David Owen Brooks was 18 when he went to the Houston Police Department on August 9, 1973, with his father and his uncle, saying he had information about Elmer Wayne Henley. The day before, Henley had shot and killed Dean Corll at Corll's house in Pasadena and had begun leading officers to the graves of teenage boys. Brooks gave his first account as a witness. By the next day he had signed two written statements. In the first he said he had left something out of what he told the detective: that he had been present when most of the killings happened.
Brooks was never accused of strangling or shooting anyone. In 1975 a Houston jury convicted him of the murder of William Ray Lawrence, 15, under the Texas law of principals, which made a person who was present, knew of the intent to kill, and helped or encouraged the act as guilty as the one who did it. He was sentenced to life in prison, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the judgment in 1979, and he died in state custody in May 2020, after contracting COVID-19. That one murder is the only conviction in his record. The other killings he described are his own account.
Brooks's parents were divorced, Skip Hollandsworth wrote in Texas Monthly in 2011. His mother lived in Beaumont, and he lived with his father, a paving contractor, in Houston. He was about 10 or 11, in the mid-1960s, when he first went to the candy factory that Dean Corll's mother ran in the Heights, a neighborhood of older houses north of downtown. In his statement to police in 1973, Brooks said he had met Corll when he was in the sixth grade.
Corll was much older. Texas Monthly described him as having been raised in Indiana and Tennessee and having come to Texas at 16 with his mother. In 1962 the family moved to the Heights so his mother could open the candy business, where Corll ran the assembly line and handed out candy and rides to neighborhood children. He served in the Army, in a radio repair school at Fort Hood, and received a hardship discharge in 1965 to return home and help his mother. Later he worked as an electrician for Houston Lighting and Power. The writer James Conaway, in a 1976 Texas Monthly essay, described the back room of the candy business as a place with a pool table where boys spent time.
Brooks came to see Corll as a father figure, according to Texas Monthly. His later trial lawyer, Jim Skelton, recalled Brooks saying that Corll was the first adult man who did not make fun of him. In his oral statement to police, as the Court of Criminal Appeals summarized it, Brooks said that Corll had sexual contact with many boys, Brooks among them, and that he had lived with Corll off and on. Texas Monthly reported that Corll gave him money when he needed it and let him stay over, and that Corll gave him a green Corvette for his sixteenth birthday. The Associated Press, reporting on his 1975 trial, said the evidence showed Corll later paid him for sexual acts. Brooks dropped out of Waltrip High School as a freshman, Texas Monthly reported. Conaway wrote that Brooks and Henley were schoolmates in the Heights and failed the ninth grade together.
Brooks told police in August 1973 that on one visit to Corll's apartment he had found two boys tied to Corll's bed. Texas Monthly dated that visit to December 1970, when Brooks was 15, and said the two boys were later identified as Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates, both 14. Corll told Brooks afterward that he had killed them, Brooks said in his first written confession; he had left before they died and did not know where they were buried. The juvenile division of the Houston police listed both boys as runaways, and their parents received no official search, according to Texas Monthly.
From that point the record rests on Brooks's two written statements, the evidence at his trial, and what Henley later said. Brooks did not go to the police. Corll gave him money and somewhere to stay, and the visits continued.
Randell Harvey was 15 when he disappeared on March 9, 1971, while riding his bicycle to his job at a gas station, Texas Monthly reported. Hollandsworth wrote that Brooks, who knew Harvey well, was "probably" the one who persuaded him to put his bike in the back of Corll's vehicle and ride with them, and that Corll and Brooks later took his body to the storage shed Corll rented. That is the magazine's reconstruction; Brooks was never charged with Harvey's death. Harvey was not identified for decades. His remains were identified only after forensic work at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office in 2007 and 2008, and in November 2008 they were released to his sisters for burial, according to ABC13 in Houston.
Brooks introduced Elmer Wayne Henley to Corll in 1971, Texas Monthly reported; Henley was 15 at the time. Brooks told police the same in his oral statement in August 1973: he was the one who had brought Henley to Corll. Henley, by Texas Monthly's account, recruited friends and classmates for Corll and was paid $200 for each boy. Conaway described Brooks, in contrast, as emotionally dependent on Corll and passive in the crimes.
Texas Monthly reported that Henley and Brooks would help Corll strip and bind boys who had been lured to his apartment, and that they helped carry and bury the bodies. The magazine did not say that Brooks killed anyone, and Brooks always denied it.
On August 10, 1973, Brooks signed his first written confession. As the Court of Criminal Appeals later summarized it, he said what he had told the detective the day before was partly true, but that he had left out the fact that he was present when most of the killings happened and was "supposed to help if something went wrong." He went through the deaths he knew about in order. The following accounts come from that statement and from the evidence the state offered at his trial; none of these deaths was the subject of a conviction against Brooks.
Ruben Haney was 19. His mother testified at Brooks's trial that the last time she heard from him, he told her he was spending the night with Brooks. In his statement Brooks said only he and Corll were present, that Corll killed Ruben, and that he was there when it happened. Ruben was found buried in the boat stall Corll rented, and the pathologist found he had been strangled.
Donald and Jerry Waldrop were brothers. The appellate opinion gives their ages as 13 and 15; Texas Monthly gives them the other way round. Brooks said Corll strangled them while he was present but did not take part, and that he thought he had been at the burial but could not remember where. Their bodies were found in the boat stall. Their father, Everett Waldrop, told Texas Monthly years later that he had "camped on that police department door for eight months" and was told his boys were runaways. After the graves were opened in 1973, the medical examiner wrongly identified two other bodies from the boat shed as the Waldrop brothers, and those boys, David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle, were buried near Atlanta, Georgia, before the error was caught through dental records, United Press International reported in September 1973.
James Glass was a boy Brooks said he had once driven home, only for him to go back to Corll's. Brooks said Corll killed him. His body was in the boat stall.
Billy Balch, 17, and Johnny Delone, 18 in the court's account, were buried on the beach near High Island. Texas Monthly spells the first name Baulch and gives Johnny's age as 16. In his statement Brooks said Henley killed both boys, with Corll's help in Johnny's death. Henley was later convicted of Johnny Delone's murder.
Stanley Blackburn, 20, was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His mother identified his driver's license, which was found in Corll's house. He was buried near Lake Sam Rayburn. James Dreymala, 13, a blond boy from South Houston, was buried in the boat stall, where his bicycle was found; his father identified the bike at trial. Brooks said he was not there when either of them died. He said he had come in just after Corll killed the boy from Baton Rouge, and that he had spent about 45 minutes with the younger boy, bringing him a pizza, before leaving. The Texas Observer described James Stanton Dreymala as the last known victim, held for several days before he was killed.
Brooks put the total at 25 to 30 boys, buried in three places: most in the boat stall, two that he was sure of and perhaps three or four near Lake Sam Rayburn, and five or more in a row on the beach at High Island, where he said he drove the car but never dug a grave. He said he had helped bury many of them, though not all, and he offered to take officers to High Island and try to find the graves.
William Ray Lawrence, known as Billy, was 15. His father last saw him on June 4, 1973. That night the boy telephoned and said he was going fishing with friends he would not name and would be back later in the week. On June 11 his father received a letter, postmarked June 8, in which Billy wrote that he was looking for work in Austin and would be home later in the summer. A photograph of him was later found in Corll's bedroom, and his father identified it in court.
Brooks's second written statement on August 10 was about him. Brooks said that around July 10 he called Corll's house several times, and Henley answered and told him someone was there, "sort of" a friend. Brooks went over and found the boy alive and tied up. He said he knew him only as a friend of Henley's, though he later picked out the photograph he had seen at Corll's house. He drove Henley home, came back and slept in the other bedroom while the boy was still alive. The next evening, when the three of them left for the lake around 6 p.m., he wrote, he knew the boy was dead and in a box. He said he did not remember how the boy had been killed, that he had seen killings many times, and that he had never done one himself.
At the lake, he said, they slept and fished in the morning. That evening he and Corll dug a grave near a dirt road a few miles from Lake Sam Rayburn while Henley watched from the van. Brooks helped carry the body to the grave and helped hide the signs of digging, he wrote.
The boy's body was dug up near Lake Sam Rayburn on August 9, 1973. Dr. Jack Pruitt, the pathologist, testified that he died of strangulation. Henley was also later convicted of Billy Lawrence's murder, the Texas Observer reported, and the Observer wrote that he had been held longer than any other victim.
