3 suspected in Houston slayings
Near top of grimmest list
L.A. Times/Washington Post Service HOUSTON Elmer Wayne Henley, David Owen Brooks and Dean Allen Corll. Less than a week ago, they were the obscure names of two teen-age dropouts and a 33-year-old bachelor they hung around with.
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Today, the names are mentioned in the same breath as Juan Corona, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Charles Whitman,
Mark Essex and the Boston strangler the American mass killers of the decade.
And perhaps before tonight the Texas murders will head that list of killings, not only for the decade but for the run of American history.
The toll stands at 23 teenage boys, with digging for bodies to resume today at one of three mass graves pointed out to police by Henley, 17, and Brooks, 18, both charged with murder. The total goes up to 24 when Corll, who Henley has told police he killed last Wednes day, is counted. Juan Corona holds the grim record
25. most of them migratory farm workers killed near Yuba City, Calif., in
1971.
Henley is slight, outgoing, 5 feet 7 inches tall, with long brown hair in disarray
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and a thin moustache and goatee. He is a high-school dropout who got A's and B's into the 7th grade with an above-average IQ, but then nosedived to failing marks and quit in the 9th grade. The oldest of four in a broken home, he had been living with his mother and grandmother in a decaying section of Houston
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Neighbors say Wayne, as he is called, was always a normal, polite boy with
seemingly normal interests. In the past two or more years, when he and Brooks say they were procuring teen-age boys to satisfy Corll's homosexual appetite
and helping to torture, kill and secretly bury them
he never acted in any unusual way, the neighbors say. They saw no signs that he drank heavily or used drugs.
But family responsibility weighed on him, they say. Reuben Beene, 79, who lives next door, says he wrote a letter a few months ago to help Wayne get into the Navy. So did a man arross the street, F.D. Allison, 77. The Navy turned him down.
Brooks is more than 6 feet tall, slender and blond. He wars rimless glasses, was recently married and his wife is pregnant. He is also a high-school dropout but,
unlike Henley, he usually did poorly. Also from a broken home, he had been living with and working for his father, an asphalt contractor, before moving in with Corll sometime last year.
At the small apartment complex where he brought the other residents know lithis bride only a month ago, tle of them, only seeing them come or go in his 1969 green Corvette Stingray.
much larger apartment complex where Brooks and Corli lived together for five months last year, and where Brooks has told police some of the slayings took place, they are remembered as pleasant and quiet.
At Westcott Towers, a
Corll was a short, wellbuilt man with sideburns, a relay tester for Houston Lighting and Power. Neighbors in Pasadena, a Housto n subdivision where he recently moved after Brooks got married, say he was pleasant, quiet and retiring.
He had a white van in which he did electronics work, sometimes inviting neighborhood boys in to repair radios, stereos and the
like.
Corll's mother died when he was young, neighbors say, and his father remarried.
Two other central figures in: the case at least at its violent end-are out of pub lic view: Rhonda Williams, 15, and Timothy C. Kerley, 20, who were in Corll's Pasadena apartment when Hen-
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ley is said to have shot and killed him.
Henley has told the police that Rhonda, Timothy and he were sniffing paint fumes and had passed out. When he awoke, Henley said, Corll had fastened the other two to a sex torture board. Corll was handcuffing him and threatened to kill him, Henley told police, when he talked himself free and then shot Corll.
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ed over the weekend, police With the digging suspendcontinued to try to identify the badly decomposed ́bodies already recovered. And parents of suspected victims continued their outspoken criticism of the Houston police not only for their failure to uncover the sex-and-sadism-ring and locate their boys, but also for failing to notify parents of those believed to be killed.
W. T. Scott, whose son Mark, 18, was killed, told a reporter he learned the news when a niece read Mark's name in a Houston newspaper and phoned him.
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"I called the police department and they gave me a detective. He told me, yes, they had a statement to this effect. I became unglued and I asked why it was I had to read the newspaper to find out my son had been murdered. Why couldn't they call us us`. and tell us? He said, well, I had to understand that they couldn't sit down and call all the parents because they had so many people up there that day."