The Candy Man;
He Had a Little Store and a Lust for Blood
by Michael Myers
In the cast-off community that is Houston Heights there once was a green tin building. Over its front door was a sign with a candy cane painted on it and three words that delighted the youngsters across the street at James F Helms Elementary School. “Corll’s Candy Kitchen” said the sign and it watered the mouth of many a kid with thoughts of a peppermint or a gum drop or a lump of chocolate.
The children came with their scrubbed faces their freckles and their lunch buckets and the proprietor would pass out his sweets at 505 W 22nd Ave. Dean Arnold Corll was The Candy Man. He had a pool table in the back room, and he often invited some of the little boys he knew especially well to an awkward game of eight-ball under the high ceiling of the candy factory. Mrs. Fred Hilligiest said her son David 13, often came home excited because The Candy Man was giving his wares to the kids David said it was free and it was fun. But his mother didn’t like the sound of it and forbade David to visit the store. On a hot May 30, 1971, David left home to go swimming with a chum Gregory Winkle 16. All they wore was their swimming trunks. They never came home again. The boys were last seen getting into a white van on that May Day Corll drove a white 1969 Chevrolet van, and he put many a mile on it.
“He did a lot of business with that truck” Eugene Swander said. He is a shift worker and next-door neighbor to Corll 33 who last lived at 2020 Lamar in suburban Pasadena Texas. “He always backed up that van so the side doors would open to the house. It was always parked that way, even after dark.” The Candy Man is gone now, and his passing has uncovered the largest known mass murder in the United States this century. Corll, a trombone player in high school a radioman in the Army and an electrician when he died, is posthumously accused as a killer of 27 boys.
Some were the ones he used to “entice with the treats of his trade behind the green door of the candy store on 22nd Ave. Elmer Wayne Henley 17 a Corll sidekick for three years ‘ said he fired six 22-caliber bullets into the older man’s body on the early morning of Aug 8 at the end of a sex orgy. “He had a lust for blood” the six-foot 130-pound Henley said two days later. “It was either me or him right then” I Henley called police. After several hours of questioning ‘he revealed an astounding story. He said that for three years he Corll and David Owen Brooks 18, had been involved in luring young boys with the promised excitement of sex liquor or marijuana. One by one the lads were sexually abused, some held for days at a time, and then strangled or shot to death.
During the six days from August 8 on police dug up ‘the 27 bodies in a barn, on a beach and in the piney backwoods of Texas. In stall No 11 at the “Southeast Boat Rental” sheds at 4500 Silver Bell in Houston, police unearthed 17 bodies. Corll who never owned a boat rented the space that was 12 feet wide and 30 feet long on Nov 17, 1970, for $20 a month. “This guy must have spent half his time digging graves” said detective Larry Earls a policeman for eight years. “The whole floor is covered with bodies.” And it was From the surface of the black earth down to four feet there were the bones of victims who were wrapped in plastic bags and coated with lime At Henley’s direction officers then took their shovels to the shores of Lake Sam Rayburn 120 miles to the north.
There they dug up four more bodies. Over the grave of the first Henley bowed his head pointed and said: “Billy is buried there.” William Lawrence 15 left his Heights home earlier in the summer saying he was off to see the world with a rock band. Henley and Brooks were charged with helping to strangle Billy. They were locked in jail when Billy was buried for the second time in private ceremonies in Houston “It’s not my place to pass judgment on these men” said the boy’s father, Horace J Lawrence tears glistening on his cheeks “God only has the right to pass judgment. Vengeance is Mine said the Lord. Brooks and Henley led officers over a drawbridge past men fishing for croakers flounder and sand trout and onto the beach near High Island Tex where six more bodies were spared from shallow graves.
As two-foot-high breakers skimmed ashore, sheriff’s deputies sweated from boot to hat brim under a 100-degree sun for two days to find the final six victims. Over the 22-foot-deep hole stood Louis Otter who has been a lawman for 30 years, 26 as sheriff of Chambers County a coastal area known for its rice farming and excellent goose hunting. “All people are going to die someday” said Otter, a straw Western hat shielding the sun and a bone-handled 45-caliber automatic riding snugly to his right hip in a hand-tooled holster “But most people want somebody to come and say ‘you know he was a good kid or a pretty good kid’ as they stand around that resting place” And the sheriff’s lean and hard face tightened “These kids didn’t get that chance” After listening to two hours of testimony from 20-year-old Billy Ridinger , who barely escaped Corll’s torture chamber two years ago, a Houston grand jury indicted Henley on three counts of murder and Brooks on one count. The two were held on $100000 bond on each charge.
