by Jack Olsen
“I was in the process of getting a divorce when Dean and I first went out,” she recalled, “and I was worried about being seen alone with a man. We went to the show, but we took my two sisters, my niece, my two sons, my brother and his friend, and Dean paid for every one of us. A few months later, when my divorce was final, we began dating. Dean was one of the kindest men I ever knew. If he had something and someone needed it, he’d give it to them. So far as I know, he didn’t have any special hobby, unless it was helping other people. If I said I needed something, he would get it for me. That guy must’ve went through fifteen TV’s the last five years; every time I turned around, his TV would be gone. Somebody would come up and say ‘I’d like to have it,’ and he gave it to ‘em for hardly nothing.”
Unlike “Guy,” Betty Hawkins never saw Corll in tears; he was far more likely to be sardonically humorous. “He was a good one on jokes,” she said. “Just clever remarks that he made up himself. His whole family’s like that: his brother and his sister and his mother, Mary West. You can say anything to them, and they can make a joke out of it. Like at the funeral, we didn’t like all the picture taking, but Mrs. West said, ‘Oh, well, let ’em go ahead. I always wanted to be on TV!’”
The young divorcée was pleased by another of Corll’s characteristics. “He made me feel like I was somebody,” she said, “and the biggest majority of men seemed to want to make me feel so much lower than them, and all they wanted was to take me to bed. They’d think, Oh, she’s been married, she’s got to have some, she’s an easy make. In five years, Dean and I never really had sex. Sometimes we would hug and kiss. There were times that we came close, but we never did it. Once we started, but he stopped. I felt like he had enough respect for me to not. He believed you should be married. There aren’t very many like that. We both felt the same about it.”
After the first year of dating, “he’d say things like, ‘You know I been thinking lately I oughta settle down and get married.’ But he never really asked me. One time we talked about it, and 1 thought he was gonna ask me, but all of a sudden he changed his mind, and he wouldn’t give me any reason. And later on he’d say he couldn’t afford to get married. And I’d say, ‘Well, I can work, you know. Even if I worked part time to take care of my own kids, that would save on the nursery.’ But he’d say, ‘No. Uh uh! If we got married, you wouldn’t work, definitely not!’”
At times during the five years, the courtship waned, and for a whole year the young mother dated another man and hardly saw Corll. “Dean just ignored it,” she said. “He’d always say, ‘Well, I want you to be sure I’m the one you want.’”
Betty Hawkins knew about Corll’s friendship with Wayne Henley and David Brooks and certain other young men and boys, “but I figured Dean liked them and he was helping them. I know David lived off Dean. Around 1970 David came here from Beaumont, and Dean drove him back to get his clothes. David was fourteen or fifteen then. Dean always liked kids, and he always wanted to help people; that’s why I didn’t think anything of David living with him. David had run away any number of times from Beaumont to come back to Houston. Lately Dean began saying that he wanted to get away from those boys, Brooks and Henley. I’d say, ‘How come you move so much?’ and he’d say ‘Well, I was just trying to get away from those boys.’”
When David Brooks and his girl friend were married in 1973, Corll told Betty, “They want to use our family’s place up at Lake Sam Rayburn for their honeymoon. I don’t know why they want to have a honeymoon. They’ve already done all they can do.” Betty Hawkins said that was a perfect example of how funny Dean could be.
Mrs. Mary West, Dean Corll’s mother, had flown to her son’s funeral in Houston from her home in Colorado, and then quietly returned. Both sides of the fractured family had adopted a posture of silence about the case, but Mary West was a vivacious, bombastic woman, as sensitive to deprecation as her son, and soon she dispatched an open letter to Wayne Henley and David Brooks:
My heart is heavy with sorrow; not only for the loss of my son, but also for the loss of all the boys and people whose lives they touched.
To David and Wayne, you may have the best defense lawyer the world can offer but your best defense is God. You can lie, plan, and plant evidence to shift the blame to one who cannot defend himself, but you surely know that your days on this Earth are numbered, whether it is behind bars or walking the streets. We are not concerned with your bodies, but we are concerned with your souls. “And the truth will set you free.”
