Couples Who Kill

– but said he was relieved that David hadn’t actually taken a life.

David Brooks was deeply involved in the deaths though, telling investigators how he’d seen boys tied to the bed and had helped carry their corpses to suitable burial sites.

Wayne Henley had initially told detectives that he’d ‘be about forty when he got out’ but in August 1974 he was sentenced to 594 years, a sentence that was later overturned due to legal irregularities. Tried again in June 1979, the alcoholic teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment. David Brooks also received a life sentence in March 1975 for killing one of the boys – and life in his case is liable to mean just that.

Meanwhile, Mary Corll continued to protest her dead son’s innocence, describing him as asexual rather than homosexual and suggesting that he just wanted to please everyone all the time, that he didn’t have a sadistic bone in his body. She said that Dean was innocent and that Wayne and David wouldn’t have committed the killings if they’d gotten religion. But Dean and Wayne had both gone to church and had lured two of Dean’s victims from a religious rally, and sex offenders are more likely to come from restrictive religious households than from secular ones.

Update
Wayne Elmer Henley – now in his late forties – is still in prison. He is eligible for parole consideration every three years but the authorities are considering changing this to every five years as he’s such an unlikely candidate for freedom.

Wayne told a curiosity-seeker who wrote to him that he found it easiest to isolate himself in prison rather than become intimate with anyone. He expresses himself creatively and has become a respected painter of flowers and landscapes. His Houston art shows have quickly sold out and he recently featured in a documentary about people who produce or collect serial killer art.

He has undoubtedly bettered himself in prison but – given that he contributed to the deaths of up to thirty boys – it is unlikely that he’ll ever be released.

Neighbours told the police that Dean Corll was a good man who regularly attended church. He’d pretended to them that he was a widower so they’d assumed that Wayne Henley was his son and that the younger boys who entered the house were his son’s friends. But Wayne was now able to tell the police that Dean liked little boys and that he’d procured them for him. Being economical with the truth, he added that Dean had told him during their gunfight that he’d killed a few other boys.

For several hours the police did nothing with this information, assuming that Wayne Henley was hallucinating after his paint-sniffing session, but a policeman who had a young male relative missing – and who knew that other boys were missing – suggested they check out his tale.

The police asked Wayne if he knew where the burial sites were and he took them to the boat shed first and they began to dig up the floor, soon finding body after body. Each was neatly wrapped in plastic which Dean Corll had stolen from his workplace and some still had their hands tied or handcuffed behind their backs. One boy’s mouth was stretched wide open in a last desperate gasp for air as he’d been strangled, whilst others had rope still tied tightly around their necks. A few were so badly decomposed that they were merely disjointed bones and skulls, but a bike found in the shed belonged to a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone missing less than a week before.

Wayne Henley was close to a nervous breakdown as the bodies were brought out so the police treated him gently, letting him phone his mother and sit in the police car to compose himself. In turn, he said that he was grateful to them for not beating him up and he began to talk. For the first time he admitted his own part in some of the murders, saying that he’d helped Dean Corll to strangle one of the victims. He added that there were more bodies at another two burial sites.

That first day, the diggers found eight corpses in the boat shed. The following day they discovered several more. Almost all of the bodies were gagged and some contained bullet wounds whilst others had cord wrapped around their throats. Sometimes the genitalia – with telltale knife wounds or teeth marks showing the means of castration – was found in a separate bag. The smallest body was that of a nine-year-old, the oldest in their teens. At the end of the day, the investigators had found another nine bodies, bringing the total to seventeen.

Wayne now led them to the second burial site, the Corll’s lakeside retreat. It yielded up another two decomposing bodies. Later, further bodies were found at the Angelina National Forest, making a total of twenty-seven. Wayne said that there were more, that the total was over thirty, but investigators gave up at this stage.

The teenager was glad that his co-killer was dead and was desperate to confess further details but he shook so badly in custody that he had to be tranquillised. When asked why he did it, he said that being shot at by his own father had been pivotal. He also hinted that Dean Corll had been blackmailing him. Corll might have threatened to tell the world that he’d had sex with Wayne knowing that Wayne was outwardly fiercely heterosexual. Indeed, the teenager kept emphasising to the detectives that he’d had a girlfriend.

