Most of the familys business was in Houston, so Corlls mother and stepfather relocated there and opened up a candy store. After he graduated from high school, Dean Corll relocated to Houston as well, where he continued to work for the family business. At that point, it seems as though Henley finally snapped. I sent him a letter once, asking how he was doing, says Henley. The photo on the left is from August of 1964, when Corll joined the US Army. She would have had some peace when she died.. From around the country, aging parents who do not know how to use e-mail still send handwritten letters to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences (the former medical examiners office), wanting to know if their sons who went missing in the early seventies might be buried in one of Corlls cemeteries. He was nicknamed "the Candy Man" because he owned and operated a company called "Corll Candy Company". They got in their car and roamed the streets, peering down alleys and stopping at the local drive-in restaurants. Maybe Dean was considering me as one of his next victims, Henley says in the penitentiary visiting room. 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. Nevertheless, the teenage runaway story got traction. My mom did her best to forgive, recalls the Hilligiests youngest son, Stanley, who now works for a Houston oil field services company. The doves around her fluttered, then settled, then fluttered again. Some of the more recent victims were quickly identified. When Aguirre put on the handcuffs, Corll dragged the teenager into the bedroom and, according to Henley, had his fun with him. After Aguirre was strangled to death, the trio took him down to High Island for his burial. He was this smart, clean-cut, nicely dressed man. Elmer Henley was found guilty of six murders and sentenced to life in prison. ., Unable to finish his sentence, he puts down his fork and doesnt eat another bite. He told Brooks he had killed the boys and buried them in his storage shed. More recently, Andrea Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in 2001 in a home in Clear Lake. Danny, the son of a union electrician, was equally good-looking, with curly brown hair and blue eyes and peach fuzz on his face, says Bettye McCool Johnson, his girlfriend at the time. Surratt, a board member of the Houston Association of Realtors, said, "We don't have to disclose suicide or natural deaths on the property. All Rights Reserved. He had seen so many broken marriages. True to form, she divorced the merchant seaman in 1968, and based on her visits to Houston psychics, who told her that she needed to get as far away from him as possible, she closed the candy factory and moved to Colorado. WebOur Mission. In a logistical move shortly thereafter, he and his family moved to the northern outskirts of Houston in order that the family candy business could be closer to the city they had noted the majority of their produce had been sold. @ 29.68135776, -95.21422424 South Houston, Texas (TX), US This was the last home of the serial killer where at least six teenage boys were tortured and killed. I know people will always think that Im evil, Henley says. We report on vital issues from politics to education and are the indispensable authority on the Texas scene, covering everything from music to cultural events with insightful recommendations. Two and a half months later, they went after two boys on the north side of the Heights who were walking to the neighborhood swimming pool. By the next day, police officers were exhuming bodies from a wooded area near Sam Rayburn Reservoir, outside Lufkin, and on a beach at High Island, east of Houston. Dorothy, a soft-spoken homemaker, and Fred, who worked for the city striping streets, got in their Ford Galaxie and raced to Freeport, checking the beaches and showing Davids photo to everyone they met. He pointed the gun at Mark, who, said Brooks, just gave up. Corll and Henley then strangled him with a cord. Mrs. Mary Scott in the house in the Heights that her family owned when her son Mark disappeared on April 20, 1972. A television reporter even filmed Henley using a radio phone to call his mother. 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.. (Devastated, Siebeneicher ended up committing suicide in 1977.) The house where Dean Corll lived and died is listed for nearly $185,000 on HAR.COM. Corll - known as the Candy Man because his family owned a candy shop - was a serial killer who, with the help of young boys, would lure victims back to his home where he would abuse and torture them before killing them with a .22 caliber pistol. They have no idea who she isand why would they? Throughout the summer and into the fall, families huddled around open graves at Houstons cemeteries, burying their boys. Mr. and Mrs. Scott and their younger son, Jeff, called Marks friends and classmates, asking if they had seen him. Once, when they were in bed, they began to have