Manhunters

  Back at the police station, Elmer Wayne Henley, nervous and chain-smoking, was explaining how he came to shoot his friend Dean Corll.

  He had met Corll, he said, when he had lived in a run-down area of Houston known as the Heights. Corll, who was sixteen years his senior, had recently moved into a house that had belonged to his father; it was in Pasadena. On the previous night, he and Timothy Kerley had gone to a glue-sniffing party at Corll’s house. But in the early hours of the morning, the two boys had made some excuse to go out and collect Rhonda Williams, who had just decided to run away from home. Rhonda had been in a state of tension and misery ever since her boyfriend had vanished a year earlier.

  Corll had been furious when the boys arrived back at the house with Rhonda. “You weren’t supposed to bring a girl,” he yelled, “You spoilt everything.” But after a while he seemed to control himself and regain his good humor, and the four of them settled down to paint-sniffing in the living room. Paint was sprayed into a paper bag, which was then passed around so that they could all breathe in the fumes. Within an hour, they were all stretched out unconscious on the floor.

  When Wayne Henley woke up, daylight was filtering through the drawn curtains, and Corll was snapping handcuffs on his wrists; his ankles were tied together. The other two were already handcuffed and bound. As they all began to recover their senses and struggle against their bonds, Corll revealed that his good humor of a few hours ago had been deceptive. He was seething with resentment and fury. He waved the knife at them and told them he was going to kill them all. “But first I’m gonna have my fun.” Then he dragged Henley into the kitchen and rammed a revolver in his belly.

  Henley decided that his only chance of escape was to “sweet talk” Corll, persuading him that he would be willing to join in the murder of the other two. It took some time, but finally Corll calmed down and removed the handcuffs. Henley would rape Rhonda while he raped Timothy Kerley. Corll went and picked up Kerley, carrying him to the bedroom like some huge spider with its prey. Then he came back and carried off Rhonda. He turned on the portable radio to its top volume to drown out any screams or protests.

  When Henley went into the bedroom, Corll was naked, and was handcuffing Kerley, who was also naked, to the plywood board. Kerley, like Rhonda, was gagged. Corll handed Henley the knife and ordered him to cut off Rhonda’s clothes. Rhonda was still dazed from the paint-sniffing, and was only half-aware of what was happening. But Kerley understood and struggled violently as Corll tried to sexually assault him.

  Knowing he was under observation, Henley pretended to rape Rhonda; in fact, he was incapable. But as Kerley thrashed and struggled violently, trying to throw off the heavy man, Henley shouted above the music: “Why don’t you let me take her outta here? She don’t want to see that.” Corll just ignored him. Henley saw his chance and jumped to his feet, grabbing the .22 pistol from the night table. “Back off, Dean! Stop it!” Corll lurched to his feet. “Go on, Wayne, kill me. Why don’t you?” As he lunged towards Henley, the boy fired; the bullet struck Corll in the head, and he staggered past, while Henley fired another shot into his shoulder. As Corll tumbled through the door and hit the wall of the corridor, Henley emptied the rest of the bullets into his back. Corll slumped down slowly to the floor, resting finally with his cheek and shoulder against the wall.

  Henley found the handcuff key and released his friends—Rhonda was still unable to take in what had happened. But when she saw Corll lying in a pool of blood, she screamed. Henley calmed her, and the three of them dressed—Rhonda making do with her slashed clothes. What should they do next? Simply leave the corpse and go away? But it would be found sooner or later, and if neighbors had seen them entering or leaving the house, they would be in serious trouble. So Henley looked up the number of the Pasadena police department and rang them. As the tension relaxed, all three of them found that they were unable to stop sobbing.

  It took Henley an hour and a half to make his statement. Meanwhile, Kerley was able to confirm the story. But Kerley also mentioned something that intrigued the detectives. “While we were waiting for the police, Wayne told me that if I wasn’t his friend, he could have got fifteen hundred dollars for me.”

