by Jack Olsen
We took the body out of the box, that is, Dean did, and I held the boy’s feet about halfway to the grave. The body was already wrapped in plastic. I went back to the van to get the carpet and a flashlight. The carpet is to shovel extra dirt on and take it someplace else so there wouldn’t be a mound showing.
I almost took too much dirt off and Dean griped at me for it.
“You’re sure it’s okay now?” Tucker asked.
“It’s okay now,” Brooks said.
“Well, let’s go back to jail.” He returned the blond-haired boy to his cell and headed toward homicide.
“Hey,” Brooks called out. “Hey, come here a minute.”
“Yeh?” Tucker asked.
“Listen, will you come back and see me tomorrow morning? I mean, I’d really ‘predate it. I really don’t like to sit in jail all the time.”
Tucker knew he faced another couple of hours writing supplementaries on the case, and he would not reach home till at least 3 A.M. “Okay,” he said, and returned to his tyrant typewriter.
Late that night, Horace “Jimmy” Lawrence was sitting alone in his cottage on Thirty-first Street, a few blocks north of The Heights, when the telephone rang. “Jimmy,” a friend said anxiously, “I’m sorry. I was so shocked to hear about Billy.”
“Whatcha mean?” Jimmy said. As far as he knew, Billy was still working in Austin, and would soon be back for school.
“They found Billy’s body up at Lake Sam Rayburn!” the woman said.
Lawrence said slowly, “What the hail are you talking about?”
“Oh, my God, Jimmy, you didn’t know?” the anguished woman said. “You wait right there! I’ll be over.”
Jimmy sat alone, puzzled by the conversation. He decided that the upset woman must have heard a garbled news report, or perhaps was under the influence. Jimmy Lawrence knew that his son’s body had not been found at Lake Sam Rayburn or anyplace else. If it had, he would have heard from his friends in the Houston police department. Lawrence had once been a deputy sheriff, and he knew dozens of lawmen. If anything went wrong, he would be one of the first to find out.
The phone rang again, and another friend offered condolences.
“Man, what are you talking about?” Jimmy said. “Where are you hearing all this?”
“On the radio, Jimmy,” the man said. “They said Billy’s body was found up in San Augustine County.”
Lawrence put through a call to John Hoyt, sheriff of San Augustine. “John, what’s going on up there?” he asked.
“You mean you haven’t heard?” Hoyt said. “They think they found your boy.”
“They couldn’ta found my boy,” Jimmy Lawrence said. “He’s got him a job over at Austin.”
“Well, give me his description,” the sheriff said. Minutes later he returned to the phone. “Jimmy,” he said gently, “they say the body has that same little V in the front teeth. And you know the young fellow that showed ’em where to dig? Wayne Henley? Well, he said that Billy was one of the boys they killed.”
Lawrence was stunned. It seemed impossible, but Hoyt sounded positive. “Jimmy,” Hoyt said again, “I hate to be the one to tell you, but they know for sure. One of the bodies is your son.”
Jimmy put the phone down in a daze. He sat in his darkened living room and waited for his friends, and by the time they arrived, he was doubled over with asthma.
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Jim Tucker rolled over in bed and thought about driving downtown to pay his promised visit to David Brooks. Like most of the other detectives involved in the case, he was off duty over the weekend, and he was exhausted from the heavy action of the last two days. He rolled over and went back to sleep; David Brooks would have to wait. Almost the entire homicide division stayed home that weekend, resting in the knowledge that the bodies were going nowhere, the culprits were either dead or in custody, and Monday would be soon enough to get back on the case.
ON MONDAY MORNING, a digging party under the direction of a country sheriff named Louis Otter convened at High Island beach under the watchful eyes of several hundred reporters, cameramen and spectators and four or five helicopters carrying television newsmen. The sheriff, a lean middle-aged man in straw hat and boots and a thick leather belt with his name hammered into it, strutted around emitting local color. A national news correspondent asked him what was on the schedule.
