Little’s Known About Corll, “A Good Boy”
by Houston (AP)
So little is known of the 33-year-old electrician who allegedly masterminded a macabre chain of 27 homosexual killings that even his middle name got mixed up until it appeared on his gravestone. “Dean Arnold Corll,” it said. Police had been saying it was Dean Allen Corll, but a check of birth, Army and driving records showed the grave citation was right. A small point, but it stood uncorrected for a week, subject to the same dearth of information that has made a mystery of everything about Corll. Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. has said he shot Corll to death the morning of Aug. 8 during an argument at a sex and paint-sniffing party. Henley, 17, and David 0. Brooks, 18, later led investigators to the graves of the teenagers and detailed to police nearly three years of luring boys to apartments and houses where Corll resided. Henley and Brooks now are under indictment on charges of murder and are being held in jail.
A copyright story published by the Houston Chronicle traced Corll’s background from a Fort Wayne, Ind., birth record to the fatal shooting in suburban Pasadena through relatives and friends who requested anonymity. Former classmates at Vidor, Texas, where he attended high school, recall Corll as a good boy who “liked girls just as much as the rest of us” and who was a good trombone player in the school band. “Vidor was so strict in those days, don’t think we even knew what a homosexual was,” the Chronicle quoted a woman as saying. “All the acceptable behavior was motivated by the Baptist church, and you didn’t even smoke in Vidor.” Corll’s best friend in Vidor said it is difficult to believe what he has read and heard since Corll’s death. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If Dean Corll had knocked on my door last Wednesday night before this story broke, I would have invited him in for a beer.” Corll was born on December 24, 1939, in Fort Wayne to Arnold and Mary Corll, both 23 at the time.
“But his parents never were happy,” a woman relative said. “They fought and fussed before they got married and they fought and fussed right up to the end.” The relative said, “Dean was a good boy, but the good ones are so often used by the damnable ones. “High school was sort of a struggle for him. He had to work, helping out his mother, and he had odd jobs here and there.” Corll worked with his mother, then known as Mary West, in a candy business after high school graduation and then went north in 1960 to care for his recently widowed grandmother. “He knew she’d be alone and would need someone to take her to church and places,” the relative said. “He got a job up there, stayed with his grandmother two years, but he always managed to send a little money to his mother down here.”
In 1962, Corll lived with his mother, brother and half-sister in Houston in the Heights area where a number of the victims of the mass murders later grew into their teens. The Corll Candy Company was established with Mrs. Corll as president, Dean as vice president and the brother as secretary-treasurer, with the stepsister assisting. Drafted in 1964, Corll was stationed at Ft. Polk, La., Ft. Benning, Georgia and Ft. Hood, Texas prior to receiving 10 months later an honorable discharge as a hardship case so he could return and help the family with the candy business. The candy factory later was moved to a larger building across the street from an elementary school in the Heights. The firm was dissolved about 1968, and the mother and half-sister moved to Colorado.
Corll entered an electrician’s training program at the Houston Lighting & Power Company and was working for that firm at the time of his death. After his parents were divorced, Corll kept in touch with his father. The relative said that about two months ago the father moved and offered his son the use of his old house in Pasadena.