If you knew where to find the bodies of these children, you also have a list of names. Please set the anxious parents’ hearts at ease, and see how much better you feel.
I am not trying to solve this mystery, as I know nothing about the case. I only know that Dean loved both of you. He did things for you that you could not do for yourself but you cut off the hand that fed you. Dean cannot help you now. He loaned you his truck to go on dates. He borrowed money from the bank to buy you a Vet.
Would he have rented the boat shack to bury bodies in and still loan it to friends or the family to store furniture in and help them move in? Would he ever stoop so low as to have had these wild parties in a house belonging to his father whom he adored? He was not a sex maniac nor a sadist. You might be able to convince the type people who drag their children out to see bodies dug up out of the Earth that this is true, but the people who know Dean, worked with him, will never believe these terrible accusations.
I called him on the telephone Sunday night. I tried calling all day and when I finally got him, he said he was dodging someone. He did not say who, and I thought perhaps it was someone he might have owed money to. I do not worry, because Dean has never given me cause to worry….
The gas mask on the bed proves to me and the world that Dean was not going to shoot you. He only wanted to live and let live. The torture boards were also planted, and where are his clothes and the books I sent him on Help for Today and This Thing Called You by Ernest Holmes?
Parents, pray for your children, and children, write your parents. What a wonderful world this could be if we all turned to God for guidance. The police department could solve all their problems if they too really and truly asked God for help. God does not protect us from the law. He is the Law. The law of love, life, happiness, prosperity and success.
I cannot help but wonder if the digging would have stopped if the record had not been broken.
If the schools and society got off the sex kick and the school teachers only concentrated on the Three Rs and parents and society taught their children that when they are old enough to leave their earthly father, they should depend on their Heavenly Father for guidance, this world, in my opinion, would be a better place to live.
Now that the digging has stopped, let’s keep searching for souls, with prayer, letters to the press. I’m sure the press will cooperate, because they too could use a bit of God’s help.
Father God—You are my life. You are all life. You make the darkness turn to light and turn swords into plowshares. You can lead nations out of trouble and have Your all seeing eye on the sparrow. There is no big and no little in Your vast spiritual system. When You are for us, who can be against us? I pray for the law officers and the attorneys that they do some soul searching and ask for Your divine guidance. I know that Dean’s life was not shed in vain and know that our children who have left this Earth’s plane have returned to You and are surrounded by Your loving care. Grant the parents of all missing children the strength to wipe the bitterness from their hearts and know that you will not forsake us.
Thank you Father. And so it is.
Dean Corll’s Mother
Mary West
Reporters called on Mrs. West in her little second-floor apartment atop a gift shop in Manitou Springs, Colorado, “Gateway to Pikes Peak.” They found a petite, alert woman with wide-set blue eyes lined in green under neatly penciled brows. Her hair was chestnut, trimmed to a medium length, and her lips wore the permanent downturn
of a difficult life. Mrs. West was not reluctant to place the original blame. “I came from a dirt farm in Indiana,” she said. “I drove tractors and horses. I run out and got the cows when they got out, went to the outhouse at night, stepped on the boards and everything. It wasn’t the easiest life.” Fifty-seven years after her birth, she remained convinced that she was unwanted. ‘T was the only one in the family ever got a divorce, and that went against me, and I was the second daughter of a farmer, which made it bad from the beginning. See, farmers want a boy to start with, and my parents got a girl. When a farm family gets the second girl, that’s bad. I was the second girl. Then Mom and Dad got a boy and another girl, and I was left out in the middle. They never really did count me in.”
Mrs. West sipped Scotch and soda and talked bitterly about her American Gothic background, and it was easy to visualize Dean Corll’s mother as the prostrate woman in Andrew Wyeth’s evocative painting Christina’s World. Tears came to her eyes, and she paused and composed herself. “My dad died in the wintertime, and I went up for the funeral and I had to borrow a hat from Mom, ’cause I never wear a hat, and the next day I overheard Mom say, ‘Oh, Mary looked so funny going around here with a hat on!’ I had my feelings hurt. And even now my mother says things like ‘I don’t think Dean was doin’ right.’ But she doesn’t know! I remember a time when I was trying to get away from one of my husbands, and I went on a train trip with a girl-friend, but she was drunk all the time and flopped all over me and tried to make a nigger porter, so I went on to Indiana to visit my folks, but I had a scene with my mother. I finally said, ‘Mom, you’ve never done anything I wanted you to do!’ and just flat shot my mouth off. They told me not to talk to my mother like that, and the doctor had to get me some nerve medicine. They never talk nice to me in Indiana. I always had my feelings hurt when I got up there anyhow.” She dabbed at her eyes again.
