off Dean, but I worked.”
“Where did you work?”
“In different places.”
“Dean,” a confused newsman asked, “were there drugs involved in these murders?”
Henley pounced. “I’m Wayne,” he said sarcastically.
“Wayne,” another reporter asked, “were most of the people homosexual?”
A sheriff’s deputy held up his hand and said, “That’s enough, gentlemen.”
“That’s—No comment,” Henley said as he slumped back on the seat of the car.
The beach at High Island lay three hours to the south of Lake Sam
Rayburn, and Willie Young and the Pasadena detectives decided it was time to begin the long drive to the next burial site. On the way, Henley talked with the lawmen and soon regained his good spirits. “He seemed to like it in the car, surrounded by detectives, jawin’ his head off,” Young said later. “He acted like a li’l ol’ puppy.”
The driver stopped for gas and Young bought a copy of the Beaumont Enterprise with its massive front-page coverage of the case. “Hey, lemme see that!” Henley said. “I unnerstan’ the papers been sayin’ some wrong thangs.” Willie Young handed over the front section, and the boy began reading excitedly, interrupting himself every paragraph or two with a complaint.
“Lookee here!” he said. “Why, this makes Rhonda sound like a whore! That’s unfa’r! That’s not true!”
Young saw that the boy was becoming agitated again, and regretted letting him read the newspaper.
“And lookee here!” Henley went on. “Isn’t that the most disgustin’ thang yew ever saw?”
“What?” Willie Young asked.
“They wrote my name without the ‘Junior’ on it,” Henley said. “Look! Calls me Elmer Wayne Henley. Elmer Wayne Henley! That’s my daddy!”
The boy perused the articles several times, and gradually his ire seemed to fade. He laughed and showed Young an item about the pleasures of middle age. “I know I’m gonna be sent away,” he said, “and I’ll be about forty when I git out. Mebbe they’ll take me in the Army.”
It was nearly noon when the car crossed the Intracoastal Waterway and approached the village of High Island. The community water tower, a dull silver-gray against the Gulf sun, bore the word “CARDINALS” splotched in maroon paint. Black Angus and whitefaced Hereford cattle munched lazily in meadows dotted with steel “nodding horses,” sucking the final drops of oil from an old wildcat field that was nearly played out. Most of the habitations were on stilts or pilings. High Island was anything but high; it was a foot or two above sea level, and an occasional hurricane sent sheets of salt water cascading across the meadows. The downtown section consisted of a handful of commercial establishments flanking the two-lane Highway 124. Babineaux’s, an overgrown tin shack partly covered with flaking paint, advertised “DANCING NIGHTLY.” The sign on a bait shack read “SHRIMP SQUID MULLET,” and in the front window of Nancy’s Cafe a cardboard placard reminded citizens that “THE REVELATIONS, GOSPEL MUSIC EVANGELISTS, ARE COMING TO THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, HIGH ISLAND.” The Revelations were from Lake Charles, Louisiana, a two-hour drive around the scimitar curve of the Gulf. It was not every weekend that High Island’s three hundred citizens could look forward to live entertainment from out of town.