“Corll’s Candy Kitchen” is long gone. It folded years ago and is now a vending machine repair shop and the green paint on the corrugated tin has been faded by a hundred rainstorms. But in the Heights live the families of as many as 13 of The Candy Man’s victims. There is the Hilligiest house and the Winkle house and there is the Henley house. There are a lot of weeds and unmowed St Augustine lawns and porch after vacant porch .Mrs. Lillian Goff stood in the shade of a red oak tree and said that she was scared “The neighborhood has gone down. We’re always worried about our little girls. Suddenly we find out it was our boys we should have been cautioning all along.”
Across town in Pasadena, the blinds are drawn at the white frame dwelling that was the home of Dean Arnold Corll who kept odd hours and was fond of cuddling stuffed animal toys. His neighbors barely knew him. “I know it sounds strange never to have a conversation with your neighbor, not even saying “hello,” but he wouldn’t talk to me. But he spoke to my boy” Eugene Swander said of his 12-year-old son. “And now that kind of gives me the creeps. He was very careful not to become acquainted with people around here.” Swander said he did notice Corll’s peculiar hours for coming and going and he said he knew and liked Corll’s father Alton Corll an electrician foreman for the Baylor College of Medicine who lives in a new Pasadena home with his third wife.
The younger Corll moved into the house at 2020 Lamar when his father bought the new home. “Emotionally he must be devastated” Swandler said of Corll’s father “I guess we have to say “I hope I know my children.” Apparently Mr. Corll didn’t know his son as he hoped he did. Two days after his death a 15-minute funeral was held for Corll at the Sunset United Methodist Church in Pasadena. An American flag was draped over the coffin and later was folded and handed to his father. After Corll bet Brooks, Brooks introduced him to Henley. And the trips across town to the sea-shelled and dirt driveway of the boat shed became frequent. When Henley led police there and the desperate digging began on the night of Aug 8, officers used jail trusties, three blacks three whites and a Chicano to do the shoveling. They were promised a day off their sentences for their work “It takes a cruel man to do this” one of the trusties Miguel Garza said.
“I forget never this. It hurts when you reach in and grab a pair of pants that were for a small boy.” Brooks told of the cruelty in a three-page statement to police. “Dean kept this boy around the house for about four days before he killed him” he said of one of the victims. “I think I helped bury this boy also but I don’t remember where it was “It really upset Dean to have to kill this boy because he really liked him” And of Henley, Brooks said: “Wayne took part in getting the boys at first and then later he took an active part in the killings. Wayne seemed to enjoy causing pain and ha was especially sadistic at the Schuler address.” Brooks whose blond hair hangs to his shoulders with tin-rimmed glasses perched in the middle of his nose said he helped with the burials but killed no one.
In the woods two miles outside Broadau Texas where Henley led police to the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st bodies, the skinny youth with the barest of chin whiskers talked with newsmen “What happened here?” Henley was asked. “Boys were buried Dean Corll decided he wanted to have sex with them, killed them brought them out here” he mumbled into his hands “Why here Wayne?” “Dean’s parents have a place out here. He said the boat shed was getting full” said Henley and he chuckled weakly at the sickness of his joke. He said Corll paid him and Brooks $5 to $10 a boy to lure the lads to the “torture board” a plywood board on which the victims were spreadeagled and tortured. “I feel pretty grotesque I almost cracked several times” Henley said crying how “I didn’t feel I was going to be able to hold my sanity much longer.” A Pontiac Bonneville hearse loaded with black bags containing the bones of boys started the trip of two miles down the muddy backroad onto farm-to-market road 3185 and into San Augustine.
Then Sheriff Hoyt took Henley 100 miles south to the beach in the search for the final bodies. There at High Island the youth was taken to Dot’s Cafe and while a half dozen deer heads peered at him from the walls he ate a ham sandwich and sipped a can of soda pop through a straw. Out on the beach Henley met Brooks who had been brought from Houston. Both youths volunteered to point out the graves. “Brooks found the first one today. He looked under a rock” said Houston homicide detective WL Young. “The second one, Corll buried that body about six months ago “He strangled them, but he had a real scare one time.” Young said “He thought he had drowned one guy in a bathtub, but he left, and the guy got up and put up a fight. Corll finally strangled him.” A gray Cadillac hearse spun through the sand with more corpses in black bags and Sheriff Otter was there again sweat soaking through the Western frills of his yellow shirt. “We got yet in this world more good people than we got people going around taking lives.
That’s my opinion” he said, “I just think possibly the law otta be changed back to where you got an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The next day Aug 14 the digging had stopped, and a coastal shower spawned by a squall in the Gulf of Mexico soaked the six miles of beach and washed away the tire tracks and thousands of footprints and all signs of death. For three minutes a rainbow arched over the gateway to the Sandy Bolivar Peninsula and then it went away.
