The Man With Candy (19 page)

After Henley was returned to the Pasadena car for the drive to Lake Sam Rayburn, Tucker told his partner, “Jack, I never saw anybody feeling so good about a confession. He was cheerful, clowning, performing for everybody.”

“Yeh,” Hamel said. “I saw him goin’ out. He was jes’ havin’ a blast.”

Danny James, the rookie homicide detective, begged Breckenridge Porter to assign him to the case he had missed the day before, and the lieutenant said, “Okay, brother, if you wanna go out to that shed and help dig, you’re welcome to it.” James drove home on the way to the Southwest Boat Storage and changed into faded jeans and T-shirt, both expendable. “I didn’t want to ruin my suit,” the homicide division’s fashion plate explained.

Late in the morning, a few newsmen and detectives were standing around the entrance to the shed talking. Larry Earls and another detective pulled up with a team of trusties, and after a few minutes Earls said, “I asked for heavy digging equipment from the city, but we might as well start in with shovels.”

One of the trusties stuck a spade squarely in the middle of the sandy floor and looked at Earls questioningly. “Sure, why not?” Earls said. “The way we hear, one place is as good as another.”

“Yeh,” Danny James said. “The way we hear, it’s wall-to-wall bodies.”

By noon, the party had disinterred another pair of young boys, wrapped in plastic, covered in lime, and almost entirely skeletonized. Then two more bodies were recovered from individual graves, and another pair in the far left corner. The last two bore identification cards marked Donald and Jerry Waldrop, fifteen and thirteen years old, hospitalization cards in the same names, and two cigaret lighters.

As more bodies came into view, it became almost impossible to
separate one victim from another. “We had to reach in with our hands and separate little bitty bits of bone from crushed shell and muck, and then pitch them up into bags,” Larry Earls said later. “We were pulling hair out of the mud in chunks, working in mud made out of dirt and rotten blood. It was caked on our shoes. It got into our clothes. It was awful.”

The officers found the first evidence of sexual mutilation. A small plastic bag lay alongside one body; inside were a penis and testicles. The rest of the body had decomposed, but the airtight sack had preserved the genitalia. Another boy’s penis was gnawed nearly in two. Almost all the victims had been gagged and wrapped in plastic, and heavy twine or Venetian-blind cord was cinched about most of the necks. Several had been shot, their hands tied behind their backs. One had a caved-in chest; it appeared that he had been kicked to death. Most of the victims seemed to have been in their early teens, but there were a few exceptions. Danny James winced as he extracted a pair of muddy pants that were no more than a foot and a half long, suitable for a boy of nine or ten years. The eighth body of the day, found near the entrance, was intact in a striped swimsuit, undershorts and black cowboy boots.

As the hours passed and the temperature climbed, the diggers found that they could work only in short shifts before dashing outside for air. A policeman kicked a hole in the back of the shed, but there was hardly any breeze, and the situation was only slightly improved. The trusties, mostly winos, became casualties themselves, sprawled in disarray on the parking lot, preferring the relentless Texas sun to the specter of death inside. Danny James and Larry Earls continued to dig in the galvanized-steel cauldron, along with a few other detectives who came and went as they could be spared from the office. An observer who spent the entire day at the shed said later, “The city sent out a backhoe that just wasn’t big enough, and all the work wound up being done by hand. Naturally the men got a little short on patience, and they kind of jumbled the bones around. When they came to graves with more than
one body, they just divided the bones into body sacks about equally. I really couldn’t blame them.”

By day’s end, nine bodies had been removed, bringing the total to seventeen, two less than Wayne Henley had forecast for the shed. The operation was shut down for good, to the chagrin of at least one officer. “It just wasn’t done right,” he said. “We waited out there all day for good equipment, but the city of Houston is so slow. We shoulda gone down about six feet and taken every bit of dirt out, but we couldn’t do it by hand, so we just gave up. There’s still bodies in that shed, I’m sure of it.”

David Brooks and his father huddled together in an office at headquarters, and Jim Tucker dropped in on them once in a while to buoy their spirits. “What I’m worried about,” Alton Brooks said, “is the publicity. It might could hurt mah bidness.”

Tucker said, “At this point, you don’t have a whole lot to worry about, Mr. Brooks. Your son’s just given us background information, things he’s heard of. I don’t think you’re gonna get any bad publicity.”