He also said that Dean had failed to pay him for procuring most of the boys, which suggested that he had enjoyed killing them. He admitted that two or three had been so difficult to strangle that he’d had to ask Dean to help. David Brook would also confirm this view of Wayne as someone who wanted on some level to kill, saying that Wayne had enjoyed causing the victims pain.

The abducted boys had suffered horrendously. One teenager, after being repeatedly raped, had been forced to watch his friend being strangled to death by Wayne Henley. David Brooks tried to pacify the terrified survivor, upon which Wayne shot the boy in the face. A moment later he regained consciousness and pleaded for his freedom, whereupon Wayne strangled him to death.

When the other prisoners on remand heard of what Henley had done they wanted to kill him and he had to be moved to solitary confinement for his own safety. His lawyer described him as physically and mentally ill and said that the recreational drugs and alcohol which he’d used liberally had put him into a temporarily psychotic state.

David Brooks was interviewed at length and at first denied ever seeing any cruelty taking place at Dean’s house. But later he made a full statement and gave details of many of the tortures. He added that when it came to killing the boys ‘It didn’t bother me to see it. I saw it done many times. I just wouldn’t do it myself. And I never did do it myself.’

His father proved very supportive to him when he was in custody. The older man wept as he realised that his son had procured some of these boys, knowing the atrocities which awaited them

r teenager and impregnated her. This now left Wayne as Dean Corll’s sole procurer, and the strain began to tell. In March 1973, he told his friends that he was never coming back to the Heights again and he travelled to Mount Pleasant to live with his dad, got a job in a gas station and resolved to put the past behind him. But within a month relations had soured and he returned to his mother’s house, soon returning to Dean Corll’s outwardly affable company.

Wayne’s mother thought that Wayne treated Dean like a father, and Wayne told friends that he was more like a brother – but in reality he lurched between being sexually abused himself or finding Dean younger boys to sexually assault.

The constant killing was taking its toll on the younger man, who now begged a friend to go to Australia with him, offering to pay the friend’s boat fare. He was drinking more heavily than ever and his speech was often slurred. He also asked older friends and relatives to accompany him to Dean’s parties, clearly realising that the man could not kill in front of witnesses. He was sufficiently desperate to visit the local Methodist minister twice, talking about unhappy aspects of his family life.

In April he quit his job in asphalt paving and thereafter took casual employment. But he usually had money in his pocket, money provided by Dean.

Burn out
By thirty-three Dean was drinking as heavily as Wayne and had developed high blood pressure, unusual for a man of his age who was only slightly overweight and active. Acquaintances noticed that he was becoming increasingly agitated and he talked about getting married to a long-term female friend and having a child. Then he changed his mind after phoning his mother who he hadn’t seen for five years. During a later phone-call he told her that he was contemplating suicide, but her religion made her believe in reincarnation and she told him that suicide was pointless as he’d have to go through the same lessons again in another life.

Deciding to teach yet another luckless boy a lesson, Dean asked Wayne to procure him a new male victim, but Wayne did the unthinkable and brought both a boy and a girl to Dean’s house.

Dean is murdered
It was 8th August 1973 when Wayne brought his friends to Dean’s party. Wayne fancied the girl, Rhonda, and had promised to help her run away from home. But Dean insisted on all-male parties and was so enraged at seeing the girl that he threatened to shoot them all dead.

Eventually he pretended to calm down and suggested they all sniff paint and get high. The teenagers did so, but when they lost consciousness Dean Corll tied them all up. Wayne revived to find himself strapped to the hellish plywood board. Dean was threatening to torture all three of them to death.

Wayne Henley now used all of the information he knew about Dean Corll to plead for his life. He reminded Corll of what they’d been through together and suggested the torture session would be much more inventive if two of them were doing the torturing. Eventually Dean agreed to this on the proviso that Wayne raped the still semi-conscious Rhonda – who was tied up in the bedroom – whilst the other boy was strapped to a second torture board.

Wayne said that he would and Dean untied him. But, chivalrous in his own way, Wayne was unable to rape his female friend. Enraged, Dean now began to wave a gun about.

A struggle ensued in which Wayne got hold of the pistol and Dean dared him to use it. The teenager obliged and fired six shots into Dean Corll who was dead before he hit the ground. The trembling seventeen-year-old freed the unconscious captives then called the police, saying in his singsong voice ‘Y’all better come right now. Ah kilt a man.’

Investigating, the police found the torture boards and various thin white tubes plus the often-used seventeen inch dildo. They also found that Dean’s van had been made into a mobile torture chamber, with manacles set in the walls and a box with airholes which had clearly been used to keep captives in.

y caved in. He started to hang out at a fried chicken bar where the local school pupils congregated, and offered them drink and drugs if they came back to his friend Dean’s house.

Boy after boy disappeared – but the police told their parents that they were runaways. This was partially corroborated when Dean Corll made them write letters to their families saying that they’d found work on a ship or in a faraway town. (Catherine Birnie, profiled in Women Who Kill, made her victims do the exact same thing.) One boy called his parents sounding very frightened, but before they could ascertain where he was they heard a man’s voice and the line went dead.

Wayne’s friends noticed that he didn’t invite any of them to Dean’s parties, preferring to take along boys that he hardly knew. One victim was found at the school where Wayne took his driving lessons. Another was a friend of a friend. These boys were happy to go with Wayne to Dean’s house where they enjoyed cocaine and glue-sniffing sessions. They saw the thin young man and his older friend as altruists until they lost consciousness…

The victim would revive to find himself strapped, face inwards, to the specially constructed plywood board. Dean would then rape him repeatedly and violate him with the variously-sized glass tubes. Wayne also got in on the act, pulling out the boy’s pubic hairs. David Brooks occasionally called round to find Corll and Henley torturing one of their prisoners, though he’d claim that he watched but didn’t join in.

Cruelly, Wayne remained in touch with the parents of some missing boys and helped them distribute posters. The parents had no idea that he’d already helped to kill their sons and had buried the bodies in Dean’s boat shed.

The torture worsens
But pushing an oversized dildo into a victim’s rectum can’t make up for more than thirty years of repression. Hearing a boy scream can’t compensate for all of the years when you were emotionally scarred. As such, Dean Corll had to think up greater and greater excesses in order to assuage his blood lust – and he took to castrating his victims with a knife.

At least one victim had his testicles bitten off and it’s telling that during this period Dean Corll was especially anxious about his own genitalia as he’d developed a water pocket in his scrotum which caused him increasing pain. He told a female friend that he couldn’t afford to have this hydrocele treated, but it’s more likely that he was fearful of the operation. He delayed until he was in agony then had the hydrocele removed.

His cruelty to his victims continued. One boy was viciously kicked to death whilst others were injured with bullets, sometimes being kept alive for several days.

The killing spree escalates
Dean Corll needed these torture murders to provide him with everything he lacked – self-esteem, the gratification he couldn’t find through his boring job, revenge at those who had punished him throughout his childhood. But he found, as most serial killers do, that the good feelings lasted for a shorter and shorter time. As a result he started to encourage Wayne to bring him two victims rather than one. Some of these duos were friends, others were brothers. He would torture them repeatedly then make one of the boys watch whilst his mate or sibling was slowly killed.

Dean also began to abuse younger victims as his need for satisfaction increased: most of his prey had been in their mid-teens but now he tortured and killed a nine-year-old boy who lived across the road.

Wayne Henley noted that Dean’s blood lust was up, that he now asked for more and more victims. He believed that Dean would only be happy when he brought him a new boy every day.

The men continued to kill with the utmost brutality. One day Wayne fired a gun as he entered Dean’s room and it accidentally hit one of their torture-victims in the jaw. David Brooks witnessed the macabre incident. Unperturbed, Dean Corll continued to torture the badly injured boy for the rest of the day.

David Brooks leaves
By 1973, David had moved away from Dean’s neighbourhood, married anoth

David Brooks continued to procure boys for Dean, only now he knew that their ordeal wouldn’t end with rape. He lured acquaintances to the house and remained for many of the resultant torture sessions. Some of these sessions lasted four or five days. He was, incredibly, indifferent to the victims’ suffering but would later claim that he stopped short of killing any of the boys. He became more and more involved with his girlfriend so decided to take a lesser role in the proceedings: by age seventeen he would marry and have a baby. Handing on the pot of gold, he introduced Dean to his former school friend Wayne Henley, a hard drinking fifteen-year-old who he knew was desperate for cash.

Elmer Wayne Henley
Wayne – he would always be known by this, his middle name – was born in 1956 to Mary and Elmer Wayne Henley senior. The couple already had one son and after Wayne they’d go on to have two more.

He was a well-mannered little boy who was often taken to the playground by his grandmother, and he had a loving mother who welcomed his friends around. She was known as a strict and righteous woman but she loved her four sons and they loved her too.

Little Wayne initially did well at school, having an IQ between 110 and 120, which is well above average. But he often returned from class to find his father beating his mother, as when Wayne’s father got drunk he became a troublemaker. He had a criminal record which stretched back years. When his marriage started to break up, he waited on the porch with a shotgun, determined to murder his wife. But the shot went wide and almost hit Wayne instead.

Wayne’s parents divorced and times were hard so Wayne took two part-time jobs to help his mother. His grades fell rapidly and he dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

He was a religious boy who carried his Bible everywhere. He hoped to join the Navy at sixteen but failed the tests and was visibly devastated. Keen to make money to impress his girlfriends – and clearly finding it easy to emulate his father’s violence – he turned to crime instead. He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, though it was David Brooks who permanently carried a gun.

Wayne got a job laying asphalt but he was bored. At sixteen he was arrested for breaking and entering. He grew a thin moustache, smoked and drank and tried to act old before his time, almost getting engaged to one of his girlfriends. Only his thin body and teenage acne showed his true age.

The late Jack Olsen, who wrote a book about the case, would brilliantly sum up boys like Henley and Brooks in a single sentence. ‘They are born, they go to school, they drop out, they get menial jobs, they reproduce others like themselves, and they die.’ It’s a chillingly accurate insight into people born into a poverty of expectation where life amounts to little more than a boring day job, evenings spent slumped in front of the television and alcohol used liberally to keep the boredom at bay.

Wayne Henley had led this kind of life, but now he had a benefactor in the form of Dean Corll to whom David Brooks had introduced him. Dean clearly lusted after Wayne’s slender body – and Wayne was willing to go along with this, as were many of the impoverished teens living in the Heights.

Corrupted to kill
At first, Wayne thought he’d struck gold in meeting Dean. The older man ferried him and his friends around in Dean’s Ford Econoline van, bought them beers and marijuana. Admittedly Wayne wasn’t allowed to bring any of his girlfriends along to these drinking sessions, but that seemed a small price to pay for a free high.

But Dean soon made it clear that he wanted his new lover to lure young schoolboys to his house to rape and eventually kill them. At first, Henley said no but then his finances worsened and Dean offered him two hundred dollars, a lot of money in the Seventies. Wayne thought some more about the offer and realised that he’d not only make a lot of cash but would manage to ward off Dean’s sexual advances for a few days whilst Dean enjoyed himself with his victim. Wayne wanted to see Dean as a father figure but felt ashamed of their bedroom acts.

Dean continued to ask Wayne to find him a boy and Wayne eventuall

albeit a sadistic one, and was happy to buy a young boy a pizza then take him to Dean’s house, knowing that Dean would talk him into having sex. In return for procuring these children, David got to live off Dean. As a result, Dean was frequently broke.

But the arrangement suited both parties so it continued until David Brooks returned to the house unexpectedly one day to find a naked Dean Corll sodomising two boys who he’d stripped and bound to a homemade torture board. David would later say that this didn’t shock him, but that Dean was clearly shaken at having a witness to the crime. The older man untied the boys and offered to help David buy a car if he’d forget what he’d seen – and envious Heights youngsters soon saw the sixteen-year-old driving a green Corvette.

It was clear to David from the start that this wasn’t consensual sadomasochistic sex as Dean had nailed a metal sheet to the inside of his door so that no one could bore their way out. The torture board was also designed for maximum restraint with holes and handcuffs in the top to hold the victim’s wrists and lower holes with rope to bind the victim’s feet. And, to make sure that the rape victim couldn’t scream the house down, Dean bought several gags. He even wired up a security system so that he’d be alerted if anyone approached his property.

