Coroner Still Seeks Victims’ Identities After 35 Years

by Monica Rhor

One after another, as a steamy summer evening faded from dusk to darkness, the bodies of young boys were pulled from the dirt floor of boat stall No. 11. By night’s end on August 8, 1973, eight corpses had been recovered from makeshift graves. The next day, nine more were discovered inside the corrugated metal shed in southwest Houston. Another 10 bodies were found on remote High Island beach, 80 miles east of Houston, and in a wooded area near Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas. Twenty-seven dead. Some as young as 13, none older than 21. All victims of one killer, Dean Corll, and his two teenage accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks.

Most of the bodies were badly decomposed, their identities obscured by time and elements. The condition of their bodies hinted of agony in their final minutes. Some were wrapped in plastic and encased by a thin layer of lime powder. Others had cords wrapped around their necks, and tape strapped around their feet and mouths. A few had been sexually mutilated One boy was found curled in a fetal position. All over Houston, all over the country, parents of missing boys learned of the murders and feared the worst. In the working-class Houston neighborhood where Henley and Brooks lived, (where Corll had once owned a candy shop across from an elementary school, where dozens of boys had seemed to vanish over the previous three years, the dread was almost unbearable. For some families, answers would come swiftly. For others, it would take decades.

But some have been trapped in’ a limbo that has stretched from the Nixon administration into the 21st century. Three bodies remain three young men, believed to have been 15 to 20 years old, their bodies chilled to 38 degrees in the long-term storage unit of the Harris County medical examiner’s office still seeks victims’ identities after Forensic pathologist Dr. Sharon Derrick talks about the still unidentified victims of serial killers Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley in Houston. On the table are some of the personal items found with bodies, along with digital pictures of what the victims may have looked like. Not by Sharon Derrick, a forensic anthropologist with the medical examiner’s office. Not by the families who still contact her seeking word of long vanished sons and brothers. At the coroner’s office, the search for their identities has not ended. Instead, it has intensified.

Parents and other relatives are aging. Many have passed away. The window for finding family members is closing and with it, the possibility of finding the names to match the numbers. “We need to get the word out, because at some point before too awful long, there won’t be anyone living that will have memories of them,” said Derrick. “We really need to push this.” The night he disappeared, on August 3, 1973, 13-year-old James Dreymala hopped on his red bicycle and went out for a ride. He never came home, like Marty Ray Jones and Charles Cobble, who slipped from sight two weeks earlier, and James Eugene Glass and Danny Michael Yates, who had vanished from an evangelical rally three years before. Like so many boys from the Houston Heights, then a working-class neighborhood of bungalows and Victorian cottages, James just vanished. Anguished parents called police, filed missing persons reports, questioned friends and classmates, but they could find no sign of the missing boys, until August 8, 1973, when Elmer Wayne Henley called police in the Houston suburb of Pasadena to report a shooting. The 17-year-old high school dropout said he had killed Dean Corll after the 33-year-old electric company employee threatened to rape and kill Henley and two other teenagers who had gone to party at Corll’s modest bungalow.

But there was more. Henley, a slight boy with a sagging mustache, also told police that Corll, a former resident of the Heights who was known to socialize with teenagers, had sexually tortured and killed more than 20 boys over the previous three years. The bodies, Henley said, were buried in a boat storage unit Corll had rented in southwest Houston. The scene inside Corll’s house seemed to back up Henley’s outlandish claims, recalled David Mullican, the now retired Pasadena homicide detective who investigated the case. There, police found a plywood board with holes cut out for handcuffs and restraints, plastic sheeting covering a bedroom floor, and a toolbox filled with a variety of sexual devices.

Then, Henley led police to the storage shed. “When we opened the door to the boat house, he turned as white as a sheet of paper,” Mullican said. “And we knew he was involved.” The next morning, in a rambling confession, Henley told police that he and David Brooks, 18, had procured boys-for Corll, who would pay them anywhere from $10 to $200 per victim. Many were friends or acquaintances from the Heights. These are the only victims who remain unidentified. Henley and Brooks also helped Corll kill and bury some of the victims, who were strapped to the plywood “torture board” and suffered hours, sometimes days, of unimaginable sexual and physical abuse before they were shot or strangled.

Inside the boat shed, at High Island, and at Lake Sam Rayburn, Henley pointed to each grave, told police who they would likely find buried there, and how that boy was killed. “I desired that the entire incident be over with and the only way to completely end it was to give up all the information,” Henley said in a recent interview. “It took me way too long to figure out how to get out of it, but once I made that step, I wanted to get all the way out.” There were only a few victims he could not name. After three days, four bodies had been identified, and the police were flooded with inquiries about missing boys from as far away as Russia. James Dreymala, the last boy to disappear, was the first body recovered from the boat shed.

Not far from his crumpled body was the bicycle he had been riding. At the end of the first week, 11 boys had been identified, but the number of teenage boys who had vanished from their homes and fit the profile of Corll’s victims crept upward of 200. By July 1974, when Henley was convicted in six of the murders and sentenced to six life terms in prison, 21 victims had been identified. Brooks was convicted of one murder, and also sentenced to life. It would take more than a decade to identify the next two victims, and another 10 years and the advent of DNA testing to confirm the death of the 24th, 15-year-old Mark Scott. Last year, Derrick sent samples from the three boys to the University of North Texas for DNA testing, hopeful that advances in technology could result in a breakthrough.

She hit the jackpot. There was mitochondrial DNA from all three boys. Now, she needed a relative to provide a match. So, she again pored through the paperwork. One name caught her eye: Randell Lee Harvey. The 15-year-old fit the physical description of one of the remaining victims. His disappearance in March 1971 fit the time frame. His last known addresses in the Heights fit the right neighborhood. Derrick finally found Lenore McNiel and Donna Lovrek, Randy’s two sisters, in Trinity, Texas. For decades, the two have suspected that their brother was one of the Corll victims. One of Lenore’s boyfriends, Gregory Malley Winkle, was found in the boat shed, and they had friends among the dead. Lovrek and her sister submitted samples of DNA for comparison with the unidentified victims in late May. It may take up to two months to get results. But then, perhaps, she’ll know, leaving only two nameless young men in the coroner’s cold storage.