The Man With Candy (32 page)
Dorothy held onto the control that had helped the family through the long ordeal. “I’m not angry with anybody and I never have been,” she said in the voice that had developed a permanent tremolo with the loss of her son. “I put myself in Miz Henley’s place, because I’ve had six children myself, and I know that she’s bearing a bigger cross than I am. Her son’s life is ruin’t. I don’t
think it’ll ever mend. I don’t blame Miz Henley, and I don’t blame anybody else. I think that for too long we’ve all been blaming each other, when it’s the times we live in that’s to blame.”
Like their parents, the Hilligiest children had refused to entertain any thought that David was gone forever until the proof became irrefutable. “They
always
thought of him as coming back,” Mrs. Hilligiest said. “They’d even talk about it: ‘We’ll do this and that when David comes back.’ I told Stanley, the youngest one, the other night, after everybody left and the house quieted down, it was bedtime, and he came to the bed crying and shaking and he said, ‘I just don’t know what I’m gonna do. David is not coming back, and I can’t quit thinking about him.’ So I got up and I went with him and sat in the middle of the bed between the two of ’em and tried to give ’em courage. I said, ‘Well, just say a prayer. God’ll give you strength, I know. Put yourself in Wayne’s two little brothers’ place. Look at what their brother has done. And your brother, he’s not suffering. Sometimes these things have to happen to help other people. Out of every evil comes some good. Time will heal for us. We’ll never forget David, and we’ll always have good memories of him.’”
Mary West sat in her simple apartment over the gift shop in Manitou Springs and slowly composed a reminiscence about her son Dean Corll. “We do not say that there is no evil experience,” she wrote, paraphrasing the teachings of her faith, the Church of Religious Science. “Evil is not an entity, but the misuse of a power which in itself is good. We shall never know the nature of good by dissecting the nature of evil.” She concentrated for a few minutes, then added some thoughts of her own.
“The police, the news reporters, the TV reporters, the psychiatrists are trying so hard to convince the whole world that Dean Corll was a homosexual sadistic murderer…. Dean Corll was good, not a goody-good that hides behind a title, a church or a
philosophy. He was
basically
good. He never spread rumors, he made up no lies. He did not choose his friends; his friends chose him.
“He moved, the paper quotes, ten times in one year; I’m inclined to think it was a two—or three-year period. However, when the boys started bugging”—she scratched out “bugging” and substituted “getting to him”—“he moved on. They did not mind his moving; they always found him, and the boat shed was always at their disposal. The police found no bodies in any place where he lived or worked, try as they may. Did they tell the reporters that they found a dead dog that Dean dearly loved buried in his backyard in Pasadena? Did they put the dog back where Dean had buried him? What
did
they do? Or does it matter….?
“A very dear friend told me the other day that a lady in Houston told her that she recognized Dean from an unretouched picture in the paper as a young man who stopped on the street to lend her a hand with her stalled car. She said she thought it was only out of gas. The young man in the white van got the gas and told her if that didn’t fix it he’d help her. This young man before his death was as the TV said a nobody, moved about unnoticed by most people. Some of the world will remember his white van pulling out cars that were high-centered in the sand on Galveston Beach, helping people move, or even giving shelter for the runaway kids. Dean was not a sex maniac, he’d simply seen too many broken hearts, broken homes and did not want the responsibility of marriage….
“Without trial, with no heed to the people who really knew Dean, he has to go down in history as a sadistic murderer. I never heard Dean use the Lord’s name in vain, or anyone who knew Dean never heard him curse our Lord. He let people do as they wanted to—”
She stopped. The memoirs would be finished later. She telephoned the Houston number of a psychiatrist who had been
widely quoted about the murders, and for fifteen minutes she berated the man for publicly comparing her son to various sex murderers of history. “You want to compare Dean with somebody!” she scolded. “Get this: in three hours and fifteen minutes he woulda been a Christmas baby. He lived to be thirty-three years old. His mother’s name was Mary, and he was a bachelor electrician. He loved kids, and when they got on his nerves, he moved on. He was gentle, he would never cut his mother down, never, never talk back to anybody, and he let everybody do as they pleased. And he was crucified in the newspapers!”
No psychiatrist or journalist or district attorney would change the mind of Dean Corll’s mother. She had her own insights, her own reference points, even her own sources of information. A clairvoyant who worked as a matron at the jail over in Colorado Springs told her, “I see Dean. He’s completely clear. He’s robed in white. He has an aura of white around him.” Mary West could see the truth, as clear as the nimbus surrounding her son. Like the twice-buried boys of the eddy called The Heights, the man with the candy had gone through the veil to another life. She hoped it was a better one.
*The Houston
Chronicle
headlined: “DALLAS POLICE PROBE HOMOSEXUAL CALL-BOYS.”
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