The Man With Candy (21 page)

“Approximately. I kin give ’em an area.”

“What area?”

Henley looked around, annoyed. He conveyed the impression that the press was intruding on a sacred relationship. “That’s between me and the police,” he said curtly.

“How have you been treated since you reached the San Augustine
police department?” a local reporter asked.

“They’ve been great. Couldn’t ask for better.” For the first time in the interview, he sounded momentarily warm and friendly, but he quickly returned to his Olympian stance when a newsman asked how old the boys were.

“Teen-agers,” he said.

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“Somew’ar,” he said, in a tone that suggested his lawyer was no more competent than the press.

“Who is he?”

“No names.”

“Wayne, are you sorry about all this?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said impatiently.

“Wayne, were the boys dead when you brought them up here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How were they killed?”

“Shot, choked.”

“With a twenty-two?”

“Twenty-two.”

By now Henley was making it plain with his brusque answers that the interview was over, but the reporters bored in.

“Were they killed in Houston and then brought up to the San Augustine area?” someone called from the rear.

“These here, Pasadena.”

“Any of them knifed?”

“No.”

“What happened previous to the killings?”

Henley sighed. “He had sex with ’em,” he said.

“Is that all? Any torture?”

“Supposedly,” he said.

“What kind of torture?”

“Mostly jes’ pickin’. It wasn’t what yew would really call torture.”

“Describe it for us.”

Henley paused. “No details,” he snapped.

“Have you made a complete statement of all you can recall?”

“As complete as I could at the time.”

“Was this under any duress?”

“Any what?” A look of confusion crossed his face.

The reporter laughed and said, “There was no pressure, no force used on you?”

“No, sir.” The boy’s voice took on a cloying tone. “These men haven’t had to force me, haven’t had to holler at me, and I haven’t had any reason to feel bad at ’em.”

Another reporter wanted to know why he had phoned his mother two nights before and told her about killing Corll.

“She deserves to know,” he said in the familiar singsong delivery.

The reporter pressed the point. “She acted like she sort of knew the situation,” he said. “She wasn’t too surprised.”

Henley’s voice rose in annoyance. “That’s between me and her!” he said. “It’s none of yer business.”

“And your brothers were aware, too, weren’t they?” another newsman insisted.

“That’s none of yer business either!” Henley snorted.

“Wayne,” someone asked in a softer voice, “how do you feel about this whole ordeal?”

“Pretty grotesque.”

“What do you mean by that?” the same reporter asked.

Henley’s dark eyes blazed. “Do yew read the dictionary?” he said churlishly.

The reporter said, “No, I don’t—”

“Wayne,” another interrupted quickly, “you been carrying this around with you for a long time. Didn’t you almost crack several times?”

“Yep,” the boy said softly.

“How come this time?”

“This time,” he said in a voice quaking with self-pity, “I just haven’t felt like I was gonna be able to hold mah sanity much longer.”

“What provoked you that night for you to decide to tell it all?”

“I jes’ think I owe these people this much,” he answered piously, “to let ’em know what’s happened to their boys.”

“How do you feel about it now?”

Henley seemed genuinely disturbed by the question. “I don’t know how to put it,” he said.

“These boys out here, are they from the Houston area?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you and the other gentleman pick them all up and take ’em to this house, or did the other fellow get some of them?”

“He got some.”

“But you took most of them?”

“Oh, he was with us.”

“What did you tell these boys when you took them there?”

“Gonna go visit, party a li’l”

“Did you have any girls?”

“No.”

‘Is it true he got mad because you brought a girl that last time?”

“Yes. I brought the girl to keep her while she run away. There was no bad intentions to her.” Detectives nodded. Henley had told them several times earlier that he wanted to correct any false impressions about Rhonda’s behavior, that she was a good, moral person and his own motivation had been strictly to help her.

“But this is the first time you took a girl, right?” a newsman asked.

“I’ve taken girls there before. I’ve never tried to
keep
one there.” Something amused him, and he laughed.

“Why was he angry this time?”

“I wasn’t suppose to brought her till the seventeenth.”

“What was gonna happen on the seventeenth?”

“That’s when she decided that’s when she wanted to run away. She said the seventeenth, the week afterwards. I don’t know whar’ she picked the date.”

“Wayne,” a dogged reporter broke in, beckoning toward the pine forest, “are there more bodies in there?”

