American Serial Killers by Peter Vronsky

Author:Peter Vronsky [Vronsky, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Queering of Serial Murder

Like the Corona murders, the Candy Man murders also vanished from public view. The main perpetrator in this narrative, Dean Corll, having been shot dead, escaped the ritual trial so necessary to a true-crime narrative. To this day, we know very little about his past. He is but a shadowy figure, with only a few photographs of him in the public record. His disciples, Henley and Brooks, were fucked-up juveniles in fucked-up times in a fucked-up place, and that explained everything to everyone’s satisfaction.

The homosexual dimensions of these two spectacular murder cases with a combined total of fifty-two male victims took on a sudden significance for conservatives. This carnage was dramatic evidence of the dangerous post-sixties creeping tolerance of all forms of “deviant” sexuality, especially homosexuality. In a way it foresaw “gay serial killers” in the manner AIDS was first characterized as an exclusively “gay disease” when it surged in the 1980s.

That many of the boys killed by Dean Corll were troubled juvenile delinquents residing in a poor inner-city neighborhood and that they had been lured with promises of marijuana and good-time parties, perhaps were even “male prostitutes” selling themselves, left a sense among staid conservative Americans that somehow the boys had “put themselves” at risk as drug users and/or as sex workers. Getting abducted, raped and murdered was an “occupational hazard” for prostitutes and young, poor weedheads as far as mainstream Americans were concerned, as was hitchhiking or running away from home, or many other things that made you one of the less-dead.

The superconservative mentality of the average police officer at the time further warped this perception. As one police officer explained it to the mother of one of the twenty-seven unearthed victims, “It looks like a homosexual thing.”18

Both the Corona murders and the Corll murders confirmed for police their overkill theory and its connection to gay deviant sex. What Dean Corll did to his teenage victims was overkill; there was no denying that. True-crime literature also echoed this theme of exceptional violence in gay homicide. As Dennis McDougal asserted in his book on the gay serial killer Randy Kraft in California:

Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends—they beat up on each other, shot each other, stabbed and strangled and slapped each other. But they rarely went in for torture and dismemberment and all of the other imaginative mutilation that seemed to delight a small and perverse—but all too active—segment of the gay community in southern California, particularly around Long Beach. They had their dungeons and their whips and chains, all for fun. Just make believe, they said. Heterosexuals did it too, of course: tying each other up and going through crazy rituals of submission and punishment. . . . But when it came to body dumps of nude young males, raped and maimed at the hands of another, it could generally be traced back to a lover whose anger or ecstasy—or both—got out of hand. The results were almost always ghastly.19

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