Parents, Huston Police Differ on Slaying Of 27 Boys
by Christine Chapman
The author, an English teacher at Washington’s Sidwell Friends school, is currently writing a book about runaway children and their parents. In May 1971, 13-year-old David Hilligiest told his mother he was going swimming. He planned to walk to a pool not far from this home in Houston Heights, Texas stopping first by a friend. Neither David nor his friend ever returned home. More than two years later another 13-year-old, Stanton Dreymala, left his home in a suburb of Houston to ride his bike. The boy had spent the early evening with his family ‘visiting a sick relative in a hospital.
When the family returned home, his father let him go out for a while. He never came back. What happened to David Hilligiest and his friend James Dreymala was not known until 27 bodies of murdered boys were unearthed in Houston last August. The three boys were among the victims of a murder ring allegedly of Dean Corll, their murderer, who was himself killed in August by a 17-year-old friend, Elmer Wayne Henley. Since that dark discovery in Houston, Texans have been asking the same questions over and over again. How could Corll have killed so many boys over three years without being found out? How could he bury them without being seen? How could so many boys disappear without alarming their parents?
How could those boys from a single neighborhood vanish without the police detecting a pattern? Many instant theories have appeared. Parents have blamed the police for indifference. Police have accused parents of negligence. Junior high school principals and ministers have mentioned divorced parents and broken homes. Newspapers have described Houston Heights as a crumbling neighborhood attractive only to people who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere, to families as careless with their children as they are with their property. Social commentators have pointed to the wanderlust of today’s children, to the restless youth who hitchhike for kicks. And one of the most widely held assumptions is that the murdered boys were among the estimated one million youths who run away from home each year.
Talks with the Dreymala and Hilligiest families and others in Houston suggest that, except for one of the 27 boys, they were not runaways at all. Neither parents nor police was able to prevent the tragedy though each blamed the other for allowing it to happen. Some parents accused the police of failing to search for their sons. They wanted help, and they were lucky if a police officer returned their call or visited them to ask questions about their boys. They had assumed that the police would protect them and their children. They were shocked to learn that there was little police would do to help them, and nothing they could do, under Texas law, to find the children. Parents called the police ignorant, cruel and inept, and the Houston police chief at the time, Herman Short, responded with: “Many parents have been too lax.”
The police said the parents were unconcerned about their children. They didn’t pay enough attention to them; they weren’t strict; they let the youngsters run wild. “We can’t raise people’s children for them,” said a police officer. “We’re not baby-sitters.” Chief Short also called a press conference to explain the law to the public. “I want to set the record straight,” he said, “on our authority as it relates to runaway juveniles.” He explained that in Texas there are no laws, or interpretations of laws, that classify runaways as law-breakers. Nothing in juvenile law, he insisted, determines that a child leaving home is illegal. He stressed the incongruity of investigating a case in which no one knew a law had been broken.
Unless there, was evidence of a crime, the police would not investigate a child’s disappearance. They assumed that the missing children had run away from home, because all over Texas kids were leaving home. Running away from home was another way of growing up in the 1970s. During 1971, when Henley and David Brooks began inviting boys to Corll’s parties, Houston police recorded 5,652 juveniles as missing. During 1972, when other parents from the Heights filed reports on their absent sons, police recorded 5,228 cases of missing 2 Cases Victims children. In police district t, which is the Huston Heights area, 415 juveniles were listed as missing for 1971, the year David Hilligiest disappeared. In 1972, 446 juveniles were recorded as running away from the Heights.
Houston’s police procedure regarding missing children is like Catch-22; if the parents know where the child is, the police will pick him up. If the parents don’t know, the police won’t know either so they do what they can: take information from the parents, list the missing children as runaways if they are under 17, and broadcast their names and descriptions on police radio. A detective in the juvenile division said: “If officers stop a car with a juvenile in it, they might ask for identification. If the name is on the missing list, they will bring him in. But we don’t have the manpower to look for him.” Chief Short had told reporters: “The juvenile courts have repeatedly advised this department that runaways per se must be handled as a public service.” The courts had deterred the Police from involving themselves with the erratic behavior of children unless the kids were breaking the law. Children leaving home were none of their business. It was a family matter, not a case for the police. The understaffed police department agreed. But when the murders were revealed, the police were accused of failing to perform their duty. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” groaned Lt. Earl E. Kirkland of the department’s community relations service. “We protect children from everything but themselves. A runaway is a sitting duck for a homosexual.”
All this gives small comfort to the murdered in Point Show Not Runaways boys’ parents, who ‘ may never know what actually happened to their sons. “We believe they took him off the street, off his bike,” James Dreymala said of Stanton. “He was abducted physically, but he gave them one hell of a fight. When the police showed Stanton’s photo to Henley and Brooks, they said, ‘Corll picked up that boy and took care of him.’ Still,” he admitted, “we go through all kinds of speculation as to what really did happen.” James and Elaine Dreymala are Seventh Day Adventists, a handsome couple in their mid-30s who live in the suburb of Meadow Creek, where the brick homes are lined up on green lawns behind tall pine trees.
James Dreymala had left the house Friday evening, Aug. 3, 1973, to ride a bike he’d made himself from bits and pieces of old bikes. He was a lanky boy, a month away from turning 14 and entering 8th grade. He was on the track team at school and played cornet in the band. He also played baseball (right field in the pony league), and last summer he went to a church Differ on camp and met a girl he liked. His father was teaching him how to drive. He’d taught his father how to play chess. He called his mother “Shorty” because, at 5’9″, he towered over her. He was proud of his height and proud of his pale blonde hair that his folks let him wear long. He liked to sing and talk at the rap sessions his church sponsored on weekends.