“In whar’?”

“In the woods.”

“Not to mah knowledge.”

“Who would know, Wayne?”

“Dean Corll.”

“Anybody else?”

He reverted to the clipped delivery. “No more names.”

“Did you ever bring your brothers over to Dean’s house?”

“No. My li’l brother Paul had been there at Westcott in Houston mebbe onct, mebbe twice.”

“What kind of man was Dean?”

“Dean was a nice—He was reserved, quiet, enjoyed hisself. The man that did these killin’s was somethin’ else.”

“Your mother said he was like a father to you. Is that the way you depict him?”

Henley pondered the question.
“Ummmmm,
no, it was more of a brother-type person, somebody I could talk to.”

“Apparently you respected Dean.”

“At one time,” he said in the manner of a person who has been seriously let down by a friend.

“Then why did you kill him?”

The boy answered in a higher pitch, as though defending himself against an outrageous charge. “I was tired of him doin’ thangs like that, and it was either me or him rat then.”

“Did you ever try to talk him out of this?”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“Oh, he would go so far and then he’d drop it. A little bit later
he’d come up again.” Reporters guessed that Henley meant Corll would come up to The Heights again, looking for boys.

“Do you think that sometimes he was a different person? How did he change? What caused the change sometimes?”

“He had a lust for blood,” Henley said slowly.

“When you didn’t get paid after bringing the boys there, why didn’t you stop?”

There was a long silence, and the boy said, “No comment.”

“Wayne, how often were there parties?”

“Whenever we’d git ready to.” He was beginning to sound bored and truculent once more. But when a reporter asked how the parties were financed, his voice took on a note of self-satisfaction. “Dean didn’t necessarily finance all these parties,” he said. “Now David Brooks lived most of his life off Dean, but
I
worked.”

“Where did you work?”

“In different places.”

“Dean,” a confused newsman asked, “were there drugs involved in these murders?”

Henley pounced. “I’m
Wayne,”
he said sarcastically.

“Wayne,” another reporter asked, “were most of the people homosexual?”

A sheriff’s deputy held up his hand and said, “That’s enough, gentlemen.”

“That’s—No comment,” Henley said as he slumped back on the seat of the car.

The beach at High Island lay three hours to the south of Lake Sam Rayburn, and Willie Young and the Pasadena detectives decided it was time to begin the long drive to the next burial site. On the way, Henley talked with the lawmen and soon regained his good spirits. “He seemed to like it in the car, surrounded by detectives, jawin’ his head off,” Young said later. “He acted like a li’l ol’ puppy.”

The driver stopped for gas and Young bought a copy of the
Beaumont
Enterprise
with its massive front-page coverage of the case. “Hey, lemme see that!” Henley said. “I unnerstan’ the papers been sayin’ some wrong thangs.” Willie Young handed over the front section, and the boy began reading excitedly, interrupting himself every paragraph or two with a complaint.

“Lookee here!” he said. “Why, this makes Rhonda sound like a whore! That’s unfa’r! That’s not true!”

Young saw that the boy was becoming agitated again, and regretted letting him read the newspaper.

“And lookee here!” Henley went on. “Isn’t that the most disgustin’ thang yew ever saw?”

“What?” Willie Young asked.

“They wrote my name without the ‘Junior’ on it,” Henley said. “Look! Calls me Elmer Wayne Henley.
Elmer Wayne Henley!
That’s my daddy!”

The boy perused the articles several times, and gradually his ire seemed to fade. He laughed and showed Young an item about the pleasures of middle age. “I know I’m gonna be sent away,” he said, “and I’ll be about forty when I git out. Mebbe they’ll take me in the Army.”

It was nearly noon when the car crossed the Intracoastal Waterway and approached the village of High Island. The community water tower, a dull silver-gray against the Gulf sun, bore the word “
CARDINALS
” splotched in maroon paint. Black Angus and whitefaced Hereford cattle munched lazily in meadows dotted with steel “nodding horses,” sucking the final drops of oil from an old wildcat field that was nearly played out. Most of the habitations were on stilts or pilings. High Island was anything but high; it was a foot or two above sea level, and an occasional hurricane sent sheets of salt water cascading across the meadows. The downtown section consisted of a handful of commercial establishments flanking the two-lane Highway 124. Babineaux’s, an overgrown tin shack partly covered with flaking paint, advertised “
DANCING NIGHTLY.
” The sign on a bait shack read “
SHRIMP SQUID MULLET,
”
and in the front window of Nancy’s Cafe a cardboard placard reminded citizens that “
THE REVELATIONS, GOSPEL MUSIC EVANGELISTS, ARE COMING TO THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, HIGH ISLAND.
” The Revelations were from Lake Charles, Louisiana, a two-hour drive around the scimitar curve of the Gulf. It was not every weekend that High Island’s three hundred citizens could look forward to live entertainment from out of town.

