The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen

Author:Jack Olsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: True Crime, Retail, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780743212830
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2000-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Good Dude’s

Good Times

The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime.

—William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel, 1923

ONE BY ONE THE LOST BOYS OF The Heights were accounted for, either in the revelations of Wayne Henley and David Brooks or on the cold slabs in the medical examiner’s laboratory, where the macabre process of identification proceeded under forced draft. As the list of known victims lengthened, the connection with the old neighborhood showed up clearly. Two skeletons from the shed turned out to be young brothers whose parents now lived in Georgia, but who had lived in The Heights in 1971, when the boys had disappeared. Another victim had lived in a trailer court off the northwest corner of The Heights, and two more had been last seen at a religious rally just west of the area. Of the first twenty bodies that were positively identified, only three of the victims lacked a Heights connection: one had been picked up while hitchhiking, another had met Henley at driving school and been invited to “a party,” and a third had vanished while bicycling near Corll’s house in Pasadena.

Each day the local newspapers recorded the latest developments in depth, and TV and radio stations aired “specials” and extended coverage. Certain Houstonians were mortified. It seemed to the well-entrenched booster-and-boomer set that extensive damage was being done by this suppurating boil oozing up through the city’s layer of pancake make-up. They told each other defensively that a lunatic could appear anywhere; The Bayou City had no monopoly on mental illness. Larger questions were ignored: Should a lunatic have been able to run off a string of twenty-seven murders before being exposed, and then only accidentally? Or was there something about Houston and The Heights uniquely conducive to such an unrelieved succession of horrors?

The establishment pulled its wagons into a circle. Local pundits who once had raged at the city’s violence fell strangely silent, as though there were no further civic lessons to be learned from the case. A visiting reporter called the Chamber of Commerce for the latest population figures and was asked who wanted to know and why. When he said that he was preparing a national article on the murders, the chamber spokesman said, “Well, we don’t have a thing to do with that!”

Officials of the Houston Lighting & Power Company, the privately owned utility where Dean Corll had worked, turned reporters away at the door, refusing to discuss any aspect of the case. When a long-haired correspondent from New York appeared in The Heights to ask questions, he was called “a pill freak, a drug addict and a faggot” and was ordered away at gunpoint. One by one the normal news sources were embarrassed into reticence. Relatives of Henley, Brooks and Corll went into tight seclusion, and lawyers for the two young prisoners maintained a policy of total silence.

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