“Well, me and them deputies gonna play marbles, and the rest of these guys gonna work,” Otter said in his Texas tidewater accent “I’m gonna win, ’cause I was marble kang when I went to skewl.”
He spoke above the noise of a Galion 118 road grader, ten feet high with a twelve-foot blade, its Diesel exhaust stack emitting smoke and its eggyolk-yellow frame shivering from one end to the other with restrained power. “Now ’member,” the sheriff shouted at the hard-hatted driver, “we ain’t gonna dig it all! If we did, we’d be here till David blowed his trumpet.”
A deputy reported that civilian cars were parked along the strip where the machine was going to trench. “Deputy,” Otter drawled, “go up and git those cars moved offa there, and if they don’t move, jes’ let that blade run rat over ’em.” He turned to the man jouncing atop the grader. “Got the idee?” he barked. “You’re the boss. You’re gonna have to move a lot of sand today. Lay it up!”
The machine chugged over to the line where the salt grass met the sandy beach and began slicing a layer while the sheriff and a deputy followed in an open Jeep looking for streaks of lime or remnants of the dead. About thirty yards east of the two Friday graves, the blade ripped out a hank of black hair and a leg bone, and a digging party exhumed the jumbled remains of a boy.
Two miles up the beach, in another county, a truck driver took a deputy to a spot where he had observed mysterious goings on about eight months before. He had noticed a car stuck in the sand, and when he had offered assistance, a young man who looked like Wayne Henley had rudely waved him away. The incident stuck in his mind, and he pointed out a mound near the same spot. A long stick was inserted deep into the sand and an unmistakable odor wafted into the breeze. Three feet down, at the edge of the salt grass, a work crew unearthed the body of another young man, hands folded and tied across his stomach, ankles crossed and bound tightly. The boy wore blue jeans, and one pocket was crammed with hand-loaded rounds of .270 caliber ammunition. A pair of scissors hung from his belt. The cause of death was apparent: four or five heavy-caliber slugs had torn the boy’s rib cage apart. Detectives theorized that the victim had been hunting at the beach, had stumbled on a burial scene, and had been executed with his own rifle. The truck driver who pointed out the spot was lucky to be alive.
The discoveries of Monday morning brought the total number of bodies to twenty-five, the same number attributed to the farmlabor foreman Juan Corona in California. “That ties Corona!” a newspaperman said excitedly. Later in the day, diggers uncovered a pair of bodies lashed together with cord, one atop the other, the skulls wrapped in plastic, not far from where Sheriff Otter and his men had been searching in the morning. Now Texas had the modern American murder record all to itself.
Detectives called on Wayne Henley and David Brooks in their cells that evening, but the twin waterfalls of self-incrimination had dried. Both suspects had seen lawyers; both had been advised to shut up. “Henley’s a sick man, physically and mentally,” his lawyer said. “I talked to the man, and his actions, prior to and during the whole bizarre events, just point to an extremely diseased mind, with periods where he’s lucid.” Brooks’s lawyer simply noted, “My client will have nothing more to say.”
Henley complained that prisoners were calling him names and cursing him; he said he feared for his life. That night he was transferred to solitary confinement in Houston, and within five minutes every prisoner knew he was there. The opening price on his head was one hundred dollars, a king’s ransom in jailhouse currency.
Good Dude’s
Good Times
The imagination will not down. If it is not a dan
ce, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. —William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel, 1923
ONE BY ONE THE LOST BOYS OF The Heights were accounted for, either in the revelations of Wayne Henley and David Brooks or on the cold slabs in the medical examiner’s laboratory, where the macabre process of identification proceeded under forced draft. As the list of known victims lengthened, the connection with the old neighborhood showed up clearly. Two skeletons from the shed turned out to be young brothers whose parents now lived in Georgia, but who had lived in The Heights in 1971, when the boys had disappeared. Another victim had lived in a trailer court off the northwest corner of The Heights, and two more had been last seen at a religious rally just west of the area. Of the first twenty bodies that were positively identified, only three of the victims lacked a Heights connection: one had been picked up while hitchhiking, another had met Henley at driving school and been invited to “a party,” and a third had vanished while bicycling near Corll’s house in Pasadena.