The rapes continued, with the victims – who’d happily sniffed glue or gotten drunk before the event – being set free after their ordeal. None of them reported the sexual assaults, though Dean Corll took some precaution by moving house frequently so that his victims couldn’t find him. He also moved again and again when neighbours complained about him partying with boys late into the night. Once, when Brooks and Corll were in the house, neighbours were woken by a young boy screaming and banging on the wall and an older man shouting ‘Stop him!’ But they assumed that someone was merely tripping out on drugs.

The reality was much more ugly, for David Brooks had started procuring younger children for his friend to rape. Dean Corll terrorised and violated boy after boy but it still wasn’t enough to assuage his rage. He had a lowly job which he loathed, no real friends, no creative outlet. He was approaching thirty and had nothing to show for it. His home was rented and he often had to sell his possessions to fund David Brooks’ lifestyle. He still hid his sexuality from his family, so his increasingly sporadic relationship with them was built on a lie.

Now he noticed the first signs of ageing – lines around his eyes and thinning hair – but Dean Corll couldn’t afford to age gracefully. After all, his persona around young boys was that of a Peter Pan. They wanted a youthful Dean who could party all night with them, not a man who resembled their dad.

Dean Corll had played at being a young boy’s friend and when this hadn’t brought him emotional relief he’d become a rapist. Now that too was no longer enough. He looked at the board where he’d bound his rape victims and imagined what it would be like to torture them repeatedly, to ensure they never left.

Almost thirty-one, he’d had enough of sadistic sexual fantasy and rape and was ready to put his macabre dreams into action. For the first time he’d be important, noticed, have the power to grant life or death. The obedient mother’s boy and the doting sugar daddy to David Brooks was about to become a tyrant who made his helpless victims scream and beg.

The first known victim
There’s some uncertainty about the fate of the two boys whom David Brooks found tied to the torture board, as at first he said Dean had let them go, but later he stated that he believed Dean had killed them. But in September 1970 a teenage male hitchhiker became Corll’s first known victim. Corll gave him a lift, took him back to his flat and plied him with drink or drugs until he was semi-conscious. He was then stripped naked and strapped to the torture board.

The luckless youth was raped – and when Dean Corll was bored with raping him, the torture started. A thin glass tube was inserted into his penis and a large dildo forced into his rectum. The teenager was tightly gagged to muffle his screams. Later in the proceedings Corll would break the glass tube whilst it was still lodged inside his victim’s urethra. When he tired of the boy’s visible torment, he strangled him to death.

Other victims

Dean eventually rented his own apartment but still worked alongside his mother on a daily basis. By now she’d married again, this time to a merchant seaman she met through a computerized dating agency. The seaman was insanely jealous of his new wife and threatened to kill her so she divorced him but bizarrely she soon married him again. The relationship remained deeply unstable and Dean had such bad fights with this man that he soon refused to visit his mother’s house.

Meanwhile all the infighting at the candy company took its toll and it began to suffer losses. Mary Corll decided to give the business up so Dean trained as an electrician with the Houston Power & Lighting Company, testing relays. The work bored him but it was relatively well paid. Now his mother filed for her fifth divorce, telling her friends that her poor marriage record explained why Dean hadn’t married. He was simply a bachelor boy.

The bachelor boy bought himself a powerful motorbike and gave the local boys lifts on the back of it, but he begged them not to tell his mother as she would worry excessively. When she saw the machine she did indeed worry and scolded him as if he was still a child. In turn, he scolded her for dating, but she was still an attractive woman and understandably wanted male company.

Home alone
In June 1968 a psychic told Mary that she should leave Houston. She always listened to psychics so she moved to Dallas – and twenty-eight-year-old Dean was on his own for the very first time.

He now rented a house across the road from a primary school and started to invite boys to his house to watch television. There, he’d play the handcuff game, where he’d cuff them and pretend he’d lost the keys. Homosexual serial killer John Gacy had done the exact same thing, going on to torture his cuffed victims for days before suffocating or drowning them. But for now Dean simply teased his trusting captives and let them go. Police reports would record that he had paid other boys ten dollars to indulge in oral sex with him. One such boy was David Brooks.

David Owen Brooks
David was the son of Alton Brooks, a successful paving contractor. Dean had first met David when the boy was only twelve and Dean was twenty-seven, but they lost touch when the Brooks’ marriage began to disintegrate and David was moved around the country to live with various relatives.

