The Man With Candy (24 page)

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 wanting 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.

“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.