Mary West was married and divorced five times—twice to Arnold Corll, twice to a merchant seaman, and once to the traveling salesman whose name she retained. “But there was never any violence in my marriages,” she was quick to point out. “It was always just a confliction of ideas.” She belonged to the Church of Religious Science and believed that evil per se exists only in the mind. “We teach that man will eventually go back to his Maker through different stages,” she explained. “Always upward. In your next life, you’ll see everything clearly.”
Shortly after the news of the murders broke, she telephoned a clairvoyant in Dallas who told her that Dean had been used by others. A card reader in nearby Colorado Springs examined the date and hour of her son’s birth and declared, “He couldn’t possibly have done it. He couldn’t even have been a homosexual.” Another seer told Mrs. West that Dean’s only involvement in the case was that “he knew something he didn’t tell soon enough.”
Her intuitions confirmed, the resolute woman began a fight to clear her son’s name, starting with the open letter to Henley and Brooks. “It burns me up that the newspapers are publishing stories about twenty-seven dead boys, and they don’t say twenty-eight,” she exclaimed. “Dean was killed, too, but they don’t count him! It’s not a twenty-seven-boy deal, it’s a twenty-eight-boy deal! I’m gonna slap a suit on the papers some day. I can’t wait till the front page in Houston says ‘Mary West sues TV stations and papers for one hundred thousand dollars apiece.’
“I wouldn’t mind if I thought that Dean did it. If he was the type that could do it, I wouldn’t mind at all. I’d say, ‘Well, my son did something big.’ But when I know he didn’t do it, that bothers me. So I’m suing the papers for saying he’s the killer. Let this case be an example.”
One evening a Houston reporter telephoned Mrs. West and questioned her about a remark made by her seafaring ex-husband: “That queer SOB of a son of hers broke up our marriage.”
Mrs. West exploded over the long-distance wires. “What the hell is the difference?” she snapped. “You’re not trying the gay people, you’re trying a murder case down there!” She told another newsman that she was convinced that Dean was not a homosexual; “he was disinterested in sex in any way, shape or form. He might have had his moments; he might have been with a boy, I don’t know. But that doesn’t make him a homosexual. It definitely wasn’t a passion with him.” Later she added, “I wouldn’t consider Dean a homosexual or a heterosexual. I know nothing about his sex life. I don’t think it was important to him. Dean knew how much trouble you could get in if you used sex just as an entertainment.”
And if her son was neither a homosexual nor a heterosexual, he was much less a murderer in the embattled woman’s eyes. “All 1 want to do now is prove him innocent,” she said. “I don’t even care if they get me. It doesn’t mean that much. I’m not afraid to die. If people knew the whole story of Dean’s life, they would be absolutely sure that Dean—is—no—killer! And if people heard the whole story, they’d know I didn’t let him down.”
THE RECONSTRUCTED LIFE HISTORY of a murdered murderer must proceed from certain assumptions. The party of the first part is unable to explain, to defend, or even to send up regrets from the grave. He cannot beat his breast and cry a becoming “Mea culpa.” His killer must speak of him in the most odious terms, and so must those who loved his victims. His own closest admirers must dissociate themselves from his memory, or embrace convoluted theories to deny the unassimilable truth. Everyone with the slightest involvement stakes out a position and busily defends it, like a badger backed down a hole. Grays can be turned to blacks or whites, and the truth made to suffer.