At one stage, after stealing a stove in Louisiana, he was taken from his mother and returned to his Houston-based father whom he hadn’t seen for years, but the first thing the man did was force the long-haired teenager to get a short-back-and-sides. David felt completely powerless now that even his appearance wasn’t his own. All that he owned were his thoughts and as a result he began to tell his girlfriends that none of them really knew him or knew what he was thinking. They probably didn’t as he had a higher IQ than most of the local children and often got good grades at school.

When living with his father didn’t work out, he was sent to live with his grandfather, then his grandmother. When he was fourteen he moved back to the Heights and lived briefly with his mother. There, Dean offered him money to be his sexual partner. Brooks was heterosexual but desperate for cash to buy status symbols so he accepted the offer, rationalising that it wasn’t really homosexual sex if Dean did everything to him and he didn’t reciprocate. This suited Dean who liked to be the active sexual partner, the one in charge.

But during the day, the youthful David was the one in charge. The teenager could call the shots, telling Dean what to get him to drink, to eat and to get high. He also enjoyed going on fishing trips in Dean’s van whilst the other local boys sat on their porches and longed for a more exciting life.

David now became best friends with a teenager called Wayne Henley who attended the same school. He started to hang around with Henley’s crowd at night and his grades dropped markedly. He continued to steal, breaking into a chemists for drugs and stealing from grocery stores. He would offer these drugs for free to younger children. Luckily some told their parents who warned them off.

At fifteen the would-be drug dealer dropped out of school and began living with Dean. The teenager had grown his hair long again and gotten himself a girlfriend. He’d grown to six-foot two so presumably had little sexual appeal for the paedophile Corll, but Dean wanted to keep David around, as David was a magnet for younger boys. The fifteen-year-old had a strong personality,

the house quickly picked up on the terrible tension, so for a sensitive child like Dean it must have taken its toll.

By Dean’s early teens, his industrious mother had set up a candy-making business from home. This took up all of the teenager’s time as he collected the pecans, wrapped and boxed the candies and delivered them. There was simply no time left over for a social life. There was also no time for sexual education but his mother figured he’d watched animals copulating on his grandmother’s farm and knew all he needed to know.

Meanwhile the ill-educated teenager seemed happy to work for hours after school without pay – but he eventually had enough of being ordered around by his stepfather and being told he was useless. He snapped and point blank refused to run any more errands for the ungrateful man.

Dean continued to live inside his own head. He was sufficiently nice that he didn’t draw attention to himself, but not so approachable that females or older males wanted to befriend him. With his brown hair, brown eyes and neat appearance he was so ordinary that few people gave him a second glance. Those that did noted that he flirted with boys and did everything he could to keep the attractive ones close to him, behaviour that his increasingly-religious mother was quick to deny.

Dean failed his final exams at school but wasn’t too worried as he was going into the family’s candy business. He continued to work long hours there until he was nineteen and his grandfather died. His mother now packed him off to live with his widowed grandmother in Indiana so that she had company and someone to take her to the local Methodist church. The teenager found a job there and even sent money home to his mother. If anything, he was too good, a young man who seemed to live a completely selfless life.

Dean’s life at this point was very similar to that of cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer who also lived with his grandmother and regularly accompanied her to church. The rest of the time he appeared to outsiders as completely passive. But beneath his non-person exterior, strong desires were brewing. Dahmer at first satisfied these by having auto-erotic sessions with a male mannequin, then he drugged men in bathhouses and had sex with their unconscious bodies. Finally, he had sex with men whom he’d abducted and crudely lobotomised, having further erotic encounters with them after they were dead.

At this stage Dean Corll was still getting by with an active sadistic fantasy life. But at age twenty-one he was called back home to help in the candy business as it was really taking off. By now the family had relocated to the Heights area of Houston, Texas, and for the first time the business paid him a proper wage rather than just board and lodgings. Unfortunately relations between himself and his stepfather remained mercurial.

Two candy businesses
Gradually the family split so that Mrs Corll and her children were running one candy business and her third husband – still living in the same house – was running another. They eventually separated but stalked each other for many months. Mary would later say that the split was amicable but friends said that she hated her ex-husband and was desperate for his candy enterprise to fail. Dean also loathed his former stepfather and worked even harder than before for his mother in order to make their business succeed.

