David Owen Brooks was born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1955 and grew up in the Houston Heights. He met Dean Corll around 1967, when he was twelve and Corll was working in his mother's sweet factory handing out free pecan candy to local children. Corll gave him money, a place to go, and later a car.
From 1970 Brooks began bringing other boys to whichever address Corll was renting, for a payment of up to two hundred dollars each. He later said he had known what would happen to them from an early stage. He introduced Elmer Wayne Henley to Corll in 1971, and Henley took over most of the procuring.
At least twenty-eight boys and young men died over three years. Brooks admitted being present at several of the killings and helping to bury bodies at the boat shed on Silver Bell Street and at Lake Sam Rayburn and High Island. He always maintained that Corll and Henley did the actual killing.
After Henley shot Corll on August 8, 1973, Brooks went to the police with his father and made a statement. He was charged with four murders and convicted in 1975 of one, that of fifteen-year-old William Ray Lawrence, and sentenced to life. He was denied parole repeatedly and died at a prison hospital in Galveston on May 28, 2020, aged sixty-five, of complications from COVID-19.