intercourse, but he stopped because he said he just didnt feel like it. Still, she said, he was a wonderful man who wanted to settle down and get married, and she never considered it odd that most of their dates were in the presence of her children or with Brooks and Henley tagging along. Dean Corll was an American serial killer who shocked the nation There had always been questions about what had happened to Marks body after he was murdered. Wayne Henley, one of Corlls teenage accomplices, is escorted into a Houston courtroom to face murder charges. After they returned to Houston, the Hilligiests and Mrs. Winkle, who lived directly behind them, printed five hundred posters offering a $1,000 reward for information regarding Davids and Malleys whereabouts. I dont think Alton really liked David all that much because he was a sickly kid who wore those hippie glasses. Mrs. Scott was then 44 years old, a switchboard operator for Dresser Industries. But they promised the families that if their sons were spotted on the streets, they would be told to go back to school. They captured and killed a twenty-year-old father who had been living in the Heights and was hitchhiking home to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to see his wife and new baby. And then there was Betty Hawkins, the single mother who first met Corll when she worked at the candy factory and who started dating him in 1968. At one point, Marys third husband, the merchant seaman, told his wife that he suspected Corll might be homosexual because of the number of young boys he invited over to the candy factory after hours. West Texans Are Learning What It Means to Live in Bear Country, Jimmy Carters Peanut-and-Egg Taco Made Quite the Impression on San Antonians, The Top 50 Texas BBQ Joints: 2021 Edition, The Campaign to Sabotage Texass Public Schools. Living less than a mile away from Corll in the snazzy Chateaux Dijon apartment complex, which offered six swimming pools and all-day water volleyball games, was the well-known Houston bachelor George W. Bush, who was then driving a Triumph sports car, chasing women, and flying jets for the Texas Air National Guard. How that man was able to go out to that storage shed, time after time, and bury one more dead boy is something Ill never understand, Mullican says after a few seconds. One day, she told the police that she had learned that Malley had a friend who drove a Plymouth GTX. One of those parents is Mrs. Scott, who has never known for sure what happened to Marks body. But, he told Derrick, his eyes filling with tears, she had died in a car crash on the night of her high school prom. Eleven of them had attended the same junior high. WebHenley would ultimately be the person to end Corlls life in that house by shooting him. The youngest victim was Jerry Lynn Waldrop, who was just 13 years old. Youre here to talk about my Mark?. His co-workers at Houston Lighting and Power always had good things to say about him, and the manager of one apartment complex where Corll had lived and committed murders called him as good a tenant as weve ever had. When he began to come around the Henley house, he worked on Mrs. Henleys car and got along so well with all the Henley boys that a charmed Mrs. Henley invited him to Easter dinner. A sheet of plastic covered the floor. . He later She asked me if I really had done all the things she had been reading about on the Internet. He was shot and killed by one of his young accomplices in 1973. WebIn September 1971, Corll moved to another apartment in the Heights: 915 Columbia Street. WebAddress. They regarded his fondness for children to be no different from what they would find in a respectable scoutmaster. Maybe he had them in the apartment when I went to work, Waldrop said to the Chronicle. Some parents and family members stood outside the gallery on opening night, holding signs that read Hang Henley! In response, Mary West simply fired the youth. In the photos, hes thin and 33, wearing bell-bottoms, a white belt, and a striped shirt with a tie that doesnt quite reach his navel. After the murders of Danny and Jimmy, Corll moved to the Place One Apartments on Mangum Road, five miles northwest of the Heights, and on January 30, 1971, he struck again. Many were just like David Hilligiest, straight-arrow, all-American kids who rarely missed a day of school. Six months after Danny Yatess funeral, his parents moved to another part of Houston, hoping that a fresh start would ease their suffering. Photos of the house and other related images. Dean would make these short, jerky movements; hed start smoking a cigarette, which he usually never did; and hed say he needed to do a new boy. Between June 1 and August 4, they killed eight boys, five of whom were from the Heightsand still the police, the neighborhoods residents, and the news media were not putting two and two together. the Serial Killers house number is 2020!!! Although she was unable to attend Mrs. Hilligiests funeral, held at the same Catholic church in the Heights where Davids 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 thats 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. Yet at least in this case, the past is hardly past. The 66-year-old is currently incarcerated at the John B. Connally Unit in Karnes County. He was lured by Elmer Henley and David Brooks to 925 Schuler St: the then-address of serial killer Dean Corll. Im sorry? she said to Derrick. A police officer who had gone to high school with Corll and married his cousin insisted that he was a quiet, well-mannered, well-groomed, considerate person. He had a nice girlfriend, Betty, a single mother who let her children call him Daddy. How Florence ButtNot Her SonLaunched the H-E-B Empire. In those years, of course, plenty of people tended to believe, falsely, that homosexuality was linked to pedophilia. When the officers in the juvenile division heard that Malley had made a quick phone call to his mother, Selma, the night he and David disappeared, telling her he was at the beach town of Freeport swimming with friends, they assumed the boys were runaways and that the matter was resolved. He wrote backhe typed his letter and didnt sign itsaying, Lets stay in touch. But we never did. Weve got to turn around, and to keep the peace, my dad would turn around, every time, says Willie Glass. Did civic leaders want the search stopped because they were concerned about how high the count would go? Do you realize I hadnt even gotten my drivers license, and there I was, out committing murders with Dean just because I wanted to please him?. She kept dreaming that her son had been buried alive and was trying to claw his way out. Jimmy Glasss family was able to identify him only because his beloved leather jacket was next to his skeleton. He met Aguirre at the end of his night shift and brought him to Corlls apartment, where Corll and Brooks were waiting. It was a giddy time in Houston: Boosters were calling the city the future of the United States. Over at the Texas Medical Center, rival surgeons Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey were pioneering heart transplant surgery, and at NASAs giant Manned Spaceflight Center, flight directors were guiding Apollo astronauts to the moon. We were in a laundry room at our apartment complex when he first kissed methe kind of thing a girl never forgets.. anonymously (anonymous users cannot post links). 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. Look at the one thats all white, Mrs. Scott said. (After being hospitalized, supposedly for a pulmonary condition, Capote dropped his project altogether.) In those first few weeks, she left work early to wait on her stoop, looking left and right. He got a job working as an electrician at the Houston Lighting and Power Company, and by 1970 he had moved to an apartment about five miles southwest of the Heights, on Yorktown Street. After taking the boys to one of Corlls apartments or rent housesCorll was constantly moving, sometimes staying in one place for only a few weeksHenley and Brooks would help Corll strip them naked, tape their mouths, bind their hands and legs, and fasten them with handcuffs to a sheet of plywood that was two and a half feet wide and eight feet long. To this day no one knows how Corll met the boys and persuaded them to ride away with him. Jos R. Ralat is Texas Monthlys taco editor, writing about tacos and Mexican food. There, Brooks said in his confession, he watched as Corll strangled them. That's how he explained it, well, it was true, she had been shot 20 to 30 times.". The house is situated in the west of Pasadena in Houston, Texas. Sheriffs deputies display a torture board that Corll had rigged up for his victims, along with other implements he used in the murders. It is not a public place. Whatever evil was in Wayne, there was still some good in him, and finally the good won. Then she said, If weve got someones else son, I want his real family to have him. For a few seconds, Derrick held Mrs. Scotts hand. Texas Lege Watch: A House Republican Fights for Chicken Freedom, Texas Monthly Recognized by ASME in the 2023 National Magazine Awards. If I had told her, I wouldnt be here now. He mentioned that the girl he had married in July 1973 had given birth to their daughter, who regularly visited him when she got older. You know your boys are runaways.. Brooks stared at the photo and said he didnt know who the boy was, but he knew how he had died. The Harris County Appraisal District website, which has owner records dating back to 1995, shows five different owners in that time. Derrick said that his remains were probably still at High Island. One afternoon, they brought down seventeen-year-old Billy Baulch, who used to sell Mrs. Corlls candy door-to-door, and his sixteen-year-old friend Johnny Delone after the two had left Baulchs home to buy soft drinks. 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