Richard Hembree (13)
Born
South Carolina
Death
3 Oct 1972, Houston, Harris County, Texas
Tragically, Richard Hembree was one of the victims of Houston’s serial killer and sex offender Dean Corll who abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered a minimum of twenty-eight teenage boys and young men between 1970 and 1973 in Houston and Pasadena, Texas. He was aided by two teenaged accomplices. Their crimes became known as the Houston Mass Murders, and he was known as the “The Candy Man.”
On October 3, 1972, 13-year-old Richard Hembree and 14-year-old Wally Jay Simoneaux (two Heights teenagers) were encountered by Henley and Brooks while walking to Hembree’s home. Simoneaux and Hembree were enticed into Brooks’s Corvette and driven to Corll’s Westcott Towers apartment. That evening, Simoneaux is known to have phoned his mother’s home and to have shouted the word “Mama” into the receiver before the connection was terminated. The following morning, Hembree was accidentally shot in the mouth by Henley, with the bullet exiting through his neck. Several hours later, both youths were strangled to death and subsequently buried in a common grave inside the boat shed directly above the bodies of James Glass and Danny Yates.