Twenty-one-year-old Dean now set up a pool table on the premises and invited the local children to play there. Several boys fled after he made passes at them but others were glad of the attention as they were from broken homes.

By the time he was twenty-two, the army wanted him to do his basic training but his mother said that she couldn’t do without him. For the next two years she prevented him being shipped away, but when he was twenty-four he was drafted and attended radio-repair school. His record was spotless and he became more open about his homosexuality. For the first time he could truly be himself. But after ten months his mother contacted the Red Cross to get him back, claiming that she couldn’t run the business single handed. When he returned to Houston he moved into a little trailer next to her house.

Dean kept in touch with his father at this time, visiting every second day and telling him about the family business. Friends said that he respected his dad now.

5 THE LOST BOYS
DEAN CORLL & WAYNE HENLEY

Men who kill as a duo are often heterosexual friends or relatives – Bittaker & Norris, Bianchi & Buono, Lake & Ng. But in the following profile the men were lovers who went on to repeatedly torture and kill at least twenty-seven boys.

Dean Arnold Corll
Dean was born on 24th December 1939 to Mary and Arnold Corll in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The couple’s relationship had been stormy even when they were dating, and it worsened after the marriage. But they still brought a second child, Stanley, into the world. Arnold Corll was a strict disciplinarian who would make Dean and his brother sit for hours on a chair without moving as a punishment for being boisterous. He also refused to let them play outside. He told Mary that they should be whipped but she recognised their supposed bad behaviour was just childish curiosity.

When Dean was five his parents’ marriage ended. Mary Corll now had to support the family alone and took a job, leaving her sons in the nursery or with various babysitters. Stanley coped with the frequent changes of minder and went off to play with his friends but Dean stayed home and worried about everything, feeling responsible for his nuclear family. He took on a pseudo-parental role incredibly early and would fret if Mary or Stanley were a few minutes late in coming home.

He developed rheumatic fever at age six and was sent home from school for a prolonged rest. For the next few months he stayed home with his mother. She took him to a school friend’s party but when he appeared to get upset she decided that he wasn’t enjoying himself and that she wouldn’t take him to further social events.

Her overprotectivity heightened when he was diagnosed as having a heart condition and she rarely let him out of her sight. Admittedly this suited little Dean as he was still worrying about her and Stanley, even exhorting her not to drive too fast.

Some time after World War II ended, Mary remarried Arnold Corll and he subjected the children to increasingly harsh punishments. By now the family had moved to Houston, Texas, and were living in a trailer. All four Corlls co-existed in cramped misery. The second marriage soon went the way of the first with verbal fights and recriminations, though Arnold Corll always kept his family well provided for. He would go on to marry a third time and this marriage would be a successful one.

Alternately ignored, shouted at or punished by his father and emotionally overwhelmed by his mother, Dean retreated into himself. He was punctual, did what he could with an average intelligence but made virtually no impression on his teachers. Outwardly benign, he was probably on the cusp of developing an active fantasy life where he was masterful and cruel.

Meanwhile, he was at the mercy of adult whims. At nine he and his little brother witnessed other neighbourhood kids committing a petty act of vandalism. When the Sheriff questioned them, they described what they’d seen and were justifiably proud of having helped the local law enforcement. But their mother’s response was to demand her sons be given police protection – and when this was refused she sent them away to live with relatives for the entire summer so that they wouldn’t be picked on by the vandalistic boys.

When Dean was twelve his mother married for the third time so he gained a stepfather, a travelling salesman who moved the family to Vidor in Texas. The town was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and was fronted by a sign which said ‘Nigger, get your ass out of town by sundown.’ Needless to say, the school’s remit centred around sports rather than civil rights.

Dean tried to fit in with the other boys, going swimming with them in the nude and combing the woods for nuts to take home to his hard-working mother. But he fainted in church one day and his heart murmur was blamed. The doctors warned that he mustn’t over-exert himself so from that day onwards he stayed home whilst the others went to the outdoor pool. He joined the school band and took great pleasure in playing the trombone, but the band leader would later be unable to remember him. The quiet boy who never gave his family any trouble was virtually invisible – but he saw and heard the constant bickering between his mother and her new husband. Casual visitors to