The Lost Boys Part III
When detectives began interrogating Henley about Corll, asking why he kept handcuffs, the plywood board, and the plastic sheet in the bedroom, Henley no doubt panicked. Had he not said anything, it is possible that the police would never have learned about the murders. Instead Henley let slip that Corll had once bragged about killing boys and burying them in a storage shed. When the police arrived at Southwest Boat Storage, a dry-land marina, the detectives opened the windowless stall number eleven, and they started digging. They found the first body in a matter of minutes. Trying to get the carrion-like odor out of his nose, thirty-year-old detective Larry Earls chain-smoked cigarettes, but his hands were so filthy that someone else had to put them in his mouth.
The police allowed the reporters to walk right up to Henley, who was standing outside the storage unit, and interview him. A television reporter even filmed Henley using a radio phone to call his mother. He cried into the receiver, “Mama! Mama! I killed Dean!” Most of the reporters felt sorry for him. Ann James, the
Post’s police reporter, later wrote that she thought of him as “a kind of folk hero who had slain the dragon.” That night, when the police sent out for fried chicken, she made sure Henley got his share.
By the next day, however, Henley was admitting his involvement to the Pasadena police. Soon after, Brooks was escorted to the Houston Police Department by his distraught father, who told detectives that his son also had something to say. Henley showed the police the burial site at Sam Rayburn Reservoir, then he and Brooks took them to High Island. Besides an army of reporters watching the diggings at the beach, there were bikini-clad girls and their boyfriends, along with young parents and children with plastic pails and shovels. At one point, a black Chihuahua jumped in one of the graves and started barking. Over at NASA, Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton ordered a helicopter containing infrared equipment to fly over the beach to see if it could spot other bodies. Some of the more recent victims were quickly identified. One of those found under the storage shed, Marty Jones, who had been murdered in late July, turned out to be the cousin of homicide detective Karl Siebeneicher, who happened to be on the scene. (Devastated, Siebeneicher ended up committing suicide in 1977.) Other bodies were able to be identified because a Social Security card or driver’s license was found near their decomposed remains. Jimmy Glass’s family was able to identify him only because his beloved leather jacket was next to his skeleton.
Throughout the summer and into the fall, families huddled around open graves at Houston’s cemeteries, burying their boys. Trying to beat back her despair, Betty Cobble, the mother of one of the victims, returned to her job delivering flowers, only to find herself providing arrangements at funerals for other victims. Six months after Danny Yates’s funeral, his parents moved to another part of Houston, hoping that a fresh start would ease their suffering. It didn’t. Not long after they settled into their new home, they divorced. The Waldrop brothers’ father, Everett, the construction worker, moved to Atlanta, which didn’t help. There he read Brooks’s confession, which had been reprinted in a newspaper. Everett learned he had been working on a new apartment complex directly across the street from Corll’s Place One apartment. “Maybe he had them in the apartment when I went to work,” Waldrop said to the
Chronicle. “Maybe they were being tortured right next door and I didn’t know it.”
Some parents turned to pills or alcohol to cope with the pain. Ima Glass, Jimmy’s mother, spiraled out of control. “Many, many times, she’d see a teenager hitchhiking on another side of the freeway and she’d shout, ‘That’s Jimmy! We’ve got to turn around,’ and to keep the peace, my dad would turn around, every time,” says Willie Glass. “Then one day she got a gun and grabbed my younger sister Pamela and dragged her to a back bedroom. When the SWAT team arrived, she fired a shot into the floor and yelled, ‘They’re not going to steal Pamela from me like they did my Jimmy!’ We got the pistol away from her and took her to the Harris County psychiatric unit. She was never the same, and neither were the rest of us. Dean Corll didn’t just kill twenty-seven boys. He killed twenty-seven families.”
But was it only 27 boys? One of the bodies at High Island was identified as Jeffrey Konen, who had been a salutatorian at St. Thomas High School, a private Catholic school west of downtown Houston, before he enrolled at the University of Texas. On September 1, 1970, about three months before Brooks first saw Jimmy and Danny tied up in Corll’s bed, the eighteen-year-old Konen had hitchhiked from Austin to Houston to see his girlfriend. He got a ride to the Galleria area, and the last time he was seen, he was hitchhiking again, looking for another ride to his girlfriend’s.
If Corll had been able to pull off that killing by himself—as well as the murders of Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates—didn’t it seem likely that he had hunted others on his own? From 1968 to 1970, a few thousand missing persons reports came into the juvenile division of the Houston Police Department. Surely some of those kids were missing because they had run into Corll.
