13 Neighbor Boys Paths Led Them to Violent Death
by John Barbour
Thirteen of the 23 lived here, in one leftover neighborhood, where the sleek brown Lincoln belonging to Wayne Henley’s lawyer is clearly out of place. Thirteen families anticipate mourning their lost sons, confused and bitter because they feel the police were indifferent to their cries for help when their children were first missed. Quietly now they wait for word that the mass grave some 15 miles away, or the other sandy graves scattered in this area of Texas have indeed yielded the remains of their brutalized and slain sons. They wrestle with the fact that tragedy can lurk behind the benign and fatherly manner of a likeable man, or behind the polite words of a neighborhood boy.
The homosexual murders came to light only five days ago when Elmer Wayne Henley, 17, told police he had just slain Dean Allen Corll, 33, to spare the lives of two other possible victims. Later, police said, Henley admitted helping Corll molest and kill 24 boys, having lured them to several homes and apartments Corll occupied over the last two years. Then David Owen Brooks, 18, came forward to say he had witnessed many of the murders and helped bury the victims.
There were 25 to 30, he said. But he denied he had killed anyone. So far, the remains of 23 boys have been exhumed from three grave sites. Only five victims have been positively identified, but medical examiners worked through the weekend at the task of identifying others. Henley has been charged with five counts of murder, Brooks with one. Police resume the search for more bodies today. But in this neighborhood, what the police do now is anticlimactic and sadly late.
When Fred and Dorothy Hilligiest, both 51, called the police on May 30, 1971, to say that their son, David, 13, hadn’t come home, they were told he was probably staying with a friend. Call back the next day, they were told. “That wasn’t David’s nature,” the mother said, incredulity on her face. “I couldn’t get over that they didn’t get out and look for him. After all he’s a human being, he’s a child.” But in her heart, she said, “I feared immediately that something had happened to him Wayne Henley lives just a block away in a white frame house with a sign in the front window that now says, “No Trespassing.”
His grandmother used to bring little Wayne over to the Hilligiest house to play with little David a decade ago. “It showed that they cared who he played with,” Dorothy Hilligiest says. “They cared how he grew up. But somewhere along the line, something went wrong.” The events of the past two years have done so much to challenge her sanity, her view on life, and her husband’s. Her eyes search for sense as she tells of running into Wayne Henley the many times over the last two years of his politeness in asking if she had heard anything of David yet, of his attempts to comfort her and reassure her. “He always seemed so interested and sincere.
I could tell he had been drinking,” she said. “He would ask if we had heard anything. And he would look off into the distance. Looking back, I can see he was carrying a burden he was trying to sedate.” The Hilligiests have raised six children in that house. Two boys remain. Mrs. Hilligiest recalls with quiet horror that after David’s disappearance, Wayne Henley once suggested obliquely that he might take Gregory, 12, fishing with him some day. The Hilligiests have spent thousands from their meager funds in their search for their son.
They offered a $1,000 reward, had circulars and pictures printed, hired a private investigator. Fred made repeated trips to Freeport, 50 miles south, to check out any and every clue. How could 13 boys whose paths crossed in school, on the streets, at a candy shop, a swimming pool, disappear without raising a general alarm? Dorothy says, “I think the police did something. But they could have done more. I knew my boy wasn’t a runaway. But they class the very young and adults as missing persons. Teenagers are runaways.” That’s part of the answer. Also, the disappearances occurred over more than a two-year time span. And, finally, while children in a neighborhood know one another, quite often the families do not. So it was that one by one, two by two, the toll grew.
The official police stance is that with over 5,000 runaway reports a year in Houston, they have neither the staff nor the time to give any one case more than 30 days of checking before it is put in the inactive file. From that point on they will check out any new clues the parents come up wiui, Dut otnerwise the case is inactive. Frustrated, the Hilligiests turned to their own resources and called in a private detective. The investigator turned up a number of possible clues, including several tales from a girl people buried alive, one boy buried in sand up to his neck. Some of the burials were at a beach. Others in what she said was a garage. But when investigators were sent out with her, she couldn’t find the garage.
Fred Hilligiest’s tanned and weathered face is marked by disbelief as he tells of passing on the investigator’s findings to a police inspector. “Private investigators are for rich people’,” Hilligiest says the inspector told him. “Then he turned to his secretary and said, ‘Check him and see if he’s licensed’.” He wasn’t, and Fred Hilligiest remembers: “I was shocked that they would go to the expense to prosecute him, but they couldn’t afford to go out and look for our boy.” “This whole summer we felt so heavy-hearted,” Dorothy Hilligiest says. “We kept our hopes up. We told ourselves that people get to feeling different around the holidays. Maybe we’d hear something Christmas. Then maybe Easter.
Maybe when school starts. We ‘tied everything to the seasons. “And then Fred woke up one night. He had been crying in his sleep. It was David’s birthday,” she recalled. And finally, Wednesday. Dorothy had just returned from the funeral of a sister. Someone called and said David’s name had been mentioned in the television news. She called the channel. They said call the police. This time she wasn’t switched to the missing persons bureau. This time she was switched to homicide. They had already pulled David’s file, she recalled. The officer on the other end sounded shaken. He said he wished that she didn’t have to hear it this way, that they were sending a man out with the word. Dorothy recalls saying only, “Oh my God. What’s going on?”
And her voice breaks and trails off when she remembers the officer saying, “Homosexual.” “He said the Henley boy told us that,” and she responded, “Why, he’s our neighbor boy.” The officer was surprised at that. And when Dorothy told him there was another neighborhood boy with David when ho disappeared, the officer said they won’d have to question Henley again about that. “Everything began to spin through my head,” she says. “About 2:30 in the morning we went out to where the bodies were found. We just had to do something, know something. We still haven’t heard anything.” David’s body has not been positively identified. When David disappeared, he was in the company of Gregory Winkle, 15, “Malley” to his mother.
Selma Winkle lives a block from the Hilligiests, two blocks from the Henley house. She once worked in a candy factory In the neighborhood. The foreman was Dean Allen Corll, whom she remembers as “a likeable, gentle man.” The candy shop was across the street from an elementary school and the children would come to the door when school was out asking for scraps of the Mexican candy. Her son, Malley, worked there, too, washing out the vats and cleaning up the pieces of broken candy. For the last 4′ years she has worked as a practical nurse at the Sharpstown General Hospital. She learned nursing while taking care of her late husband More he died of a hereditary nervous disorder. But because of the night work she didn’t see much of Malley.
He would always leave notes saying where he was going, when he would be back. Once he even left her a note with his Mother’s Day gift. in a childish scrawl the note said, “This $10.00, well $5.00 of it is for Mother’s Day gift, not for bills, for something you want. Spend it on yourself! This doesn’t come out of the money I owe you. This is your Mother’s Day gift. I didn’t know what to buy you. I love you!” On the Memorial Day when Malley and David Hilligiest disappeared Malley left no note. After all, he was only going out with a friend.
