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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun.
The bonus content of the $10 plus club includes an expose into the Norwegian black metal artist, murderer and satanist Varg Viknes, a detailed look into the history of the death penalty around the world, a video movie review of the excellent film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,
and an American radio station interviewing your humble host. More bonus features are coming up, with a wide variety of interesting topics. If you have a specific topic you would like to hear me talk about, aside from serial killers, feel free to let me know on facebook.com slash the SK podcast.
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The sun has set, and the air is fragrant with what remains of the Texas summer. Led Zeppelin was just a few days shy of performing their legendary concert not far away from where we find ourselves. The streets are full of happy, enthusiastic young people.
Bell-bottom trousers, long hair, colorful T-shirts, the hippie era is not quite over, even though the Manson family had done their very best to do just that only two years earlier in L.A.
In the late 1960s, Houston experienced a building boom that would forever transform its skyline. From a rather conservative, low-rise city, it was quickly turning into a skyscraping corporate hub. Today, the One Shell building was just a small part of Houston's downtown, the tenth tallest building.
But when the final touches were completed in 1971, it was something that Houston had never seen before, capturing the city's aspirations. It was, in short, a city of commerce and culture. And it was in Houston that Dean Corll operated. It was where he hunted. On the 17th of August 1971,
Coral and Brooks encountered a 17-year-old acquaintance of Brooks named Reuben Watson, walking home from a movie theater in Houston. I've not managed to find out what movie Reuben had watched, but perhaps it had been a clockwork orange, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece vision of an ultra-violent future.
Ruben was a lithe boy, with semi-long hair and a very boyish appearance, just what Corll really liked. Brooks persuaded Watson to attend a party at Dean Corll's address. The youth agreed and was taken to Corll's home. There, after being plied with drinks and drugs, he was tricked into putting on the handcuffs. Subsequently, Corll, with the assistance of Brooks,
strapped the terrified young boy to the torture board. What happened next, no one aside from Brooks and perhaps Henley know for sure the details of. What we do know is that the boy was brutally anally raped, probably tortured extensively, strangled to death, and finally buried in Coral's infamous boat shed. Compared with the more introspective Brooks,
Henley was a brash teenager who had once been brought up in a juvenile assault charge. He drank beer, smoked pot, and chased girls. And he could usually be found at one of the neighborhood hangouts, the swimming pool, a nearby bowling alley, or the local fast food joint.
Like Brooks, however, Henley had endured a difficult relationship with his father, who would get drunk and physically assault his wife and children. After Henley's parents divorced in 1970, he dropped out of junior high and began working part-time to help his mother. When Brooks, whom he had known for a few years, introduced him to Dean Corll in 1971, Henley was impressed.
According to interviews given by Henley in prison, he said the following, and I quote, Maybe Dean was considering me as one of his next victims. But we hit it off. He was this smart, clean-cut, nicely dressed man. He listened to me. He explained things to me. It was important that Dean liked me. He was kind. End quote. Even though Coral, by now, had been torturing and killing boys,
No one realized anything was amiss. His co-workers at Houston Lighting and Power always had good things to say about him. The manager of one apartment complex where Coral had lived and committed murders called him, and I quote, "'as good a tenant as we've ever had.'"
When he began to come around the Henley house, he worked on Mrs. Henley's car and got along so well with all the Henley boys that a charmed Mrs. Henley invited him to Easter dinner. And then there was Betty Hawkins, the single mother who first met Coral when she worked at the candy factory and who started dating him in 1968.
"'No,' she later told police. "'He wasn't sexually aggressive with her. "'Once, when they were in bed, they began to have intercourse. "'But he stopped, because he said he just didn't feel like it. "'Still,' she said, "'he was a wonderful man, "'who wanted to settle down and get married, "'and she never considered it odd "'that most of their dates were in the presence of her children, "'or with Brooks and Henley tagging along.'
Henley, too, this very day, insists that when he went to visit the Hillegists to pass out posters, he, too, was unaware that Corll had a secret life. He says Corll lured him into his orbit by first telling him that if he ever had anything to sell to make some money to help out his mother, even if it was stolen, Corll could unload it.
Then Coral told Henley the same story he had once used on Brooks about belonging to an organization that sold boys into a homosexual porn ring in California. Coral promised Henley $200 for every boy he brought to him. Coral had made an excellent choice for his second accomplice. Henley seemed to be thrilled by the idea of being part of a mysterious crime ring.
something that went far beyond his routine life in the Hates. Driving around with Coral one afternoon, he saw a teenager with long hair, asked him if he wanted to smoke some pot, and soon had him in the car and at Coral's apartment. Henley then left. The next day, Coral paid him $200. A day or so later, I found out that Dean had killed the boy, Henley said in his confession.
I found out that Dean screwed him in the ass before killing him. Just like Brooks, Henley didn't go to the police. Even when Corll told him that he had abducted his childhood friend, David Hillegist, Henley didn't back away. And when Corll pushed Henley to bring him another boy, he picked Frank Aguirre, a good friend who worked at Long John Silver's.
He met Aguirre at the end of the night shift and brought him to Coral's apartment, where Coral and Brooks were waiting. They started playing the handcuff game, to see who could get out of a pair of handcuffs. When Aguirre put on the handcuffs, Coral dragged the teenager into the bedroom and, according to Henley, and I quote, "...had his fun with him."
After Aguirre was strangled to death, the trio took him down to High Island for his burial in the boat ship. Henley then brought his friend Mark Scott to offer up to Dean Cottle. Mark, however, fought back heroically. Cottle, Henley, and Brooks were trying to tie Mark's hands when he grabbed a knife and stabbed at Cottle, catching his shirt but barely breaking the skin.
Coral wrestled with Mark while Henley ran out of the room to get a pistol. He pointed the gun at Mark, who, said Brooks, just gave up. Coral and Henley then strangled him to death with a cord. On the 9th of February, 1972, Henley and Coral picked up a youth at the corner of 11th and Studwood and lured him to Coral's home on the promise of smoking some marijuana.
Henley duped the youth into donning a pair of handcuffs before, according to Henley, leaving him alone with Corll. The youth was Willard Rusty Branch, a 17-year-old son of a Houston police radio technician and a casual acquaintance of Henley and Brooks. His body was found buried in the boat shed. According to Henley, Corll didn't like Rusty Branch.
While the boy was alive and strapped to the torture board, Corl severed Branch's genitals with a knife and placed them in a plastic bag. He later buried the bag next to the body in the boat shed.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. By late 1972, Carl Lanny's teenage henchmen had become experts in the act of rape, torture and murder.
There seemed to be no end in sight to their depravity, and for each murder Coral wanted to escalate even more. One afternoon they murdered 17-year-old Billy Bolch, who used to sell Mrs. Coral's candy door to door, and his 16-year-old friend, Johnny Delone, after the two had left Bolch's home to buy soft drinks. Fourteen months later,
Coral, Henley and Brooks grabbed Billy's younger brother Michael, who was on his way to get a haircut. They captured and killed a 20-year-old father who had been living in the Hates and was hitchhiking home to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to see his wife and new baby.
They snatched Homer Garcia, a boy from southwest Houston who was attending a driver's education class, with Henley. And they kidnapped two boys who had just moved into an apartment across the street from Henley's house. One 15-year-old boy, Billy Lawrence, whose dad worked in the mailroom at the Houston Post, clearly sensed that he was about to be killed.
Billy's story is heart-wrenching and puts the victim's humanity front and center. In order to keep him for an extended period of time, Carl forced the young boy to write a note to his father, promising he would be back in late August. At the very end of the note, Billy wrote, and I quote, Daddy, I hope you know I love you. Your son, Billy.
Billy Lawrence was kept alive for three days on the plywood torture board because, Henley later said, Corll quote-unquote really liked him. In the summer of 1973, Corll moved into the small Pasadena home owned by his father, who had remarried and was living elsewhere in town, and his appetite became even more voracious.
According to Henley, it was, quote-unquote, like a bloodlust. Carl would make these short, jerky movements. He'd start smoking a cigarette, which he usually never did, and he'd tell Henley and Brooks he needed to rape, torture, and kill a new boy.
Between the 1st of June and the 4th of August, they killed eight boys, five of whom were from the H. And still, the police, the neighborhood's residents, and the news media were not putting two and two together. Back in the early 1970s, there were no computers at the police department that would have alerted officers to the number of missing boys.
There were no amber alerts being broadcast that would have set off alarms with the public. There were no internet that would have quickly spread community gossip. As a result, parents who had lost sons on one side of the hates had no idea that there were parents on the other side of the hates who had also lost sons. It is easy to speculate that
That if Corll had been able to maintain his alliance with Henley and Brooks, there's no telling how long his killing spree might have lasted. But that summer, Brooks began to break away. He married his girlfriend after she got pregnant, and they moved into an apartment outside the Hates. Henley, too, tried to put some distance between himself and Corll, attempting to enlist in the Navy.
But he was rejected because of his limited education. I couldn't leave anyway, Henley has told interviewers. He claims that if he didn't stick with Corll, he would, and I quote, go after one of my little brothers, who he always liked a little too much, end quote. On the 8th of August, 1973,
Henley arrived at Corll's with his nineteen-year-old buddy, Tim Curley, and his new girlfriend, Rhonda Williams, a fifteen-year-old popular girl from the Hates, whose previous boyfriend had been Frank Aguirre, whom Henley had brought to Corll more than a year before.
Williams now lives in West Texas, and has told reporters that Wayne Henley said she shouldn't keep waiting for Frank Aguirre to come back. Henley told Williams that he had a feeling Frank was gone. Unfortunately, at the time, Williams didn't catch Henley in this obvious lie, that Henley actually knew very well what had happened to Aguirre.
In prison, Henley insists he had brought his two friends over to Coral to have a party, not for them to be killed. Originally, he hadn't planned on bringing Rhonda Williams at all, but she had been arguing with her father, so he brought her along to cheer her up. In the living room, they drank beer.