The authorities did dig up the backyard of the Pasadena home where Corll was living, and they searched behind the old candy factory. But only a week after the first bodies were found, the authorities called off the excavations. The Chambers County sheriff who oversaw the High Island diggings said, inexplicably, that he had decided to stop the searches until he received definite information on the location of other graves, apparently never considering that there could have been more bodies that Brooks and Henley did not know about. “It always bothered me,” says Larry Earls, the young homicide detective. “Henley and Brooks told us that they thought there were more bodies, and there were other places where we wanted to dig, but we were told no.” Bob Wright, the executive director of marketing and communications at Stephen F. Austin University, in Nacogdoches, who was a Houston radio reporter in 1973, says that he was told by a detective that once the body count surpassed the U.S. mass murder record, the excavations were halted. Did civic leaders want the search stopped because they were concerned about how high the count would go? Beating the record by just one or two bodies, after all, was a lot less humiliating than beating it by ten or fifteen.
But in the end, the number didn’t matter. America’s city of the future got hit with a torrent of negative publicity. The Vatican’s daily newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano, published an editorial that said that the Houston killings belonged to the “domain” of the devil, and even
Izvestia, the government newspaper of the Soviet Union, got in a shot at Houston, claiming that “indifference” and “murderous bureaucracy” were the reasons the killings had gone on for so long. Furious, the city’s domineering police chief, Herman Short, held a press conference in which he suggested that the boys were mere runaways whose parents didn’t do their best to look after them. He angrily declared that reports of “links” among the victims and the killers were a myth “created by the media.” While he was at it, he took his own shot at
Izvestia. “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,” he said.
Mayor Louie Welch defended the chief, bluntly declaring that “the police can’t be expected to know where a child is if his parents don’t.” Welch simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Though it was true that some of the boys had run away from home for brief periods and others had gotten into minor trouble (Mark Scott had once been arrested for carrying a knife, for example), none of them had gotten into serious trouble. Many were just like David Hilligiest, straight-arrow, all-American kids who rarely missed a day of school.
Mayor Welch
Nevertheless, the teenage runaway story got traction. Governor Dolph Briscoe appealed to runaway teenagers in Texas to contact their parents and let them know they were “alive and well,” and a young senator from Minnesota, Walter Mondale, asked Congress to allocate $30 million over three years to set up a nationwide system of halfway houses for runaway teenagers so that they would have a safe place to go and not end up in the hands of a killer like Corll. Meanwhile, when a California legislator learned that the sex-education textbook used in the state’s schools—
Human Sexuality,written by University of Houston psychology professor James Leslie McCary—had been found among Corll’s belongings, he wrote Governor Ronald Reagan a letter, demanding that the book be withdrawn from California schools, in part because it suggested that homosexuality was not an abnormal behavior. “Perhaps you should take a trip to Texas,” the legislator wrote Reagan, “and ask the parents of the 27 young boys if the unusual sexual expressions [Corll] engaged in should be considered abnormal.”
Unable to finish his sentence, he puts down his fork and doesn’t eat another bite. He sifts through his photos again. “How that man was able to go out to that storage shed, time after time, and bury one more dead boy is something I’ll never understand,” Mullican says after a few seconds. “You get close to evil like that, no matter how long ago it was, and it never leaves you.”
For weeks the story of the murders stayed on the front pages of the Houston newspapers. To great media fanfare, Corll’s mother arrived from Colorado and announced that her son had to be innocent because he would not have buried bodies at the same boat stall he loaned out to friends of the family to store their furniture. Then, the twelve grand jurors who indicted Henley and Brooks for murder issued an explosive report criticizing the police and the district attorney, saying their investigation left unexplored “the possible involvement of others and related criminal activities.” Some of the jurors were so outraged they conducted their own investigations, driving around Houston, interviewing witnesses, and trying to find out where more bodies might be buried.
Nevertheless, Henley and Brooks do not have to be reminded that their murder spree continues to destroy lives. In 2008 Henley’s onetime buddy Tim Kerley, who survived Corll’s torture board, gave his one and only interview to a Houston television station. “I have two choices,” Kerley said about that night in August 1973. “Either accept it and move on or kill myself.” According to a close relative, Kerley spiraled downward after the interview, drinking heavily and suffering from his own form of post-traumatic shock. In March 2009 Kerley died in South America, reportedly from a heart attack. Meanwhile, many parents of the murdered boys remain frozen in time, still unable to understand what happened to their sons. Some of the parents are now in nursing homes, their minds starting to slip away. “Which is maybe a blessing, considering all that they’ve suffered,” says Deborah Aguirre, whose mother, Josephine, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. “Yet when I’ve mentioned my brothers’ names in front of her, she’s started to cry.” Over in southwest Houston, the Garcias—80-year-old Luis and 77-year-old Doris—continue to live in their same home, with a faded photo of Homer on the wall, and on Sundays, they still put on their best clothes and visit his grave, setting down fresh flowers while staring at the words on his marker, which read “The day they took you, part of us went with you.”