That was the only kind of party he’d ever gone to until Corll spotted him that August evening. “Our major comfort lies in our religion,” said his father. “Our son was baptized three years ago. He re-dedicated himself at camp this summer. He enjoyed going to the church youth group on the weekends. When he called me that Friday night to tell me he was at a party across town, 1 was surprised. I told him to be home in 25 minutes. We never saw him again.” Dreymala talked about the boy and the case steadily, deliberately. He explained how he and his wife searched for Stanton throughout the weekend before calling the police on Monday. On. Wednesday the police, digging into the sand of a boatyard, discovered the body of a tall boy whom they identified later as Stanton.
Mrs. Dreymala listened to her husband and agreed with him or corrected him on details. He asked her to show me the pictures of Stanton, and she placed them between us on the couch. The boy grinned out of his snapshots. Dressed in a coat and tie, his hair brushed neatly, he smiled, pleased to be dressed up. going someplace. For a minute the father fumbled for a reason for his son’s death. He thought there was more vice in a city than in a small town because there were more people. “In a small town everybody knows what everybody else is doing. You go the same’ distance in a big city and you have no idea who people are.” He stopped, exhausted. His wife wanted to cry. He managed to say: “We feel we’re the most fortunate parents. We knew so soon about our son.”
Other parents waited over two years to learn the truth. Although David Hilthgiest was just another one of the 415 kids reported missing from the Heights in May 1971, his parents were convinced he was not a runaway. David was eager for school to end because he and his family were going to Kerrville to spend two weeks on a lake where the boys would swim and fish. His mother was already planning and packing on the afternoon he decided to go swimming. He left west 27th street, a block away from Wayne Henley’s house, with his friend Malley Winkle to hike to the pool. When he did not return, his mother called the police and quizzed kids in the neighborhood. “I talked to Wayne in May,” Dorothy Hilligiest remembered.
“He and David were not close friends, but the “Henleys live down the block. Wayne asked me if I’d heard anything about David. He said he wished he could help. He distributed some circulars for us’.” She took out the circular that she, her husband, Malley’s mother and Wayne Henley tacked up in neighborhood stores. Later the three parents distributed it in Chicago, California, New Orleans. Beside photographs of David and Malley was an offer of a $1,000 reward for information, to be treated confidentially, about the two boys. David’s hair was slicked back wet; Malley’s was hanging in his face. Both boys were smiling, probably at a school photographer, a shy David and his 16-year-old friend. When the police told the Hilligiests that they couldn’t investigate their son’s disappearance, they undertook their own search.
Not believing he had run away, yet hoping he was alive some place, they began, a routine that is becoming familiar to parents of runaway children. They hired a private detective, and he and Hilligiest combed the beaches around Freeport. Mr. and Mrs. Hilligiest drove their car into the countryside looking for David in Children of God colonies. They called runaway houses in Houston and Dallas. They talked to ministers who operated programs in churches for runaway kids. They called every hotline or crisis center number they could discover. They wrote messages to David through underground newspapers as far north as Toronto. They bought ads in the National Missing Youth Locator (NMYL), a private bulletin printed in California.
They wrote to the social security administration in Washington, asking officials to forward a letter to David if he used his social security number in applying for a job. Mrs. Hilligiest called the FBI and asked what help it could give to find her son. The FBI replied that it was unable to help her. It was out of its jurisdiction. “If my son were draft age and missing, you’d find him,” she told them. Hilligiest had tried everything he knew to find his son and he had still failed. “We had to take everything on our own,” he murmured. “We were grasping at every straw,” Mrs. Hilligiest added. “We were doing things we normally never believed in.” She even wrote to clairvoyant Jeane L. Dixon and begged her to use her power to help them find David.
The seer replied that she was unable to pick up any vibrations. When Henley named David Hilligiest as one of the boys Corll killed, the Hillegeists realized who Corll was. He was the candy man, the nice fellow who befriended David and Malley and other boys in the neighborhood when they were younger. He had invited them to the factory where he worked for his mother, who manufactured pralines. He gave David and the other kids candy and let them play pool in the rear of the shop. “I went to the factory one day.” Mrs. Hilligiest said, “and I knocked on the door asking for David. A slight built fellow, blondish, who must have been in his mid-to-late 20s then, came to the door. He was very polite and said David was there. I told him not to let David in anymore because it was a place of business, and I didn’t think the kids should be playing inside.” As she recalled this episode with a younger Corll and a smaller David, she sighed. “I always insisted on knowing the whereabouts of my children.”
When the police questioned James Dreymala about his ‘ son, they harped on reasons for the boy’s possibly running away. “Are you sure he had no reason to leave?” they asked. ‘ Searching for reasons became an exercise in coping for the bewildered parents and the beleaguered police. Parents were not negligent; they were powerless. Police were not always indifferent; they were overwhelmed. Those who labeled, the missing boys as products of broken homes were to learn that more than half of the boys lived .with both parents. Only one 16-year-old from Houston Heights was a runaway in the eyes of his parents and the law. The murdered runaway children of Houston were not runaways at all. The police and their parents did not have it in their power to save them.