Henley and Tim Curley sniffed the fumes of acrylic spray paint out of a paper bag in order to get high. But after they fell asleep or passed out, Dean Corll went on the attack. He hogtied all three of them and gagged Tim Curley and Rhonda Williams. Rhonda woke up to a sharp pain in her side. Someone was kicking her, telling her to wake up, bitch.
For a moment she thought it was her daddy. It was not unusual for him to berate her, especially if he had been drinking. Then she opened her eyes and saw that it was not her father but Dean Correll, the electrician who'd been renting this house in Pasadena. She turned over and saw her friend Wayne Henley handcuffed, his feet bound and his mouth duct-taped.
She looked to the other side, and there was the boy Tim she hadn't met until the night before, when she escaped from her father's home in the Hates. He was tied and taped too. Dean was still berating her when she looked down at her own body and realized she'd also been tied up. Dean never liked her, never liked any girls, but this was unexpected. Dean then walked over to Wayne.
slipped his arms under the teenager's shoulders and carried him to the kitchen. Dean must have taken the tape off Wayne's mouth because she then heard two voices. Then Wayne and Dean came back. Dean had a transistor radio rigged with supercell batteries for extreme volume that he placed on the floor between Rhonda and Tim.
Rhonda didn't know exactly what time it was, but she could see through curtains that it was still dark. Apparently, Henley knew Coral well enough to acquiesce to his demands, and had promised to murder his friend Rhonda. Coral believed him, and had untied Henley.
Both of them had returned to the living room, Coral carrying his .22 caliber pistol and Henley carrying a knife with an 18-inch blade. Dean told Wayne to take care of her and stepped out of the room again. The tape was by then cut off Rhonda's and Tim's mouths. Wayne nailed down beside her and whispered, "'Everything's going to be all right. I'm going to get you out of here.'" Dean and Wayne walked in and out of the room.
At one point, Rhonda told Tim that Wayne said they're going to be okay. Tim only looked at her like she was crazy. Then, Dean came back in the room, picked up Tim, and took him into the bedroom. She heard Tim screaming, and Wayne was by then pacing back and forth, hitting both the moonshine and the huffing bag. Dean then shouted that he wanted Wayne to bring Rhonda to the bedroom. Apparently, Wayne couldn't bring himself to hurt a female friend.
He shouted back that Rhonda was too heavy. A silly lie, since Rhonda was at the time only around 100 pounds, about 50 kilos. An irritated Dean came back into the room, scooped Rhonda up, and carried her to the bedroom. Dropped her on a wooden board that was eight feet long and two feet wide. Tim was by then handcuffed to it, naked.
Beneath the board, protecting the rust-colored carpet, was a large plastic sheet. At some point during all of this, Dean had taken off all his clothes, and he told Wayne to strip Rhonda's clothes off as well. Wayne put a knife to Rhonda's belt, and in a flash had cut her belt, jeans, and panties. He was about to do the same to her shirt, but she said, "'Please no, it's my friend Sheila's shirt. Please don't rip it.'
Tim was by then screaming for God. Dean told Tim to shut up and instead rape Rhonda. Crying, sobbing, Tim said he couldn't. You have five minutes, Dean told them. Dean and Wayne then took turns walking in and out of the room. When Dean was gone, Wayne looked in awe at Rhonda, who, unlike Tim, was not screaming. This was partly because Rhonda had left her body.
She'd detached herself from the situation. It's how she learned to cope with all the foster fathers who had forced themselves on her. So she was not quite frightened, but she was confused. So that's why, Wayne will recall forty-one years later, Rhonda then asked the famous question, Is this for real? When he next knelt beside her again. Yeah, this is for real, Wayne said.
Rhonda thus responded with the now famous line, Well, are you going to do anything about it? Dean had by then returned and was crouching beside Tim, caressing his penis. Tim tried to resist, which Dean answered by punching him hard in the face. Then he pushed Tim onto his stomach and straddled him. Dean then told Tim in detail what was about to happen.
that he was going to rape Tim before torturing and killing him. As this was going on, Wayne was starting to lose it. He looked at Rhonda again, and then at the .22 caliber that Dean had placed on the dresser. I would like to think that it was because she trusted me, Wayne would say years later.
The belief that she trusted me is what gave me the push I needed to do something. Wayne fired the gun at Dean, again and again and again, until there were no more bullets left. Dean staggered with a confused and pained look on his face into the hallway, collapsed and died, flush against the wall.
his blood pooling beneath his flabby, naked corpse. Whatever evil was in Wayne, there was apparently still some good left in him. And finally, the good won. Wayne saved Rhonda and Tim's life. Rhonda perhaps said it best when she told reporters that, quote, Wayne killed the devil.
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And so ends part two in the saga of The Candyman, Dean Corrin. Next week I will give you the final episode in The Candyman saga. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons, who pledge their hard-earned money every month. There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person.
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