The Man With Candy (15 page)

“I’m gonna kill you all!” Corll raged. “But first I’m gonna have my fun.”

He turned the portable radio up to a high volume and dragged Henley into the kitchen. “I’ll teach you a lesson!” he screamed, and rammed a .22 caliber pistol into the young man’s belly.

Wayne gasped and begged for life. He reminded Corll of their long friendship, of the good times they had enjoyed together. He promised to torture and kill the others, if that was what Corll wanted. “I’ll do anythang yew want me to, Dean!” he whimpered.
“Anythang!”
At last Corll relented, removed the shackles and the ropes, and shoved him back into the bedroom.

“Cut off her clothes!” he ordered, handing over the hunting knife. The boy watched as Corll laid the small pistol on a night table and began to fumble at his own clothes and fling them about.

As Henley carefully worked on Rhonda’s clothes, he watched out of the corner of his eyes. Corll rolled the naked Kerley over on his stomach and spread-eagled him against the plywood board, securing him by ropes and two pairs of handcuffs. Then he turned to the unconscious girl and strapped her on her back with canvas and nylon ropes. “You take the girl,” he told Henley, “and I’ll mess with Tim.”

Wayne stalled. The undressed Corll climbed atop Kerley. Rhonda lifted her head heavily and stared through unfocusing eyes at the scene. “Hey, Dean!” Henley shouted. “Why don’t yew let me take the chick outa here? She don’t wanna see that!”

When Corll ignored him, the agitated boy grabbed the pistol from the night table and shouted above the radio, “Back off now!
Stop!”

Corll jumped to his feet and lurched toward Henley. “Kill me, Wayne,” he said. “Kill me!” The boy backed away, but the powerfully built man charged after him. When they were only a foot or two apart, Corll said, “You won’t do it!” Henley pulled the trigger, and pulled it again and again until his friend had toppled against the baseboard.

He returned to the bedroom and began releasing the others. Kerley was semiconscious, only vaguely aware of what was happening. When the tape was removed from Rhonda’s mouth, she giggled and said, “Oh, quit playin’, Wayne!” Using the walls for support, she hopped around on her one good foot and tripped full length over the body, staining her hands with blood and still not comprehending. In the dim light of the curtained house she inspected her hands and wondered how they had become covered with catsup. She pushed herself up and saw the glazed eyes of
Dean Corll, and began screaming. Henley calmed her and helped her to her feet, and after he called police, the three waited on the front porch, as far as possible from the dead man.

During the long interrogation at Pasadena headquarters, Tim Kerley told police that Henley had made a strange statement while they waited. “He told me, ‘If you wasn’t my friend, I coulda got fifteen hundred dollars for you,’” Kerley said. The statement seemed meaningless for the moment, an acrylic
non sequitur,
but the skilled Pasadena detectives used it to open a line of private questioning with Henley. It turned out that the boy was already on probation, for carrying a pistol, and he seemed eager to cooperate. Ingratiatingly, he told how he had thought of fleeing the scene of the shooting, “but I jes’ decided I better set there and wait for y’all.”

“Who’s this Dean Corll?” a detective asked.

Henley explained that his old friend was a thief, among other things. The plastic on the floor and the acrylic paints had come from Houston Lighting & Power Company, where Corll worked as a relay tester. The seats in his Ford van had been stripped from a stolen Chevrolet Camaro.

Slowly the detectives steered Henley around to the nature of the early-morning rites at Corll’s house. Why the dildo, the handcuffs, the rectangular plywood board with its four holes and handcuffs and neat thin loop of cord and orange pillow at the top? Henley told the detectives that Corll “likes little boys,” and had been paying him for their procurement, sometimes generously, sometimes with promises or IOU’s. He said that Corll had made a slip that morning while issuing his fiery threats. “He said I wouldn’t be the first one he kilt,” Henley told the detectives. “He said he’d already kilt a few boys and buried them in a boat shed.”

The interrogators asked where the boat shed was, and Wayne told them that Dean had once taken him to a rented shed in south-west Houston; the two of them had carried out dirt in twenty-gallon cans. He said he thought he could find it again.

