A Lost Boys Slide Show The Lost Boys
In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.
Sandi says: I can only imagine how helpless these parents must have felt when they went to the police for help and were turned away. I know this was before computers, the internet, and Amber Alerts, and yet it is hard to believe that the people you are to go to for help, wouldn’t help! I pray that this article creates some pressure for HPD to reopen this case to bring some closure for these families. (April 30th, 2012 at 8:10pm)
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One morning this past September, Mrs. Mary Scott walked out of her tiny brick house, one hand clutching a plastic tub of birdseed, the other holding on to the front door in case she lost her balance. Taking her time, she stepped off the front stoop and onto a pebbled sidewalk that her husband, Walter, dead now for a decade, had laid down one weekend in the mid-sixties. From out of nowhere, half a dozen doves arrived, soon followed by half a dozen more. “Look at the one that’s all white,” Mrs. Scott said. “Miss Whitey, I call her.”
Suddenly her voice faltered, the doves forgotten. Mrs. Scott had noticed a young man down the block, walking past one of the new three-story townhomes that now line the street, some of them still unoccupied, the builder’s signs advertising wood-paneled ceilings, recessed lighting, and granite countertops. She stared in his direction, her eyes blinking behind her glasses. For a moment, she didn’t seem sure what to do. “Sometimes I see someone and I think it’s my son,” she said. “I think he’s come home.”
Mrs. Scott, who is 83 years old, lives on West Twenty-fifth Street in the Heights, a Houston neighborhood about five miles northwest of downtown. On April 20, 1972, her seventeen-year-old son, Mark, a blue-eyed kid whose cheeks dimpled when he smiled, walked out the front door of that house and was never seen again. Mr. and Mrs. Scott and their younger son, Jeff, called Mark’s friends and classmates, asking if they had seen him. They got in their car and roamed the streets, peering down alleys and stopping at the local drive-in restaurants. They called hospitals to see if Mark had been admitted, and Walter, a self-employed carpenter and handyman, drove to the Houston Police Department to report that Mark was missing.
A few days later, they received what seemed to be a hastily written postcard from Mark. “How are you doing?” he wrote. “I am in Austin for a couple of days. I found a good job. I am making $3 an hour.” His mother and father shook their heads in disbelief. Their son, who was only a junior in high school, had left for Austin without saying a word? They were convinced that something terrible had happened. Mark hadn’t even taken his beloved Honda C70 motorcycle.
Mrs. Scott was then 44 years old, a switchboard operator for Dresser Industries. In those first few weeks, she left work early to wait on her stoop, looking left and right. She walked to the chain-link fence at the edge of the yard, cocked her head, and stared down the street. Some days she would meet the postman at the mailbox to see if he had another postcard.
But Mark never wrote again. He never called. “At night, whenever I heard a noise, I’d get out of bed and walk to the front door,” Mrs. Scott says. “I always prayed he would be there, so I could give him a hug.”
Then, on the evening of August 8, 1973, the Houston television stations cut into their regular programming, and Mrs. Scott, sitting on a flower-print couch in the living room, stared at her black and white screen and sensed that her prayers would forever go unanswered. According to the reporters, a 33-year-old man named Dean Corll had been shot to death at his home in Pasadena, a Houston suburb. The police had learned that Corll had been renting a metal storage shed located just off a narrow, dead-end street about nine miles southwest of downtown. Detectives were at the shed now, the reporters continued, their voices rising, and they were digging up the bodies of teenage boys—all of whom had apparently been murdered by Corll. Checking their notes, the reporters said Corll had once been a resident of the Heights, where he had helped his mother run a small candy factory on West Twenty-second Street. Mrs. Scott grabbed her husband’s hand and said, “Oh, Mark. Our poor Mark.”
By the next day, police officers were exhuming bodies from a wooded area near Sam Rayburn Reservoir, outside Lufkin, and on a beach at High Island, east of Houston. Some of the bodies were covered with a layer of lime powder and shrouded in clear plastic, their faces looking up at the men uncovering them. Others were nothing more than lumps of putrefied flesh. A few still had tape strapped across their mouths; others had nylon rope wrapped around their necks or bullet holes in their heads. One boy was curled up in a fetal position.
Within a week, the remains of 27 young males had been found, a couple of them as young as thirteen, one as old as twenty. The New York Times quickly labeled the killings “the largest multiple murder case in United States history”—the phrase “serial killer” had not yet been coined—surpassing the 13 women choked to death by the Boston Strangler in the early sixties, the 16 people shot by Charles Whitman in 1966 from the Tower at the University of Texas, and the 25 itinerant workers killed by Juan Corona in California just two years earlier. Soon reporters began flying to Houston from every corner of the United States. A few arrived from as far away as Japan and Pakistan. Even Truman Capote, hoping to revive his floundering career and produce his next In Cold Blood, showed up, wearing his signature Panama hat, smoking cigarettes, and being trailed by an entourage of assistants.
It wasn’t just the number of murders that caught everyone’s attention. Of the victims the medical examiner’s office was able to identify, at least twenty of them had been residents of either the Heights or an adjoining neighborhood. Or they were Houston boys who had been somewhere in the Heights right before they disappeared. All of the Heights victims had gone missing between December 13, 1970, and July 25, 1973. Eleven of them had attended the same junior high. How, Capote and everyone else wanted to know, was it possible that so many boys could have been snatched away from one working-class area of Houston, a mere two miles wide and three miles deep, without anyone—police, parents, neighbors, teachers, or friends—snapping to what was happening?
And why, they asked, had Corll wanted to kill them? Big and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair and sideburns, he was known, in the words of one reporter, as the “pleasant, smiling candy man of the Heights,” always handing out treats to neighborhood children who dropped by his mother’s factory. A police officer who had gone to high school with Corll and married his cousin insisted that he was “a quiet, well-mannered, well-groomed, considerate person.” He had a nice girlfriend, Betty, a single mother who let her children call him Daddy. No one in the Heights could fathom that Corll, who had no criminal record of any kind, could be the worst predator in American history. As one man put it, “He didn’t have no temper.”
What made the story simply chilling, though, was the revelation that Corll hadn’t acted alone. Two teenagers from the Heights admitted to the police that Corll had recruited them to be his assistants: seventeen-year-old Wayne Henley, a wiry kid with acne on his cheeks and thick brown hair, and eighteen-year-old David Brooks, an ascetic-looking blond-haired youth who wore wire-rimmed glasses. They said they had lured boys into Corll’s Plymouth GTX muscle car or his white van, asking if they needed a ride or if they wanted to go drink beer. After taking the boys to one of Corll’s apartments or rent houses—Corll was constantly moving, sometimes staying in one place for only a few weeks—Henley and Brooks would help Corll strip them naked, tape their mouths, bind their hands and legs, and fasten them with handcuffs to a sheet of plywood that was two and a half feet wide and eight feet long. Often they forced the boys to write a letter to their parents or sometimes even call them, letting them know they were okay and would be back soon.
Then Corll would go to work, pulling out the boys’ pubic hair, inserting a thin glass rod into their penis, or sticking a large rubber dildo into their rectum. “Dean would screw all of them and sometimes suck them and make them suck him,” Henley said in his confession. “Then he would kill them.”
In their confessions, Henley and Brooks mentioned the names of many of the teenagers they had helped murder, several of whom were friends, including Henley’s longtime buddy Mark Scott. They admitted they helped Corll carry the bodies to his car or van, and they helped bury them in one of his private cemeteries. One morning, Brooks said in his confession, he and Henley spent a few hours fishing at Sam Rayburn Reservoir before pulling a dead boy out of Corll’s van and digging him a grave. Although the two teenagers were the products of what were then called “broken homes” (their parents were divorced) and they had dropped out of school, they were hardly regarded around the Heights as troublemakers. Not one person who knew the teenagers understood how they could have turned so quickly into vicious sadists, willing to do Corll’s monstrous bidding.
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