Mass slaying pretrial case opens

HOUSTON (P-The mother of a teen-ager accused in the Houston mass murders was the first witness in a pretrial hearing yesterday as the defense began criticism of police handling of the case.

Attorneys say actions of the police are crucial to the defense of Elmer Wayne, Henley, 17. charged in connection with six of 27 slayings.

Henley is one of two youths charged in what police have called a 21⁄2-year orgy of homosexual torture and murders of young men.

Defense lawyers say they will present 17 witnesses to support claims that police denied Henley a chance to consult an attorney before he made two incriminating statements to police.

In a small, calm voice, Mary Pauline Henley said

her "sick . . . incoherent" son may have given police oral and written statements about the grisly case before he was able to consult his attorney..

Mrs. Henley told of her first meeting with the youth in jail Aug. 9, the day after he was arrested.

"He was sick. He was seeing people who weren't there. He said people were opening the door (of his cell) from the wrong side and laughing at him. He had always been kind of nervous but never acted like that," she said.

While she spoke, Henley, clad in jeans and a striped shirt, jotted notes on a legal pad. Gone were his long hair and beard of last summer.

Mrs. Henley testified that she received a telephone call from her son last Aug.

8 telling her he had killed Dean Arnold Corll, 33, and was being helf by police.

Henley had called police in neighboring Pasadena and told them he had shot Corll during a sex and paint-sniffing party at Corll's home.

In the next few days, Henley and David Owen Brooks, 18, led officers to the bodies of 27 teen-aged youths buried at three different sites. Police, who have charged Brooks in four of the deaths, said the two youths procured teenagers for Corll in a homosexual torture and murder ring.

Attorney Samuel L. Plotkin testified that he told a Pasadena detective that he, Plotkin, was Henley's attorney; on cross-examination he said he could not be certain that he had requested that the interrogation of

Henley be stopped: "I did say that I was the attorney and I was coming out. I asked them not to coerce the boy."