Couples Who Kill

– but said he was relieved that David hadn’t actually taken a life.

David Brooks was deeply involved in the deaths though, telling investigators how he’d seen boys tied to the bed and had helped carry their corpses to suitable burial sites.

Wayne Henley had initially told detectives that he’d ‘be about forty when he got out’ but in August 1974 he was sentenced to 594 years, a sentence that was later overturned due to legal irregularities. Tried again in June 1979, the alcoholic teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment. David Brooks also received a life sentence in March 1975 for killing one of the boys – and life in his case is liable to mean just that.

Meanwhile, Mary Corll continued to protest her dead son’s innocence, describing him as asexual rather than homosexual and suggesting that he just wanted to please everyone all the time, that he didn’t have a sadistic bone in his body. She said that Dean was innocent and that Wayne and David wouldn’t have committed the killings if they’d gotten religion. But Dean and Wayne had both gone to church and had lured two of Dean’s victims from a religious rally, and sex offenders are more likely to come from restrictive religious households than from secular ones.

Update
Wayne Elmer Henley – now in his late forties – is still in prison. He is eligible for parole consideration every three years but the authorities are considering changing this to every five years as he’s such an unlikely candidate for freedom.

Wayne told a curiosity-seeker who wrote to him that he found it easiest to isolate himself in prison rather than become intimate with anyone. He expresses himself creatively and has become a respected painter of flowers and landscapes. His Houston art shows have quickly sold out and he recently featured in a documentary about people who produce or collect serial killer art.

He has undoubtedly bettered himself in prison but – given that he contributed to the deaths of up to thirty boys – it is unlikely that he’ll ever be released.

Neighbours told the police that Dean Corll was a good man who regularly attended church. He’d pretended to them that he was a widower so they’d assumed that Wayne Henley was his son and that the younger boys who entered the house were his son’s friends. But Wayne was now able to tell the police that Dean liked little boys and that he’d procured them for him. Being economical with the truth, he added that Dean had told him during their gunfight that he’d killed a few other boys.

For several hours the police did nothing with this information, assuming that Wayne Henley was hallucinating after his paint-sniffing session, but a policeman who had a young male relative missing – and who knew that other boys were missing – suggested they check out his tale.

The police asked Wayne if he knew where the burial sites were and he took them to the boat shed first and they began to dig up the floor, soon finding body after body. Each was neatly wrapped in plastic which Dean Corll had stolen from his workplace and some still had their hands tied or handcuffed behind their backs. One boy’s mouth was stretched wide open in a last desperate gasp for air as he’d been strangled, whilst others had rope still tied tightly around their necks. A few were so badly decomposed that they were merely disjointed bones and skulls, but a bike found in the shed belonged to a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone missing less than a week before.

Wayne Henley was close to a nervous breakdown as the bodies were brought out so the police treated him gently, letting him phone his mother and sit in the police car to compose himself. In turn, he said that he was grateful to them for not beating him up and he began to talk. For the first time he admitted his own part in some of the murders, saying that he’d helped Dean Corll to strangle one of the victims. He added that there were more bodies at another two burial sites.

That first day, the diggers found eight corpses in the boat shed. The following day they discovered several more. Almost all of the bodies were gagged and some contained bullet wounds whilst others had cord wrapped around their throats. Sometimes the genitalia – with telltale knife wounds or teeth marks showing the means of castration – was found in a separate bag. The smallest body was that of a nine-year-old, the oldest in their teens. At the end of the day, the investigators had found another nine bodies, bringing the total to seventeen.

Wayne now led them to the second burial site, the Corll’s lakeside retreat. It yielded up another two decomposing bodies. Later, further bodies were found at the Angelina National Forest, making a total of twenty-seven. Wayne said that there were more, that the total was over thirty, but investigators gave up at this stage.

The teenager was glad that his co-killer was dead and was desperate to confess further details but he shook so badly in custody that he had to be tranquillised. When asked why he did it, he said that being shot at by his own father had been pivotal. He also hinted that Dean Corll had been blackmailing him. Corll might have threatened to tell the world that he’d had sex with Wayne knowing that Wayne was outwardly fiercely heterosexual. Indeed, the teenager kept emphasising to the detectives that he’d had a girlfriend.

He also said that Dean had failed to pay him for procuring most of the boys, which suggested that he had enjoyed killing them. He admitted that two or three had been so difficult to strangle that he’d had to ask Dean to help. David Brook would also confirm this view of Wayne as someone who wanted on some level to kill, saying that Wayne had enjoyed causing the victims pain.