At twenty minutes after noon, the police cars, now joined by a group of press and television vehicles, pulled up at Nancy’s for lunch. Twenty-five minutes later, a car carrying David Brooks and detectives Jack Hamel and Jim Tucker arrived from Houston, followed by a car with Danny James and another homicide detective and four trusties, followed by a long string of vehicles belonging to the news media. After a soggy luncheon of hamburgers eaten from paper bags, the caravan headed toward the beach, two miles south. Taking directions from Henley and Brooks, the drivers followed Highway 124 to its junction with the beach road, SH 87, and then turned east along the Gulf, passing a sign that warned: “SH 87 may be subject to flooding and debris next twenty miles.”

They drove parallel to the beach, and at a signal from Henley they parked on the shoulder and walked down a sandy path through a narrow strip of salt grass to the beach. The Gulf was rinse-water brown, riding in small waves driven by a southerly breeze, coughing up Portuguese men-of-war and punch-drunk baitfish and bits of shell and flotsam. A line of rusty froth marked the upper limits of the littoral, and there were bits of plastic, various seaweeds and jellyfish cadavers, egg cartons, lengths of old rope, a Lone Star beer bottle, and a bleaching cypress stump half buried in the sand. Just outside the small breakers, chrome mullet jumped, harried by speckled trout and redfish, and a solitary fisherman cast a silver spoon.

The two prize prisoners, surrounded by officers to buffer them from the curious, said that Corll had taken them to the beach five or six months before and pointed out a place where he had buried
a body by himself. Brooks said that the spot was “where the highway changes color, just beyond, and then down along the grass line.” While Henley hiked up the beach to look for another burial site, Brooks walked along the ridge that marked the boundary line between sand and salt grass. He came to a small cement block and bent over for a closer look. “I’m purty sure that’s it,” he said, “but I’d like to look some more.”

“Just take your time,” Tucker said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“I want to be sure what I’m showing you,” the blond boy said.

“Fine with us,” said Jack Hamel. “It’s a nice day for a stroll.” The temperature was in the nineties, the air was oppressively wet, and there was no shade. The detectives wore their customary uniforms of suits, shirts and ties. It was anything but a nice day for a stroll, under the circumstances, but Hamel wanted to give Brooks total leeway. In court later, it would be important that the boys had found the graves entirely on their own, without prodding or hinting or outside assistance. On such legal nuances, whole cases were won and lost, and murderers as guilty as Jack the Ripper sometimes slipped their bonds. Hamel and Tucker, the old pros, were aware of their responsibilities.

“I’m purty sure this is it,” Brooks repeated after poking around in the tall grass for a few more minutes. “But I don’t want y’all to start digging for nothing. I don’t want to disappoint you. Y’all’ve been real nice to me.”

“See?” Tucker quipped to Hamel. “Didn’t I tell you everybody likes a fat man?”

They walked back to the cement rock. “This is it,” Brooks said definitely. “I’m sure.” Under the rock, there appeared to be a caked black substance. Tucker nudged it lightly with his shoe tip and a piece broke off. The inside of the fragment was pure white.

“Lime?” Tucker asked Hamel.

“Lime,” his partner answered.

By now the group had been joined by local deputies, and one of them started digging without waiting for the trusties. In a few
dips of the shovel he brought a patch of plastic into view. In a grave about two feet deep and three or four feet wide, the party found a skeleton the size of a teen-age boy’s, with strands of dark wet hair adhering to the skull. The body was entirely wrapped in plastic and tied like a package. Most of the skeleton fell apart when the outside cords were cut, but the feet were almost intact, as though a sculptor had roughed them out in clay. A coroner’s assistant said the boy might have been buried with his shoes on, creating a preservative effect. No clothes or personal effects were visible.