Accused Killer Was Known as “Gentle Person”
by John Barbour
Who is Elmer Wayne Henley Jr.? Is he the considerate elder of the family, trying to fill an absent father’s role, going to his brothers’ school to check on their progress? Or is he a sadistic killer, doing the bidding of some monstrous homosexual Fagan, helping kill 27 teenage boys in the worst and most bizarre murder spree in U.S. history? In the small holding cell under brilliant lights, waiting for a court hearing Monday, he seemed frailer than his 120 pounds younger than his 17 years. He sat head bowed, and his thoughts, his memories were his own. After the hearing he almost begged his attorney for some way out of jail where he said prisoners were abusing him.
The answer was, “No.” Henley’s expression didn’t change. He was taken into custody after calling police to say he had shot and killed Dean Arnold Corll, a 33-year-old man he looked to as a brother. He said he killed him to save the lives of two other potential victims. Then he and David Owen Brooks, 18, took authorities on a tour of three burial sites which have by now yielded 27 bodies, and may yield more. It was Brooks’ statement that first gave an insight into Henley’s possible role. Brooks described in detail many of the slayings, and in one of them said: “There was another boy killed at the Schuler house, actually there were two at this time. A boy named Billy Baulch and one named Johnny, and I think that his last name was Malone.
“Wayne strangled Billy and he said, “Hey Johnny,’ and when Johnny looked up Wayne shot him in the forehead with a .25 automatic. The bullet came out of his ear, and he raised up about three minutes later, and he said, ‘Wayne, please don’t.” Then Wayne strangled and Dean helped.” “He was just one of the crowd,” said Wayne’s minister, the Rev. Matt Chambers of the Fulbright Methodist Church. “When he was on the playground or in the fellowship hall with the other kids, he was no different from any boy.” The church was only five doors from the small white frame home where Henley lived with his mother, his grandmother and two brothers.
The minister visited Henley in jail Saturday night at Henley’s request, and the two prayed together. “Wayne took part in getting the boys at first and then later he took an active part in the killings,” Brooks said in his statement. “Wayne seemed to enjoy causing pain and he was especially sadistic at the Schuler address.” His attorney says that up to 4 months ago he was taking a tranquilizer for nervousness. A neighbor says he used to stare into the distance, distracted as though he were sedated, or had been drinking. His minister said, “I didn’t even take the boy to be nervous or upset.
The greatest problems he talked to me about was his mother and family. He had a deep sense of responsibility and felt he was the breadwinner.” “It is difficult for me to believe the boy was this deeply involved,” said the Rev. Chambers. ” He always showed the greatest respect for me and all adults. It was “Yes sir”, “No sir.” He was polite.” Henley’s attorney, Charles Melder, who met Wayne for the first time in a jail cell Saturday said the boy was “disoriented, shaking like a leaf virtually. I had to tell him what day of the week it was.” “He is not normal,” Melder said. “He does not act normally. He is intelligent. But I think he does have real mental problems.”
Accordingly, Melder has verbally and will in writing ask for a psychiatric examination. Melder has told newsmen his defense will be “not guilty” because of insanity. Melder says Henley “told us that to keep him in line, Corll threatened to sic an organization from Dallas on him.” No explanation of what the “organization” was, no explicit notion of how Corll kept a hold on him. But, talking to newsmen at one of the gravesites, Henley described Corll as “more of a brother-type person, somebody I could talk to.” “Dean was always quiet,” Henley said. “He enjoyed himself. The man who did these killings was something else.” “Then why did you kill him?” a newsman asked. “I was tired of him doing things like that. And it was either me or him right then.”
Neighbors in retrospect have trouble answering who Wayne Henley is, as well. The mother of one of the boys believed to be among the dead, Mrs. Dorothy Hilligiest, says the two boys played together when they were very small. They live only a block apart. Wayne’s grandmother, Christine Weed, would bring her grandson to the Hilligiest house and pick up again later. It showed, said Mrs. Hilligiest, that they cared how the boy was brought up, who he played with, but “somewhere along the line, something went wrong.” In the two years her son has been missing, Wayne would visit the Hilligiest home or stop her on the street to ask whether she had any news of her missing son. There he would express concern, sympathy, offer hope for the future. Always gentle, always polite.
Elmer Wayne Henley also had a record, as a juvenile. He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 1971, for burglary and theft of a residence in 1972. He was found guilty of delinquency and put on probation. Several boys in his neighborhood now recall with some misgiving’s suggestions from Wayne Henley in the last several weeks that he and Dean Corll might take them fishing. Which one of these personalities, these images that turn on each other in contradiction is Elmer Wayne Henley Jr.? Is it the young man with the stubby attempt at a beard and moustache sternly correcting newsmen while sheriff’s deputies dug for bodies behind him?
“The name’s Junior,” he said. “Not Elmer Wayne Henley.” Or was it the boy in the blue striped shirt with denim slacks, sitting handcuffed in court, studiously avoid the starting eyes of the spectators? Or was it the boy his mother saw? She broke into tears and tried to reach him, and explained, “I wanted to see him. He’s cold and he isn’t being fed enough. He hasn’t any extra clothes and he hasn’t anything to blow his nose with.”
