When Houston’s television began to crowd the screen with running accounts of the search for graves and corpses, Mrs. Walter Scott could stand it no longer. She turned off the set and refused to answer the telephone. ‘’We feared the worst, so what was the use?’’ she said, her voice trailing away to nothing.

Her son, Mark, eighteen, had left home for a weekend trip to Mexico after being arrested carrying a prohibited knife. He sent his parents a postcard from Austin. ‘’How are you doing?’’ it read. ‘’I am in Austin for a couple of days. I found a good job. I am making $3,00 an hour. I’ll be home when I get enough money to pay my lawyer.’’

Like so many of the parents, Mrs. Scott remembered both Henley and Brooks. ‘’Wayne came over for a junior high school party. He was quite talkative. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave.’’

Brooks, she recalled, had once stayed overnight with Mark. During that visit Brooks evidently shot Mark with a BB gun.

In his confession Brooks told how the youth stood up to Corll and tried to get him with a knife. He ended up being strangled but his body was never identified. There was a quarrel in the Cobble home in the later part of July, 1973. Charles, seventeen, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. T.G. Cobble, left the home to share a furnished room with a friend, Marty Ray Jones, also seventeen. At first the Cobbles were not particularly concerned because they knew he was and were acquainted with young Jones’ parents. On July 26 the sons called both parents, saying they were in trouble and needed a thousand dollars. Jones told the police he feared the boys were involved with narcotics pushers. Neither was ever seen again. Their strangled bodies were found in the boat shed.

When the body of Billy Lawrence was found at Lake Rayburn his father, Horace J. Lawrence, recalled his doubts and suspicions of Wayne Henley, He remembered that Wayne had called his boy several times and had been at the house. Then there was a robbery. ‘’Whoever did it,’’ said the senior Lawrence, ‘’knew the layout. They got the stereo I had given my son for his birthday. They got cameras and film.’’ Lawrence heard about his son’s body being discovered when a friend called to say that he had read it in the newspapers. The authorities had not bothered to contact him personally. Said Lawrence, ‘’If some of these kids would realize what was going on in that jungle they would wake up and face the facts of life and face reality.’’

(Source: Harvest of Horror: Mass Murder in Houston by author David Hanna)

One day he bought a 600-power telescope, set it up in the backyard and focused it on a farm a mile away. His grandmother was impressed when she peered through the lens, and was startled at the closeness of the farmer working by his barn. She turned to Dean and shushed his talk, afraid the farmer would hear. Dean told the story many times with amusement.

His best friend in high school said, ‘’Dean liked the girls as much as the rest of us, and when we went to the drive-in movies we spent most of our time trying to make out with our dates.’’

It was in a back room of the candy factory that Dean Corll invited children in for free candy. He installed a pool table in the back room and taught the youngsters to play pool. He amused them with a huge green frog he had rigged up. It’s eyes would light up when the telephone rang. By pushing a button, Corll could talk with the caller while playing pool.

Dean Corll loved to play with children and treated Wayne like a son, Mrs. Henley said. Wayne loved him like a father. ‘’I know Dean must have done something terrible to Wayne to make Wayne shoot him.’’ She said the only time Corll ever got angry was when she would joke about his age, and then ‘’his eyes would flash. He couldn’t take kidding about his age.’’

Mrs. Henley said Wayne had dropped out of Hamilton junior High School in 1970 after a family quarrel which ended with the boy’s father beating Wayne and taking a pistol shot at her. The Henley’s were divorced shortly thereafter, and Wayne began working longer part-time hours to supplement her income as a cashier.

‘’I don’t understand this man,’’ Mrs. Henley said of Corll. ‘’He ate Easter dinner with us and he worked on my car. He loved kids and he would drive over in his white van with a black couch in the back and a dozen kids would pile into the back and he would take them for rides.’’

Wayne said Corll had talked about an organization or group that would supply him with thousands of dollars. But, said the youth, ‘’I didn’t believe him because Dean lived poor - he just had an old TV set, no stereo, and just a transistor radio. He’d be broke once a month when the bills came in.’’

‘’Wayne seemed to enjoy causing pain, and he was extremely sadistic at the Schuler address.’’ (Corll had lived in a house on Schuler and Washington Avenue in 1971 - one of the at least a dozen houses or apartments he had lived in during the three-year period of 1970-73.)

Asked by a reporter if he had implicated Brooks in the killings, Henley’s answer was succinct: ‘’I did not. David hung himself.’’ He told reporters again that he became involved with Corll at Brooks' invitation, but that he earned money at laboring jobs to help support his mother and brothers. ‘’David lived most of his life off Dean,’’ Henley said. ‘’But I worked.’’ He said this with some pride. Then he gave words of advice to his interviewers and suggested they pass it along to their readers. ‘’You’ve got to warn these kids against hitchhiking,’’ he said. ‘’That’s how we picked up most of them.’’

David Brook's father has never issued a statement or commented publicly about the boy's relationship with Corll.

How had Corll-Henley-Brooks gotten away with their activities for so long? How had such a large number of youngsters been subtracted from such a small neighborhood without parents becoming suspicious of foul play? And, more importantly, just what the hell had the police been doing while at all this was going on?

And Corll’s immediate neighbors paid little or no attention to him at his various addresses. He was never reported to police as a peace disturber. No one ever suggested to authorities that he might be luring young boys into his apartment for immoral purposes. No one apparently heard pistol shots in his apartments or the cries of the tortured.