Late in the afternoon, the head of CID, Alton Brooks’s friend J. D. Belcher, hurried into the office. The elder Brooks asked him, “Are we in a position to leave now?”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Lieutenant Belcher said, “but something’s come up.”

The father half rose from his seat, and Belcher said, “Come on, let’s go talk to Lieutenant Porter.”

As gently as possible, Breckenridge Porter broke the news that David Brooks was under arrest. He explained that Texas law provides for the arrest of anyone implicated in a felony confession, and Wayne Henley had informed on the friend of his childhood.

“Take the boy to the magistrate and get him warned,” Porter ordered Tucker.

“I don’t know what there is to live for,” David cried out, and his father patted him on the arm. A judge read the young man’s
rights aloud, and then the detective said, “Let’s go, David. We’re going to jail now.”

Brooks turned to his tearful father and said, “I’ll be all right.”

Tucker asked the jailer for a private cell. “We don’t want any heroes getting after him,” he said. The jailer nodded assent. “Oh, and keep an eye on him, will you?” Tucker whispered. “He said something about suicide.”

Brooks’s belt and glasses were removed and he was locked in for the night. Just before Tucker left, the boy said wearily, “I’ll tell ya all about it tomorrow.”

Detective W. L. Young wore stark black glasses, combed his hair neatly to the side, and had about him the dignified look of the scholar. But as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, the illusion evaporated. Willie Young was pure down home, as pompous as red-eye gravy and as pedantic as Gomer Pyle. He had been a Houston policeman for sixteen years, and one of his specialties was making people comfortable. Now he was in a police car with Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and two Pasadena detectives, and they were driving at high speed toward Lake Sam Rayburn, one hundred and sixty-nine miles northeast of Houston, deep in the piney woods. Two other cars full of lawmen followed, and on the way the caravan picked up a team of Texas Rangers in Lufkin.

In the back of the first car, Willie Young was playing his customary role of “a good ol’ boy,” smiling broadly at Henley’s remarks and displaying the Terry-Thomas gap in his front incisors. Seldom in his six years with homicide had Willie encountered such a mouthy killer. Before they had even pulled away from headquarters, the boy had called out to Karl Siebeneicher and practically demanded that the detective hear his story.

In the car, Henley told his companions that Corll had made an offer of two hundred dollars per child nearly three years earlier, “but I sat on it for a year.” Then he got into a financial bind and
had to take advantage of the offer. Corll paid the first time, but never again.

“Well, I don’t rilly understand you,” Willie Young said, smiling. “I’ve heard of plenty murders where a guy’s kilt three people, that’s pretty common. But a nice guy like you involved in this many killin’s? Why, I cain’t visualize it!”

“Well, if yew had a daddy that shot at yew,” Henley said darkly, “yew might could do some thangs, too.”

Young was impressed by the boy’s stoic acceptance of his fate. “He acted like a guy that’s goin’ to the penitentiary for the fifth time,” the detective said later. “Like nature was takin’ its course. Seemed he just enjoyed the attention, ridin’ there in the car with three detectives for his buddies.”

Only one subject seemed to disturb the young killer: homosexuality. He kept emphasizing his relations with females. “I had a girl fri’nd and I spent the whole night with her! Man, I’d sure like to be able to do that jes’ one more time.” He seemed to be trying to impress the detectives with his manliness.

After a while, he began a disquisition on the physical difficulty of killing a human being. “Man, it’s hord!” he said. “It ain’t like on TV. Man, I choked one of ’em boys and he turned blue and gurgled, and I jes’ couldn’t kill him. He jes’ wouldn’t die! I went in and got Dean, and he come out and helped. Had to do two, three like ’at.”

It was late afternoon when the police cars reached Texas farm road 3185, three miles southwest of the small town of Broaddus near a summer community called Hickory Hollow. Lake Sam Rayburn, a man-made impoundment, was about two miles away, and the Corll cabin another two or three miles down the lake. At Henley’s direction, the cars made several wrong turns onto barely marked roads, losing an hour or so, and ended up on a bumpy dirt road parallel to a blacktop. Fresh rain had muddied the area, and the men got out and slogged into the darkening woods, Henley in the lead. He directed them to a mound in the middle of a small
clearing about seventy yards off the road, and said tersely, “Billy’s buried there.”

A hound howled far away. “Billy who?” Young asked.

“Billy Lawrence.”

One of the detectives picked at the top of the mound and exposed a layer of leaves below a thin coating of dirt. About a foot below the leaves the officers hit a hard covering that turned their shovels aside. They pried up a board four feet square and came to a stratum of lime. Below the lime, about two feet in the earth, a large rock rested atop the chest of a rotting body wrapped in plastic.

Willie Young glanced at Henley, standing a few feet to one side. The boy seemed in distress. “If this bothers you,” Young said, “we kin go back to the road. We don’t have to stay here.”

“No,” Henley said in a choked voice, “it’ll be all rat.”

As night fell, the boy led the search party on another excursion through the woods—interrupted momentarily while a Ranger shot a rattlesnake. A second body, similarly wrapped and decomposed, was brought to the surface.

By this time, newsmen had arrived and several requested an interview. Henley spoke briefly, shielding his face from the cameras. He said, “These was jes’ some boys that Dean picked up, that I helped him git, ruther, and he raped ’em, ended up killin’ ’em, brought ’em down here and buried ’em.”

He was asked about his own role.

“I helped him pick ’em,” the boy said warily.

“What part did you play in the killing?” a TV reporter asked.

“No comment,” Henley said.

Another newsman asked the boy to explain his motivation. He said, “Dean had somethin’ over me,” but refused to elaborate.

The bodies were secured in zippered bags, and the group retired to the nearby town of San Augustine, where Henley was locked in a cell at the county jail. By this time he was acting morose and troubled, the opposite of his earlier behavior, and cried
out for a doctor. Sheriff John Hoyt summoned a doctor to the jail, and the boy went to sleep under the influence of a tranquilizer and a sedative. The amiable sheriff sent out for whiskey, and the visiting detectives sat up till long past midnight, making notes and discussing the case.

Back in Houston, Lieutenant Breck Porter held his own briefing for the press. Boots propped on his desk, the crusty veteran leaned back and told reporters, “There’s no tellin’ how many bodies there are, ’cause where you’ve got a clown like this has been operatin’ over a period of four years—why, we know he’s been prankin’ with these teen-agers for at least that long, so no tellin’ how long this has been goin’ on, or how many that’s missin’ that’ll never be found.”

He was asked what advice he would give parents and children. “Well, we try to preach to our kids all the time,” he said, “but it’s pretty hard to tell your kids things like this ’cause in this day and time your kids know all the answers about everything, and think they do. This is the sort of thing that kin happen. Tell your kids: when you’re invited up to somebody’s apartment, you might never leave.”

The lieutenant said he doubted if the general public fully understood the nature of sex crimes. “Most people think this sex bit is perhaps like something I’d be involved in, you know? One of these wham bam thank you ma’am type things? And then you turn over and go to sleep? But it wasn’t that way. These ol’ clowns that go for these perverted-type sex acts, they go on for a period of two or three days. I’m sure there would be a certain amount of torture to the person it’s bein’ inflicted upon. It starts as a party. There’s really no violence connected, at first, just everybody have a good time. These kids wasn’t drug up there at the point of a gun or nothin’ like that. They was invited to a party. Hell, some of ’em
liked
it. Somebody’d take ’em home, and they didn’t
want
to go home, and they’d come back to the party. One of ’em came back
nine times to party at Corll’s place, I understand. There was lots to eat, lots to drink, pills and marijuana, barbiturates, lacquer sniffin’, the whole bit. And then they’re crocked out, and they wake up and find themselves racked up on the board. Then the sex bit starts.”

At her neat house on Twenty-seventh Street, Mary Henley sobbed and said she could not understand. “Dean treated Wayne like a son,” she said. “And Wayne loved him like a father. I know Dean must’ve done something terrible to make him shoot him.”

WHEN JIM TUCKER ARRIVED
at headquarters early Friday morning, he found that David Brooks had been moved from the basement to a fifth-floor lockup for safekeeping. “Will you get my glasses?” Brooks asked. “I’m about blind without ’em.”

Tucker picked up the boy’s personal effects and escorted him from jail for an interrogation. “Man, that was scary,” Brooks said on the way to homicide.