Dean Corll’s father, the lean electrician who surfaced briefly at his son’s funeral and was described in admiring terms by his former neighbors, took the dignified option of refusing either to discuss the case or to permit members of his immediate family to discuss it. The available information came from others, notably Arnold Corll’s ex-wife, Mary West, herself fully committed to her dead son’s innocence. Others added shadings and tones, and a pattern emerged, ragged and imprecise, but as clear and precise as anyone was ever likely to know.
Dean Arnold Corll was born on Christmas Eve, 1939, in Waynedale, Indiana, a suburb of the smoky industrial town of Fort Wayne. Both parents were twenty-four years old; the father worked in a factory. The marriage was stormy, and after the birth of a second son, the couple discussed divorce. “In those days, Mr. Corll didn’t relate with little kids,” Mary West recalled from her own point of view. “This was one of the reasons we split. The boys did things that I thought were real cute and funny, but he’d think it was something to be punished about. One day Dean stepped in the toilet, and then he got in the sink and turned the water on. I thought that was a real accomplishment, but when I told Mr. Corll about it, he said, ‘Well, he ought to be whipped for that!’ Of course, Mr. Corll never whipped the boys, and neither did I. Sometimes he’d make ’em sit in a chair for punishment. But Dean didn’t require punishment! I’d say, ‘Arnold, it’s all right to make ’em sit in a chair, but tell ’em to get up in a little while.’ ’Cause they’d get restless, they’d try to get up, and he’d make ’em sit back down. He was real strict. When they wanted to go out and play, the kids would ask me, ’cause they knew their father’d say no. Then he’d get mad at me ’cause I didn’t check with him. Oh, we just couldn’t make it!”
After the divorce, Arnold Corll was drafted and shipped to an Army Air Force station at Memphis, Tennessee, and soon his exwife and two sons drove up to the base towing a house trailer. The reconciliation was short-lived, and the young divorcée put her two sons in a day nursery and took a job. Later an elderly farm couple let her park the trailer under a tree; they took care of the boys while she was earning a living. “Dean began his schooling,” Mary West reminisced, “and Stanley played on the farm. He’d follow that old farmer with his one-horse plow all day long. One day the old man plowed his shoes under.” The memory brought a rare smile to her face. “They were happy times for the boys. They enjoyed themselves on the farm.”
The older s
on was barely six years old when his mother began to detect a difference between him and the other children, including his own brother Stanley. “Dean never cared if anybody played with him or not,” she said. “From the time he was little, he never went anyplace to see anybody else. If the kids would come to our place, he’d be nice to ’em and he’d play with ’em, but he would never go to their house seeking them out. It might’ve had something to do with a birthday party he went to when he was six, and he had his feelings hurt ’cause he was so little and he didn’t get a prize. I thought that bothered him, so whenever birthday parties would come up, I wouldn’t make him go. You would never hear him say, ‘Could I go to so-and-so’s to play?’ Stanley was always out runnin’ with the other kids, but Dean would stay home.”
After the war, the Corlls were remarried and towed the little trailer all the way to the boom town of Houston to begin a new life together, but the second marriage collapsed quickly. “Mr. Corll was a good, moral man,” his ex-wife insisted, “but we just had a personality clash. In the years since then, he’s never given me the slightest cause to be annoyed with him. He always took an interest in his sons, and he paid his support money. Sometimes people just don’t click. That don’t mean they’re not decent people.”
The next few years were harrowing for the woman and her two young boys. Dean and Stanley were shunted to nursery schools and baby-sitters while their mother eked out a living. Somewhere around the age of six or seven, Dean suffered an undiagnosed case of rheumatic fever; doctors made an ex post facto diagnosis when they found a heart murmur later. He was kept out of school and ordered to avoid all exercise. “Dean accepted it,” his mother said proudly. “He accepted everything. He never fussed at anything.” But he also developed a tendency to worry, especially about others. “He was sort of a serious type,” Mrs. West explained. “If his little brother didn’t come in for a while, Dean’d call me at work and he’d say, ‘Mother, Stanley hasn’t been in for two or three hours!’ He was always worried about the others. He grew up taking care of everybody, worrying if they were gonna come out all right. When I’d be driving him someplace in the snow, he’d stand on the front seat and he’d say, ‘Mommy, you’re going too fast!’ He even worried about me!”