Each day the local newspapers recorded the latest developments in depth, and TV and radio stations aired “specials” and extended coverage. Certain Houstonians were mortified. It seemed to the well-entrenched booster-and-boomer set that extensive damage was being done by this suppurating boil oozing up through the city’s layer of pancake make-up. They told each other defensively that a lunatic could appear anywhere; The Bayou City had no monopoly on mental illness. Larger questions were ignored: Should a lunatic have been able to run off a string of twenty-seven murders before being exposed, and then only accidentally? Or was there something about Houston and The Heights uniquely conducive to such an unrelieved succession of horrors?
The establishment pulled its wagons into a circle. Local pundits who once had raged at the city’s violence fell strangely silent, as though there were no further civic lessons to be learned from the case. A visiting reporter called the Chamber of Commerce for the latest population figures and was asked who wanted to know and why. When he said that he was preparing a national article on the murders, the chamber spokesman said, “Well, we don’t have a thing to do with that!”
Officials of the Houston Lighting & Power Company, the privately owned utility where Dean Corll had worked, turned reporters away at the door, refusing to discuss any aspect of the case. When a long-haired correspondent from New York appeared in The Heights to ask questions, he was called “a pill freak, a drug addict and a faggot” and was ordered away at gunpoint. One by one the normal news sources were embarrassed into reticence. Relatives of Henley, Brooks and Corll went into tight seclusion, and lawyers for the two young prisoners maintained a policy of total silence. Newsmen who had arrived from as far away as Tokyo and Berlin threw up their hands and went home, leaving the biggest questions of all still unanswered:
Who was Dean Corll? What was he?
The first public information about the former relay tester and candymaker had come in expressions of shock and dismay from people who could not picture him as a cold, maniacal killer. “My folks knew Dean,” a young man said in an aggrieved tone on an FM radio interview. “All my friends knew him, and my friends’ folks knew him, and they never thought anything about him until all this came out in the papers, and then they started looking down on him, which I don’t go for at all. Before that, they always thought Dean was a good dude. He’d help me, he’d help them, anything. And now they put him down so bad it’s unreal. I mean, it really pisses me off that they think he’s just some kind of sadistic killer, and forget all the good about him.”
A friend had a perplexing theory: “The police, they’ve dug up twenty-seven bodies. I think they’re content with that; they want to stop ’cause they’ve beat the record in the United States. There may be more, but they’re just trying to build this up to where they’ve got the biggest mass murder right here in Houston.” There were other implied suggestions that poor Dean Corll was somehow the victim of a malicious publicity campaign, or a stab in the back by his accomplices. “Dean’s dead,” an old friend summed up, “and those boys could blame everything on Dean, and they’d be in the clear.”
The laconic Lieutenant Breckenridge Porter took note of the statements and said in his customary drawl, “They’re ignorin’ a few factors. This goes back a long time, three years, probably more. Dean Corll’s a thirty-three-year-old man. They say that Henley and Brooks pushed him into this and they was usin’ him as a patsy and all that bullshit. Why, Corll was a big strappin’ man, and three years ago Henley and Brooks was a couple li’l snottynose punks!”
A highly respected newsman, Dave Lamble of KAUM-FM, Houston, scored an early coup by producing a nineteen-year-old homosexual who professed to have had a three-month love affair with the dead killer. Using the assumed name “Guy,” the young man told of meeting Corll in a supermarket bathroom. “Dean made a play for me and I told him I just wasn’t interested at all,” Guy said, “and then again he made his play and he followed me for about three blocks, and he just wanted to talk. I said okay, and we became extremely close friends.”