AT TWO-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON,
Houston Detective Daniel James was sitting in the homicide office on the third floor of headquarters when the telephone rang with a message from Pasadena. Automatically the young officer scribbled notes:

The caller said that Wayne Henley had spoken of “bodies” buried in a shed somewhere in southwest Houston, but added that the young killer had been involved in an all-night “bagging” party and might still be under the influence. At the moment, no one was taking him seriously.

Danny James, twenty-seven years old, was a rookie detective; he had worked on one murder to date, but he had learned a few lessons about “confessions,” especially the kind that come from huffers and pill freaks. “It’s just another kook,” he said to himself. He turned to detectives Jack Hamel and Jim Tucker and said
pro forma,
“Pasadena says they’ve got a killing and information’s come from it that there’s gonna be a bunch of killings, or several anyway, and it’s gonna come over here into Houston.”

Hamel, a thirty-six-year-old self-styled “country boy” who had recently scored first on the examination for lieutenant, heard the rest of the story and announced that it was nothing to get dandered about. Homicide detectives, he explained patiently, must accustom themselves to wild tales, and anyway it was close to the end of the shift. His partner, Jim Tucker, twenty-nine and chubby and jocular, said that for once he had to agree with his elderly partner. Tucker said he had planned to leave a few minutes early to shop for an anniversary present for his wife, and he saw no compelling reason to hang around headquarters waiting for Pasadena’s latest opium dream to unfold. “We haven’t done anything all day,” he said. “If we’re gonna get something, I’d rather get it early and get it over with.”

The team of Hamel and Tucker, Mr. Bones and Mr. Beef behind their backs (and sometimes in front), was deceptively skilled, particularly at the technique of interrogation. Sometimes they seemed to outbumble television’s lackadaisical Lieutenant Columbo, but there was always method, artfully concealed. They joked and needled and ragged, bestowed their smiles and handshakes impartially on brother officers and odious murderers, and caught their flies with honey. Now they pounced on young James, the handsome clotheshorse of the homicide division.

“Say, Danny,” Hamel said, “you remember your last murder case? Your
only
murder case? The one where your pardner was on vacation and I came along to he’p?”

James nodded.

“Well, this time you’re strictly on your own,” Hamel said with feigned abruptness. “I know you’re alone again today, but that’s not my problem. You took the call,
you
make the killin’!”

James said the case would probably fizzle out anyway. “I’m skeptical,” he said with the insouciance of two months’ experience as a detective. “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Well, jes’ hold on there a minute!” Hamel said, changing tactics. “You
never
know about these thangs. You better saddle up
your pony and git ready to ride. You might have a
beeg
one this time.”

Danny James looked at his watch. It was nearly 3
P.M.,
an hour before the end of the shift, and soon he would pick up his wife, a fingerprint classifier, and drive home to their daily reunion with two children. He enjoyed his job, but he enjoyed the reunion, too.

Inside his windowed office overlooking the bullpen where the three detectives bantered, Lieutenant Breckenridge Porter answered his phone. A Pasadena detective was calling, passing along the latest word on the killing. “What killin’?” Porter asked. A potbellied cigar-chomping veteran with thirty-one years of experience, he had heard nothing about the case. “Now holt on there a second, ol’ buddy,” he said. “Take it from the top.” The middle-aged Porter knew how a tale should be told; his aunt was Katherine Anne Porter, the novelist and short-story writer. Now he leaned back with his cowboy boots on the desk and his balding gray head nestled against the telephone and heard about “bodies buried in a shed in Houston.”

At the end, the caller added, “Oh, say, our boy Henley’s mentioned something about Corll killing a fella name of Cobble. By any chance would you check your files and see if you got something on Cobble?”

Porter sat upright. “Hell,” he said, “damn right I do!
Shee-it,
yeh! I got a file rat cheer on my desk. We been workin’ on it ’cause it smacked of a little violence. Somethin’ screwball about it.”

“Well, listen, Lieutenant,” the Pasadena detective went on, “this Corll’s supposed to’ve killed this Cobble, and there’s something about a kid named David Hilligiest, too. H-I-L-L-I-G-I-E-S-T. Henley says Corll talked about burying ’em all in the same place.”

Porter said, “Bear’s ass!”—one of his favorite expletives—and beckoned his entire available staff into his office. Jack Hamel, Jim Tucker and Danny James all remembered the case of Cobble and Jones. Marty Ray Jones’s cousin, Karl Siebeneicher, was a fellow detective in homicide, and another pair of homicide detectives had
begun to interest themselves in the case a week or so earlier. And almost everybody in the division had dealt with Vern Cobble at least once since the boys’ disappearance. The man had visited the office every day or two, buttonholing detectives and pleading for action.

“Those two kids had been in a little dope business, so we didn’t think it was worth checking,” Danny James said. “We figured they were holed up someplace, working out a way to raise money.”

Jack Hamel said, “We tried to write the Cobble father off, ’cause we felt like his hippy son had done pulled the hippy thing. You know how these kids’ll git away from home and call back and swear they need a thousand dollars or they’re never gonna see daylight again? His daddy’d come in here and set down and tell us that him and his brother-in-law’d talked to ever’body they could possibly talk to, gone ever’place they could possibly go to, and then he’d say, ‘I don’t know what you can do, but why don’t you
do
something?’ So I’d say, ‘Well, we will! What do you suggest?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Thangs like ’at. So we just left it there.”

“Yeh,” his partner Tucker said. “It seemed like another one of those cases of ‘My darling child is gone with his hippy friends and we’d like you to find him.’ What can we do on that?”

The lieutenant ordered Danny James to ask Missing Persons and Juvenile for a check on David Hilligiest. A few minutes later James reported that there was a substantial file. The thirteen-year-old boy had disappeared in May of 1971, and the parents had pressed the search every day for over two years.

Lieutenant Porter called Pasadena back and said he would provide assistance whenever they were ready to begin digging, and the Pasadena dispatcher said detectives were en route to Houston police headquarters with their prisoner. “Y’all kin go on home,” Porter told Hamel, Tucker and James. “We got enough men comin’ in to handle it.”

By four o’clock, only three of the scheduled six homicide detectives
had arrived for the evening shift; the others were either on vacation or taking off for previous overtime. Two day-shift detectives heard about the case and volunteered. One was Larry Earls, a hard-driving thirty-year-old who doubled as a private security guard, and the other was Karl Siebeneicher, at thirty-one a master’s degree candidate and operator of two business ventures on the side. When the Pasadena team arrived with the manacled Wayne Henley, Siebeneicher showed pictures of the two missing boys to the young suspect.

“Know these guys?” the detective asked pleasantly.

“Yeh,” Henley said quickly. “That’s Marty Jones and Charles Cobble.”

Henley offered no further comment, and Siebeneicher did not inform him that he was Marty Ray Jones’s cousin. A few days earlier, he had learned for the first time that his young cousin was missing, and had gone into the files to study the case. Now he told himself that there must be some tangible connection between Henley and the two missing boys. Was murder the connecting link? He climbed into the Pasadena car along with two Pasadena detectives and the taciturn Henley, and they headed south in the direction of the Astrodome. Larry Earls and another detective would stop by city jail to pick up trusties and equipment for a digging operation and meet the others later at the shed.

Henley directed the driver to an isolated intersection about nine miles south of downtown Houston, to a region of small industries, sheds, fields, falling-down barns, and wildcat housing developments. He pointed to a power plant sticking up from the scrubby coastal plains like a miniature metropolis and said, “That’s where ol’ Dean worked. He tested relays, or sumpin’ like that.”

A mile farther south, the undercover police car drove slowly through a neighborhood of modest homes and small businesses to a rutted shell road with the inappropriate name of Silver Bell. The narrow lane dead-ended alongside an L-shaped array of unpainted sheds made of galvanized steel and bearing the name Southwest
Boat Storage. It was nearly six o’clock on the summer evening; the fierce sun was slipping down toward the horizon, and a few sprigs of morning-glory hung from a fence and shone like sapphires in the afternoon light. In front of the sheds was a crushed-shell parking area, partly covered with grass and prickly weeds. To the east, beyond the dead end, thick tangles of scrub and tropical vines were matted beneath the high-tension power lines that led to the late Dean Corll’s place of employment a mile or so to the north.