The case surfaced because of a shooting. Early on August 8, 1973, Henley and two other teenagers were at Corll's house in Pasadena, where they had been sniffing paint and drinking. They woke up bound, according to testimony at Henley's pretrial hearing in January 1974. Henley persuaded Corll to release him, then shot Corll several times. Authorities ruled the shooting self-defense. Henley called police himself, and he then led officers to the boat stall in southwest Houston, telling them Corll had killed boys and buried them there. A television reporter testified that Henley used his radio telephone at the boat shed to call his mother and tell her he had killed Corll.
Texas Monthly reported that Brooks had begun to pull away from Corll that summer. He was not at the house that night. He had married his girlfriend in July 1973, after she became pregnant, and they had moved into an apartment outside the Heights, the magazine reported.
Brooks's father brought him to the Houston police the next morning. With his father and his uncle, he contacted Lieutenant J. D. Belcher, saying he had information about Henley. Detective Jim Tucker took his oral statement. Brooks said that Corll had told him he had killed two boys and buried them at the boat house, that he had once found two boys tied to Corll's bed, that he had known Corll since the sixth grade, that Corll had had sexual contact with many boys including him, and that he had introduced Henley to Corll. He said nothing that put him at a killing. Tucker testified that Brooks came in voluntarily, was not under arrest, was treated only as a witness and was free to leave, and that the Houston officers did not learn until after the statement that Henley had already implicated Brooks in his own statements to the Pasadena police.
On August 10 Brooks signed two written confessions. Detective Larry Earls told Texas Monthly decades later that Henley and Brooks both told police they thought there were more bodies. Brooks's statement implicating Henley was leaked and widely published; at a pretrial hearing in January 1974, Henley's lawyer questioned a Houston Post reporter about how the paper had obtained it, and the judge cut the questioning off.
Over the next several days Henley and Brooks led officers to three burial areas. By January 1974, wire reports put the count at 17 bodies under the boat shed, four in forests near San Augustine, in East Texas, and six on the beach near High Island, 27 in all. Brooks led police to one of the grave sites, the AP reported in November 1974. Prisoners from the Texas Department of Corrections dug in the boat shed, the Houston Press later recounted.
Identifying the dead was slow. By mid September 1973, 18 of the 27 had been identified, and 15 of those had lived in or near the Heights, United Press International reported. The misidentification of the Waldrop brothers led to a public dispute over who would pay to recover and return the bodies. The excavations were stopped after about a week, Texas Monthly reported, and many people have since believed more victims might have been found if the search had continued.
A grand jury indicted Henley and Brooks for murder. Its report criticized the police and the district attorney's office, according to Texas Monthly. Families had reported their sons missing for years, and officers had repeatedly concluded that the boys were runaways. The Houston police chief and the mayor both suggested publicly that the boys had been runaways.
Brooks was indicted in four of the 27 deaths; two of the indictments also named Henley, the Associated Press reported in October 1974. Henley, charged in six deaths, was tried first. Judge William Hatten moved Henley's trial out of Houston because of publicity, over the objections of Henley's lawyer, and in August 1974 a San Antonio jury found Henley guilty of six murders. He received six 99-year sentences, to run consecutively, for a total of 594 years, the AP reported; the verdicts were then under appeal.
Brooks's own case went through months of disputes. In September 1974 the judge set a jury hearing on whether he was competent to stand trial. The AP reported that he was a young father whose child had been born after he was jailed. His court-appointed lawyer, Ted Musick, planned to argue that Brooks was insane and said that, if he were found competent, he might advise Brooks to accept a state offer to plead guilty to one count of murder in exchange for a 99-year sentence. In October Musick asked the court to stop the jail from cutting Brooks's hair, saying inmates and a jailer had forced a haircut on him; a sheriff's lieutenant testified that he had been made to have the haircut but had not been abused, and the judge declined to intervene.
The competency hearing opened in early November 1974 and ended almost at once. Musick and his co-counsel, Elaine Hocker, withdrew after a disagreement over strategy, especially the insanity plan. "There's a basic disagreement between me, the boy and the boy's father," Musick said. Brooks's father hired Jim Skelton, a Houston lawyer who did not believe his client was insane, and Hocker stayed on privately. Brooks withdrew his earlier sworn statement that he could not afford a lawyer. The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Don Lambright, then suggested moving the trial, as Henley's had been. On November 13, 1974, Judge Hatten refused, saying that the defendant believed he could get a fair trial in Harris County. He also barred lawyers on both sides from commenting on the case.