  Questioned about the plywood board and the dildo, Henley told the police that Corll liked little boys, and had been paying him to procure them for him. But why, in that case, had Henley decided to kill him? “He made one mistake,” said Henley. “He told me that I wouldn’t be the first one he’d killed. He said he’d already killed a lot of boys and buried them in the boat shed.”

  The words made the detectives glance at one another. So far, they had been assuming that this was a simple case of glue-sniffing and sexual perversion, and that Corll’s threats to kill the teenagers had been intended to frighten them. Henley’s words raised a far more unpleasant suspicion. For nearly three years now, boys had been disappearing from the Heights area of Houston. Some of them were assumed to be runaways, but in the case of many, the parents had ruled it out as impossible—as, for example, in the case of a nine-year-old. Now the police had learned that Corll had lived in the Heights area until he moved to Pasadena, and one of his homes had been directly opposite that of the missing nine-year-old.

  “Where is this boat shed?”

  Henley said he wasn’t sure; he had been there only once. But it was somewhere in southwest Houston. He now was able to recollect three of the names that Corll had mentioned: Marty Jones, someone called Cobble, and someone called Hilligiest. Even with all these details, none of the detectives really believed that they were dealing with serial murder. It was more likely that Henley was still under the influence of the “glue.” But his story had to be checked.

  Detective Sergeant Dave Mullican asked Henley: “Can you remember how to get to this boat shed?”

  “I think so. It’s near Hiram Clark Road.”

  The first stop was the Houston police headquarters. There Henley was shown pictures of two boys who had been missing since July 27, thirteen days earlier. Henley identified them as Charles Cobble, seventeen, and Marty Jones, eighteen. The teenagers had shared a room, and both had good school records. Neither had any reason to run away.

  The Pasadena detectives—accompanied by two of their Houston colleagues—now headed south to Hiram Clark Road. Another group of detectives was ordered to collect spades and ropes, and to meet them there. It was already late afternoon when the two cars arrived at the rendezvous point. Henley now took over the navigating. In an area of open fields dotted with grazing cattle, they finally pulled up beside a barbed-wire fence on Silver Bell Street, and Henley pointed out the corrugated iron shed standing well back from the road.

  Southwest Boat Storage was virtually a parking lot for boats, with twenty roofed “stalls.” The police cars drove into the compound, and Henley directed them to stall number eleven. “That’s Dean’s.”

  The double doors were padlocked, and the owner, Mayme Meynier, who lived in a large house next to the compound, told them that she had no key: the renters provided their own padlocks. When they explained that Corll was dead, she gave them permission to break in.

  There was no boat inside the shed, only a half-dismantled car, a bicycle, and a large iron drum. With the sun on the roof, the place was like an oven. There were a few cardboard boxes, water containers, and—ominously—two sacks of lime. Two long strips of old carpet covered the earthen floor. A large plastic bag proved to contain a mixed lot of male clothing, including a pair of red shoes.

  Wayne Henley stood at the door, gazing blankly inside. Then he walked back towards the cars, sat down on the ground, and buried his head between his knees.

  The first task was to move everything out of the shed. While this was being done, a detective noted the registration numbers on the car and the bicycle and radioed them to headquarters. The answer came back quickly: the car had been stolen from a used-car lot, and the bicycle belonged to thirteen-year-old James Dreymala, who had vanished less than a week ago.

/>   The shed was now empty; the two strips of carpet were also rolled out. Mullican pointed to a swelling in the floor near the left wall, and told two “trusties”—convicts from the local jail who had been brought along to help—to start digging.

  Even with the doors open, the heat was stifling. Both men were soon perspiring heavily. Six inches down in the sandy earth, they uncovered a white substance. “That’s lime,” said Mullican. “Keep digging.”

  Suddenly, the shed was filled with a sickening stench; the detectives held their noses. The next carefully excavated shovelful revealed a face staring sightlessly up at them. The younger trusty dropped his spade and rushed from the shed, retching. A policeman calmly took up the spade and went on clearing the earth. Minutes later, the policemen found themselves looking down at a large plastic bag that contained the body of a boy. He looked about twelve or thirteen, and was naked. When the bag had been carefully lifted from the ground, it was obvious that the body inside had been recently buried. One of the detectives again radioed headquarters, this time to send for forensic experts.

  Outside, the press was arriving. One radio reporter had allowed Wayne Henley to use his car telephone to call up his mother. They heard him say: “Mama, I killed Dean.” Over his own microphone the reporter heard Mrs. Henley said: “Oh Wayne, you didn’t.” From what followed, it was clear that Henley’s mother wanted to rush out to the site; a detective shook his head.

  Moments later, as Henley hung up, the body was carried out from the boat shed in its plastic sheeting. Henley was clearly shaken. “It was all my fault.” “Why?” asked a detective casually. “Because I introduced him to them boys.” And the teenager went on to explain that, during the past two years, he had procured many boys for Dean Corll.

  By the time the radio reporter went on the air at six o’clock, a second body had just been discovered. As it began to grow dark, a fire engine with a floodlight and two air-extractors arrived. Soon after that, two more bodies were uncovered. One had been shot in the head, the other strangled with a Venetian blind cord that was still knotted tightly around the throat.

  As the news of the finds was broadcast, crowds of spectators arrived to peer over the barbed-wire fence. The air extractors blasted the smell of decaying corpses at them. One reporter had already minted a striking phrase: “There are wall to wall bodies in there.”

  Detectives questioned Mrs. Meynier about her former tenant. She described him as “the nicest person you’d ever meet,” a “gentleman” with a charming smile and dimples. He had never been behind with his $5-a-week rent. But recently, she had been baffled when he told her that he wanted to rent another stall. Why should he need more space? Surely he already had plenty.

  Asked how long Corll had rented the stall, she replied: “Since 1971.” The detective turned away muttering: “My God!”

  Henley, meanwhile, was also telling reporters how nice Corll could be. His mother liked ol’ Dean and did not object to their friendship. But as the fourth body was carried out, he became nervous; it was obvious that he was suffering from a glue-sniffing hangover. At ten o’clock he was driven back to the police station. Two hours later, the body count had risen to eight, and the diggers were exhausted. They decided to call it a day.

  Back in the Heights, many families with missing teenage sons were now watching their television screens for the printed messages that gave the latest news, and trying to convince themselves that their child could not be among those in the boat shed. But for those whose children had known Dean Corll, that was a slender hope. Now the parents found themselves wondering why they had failed to suspect Corll of being a sexual pervert. He and his mother had run a candy factory in the Heights, and Corll was popular with the children because he gave them candy. He also gave them lifts in his white Dodge van.

  By midnight, a planeload of reporters from other parts of the country arrived in Houston. And from all over the world, reporters were converging on the corrugated iron boat shed. Dean Corll had been dead for only sixteen hours, but his name had already reached every part of the globe. If the number of his suspected victims was confirmed—and the detectives had a list of forty-two youngsters who had vanished since 1970—he would be America’s worst mass murderer to date. Even the nineteenth-century Chicago killer H. H. Holmes had confessed to only twenty-eight.

  Two hours after the lights went out at Southwest Boat Storage on Silver Bell Street, a car containing five people drew up at the barbed-wire fence. They identified themselves to the police on guard as the Hilligiest family. Thirteen-year-old David Hilligiest had disappeared more than two years earlier, on May 30, 1971. He had set out for the local swimming pool early that afternoon, and failed to arrive there. On that same day, another local boy, George Malley Winkle, sixteen, had vanished. The Hilligiests had spent $1,100 on a private detective, but had failed to find the slightest trace of their son. Now, after telephoning police headquarters, they had learned that Wayne Henley had mentioned David Hilligiest as one of the buried victims. They begged the guard to allow them to go to the boat stall. The police explained sympathetically that that was impossible; the lights were out and the place was now locked up. They had better go home, get some sleep, and prepare for their ordeal of the next day.

  At ten the next morning, after a visit from his mother and a light breakfast, Henley was again sitting opposite Mullican in the Pasadena interrogation room. The rings under his eyes made it obvious that he had slept badly.

  “Tell me about the boys you procured.”

  Henley explained that he had met Corll two years earlier, and that Corll had then offered him $200 each for any boys he could “bring along.” For a year he did nothing; then, when he badly needed money, decided to take up the offer. Corll had not actually paid him the full $200 for the first boy he had procured. And he had not paid subsequently.

  Now Henley made his most significant admission so far: he had been present when Corll had killed some of the boys. This suddenly changed the whole situation. The police had been assuming that they were dealing with an insatiable homosexual rapist and a youth he had persuaded to help him find boys. Now it began to look as if Henley had been an active partner in the murders.

  They were interrupted by the telephone. It was the Houston police headquarters. A man named Alton Brooks had turned up at the police station with his eighteen-year-old son, David, explaining that David had known Corll and wanted to talk about it. And David Brooks was now giving a statement that implicated Henley in the murders.

  When Mullican hung up, he told the teenager on the other side of the desk: “That was Lieutenant Porter at Houston Homicide. He says he has a boy named David Brooks in there, and Brooks is making a statement about you and Dean Corll.”

  Oddly enough, Henley looked relieved.

  “That’s good. Now I can tell you the whole story.”

  Mullican’s next question was: “Did you kill any of the boys yourself?”

  Henley answered without hesitation: “Yes, sir.”

  Mullican did his best to show no emotion during the statement that followed. But it was difficult to appear impassive. Wayne Henley was describing how he had lured some of his own best friends into Corll’s lair, witnessed their torture and rape, and then participated in their murders.

  It seemed that David Brooks had been Corll’s original accomplice, as well as his lover. He had been procuring victims for Corll long before Henley came along. In fact, Henley was intended to be just another victim when he was taken along to meet Corll in 1971. But Corll soon realized that Henley would be more useful as an accomplice. He had lot of friends, and would do anything for money. In fact, said Henley, he was pretty sure that Corll still planned to kill him sooner or later, because he had his eye on Henley’s fourteen-year-old brother, Ronnie, and knew he would have to kill Wayne before he could get his hands on him.

  The method of obtaining victims was usually much the same. Corll would drive around with Henley until they saw a likely victim, and Corll would of
fer him a lift. Since there was already a teenager in the car, the boy would suspect nothing. That was how Dean had picked up that thirteen-year-old blond kid a few days ago. Dean was parked in front of a grocery store when the kid came past on his bike. Dean called him over and told him he had found some Coke bottles in his van, and the kid could go and collect the deposit on them. The boy (it was thirteen-year-old James Dreymala) took the bottles and came back a few minutes later with the money. Then Dean remembered that he had a lot more Coke bottles back in his garage, and if the kid would like to come along, he could have them, too. So James Dreymala allowed Dean to put his bike in the back of the van, and went back to Dean’s house on Lamar Street. The boy said he had to ring his father to ask if he could stay out, but the father refused. After the call, Dean “had his fun,” strangled the teenager, and then drove the body out to the boat shed to join the others.

  At about this time, Mullican heard the latest report from the boat shed. Four more victims had been found in the past two hours, bringing the total up to twelve. And beside one of them his genitals had been found in a plastic bag. Part of Dean’s “fun” was castrating his victims.

  Henley’s new confession went on for two more hours. It was rambling and often incoherent, but Mullican gathered that Henley had been present at the murder of at least nine boys. He admitted shooting one of them himself. The bullet had gone up the boy’s nose, and the boy had looked up and said: “Wayne, why did you shoot me?” Henley pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger again; this time the boy died.

  Had Corll buried any bodies in other places beside the boat shed? Mullican wanted to know. Oh sure, said Henley, there were some on the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn and more of them on High Island Beach, east of Galveston.

  It was now past noon, but it seemed a good idea to bring Wayne Henley and David Brooks face to face. He would then persuade Henley to show them where the bodies were buried at Lake Sam Rayburn.