Victim’s Family Finally Has Answer

by Houston (AP)

The minute Lenore McNiel saw the lock of matte brown hair in the medical examiner’s office, she knew she had finally found the brother who had been missing for nearly four decades. “That’s his hair!” McNiel recalls saying, when she recognized the curly, frizzy strands that had so frustrated her big brother, Randy. But McNiel’s gulp of recognition on that day earlier this year would lead not to a happy reunion, but a bittersweet homecoming. The hair belonged to ML733349, the teenage victim of notorious Houston serial killer Dean Corll who tortured and murdered 27 young boys in the early 1970s. That boy, along with two other Corll victims, had been unidentified since being found 35 years ago in a shallow grave in a Houston boat stall.

And this month, after a two-year investigation by forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick, the Harris County Medical Examiner officially identified ML73-3349 as Randell Lee Harvey, a 15-year-old Houston boy who disappeared on March 9, 1971. It was the answer McNiel and sister Donna Lovrek had both sought and dreaded for SO long and the news has pounded them with the weight of fresh grief. “At least we know. We can put him to rest,” McNiel told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “I would just lay on my bed crying, praying to God that we could put my brother to rest before we die, and sure enough, we can.” McNiel and Lovrek, who moved out of Houston’s Heights neighborhood more than 20 years ago, had long suspected Corll had killed Randy. Corll and his two teenage accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks also lived in the Heights and many victims were from there.