And in the Heights, there is Mrs. Scott. In September, when her neighbor Mrs. Hilligiest died in her home at the age of 88, Mrs. Scott told her younger son Jeff, who had moved back in with his mother to look after her, that she could be the last parent left in the neighborhood who had lost a son to Corll. Although she was unable to attend Mrs. Hilligiest’s funeral, held at the same Catholic church in the Heights where David’s had been, she heard that the priest had told the mourners that despite the many good things Mrs. Hilligiest had done over the years, she would always be remembered as “a woman of sorrows.” Mrs. Scott said to Jeff, “There are days when that’s what life feels like, just sorrow.” Driving past her house on their way to and from work, the new generation of residents barely notice Mrs. Scott as she stands in the front yard, feeding her doves. They have no idea who she is—and why would they? When Sharon Derrick rang her doorbell in October, Mrs. Scott assumed that everyone had forgotten about the murders. “I’m sorry?” she said to Derrick. “You’re here to talk about my Mark?”
As a teenager growing up in Austin, Derrick had read as many newspaper stories as she could find about the killings. But she too had forgotten about them until 2006, when she went to work at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. One afternoon she walked into one of the institute’s refrigeration units and saw two plastic tubs and a cardboard box, each one marked “1973 Mass Murders.” The containers held the unidentified remains of three boys dug up from Corll’s burial grounds.
Derrick, a scholarly, silver-haired woman, had no idea there were still bodies from the Corll killings that had never been identified. During her free time, she began studying old autopsy reports. She read the original police case files of the murder investigation, and she tracked down as many of the missing persons reports as she could find that had been filed with the Houston Police Department between 1970 and 1973. She also perused a stack of other missing persons reports, the pages yellowed by time, that had been mailed to the medical examiner’s office in the seventies from parents and police departments around the country (one of Derrick’s colleagues had come across the reports stashed in the back of a file cabinet). Derrick then conducted DNA tests on the unidentified remains—DNA testing wasn’t used to identify bodies in 1973—and she sent the skulls of those remains to a laboratory at Louisiana State University that specialized in computerized facial approximations.
After doing DNA tests with a colleague at the institute, she discovered that a body stored in a different area of the refrigeration unit—it had been found on High Island in 1983 and labeled as “archaeological remains”—was actually another Houston boy who had been murdered by Corll, which upped the known number of his victims to 28. She then received an intriguing tip from two Houston freelance writers, Barbara Gibson and Debera Phinney, who publish their stories at texascrimenews.com and are so obsessed with the killings that they’ve approached the owner of Corll’s old storage shed to ask him if they can dig even deeper than the police did. The women told Derrick that they believed that the medical examiner’s office had used the wrong missing person report in 1973 to identify the remains of Michael Baulch, one of the two Baulch brothers who were abducted and murdered on separate dates, and that he could very well have been misidentified. After doing more DNA tests, Derrick realized they were right. Since the parents were both dead, she was forced to call the siblings of the brothers to give them the news.
Derrick became even more driven to help these families. After reading the file on Mark Scott, she especially wanted to do what she could for Mrs. Scott. There had always been questions about what had happened to Mark’s body after he was murdered. In 1973 officials with the medical examiner’s office had told the Scotts that they believed Mark had been buried at High Island but they weren’t sure where his remains were. Desperate to find his son, Walter Scott had driven to High Island almost every day with a shovel so he could dig into the sand and “pray for something to guide me,” he later said. In 1994, more than two decades after the murders, the medical examiner’s office presented the Scotts with remains that they said they believed were Mark’s, based on early versions of DNA identification. Although the family had the remains cremated and placed in the family columbarium at the Chapel of the Chimes at Brookside Memorial Park, they were still not convinced they had been given the right boy.
Fortunately, the medical examiner’s office had kept a single bone from the remains that had been given to the Scotts. When she visited Mrs. Scott and Jeff, Derrick said that because DNA technology was now so advanced, she would be able to let them know if Mark was in their columbarium. All she had to do was get a DNA sample from one of them and compare it with a new sample she had taken from the bone. “I think this might give you some peace of mind,” Derrick said to Mrs. Scott, who nodded and replied, “I would like to know.” Derrick swabbed Jeff’s cheek and returned to her office, where she sent the DNA to a laboratory at the University of North Texas to be processed.
Finally, in February of this year, Derrick received the results. She returned to the Scotts’ home and asked Mrs. Scott and Jeff to sit down. In what she would later describe as one of the saddest moments of her career, she told them that the DNA from Jeff’s swab didn’t match the DNA that came from the bone. The conclusion was inescapable: Mark was somewhere else. Derrick said that his remains were probably still at High Island. She paused and added that because the beach had been under water since Hurricane Ike, there was a good chance Mark would never be found.
Mrs. Scott said nothing. Nearly forty years later, the grief was still so intense, and so bottomless, that she looked as if she could not take another breath. Then she said, “If we’ve got someone’s else son, I want his real family to have him.” For a few seconds, Derrick held Mrs. Scott’s hand. Attempting to console his mother, Jeff told her, “Maybe the ocean will uncover him and someone will find him floating in the water. Or maybe he’ll wash up to shore, and we can give him a proper burial.”
“All I’d like to know, before I die, is where that man put my son,” Mrs. Scott later said. “I want to know where my Mark has gone.”