Brooks pleaded not guilty and was tried in Houston in early 1975 on one indictment, for the murder of William Ray Lawrence. The charge was murder with malice under the Texas penal code in force in 1973. The state did not argue that Brooks had strangled the boy. It relied on the law of principals: Brooks was guilty if he was present when the killing happened, knew of the intent to kill, and aided it.
The jury heard both written confessions and Tucker's account of the oral statement. Over defense objections it also heard evidence of the eight other deaths Brooks had described: the families' identifications, the remains and belongings dug up at the three sites, and the pathologist's findings of strangulation. The judge instructed the jurors that they could consider those other killings only on questions such as intent and knowledge.
On a Tuesday in early March 1975 the jury found Brooks guilty, and the next day the jury of eight women and four men sentenced him to life in prison, the Associated Press reported in The Battalion on March 6, 1975. The prosecutor had urged jurors to "consider the nature of the animal" in deciding punishment. Brooks was 20. His father said the conviction would be appealed. Skelton argued that the trial had been unfair because Judge Hatten let the jury hear evidence about all the killings, though Brooks was tried for only one, and he noted that Brooks could still be tried on the three other indictments. No later prosecution on those indictments was reported.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided Brooks's appeal on May 16, 1979, in an opinion by Judge Dally for a three-judge panel. Brooks's lawyers, Skelton and Elaine Brady, raised seven grounds of error. They argued that the evidence did not show he had taken part in the killing; that the law of principals had been wrongly put to the jury; that the other deaths should have been kept out and the limiting instruction was improper; that his oral statement to Tucker had been taken in violation of the state's confession statute, Article 38.22; that the circumstantial evidence charge was wrong; and that the jury should have been allowed to consider whether he was only an accessory.
The court rejected every ground. It found that the oral statement was not the product of custodial interrogation, since Brooks had come in on his own as a witness and was free to leave, so the statute did not bar it. The other killings were admissible because they showed intent, knowledge, motive and a continuing scheme. Because Brooks admitted being present, he could not be a mere accessory, and accessory was not a lesser offense included in the charge. On the evidence, the court held that the confessions and surrounding facts showed a common design and that Brooks's conduct fit four of the six situations in which Texas law then made a person a principal: being present, knowing the intent and aiding; keeping watch; helping conceal the killing; and agreeing to the crime and being present when it was committed. The conviction and life sentence stood.
Brooks was sent to the Ramsey Unit, south of Houston, Texas Monthly reported. He did not speak publicly about the case in the decades that followed. Hollandsworth wrote that Brooks never answered his letters or interview requests when he was reporting the 2011 article, while Henley agreed to talk. Texas Monthly also reported that Brooks once sent Henley an unsigned typed letter suggesting they stay in touch, and that they never did.
In December 2006 the forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick of the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office visited Brooks at the Ramsey Unit as part of her work to identify the remaining victims. Talking about his early years with Corll, he told her he wished he had told his mother what Corll was doing to him, and that if he had, he would not be in prison. Shown a computer approximation of one unidentified boy's face, he said he did not know the boy but knew how he died. He then drew a map of a corner in the Heights where, he said, the boy had lived. Derrick connected the address to a boy who had disappeared in 1971 and whose mother had filed a missing person report two days later. The mother had died; Derrick contacted the boy's two sisters. Texas Monthly did not name the boy.
Derrick's work over those years identified several of the dead and corrected earlier mistakes. In 2008 she collected DNA from two sisters of a suspected victim, which led to the identification of Randell Harvey, ABC13 reported. She also found that the remains given to the family of Michael Baulch, Billy's younger brother, in 1973 were not his, and that a set of remains found on High Island in 1983 and filed as archaeological remains belonged to another boy from Houston, raising the known count to 28, according to Texas Monthly. The Texas Observer reported in 2022 that her work had raised the estimate to at least 29.
By 2020 Brooks was held at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. On May 12, 2020, he was taken to the prison hospital in Galveston, and he died there on May 28, at 65, the Associated Press reported, citing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He had symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and had tested positive for the virus. He also had several preexisting conditions, and preliminary autopsy results suggested the virus contributed to his death. KHOU in Houston reported that he had served 46 years of his life sentence.
Some reports of his death, including the AP story and a 2025 KPRC report, said he had been serving six life sentences. The court record and contemporary reporting show one conviction and one life sentence, for the murder of William Ray Lawrence. Henley, not Brooks, was convicted of six murders.
Henley remains in prison. He was refused compassionate release in 2022 and parole again in November 2025, when the parole board set his next review ten years later, KPRC reported. Families of the victims, among them the Dreymala family, opposed his release; James Dreymala's sister told the Texas Observer that Henley did not deserve compassion for any illness because her brother had not been treated with basic humanity.
At least one victim from the boat shed was still unidentified in 2018. Derrick told KENS 5 that he was probably about 15 and disappeared in late 1971 or early 1972, and the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences asked the public for tips. Andy Kahan, a victim advocate with Crime Stoppers of Houston, told KENS 5 that police often labeled the missing boys runaways and did not search hard for them.
Texas Monthly's Hollandsworth wrote in 2011 that Brooks had never spoken publicly since his confession. The only account of what he did, in his own words, remains the two statements he signed on August 10, 1973.
Proven against Brooks, and final: the murder with malice of William Ray Lawrence, as a party, under the Texas law of principals (jury verdict, March 1975; affirmed May 16, 1979). The jury and the appeals court accepted that he was present, knew of the intent to kill, and helped conceal the killing. No court found that he personally killed anyone.
Described in his statement, never tried against him: his presence at the deaths of Ruben Haney and the Waldrop brothers, his knowledge of other killings, and his part in burying many of the dead. Evidence of eight deaths was admitted at his trial to show intent and knowledge; that is not a conviction for those deaths.
Attributed by Texas Monthly, never charged: that he probably persuaded Randell Harvey to ride with Corll, that he helped take Harvey's body to the shed, and that he took part with Corll and Henley in the abduction of Michael Baulch.
Charged, outcome not found: three further murder indictments against Brooks, pending in 1975.
Details that vary between sources: the ages of Donald and Jerry Waldrop (13 and 15 in the court opinion, reversed in Texas Monthly); Johnny Delone's age (18 in the court opinion, 16 in Texas Monthly and the Texas Observer, which spells his name Delome); the spelling Balch or Baulch; the total number of victims (27 found in 1973; 28 and at least 29 in later reporting); the date of the Lawrence killing (the father's last sighting on June 4 and a letter postmarked June 8, against Brooks's statement placing his visit around July 10, both recited in the court opinion); Brooks's sentence (life, in the court record and the AP's 1975 report; "99 years" in James Conaway's 1976 essay; "six life sentences" in 2020 and 2025 news reports); and whether his child was a son (AP, November 1974) or a daughter (Texas Monthly, 2011).
Mid 1960s: Brooks, about 10 or 11, first visits the Corll family candy factory in the Houston Heights; he later dated his meeting with Corll to the sixth grade.
1965: Corll receives a hardship discharge from the Army.
December 1970: Brooks, 15, finds two boys tied up at Corll's apartment, later identified by Texas Monthly as Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates.
March 9, 1971: Randell Harvey, 15, disappears on his way to work.
1971: Brooks introduces Elmer Wayne Henley to Corll.
June 4, 1973: William Ray Lawrence, 15, is last seen by his father.
July 1973: Brooks marries his pregnant girlfriend.
About July 10, 1973: by his statement, Brooks is at Corll's house while Lawrence is held there, and he later helps bury him near Lake Sam Rayburn.
August 8, 1973: Henley shoots Corll dead in Pasadena and leads police to the boat stall.
August 9, 1973: Brooks gives police an oral statement as a witness; Lawrence's body is recovered.
August 10, 1973: Brooks signs two written confessions.
September 1973: misidentification of the Waldrop brothers comes to light; 18 of 27 victims identified.
January 1974: Henley's trial moved out of Houston.
August 1974: Henley convicted in San Antonio of six murders.
September 25, 1974: the forced haircut in the Harris County jail.
November 4, 1974: Brooks's competency hearing ends when his appointed lawyers withdraw; Jim Skelton takes over.
November 13, 1974: Judge Hatten keeps Brooks's trial in Houston.
March 1975: jury convicts Brooks of the murder of William Ray Lawrence; life sentence the next day.
May 16, 1979: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
December 2006: Brooks meets Sharon Derrick at the Ramsey Unit and draws a map that helps identify a victim.
November 2008: Randell Harvey's remains are released to his sisters.
May 12, 2020: Brooks is taken from the Polunsky Unit to the prison hospital in Galveston.
May 28, 2020: Brooks dies, aged 65, after testing positive for COVID-19.
November 2025: Henley is denied parole.