A week after the chance encounter, Guy continued, Corll called and invited him to spend the night in Pasadena. “He showed me around the house, then he pointed to this one door and he said, ‘I’ll never take you in there!’ Later on that night we did go to bed together. He didn’t force me or he didn’t edge me into it. He said, ‘If you want to, you can, and if you don’t want to, we don’t have to.’ He made it my decision. I did go to bed with him. He didn’t want to hurt me. He kept telling me, ‘If I’m doing anything to hurt you or if I ever do anything to hurt you, let me know.’ He was just an extremely gentle Teddy-bear-type person to me.” Guy said he never learned the mystery of the closed room.
After that first evening at Corll’s home, the lovers met once or twice a week to talk, usually in a small park. “He’d just talk about how people can get other people to do things, and how it was really sad that people were forced to do things that they really didn’t want to do. He talked several times about his mother, but this was personal and private. There was some unhappy experiences he told about.” Judging by the conversations, Corll knew his way around the homosexual community in Houston, but by personal choice was not a member in good standing. “He was very critical about several places, saying that he doesn’t like bars,” Guy told Lamble. “He was critical about one of the steam rooms and baths. He mentioned that this place was physically dirty, or very unclean. He mentioned that at this place the people seemed to be, as he put it, flaming faggots, bartenders were B-I-T-C-H-E-S, and he didn’t like this place and he didn’t like that place.”
After a while, Guy began to notice that there were broad areas of Corll’s life that were being left out of the discussions. “One time he wanted to tell me something, and then he said that he couldn’t tell me because he knew that it would hurt me very badly. I never knew anything that he did. He was sort of like in a cloud of mystique; he was just there. Seemed like he had another life he would go to that I was not part of, and then he would travel over into this one and I was part of it, and I never tried to infiltrate his other domain. He seemed to set up a barrier and wanted me to stay on one side. The other aspects of his life were taboo. I knew he had a friend named Wayne, but every time I’d bring up his friends, he’d more or less just cut ’em off, as though they were nonexistent. And he never wanted me to meet them.”
Guy soon realized that his new friend was deeply troubled, that his life was at a critical juncture. “He felt like an outcast, especially agewise. He was hypersensitive about his age, how he looked, if he was young-looking, if he was physically good-looking, if he had maybe something a little bit wrong with his hair. He’d always want compliments, or he’d want constructive criticism. At times he would be totally childlike and rambunctious and crazy. He wanted to be in with the youthful crowd; he’d show it by his actions. Someone who’s around thirty-five years old, you don’t see him w
anting to go wading in a pond. You don’t see him wanting to take off his shoes and roll up his pants legs and go skipping down the street. We did that several times. He was in a crazy mood sometimes, and we’d do crazy things.”
And Corll cried. Guy said, “If I seemed like I was angry with him, or it seemed like I was frustrated or something, he always thought that he was to blame for it, and several times he even broke down in tears because he thought I was angry with him.” Guy was unable to reconcile the picture of Dean Corll the mass murderer with his own memories of Dean Corll the gentle lover. “There was no sadistic moves or threats or anything of the sort. He was an extremely gentle person.”
One spring evening in the park, the two new friends discussed music, and it developed that the favorite song of each was The Stylistics’ version of “Betcha By Golly Wow.” They exchanged mint copies of the record and recited the lyrics interminably.
Toward the middle of summer, Corll began talking about fleeing Houston. “He was determined that I was going to leave with him,” Guy told Dave Lamble, “and we were gonna go someplace that he was unknown, that I was unknown, someplace like in Mexico, farther down, even Central America, away from this entire life here. Several times he got to the point where he was determined that he wanted another life-style or a change from this life. He felt that he would just die here, but that he could become another person with me.”
Guy vetoed the grandiloquent plan, and “Dean was hurt, but he wasn’t angry with me. He said he still wanted to be with me.” And whenever Guy would suggest that all affairs must come to an end, Corll would cry.
A sometime girl friend turned up. Betty Hawkins was in her late twenties, divorced, the mother of two small sons, one of them studying Braille because of incipient blindness. Mrs. Hawkins herself had been born with one sightless eye; she was a short, likable woman with a lovely soprano voice and an outgoing personality. She had known Dean Corll for a dozen years, and dated him sporadically for five.