The abducted boys had suffered horrendously. One teenager, after being repeatedly raped, had been forced to watch his friend being strangled to death by Wayne Henley. David Brooks tried to pacify the terrified survivor, upon which Wayne shot the boy in the face. A moment later he regained consciousness and pleaded for his freedom, whereupon Wayne strangled him to death.

When the other prisoners on remand heard of what Henley had done they wanted to kill him and he had to be moved to solitary confinement for his own safety. His lawyer described him as physically and mentally ill and said that the recreational drugs and alcohol which he’d used liberally had put him into a temporarily psychotic state.

David Brooks was interviewed at length and at first denied ever seeing any cruelty taking place at Dean’s house. But later he made a full statement and gave details of many of the tortures. He added that when it came to killing the boys ‘It didn’t bother me to see it. I saw it done many times. I just wouldn’t do it myself. And I never did do it myself.’

His father proved very supportive to him when he was in custody. The older man wept as he realised that his son had procured some of these boys, knowing the atrocities which awaited them

r teenager and impregnated her. This now left Wayne as Dean Corll’s sole procurer, and the strain began to tell. In March 1973, he told his friends that he was never coming back to the Heights again and he travelled to Mount Pleasant to live with his dad, got a job in a gas station and resolved to put the past behind him. But within a month relations had soured and he returned to his mother’s house, soon returning to Dean Corll’s outwardly affable company.

Wayne’s mother thought that Wayne treated Dean like a father, and Wayne told friends that he was more like a brother – but in reality he lurched between being sexually abused himself or finding Dean younger boys to sexually assault.

The constant killing was taking its toll on the younger man, who now begged a friend to go to Australia with him, offering to pay the friend’s boat fare. He was drinking more heavily than ever and his speech was often slurred. He also asked older friends and relatives to accompany him to Dean’s parties, clearly realising that the man could not kill in front of witnesses. He was sufficiently desperate to visit the local Methodist minister twice, talking about unhappy aspects of his family life.

In April he quit his job in asphalt paving and thereafter took casual employment. But he usually had money in his pocket, money provided by Dean.

Burn out
By thirty-three Dean was drinking as heavily as Wayne and had developed high blood pressure, unusual for a man of his age who was only slightly overweight and active. Acquaintances noticed that he was becoming increasingly agitated and he talked about getting married to a long-term female friend and having a child. Then he changed his mind after phoning his mother who he hadn’t seen for five years. During a later phone-call he told her that he was contemplating suicide, but her religion made her believe in reincarnation and she told him that suicide was pointless as he’d have to go through the same lessons again in another life.

Deciding to teach yet another luckless boy a lesson, Dean asked Wayne to procure him a new male victim, but Wayne did the unthinkable and brought both a boy and a girl to Dean’s house.

Dean is murdered
It was 8th August 1973 when Wayne brought his friends to Dean’s party. Wayne fancied the girl, Rhonda, and had promised to help her run away from home. But Dean insisted on all-male parties and was so enraged at seeing the girl that he threatened to shoot them all dead.

Eventually he pretended to calm down and suggested they all sniff paint and get high. The teenagers did so, but when they lost consciousness Dean Corll tied them all up. Wayne revived to find himself strapped to the hellish plywood board. Dean was threatening to torture all three of them to death.

Wayne Henley now used all of the information he knew about Dean Corll to plead for his life. He reminded Corll of what they’d been through together and suggested the torture session would be much more inventive if two of them were doing the torturing. Eventually Dean agreed to this on the proviso that Wayne raped the still semi-conscious Rhonda – who was tied up in the bedroom – whilst the other boy was strapped to a second torture board.

Wayne said that he would and Dean untied him. But, chivalrous in his own way, Wayne was unable to rape his female friend. Enraged, Dean now began to wave a gun about.

A struggle ensued in which Wayne got hold of the pistol and Dean dared him to use it. The teenager obliged and fired six shots into Dean Corll who was dead before he hit the ground. The trembling seventeen-year-old freed the unconscious captives then called the police, saying in his singsong voice ‘Y’all better come right now. Ah kilt a man.’

Investigating, the police found the torture boards and various thin white tubes plus the often-used seventeen inch dildo. They also found that Dean’s van had been made into a mobile torture chamber, with manacles set in the walls and a box with airholes which had clearly been used to keep captives in.