The Man With Candy (30 page)

For a while, the boy and his Bible were never parted, not even in public. At sixteen, he laid plans to join the Navy and send his mother an allotment. He went back and forth to the enlistment center for tests, and affixed a sticker to his grandmother’s car: “
SAILORS HAVE MORE FUN.
” When the Navy rejected him, a neighbor said, “It just knocked him over.” Not long after, he was arrested for breaking and entering, and again for assault with a deadly weapon. He drank beer heavily and ran around with Dean Corll. “He’d give the impression of not being entirely with you,” a friend recalled. “He was off away someplace in his head. Spaced out on beer maybe.”

There were a few Heights boys who entertained conjecture about the sexual orientation of David Brooks, but no one doubted Wayne Henley’s heterosexuality. “He had a lot of chicks,” Bruce Pittman said. “He was almost engaged to one girl, and he must have had a crush on Rhonda Williams, ‘cause he talked about her a lot. He messed around with too many chicks to be a homosexual.”

“He’d always invite my daughter Mary,” said a neighborhood mother. “He say, ‘Mary, how ‘bout goin’ to the lake?’ And Mary say, ‘No.’ And he’d start askin’ me, ‘Would you let her go, Mama?’ I’d say, ‘No, you take
me
and I’ll go with you.’ Now Mary says, ‘Mother, it’s good I didn’t went with Wayne.’”

Close residents like the Hilligiests were flabbergasted when the case broke and Henley was arrested. “I knowed Wayne all his life,” said an elderly woman, “and he always seemed like a good kid, and he never did believe in no murders or nothin’ like that. He’d never even hurt a cat or a dog. I believe that if he had anythin’ to do with the killin’ he was under so much dope he didn’t know what he was doin’.”

Hers was the general view. All up and down Twenty-seventh Street, there was not a soul who would say that Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., had ever believed in murder, until he became involved in several dozen of them.

*For a time there was a sign at the city limits: “NIGGER, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF TOWN BY SUNDOWN.”

*Not his real name.

Beyond the Borderline

FOR A TIME,
there was a new outspokenness against homosexuals, as though homosexuality were an early phase of the dread disorder that consumed Dean Corll, and an impending epidemic of sex crimes could only be forestalled by harassing young men who wore eye shadow and tight pants. A spokesman for Houston’s extensive gay community pleaded for understanding before the city council. “That the person believed responsible was an alleged homosexual is only incidental,” he read from a prepared statement. “It could just as easily have been the bodies of young girls that were unearthed.” The young man posed a
reductio ad absurdum:
If the victims had been females, would there have been city-wide campaigning against heterosexuality? Slowly the wave of prejudice subsided, but not before it spread to Dallas, where police broke up an escort service that catered to homosexuals.
^*

The governor of Texas took official notice of the case in a public appeal to runaway teens to perform “a simple act of charity” by getting in touch with their parents, and broadcasters repeated the request at regular intervals. The police department was still being pestered by parents; a typical call came from a mother in Virginia who said her son had been traveling with a carnival and had dropped from sight when it reached Houston in May. She was convinced beyond doubt that Dean Corll had murdered her son, and telephoned daily to see if the body had been found.

The Vatican’s daily
L’Osservatore Romano
discussed the case
under an asterisk, symbol of Paul VI’s personal interest. Headlined
“ORRORE,”
the editorial warned that “we are in the domain of sadism and demonism. This is beyond the borderline of crime because it is beyond the borderline of reason. What wicked force can produce such a degradation—we were about to say dissolution—of man?” The newspaper characterized Dean Corll as infra-human. “One kills to the point of such cruel and inhuman aberrations because one is no longer a man, but an evil force. The two monsters—sex and drugs—have generated a new and different being—monstrous and demonic.” Some interpreted the Vatican’s statement as a logical follow-up to a speech in which the Pope had warned that moral corruption was placing the world under the “dominance of Satan.”

Izvestia,
voice of the Soviet government, pointed to the “indifference” and the “murderous bureaucracy” of the Houston police department. The city’s people had become “alienated,” the newspaper commented, and “the inaction of the police is the most astounding aspect of this story.”

Chief Herman Short took no public notice of the Vatican response, but he unleashed a characteristically forceful counterattack at
Izvestia.
“This is about the silliest thing I can think of,” Short said, noting that he was not obliged by his job to satisfy the Soviets. “I wonder if they’d like to write a little story about the number of people the government has killed over there, taking their property and annihilating them. I don’t believe we’ve had anything like that happen in Houston in the last several days.”

The homicide division worked to tie up loose ends, but not every detective’s heart was in the case. Said one of them, with scattershot accuracy, “These kids, most of them, knew what they were getting into. They were male whores out for some quick money.” Another grumbled, “Those kids were what you call little turds, most of ’em. Several had police records. Several had nutty parents.” The overstressed officers were using their favorite survival
technique, making judgments about the social value of the dead, and gauging their work schedules accordingly. A Heights boy who had been interviewed just after the killings was quoted frequently. “Wayne Henley kept asking me if I could contact any boys that really wouldn’t be missed too much,” the teen-ager had said. “He wanted boys that their folks won’t raise no fuss.” Their prejudices confirmed by such statements, the investigators turned quickly to other matters. “Look,” one plain-spoken detective said, “I got
live
cases to work on, where the murderer’s at large right now, and might could kill again. Why should I fuck with this Corll thing?”

Ruby Jenkins, the candy-apple lady, brooded for days about Corll and his busy shovel, and finally told police what she knew. “They couldn’t have been more bored,” the woman said. “They sent a couple of detectives and a digging machine out to the shed on Twenty-second to meet me, and they found about forty reasons to tear up a few feet of dirt and then quit. There was concrete in most of the places were Dean used to dig, and a detective kept saying, ‘Lady, this is old cement. There couldn’t be any bodies under here. Lady, you’re just plain wrong!’ So I walked away. An NBC man came running up and said, ‘Hey, they’re not listening to you. May I interview you?’ and I said, ‘I have nothing else of importance.’ I was so embarrassed! Just before I left, one of the detectives asked if there’d been anything between my ex-husband and Dean Corll. I was shocked! I couldn’t believe my ears! In the first place, my ex-husband was about as straight and masculine as a man could be, about as queer as a one-dollar bill, and anyway what did that have to do with anything? But this detective, he kept insisting, ‘Was your ex funny? I mean, was he
funny?’
I said, ‘How do you mean, funny? Had a sense of humor?’ He said, ‘No, was he queer?’ I said, ‘Well, I never saw any queer tendencies about him. Of course, I’m not an authority on queers,’ and I drove off.”

Officers working the street were plainly taking their cue from
superiors back at headquarters. “1 don’t know if we found all the bodies or not,” the droll Breckenridge Porter said. “Probably not. Probably won’t
ever.
What difference does it make? Other’n it may be some satisfaction to the parents of missin’ kids, where they been missin’ for three, four years.” Thousands of Houston youngsters were missing and completely out of touch with parents and/or friends, and many of them came from The Heights and its environs.

“There’s other bodies somewhere,” said Lieutenant Porter thoughtfully. “I have no idee where, and we’ll never know. I cain’t even prove it, but it’s my opinion. We could be diggin’ for the next two years if we had enough men. But then we wouldn’t be keepin’ up with the homicides that are goin’ on now. The only reason we can say the case goes back three years is Henley and Brooks have been in it for three years, but perhaps back prior to three years maybe there was another Henley or Brooks? And now they’re dead? They’re now where Henley and Brooks woulda wound up, and almost
did.
We’ll never know.”

Charles Melder, Henley’s lawyer, echoed Porter in a chilling aside to newsmen. “Corll himself might have killed, far as I know, two hundred or three hundred or four hundred boys, you see?”

Students of the case recalled Brooks’s statement that Dean Corll had once “hung around” with Mark Scott and Ruben Watson, both of whom had juvenile records and both of whom had been murdered. Was it possible that Corll had used such boys as accomplices, then destroyed them to break the chain of evidence, and later laid the same plans for Henley and Brooks? If so, the slaughter could have continued far into the future, just as it might have reached far backward in time. As Breckenridge Porter emphasized, “No one will ever know,” especially with the homicide division showing only a feeble interest. A county grand jury took official notice that the police investigation lacked “professional imagination, thoroughness and professional coordination.”

Chief Short shot back: “Silly!”

In The Heights, the panic lasted a few weeks. “The children are scairt to git out at night,” an overwrought father complained. “They’re spooked! They don’t know who to trust, they don’t know who to speak to. The park out there has been empty the last three or four nights. The city turns the lights on, but they won’t use it now.”

Sheila Hines spoke for the children who lived around Twenty-seventh Street. “Everyone’s pretty scairt, ya know? A lot of the dudes are worried, ’cause like if ya couldn’t trust Wayne, who could ya trust? We knew Wayne all our lives.”

“My child woulda got into that van,
any
child woulda got in,” said a frightened mother. “If they were walking down the street and a kid came by that they went to school with and had known all their lives, why of course they’d have gone with ’em! That is the greatest tragedy about this: the fact that you can’t trust the people you know, and you can’t even trust the children that your children are running around with.”

If there were any deeper social insights to be gained from the case, they seemed to go unnoticed in the old neighborhood. “Here was a perfect proof that law and order doesn’t consist of beating up blacks and clubbing winos and chasing kids for smoking grass,” said TV commentator Mickey Herskowitz, “but I’m afraid the message passed right by The Heights. Instead of talking about genuine law and order, they’re calling for more and more of what they’ve had.”

A mass meeting was held in a Baptist church, under the watchword “Did They Die in Vain?” But the small auditorium was only a fourth full, and the frustrated audience soon retreated to the positions that had sustained The Heights historically: anger and defensiveness. The organizer, a fiery truck driver with the style of an evangelist, denounced the city council, outsiders, the press and television (“They give the people the idea that the people in The Heights are white trash, we raise punks, we don’t keer for our
children!”), and lauded Chief Short and the Houston police department. The meeting soon began to sound like a pep rally: “We’re a-gonna clean up this neighborhood!” “We have to get together!” “WE’RE GONNA MAKE IT SAFE!” Almost nothing was said about methods.

Several members of the audience arose to excoriate homosexuals, pronounced “hommasexhuls.” A sweaty little man in a gray undershirt, throwing an odor that would flatten a horse, suggested that the social problems of The Heights would never be solved until the neighborhood purged itself of “suspicious” characters. There were cries of “Yea” and “Amen.” At this unpropitious moment, an effeminate visitor from out of town made an eloquent appeal for reason. “Corll wasn’t suspicious-looking,” he said. “Henley and Brooks weren’t suspicious-looking. Maybe you’re wasting time trying to figure out who’s suspicious.” There were shocked whispers. To most of the audience, the sight was beyond belief: a real live hommasexhul filling the house of God with sibilant
s’
s while his young black-haired friend, obviously another one of “them,” beamed in admiration. When the visitor finished his statement, the moderator gulped a fast “Thank you” and called on someone else.

After a comment about the need to assist the problem children of the neighborhood, Mrs. Fred Hilligiest raised her hand for permission to speak. Uncertain of the protocol, the crowd gave her a courteous round of applause. “I’d just like to say that nothing that’s been said here has anything to do with me,” she began softly. She climbed heavily to her feet and clamped both hands on the back of the pew in front, as though to brace herself, and spoke through tears in a voice on the edge of breaking. “My child is not a runaway,” she said, at first refusing to speak of David in the past tense. “He’s not a bad boy. He went out walking to the swimming pool and he was killed. We haven’t talked about that. We haven’t talked about innocence. We might as well give up hope if we can’t let our chil’ren
have the beauty they were meant to have.” She stopped to compose herself, but her voice faded away in sobs. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’ve just had this emotion stored up in me so long, I just….” She sat down, and her husband slipped his arm about her shoulders.