At the Westcott Towers, a maintenance man one day found four bullet holes in the door to Corll’s apartment. He replaced it without question. Later, after Corll and Brooks had moved out, a steel plate was found positioned against the inside of the door. Neither the bullet holes nor the steel plate aroused curiosity for the police to be notified.

Corll’s immediate neighbor at 2028 Lamar Drive said he was asleep during the morning of August 8. He heard nothing even though Henley emptied his pistol into Corll’s body. Corll worked on his white van in the driveway to his house almost daily. He usually had the side doors of the van open ‘’as if he were loading or unloading’’ something. And, the neighbor said, Corll’s garage doors were usually open. The neighbor said David Brooks visited Corll’s home only twice, as far as he could recall. He identified Brooks from a newspaper photograph.

Another neighbor, two doors away, said, ‘’People in their houses really can’t hear anything going on in another house.’’ The wife of a Pasadena policeman who lived directly across the street from Corll’s home said, ‘’We didn’t hear gunshots or anything else coming from his home at any time.’’ And, she added, other neighbors had never come to her home with stories of suspicious happenings at 2020 Lamar Drive. She said her husband was asleep when Corll was killed and heard nothing.

Another neighbor said he sometimes had helped Corll repair his van, and that Corll would visit him and discuss electronics. Another neighbor said Corll was a ‘’real good neighbor and a real good guy who kept his hair and his lawn mowed all the time. He could be pretty witty and funny.’’

At the time of his death he was an electrical relay tester at the company's big power complex on South Main Street at Hiram Clark Road, a short distance from the boatyard.

Corll explained his feelings about killings to members of his crew of electricians one day while they were sitting around and waiting for a rain storm to subside. The talk was about war and women. Corll had never opened his mouth about women during the five years one of the group had worked with him at the power company. Someone said war was a ‘’scary thing.’’ more so the killing of a man even if he was your enemy. Corll, listening quietly as usual, uttered one of the few serious comments he had heard to make. ‘’Once you kill one, the rest come easy,’’ he said.

His companions knew Corll was an ex-serviceman, and could only assume he had been killed during battle. ‘’Now I know where a lot of our nylon cord went,’’ the fellow worker said. ‘’I read in the newspapers that some of the boys were strangled with this cord. This is a one-half inch nylon cord that we use to pull cable through tubing. The cord usually would get dirty and we would throw it away. Corll would take it with him. I think he got the plastic (rolls) from Baylor, where his daddy worked. We’d stop there occasionally and get some. But we didn’t have any indications he was a nut. He was a good worker and a quiet guy.’’

In Rome that Saturday morning, the Pope (or someone close to him) wrote an editorial entitled ‘’Horror’’ in reference to the Houston mass murders. In it he declared, ‘’We are in the domain of sadism and demonism. This is beyond the borderline of crime because it is beyond the borderline of reason. What wicked force can produce such a degradation - we were about to say dissolution - of man?’’

The editorialist answered his questions by declaring that such degradation was produced by sex and drugs.

Houston Police Chief Short said no pattern was apparent in the disappearances. (The Juvenile Division had pulled files and identified the pattern for the Homicide Division once they obtained the names and addresses of the first three victims mentioned by Wayne Henley.) Short said news stories indicating there were ‘’links’’ among the various victims and the suspected killers were ‘’myths’’ created by the media. (This, after Brooks had told in his statements how he, Henley and Corll had obtained the boys and had explained that many of the victims were their friends.)

Mr. Hilliegiest, an employee of the City of Houston street marking department.

The alarm in the Heights section crystallized 10 days after the first bodies were found. A mass meeting was held in the West 14th Street Baptist Church. Parents of boys who had been identified as Corll’s victims were on hand - and so were parents of missing teenagers. Joining them were federal, state and local officials.

Into this meeting strode a man carrying an axe, a rifle, a pistol and two tear gas canisters. He placed the axe and rifle on the floor and sat down near the front of the church with the pistol and canisters still in his hands. State Representative John Whitemore hastily summoned Lieutenant Joe Skipper of the Houston Juvenile Division. Skipper sat down beside the man and identified himself as a police officer. At this, the man lunged toward his axe and rifle. Skipper, with Whitemore’s assistance, pinned his arms and wrestled him to the floor.

The man identified himself as Earl Verne O’Brien, the father of four children. He said he had brought his arsenal to the meeting to show parents how easy it would be to kill children. He said he was a Scoutmaster, that he had camped on the beach where bodies had been found and now realized how close he had come to being involved in the crime. ‘’I love children, and I want to help them,’’ O Brien explained as he was led away to jail to be charged with carrying a pistol. The weapons were not loaded.

Chief Short did not attend the meeting, nor did Captain Horton of the Juvenile Division nor Inspector H.D. Caldwell of the Police Community Relations Division.

(Source: Mass murder in Houston, Paperback – January 1, 1974 by author Gurwell, John K)

PINE LODGE APTS., 2747 Houston, 861-0757, Mgr. Patsy Meuth who has been there since *72, stated that records show Corll signed a 6 mos. lease on 8-19-70 and Hazel Mixon was mgr. then, and that she had no move out date on him. On his application he lists BILL RIDINGER as a personal reference.

www.waltrip1970.com

Classmate Profile for Billy Ridinger, Waltrip High School Class Of 1970

The Ridinger family had known the Corlls apparently since the 1960s...

Listen closely at 7:50min - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRsVzeoEn_g

Marty Ray Jones

David Brooks, 1 of Houston's most notorious serial killers dies https://abc13.com/6223025/ex_cid=TA_KTRK_FB&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook