On the morning of August 9, 1973, an eighteen-year-old named David Owen Brooks walked into the office of a Houston police lieutenant with his father and his uncle and said he had information about Elmer Wayne Henley. The day before, Henley had shot Dean Corll dead in Pasadena and led officers to a rented boat stall in southwest Houston where the bodies of boys were buried. Detective Jim Tucker took Brooks's statement as a witness's. Brooks told him that Corll had once said he had killed two boys and buried them at the boat house, that he had walked into Corll's apartment and found two naked boys tied to the bed, that he had known Corll since the sixth grade and had sex with him, and that he was the one who had introduced Henley to him. He said nothing about being present at a killing. Only after he had finished did the Houston officers learn that Henley had already named him to the Pasadena police.
The next day he signed two written confessions. In the first he said that what he had told Tucker was partly true but that he had left out "the fact that I was present when most of the killings happened," and that he had been in the room and "supposed to help if something went wrong." He put the dead at between twenty-five and thirty, buried in three places: the boat stall, the woods near Lake Sam Rayburn, and the beach at High Island, where, he said, he never dug a grave but always drove the car. He offered to take officers to the graves. The boy who had come in as a witness left as the second of Corll's two known accomplices.
He had been in Corll's orbit for six years. His parents divorced when he was six, and he went with his mother to Beaumont and later to Tioga, Louisiana, but he stayed in touch with his father in Houston, and it was there, at twelve, that he met Corll, whose family had run a candy company in the Houston Heights and who was known for handing out sweets to the neighborhood children. Corll gave him money, attention, somewhere to go and eventually the use of his car, and by Brooks's own account had sex with many boys, him among them. Brooks later admitted that Corll paid him and that he brought other boys to him. He lived with Corll off and on for years, at a succession of rented addresses.
Eight of the dead appear in his first confession, and the state proved each of those deaths at his trial. Ruben Haney, nineteen, was strangled and buried in the boat house; his mother testified that the last time they spoke, he told her he was spending the night with Brooks. The brothers Donald and Jerry Waldrop, thirteen and fifteen, were killed at the Place One Apartments on Mangum, next to the site where their father was working on new construction; Brooks said he was present when Corll strangled them and believed the younger was the youngest of all the victims. James Glass, whom Brooks said he once drove home only for the boy to insist on going back to Corll's, was buried in the boat house. Billy Balch, seventeen, and Johnny Delone, eighteen, were buried at High Island. In Brooks's telling Henley strangled Balch and then shot Delone in the forehead with a .25 automatic, and Delone, still alive minutes later, said "Wayne please don't" before Henley strangled him with Corll's help. Stanley Blackburn, twenty, of Baton Rouge, was buried near Lake Sam Rayburn, and James Dreymala, a blond thirteen-year-old from South Houston whose bicycle was found in the boat house, was buried there too. Brooks said he was not present for those last two deaths.
William Ray Lawrence was fifteen. His father, James Lawrence, last saw him on June 4, 1973; that night the boy called to say he was going fishing with friends he would not name. A week later a letter arrived, postmarked June 8, saying he was looking for work in Austin and would be home later in the summer. In his second confession Brooks said that about July 10 he telephoned Corll's house, Henley answered, and when Brooks went over he found a boy he knew only as a friend of Henley's tied naked to the bed. He slept in the other bedroom. By six the next evening, when the three of them left for the lake, the boy was dead and in a box, and Brooks said he must have been there when it happened because he had not left the house. He and Henley went fishing the next morning. That evening he and Corll dug the grave while Henley kept watch from the van, and Brooks held the boy's feet as Corll carried the wrapped body. "I almost took too much dirt off," he said, "and Dean griped at me for it." The body was dug up near Lake Sam Rayburn on August 9, nude, wrapped in plastic sheeting and covered with lime, a cord still tied around the neck. A photograph of the boy was found in Corll's bedroom, and his father identified it in court.
A Harris County grand jury indicted Brooks for four murders, and he and Henley are both reported to have turned down offers of life sentences in exchange for guilty pleas. Brooks pleaded not guilty and was tried in Houston in February 1975 for the murder of William Ray Lawrence alone. The state did not claim he had strangled anyone. It relied on the Texas law of principals, under which a person who was present, knew of the intent to kill, and aided by act or encouraged by word was as guilty as the killer, and the judge told the jury that knowledge and mere presence were not enough. Jurors heard both written confessions and the evidence of the eight earlier murders. On March 4, 1975, they found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
His appeal reached the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1979. He argued that the evidence did not show he had taken part, that the jury should never have heard about the other killings, that his first statement had been taken in violation of the state's confession statute, and that the jury should have been allowed to find him guilty only as an accessory. On May 16, 1979, a three-judge panel rejected every point. From the confessions, the court wrote, the jury could reasonably conclude that he had been present when Lawrence was killed, knowing what Corll and Henley meant to do, and ready as before to help if something went wrong; that conduct fit four of the six situations in which Texas law then made a person a principal.
Brooks married his girlfriend, Bridget, in 1973, the year of his arrest, and they divorced in 1977. He rarely spoke to reporters in the decades that followed and is reported to have helped forensic investigators, work that contributed to the identification of one of the victims in 2008. On May 12, 2020, he was taken from the Polunsky Unit to the prison hospital in Galveston with COVID-19, and he died there on May 28 at sixty-five, having served more than forty-five years. Some reports of his death said he had been serving six life sentences, a figure that belongs to Henley. Brooks served one, for one murder, and to the end he maintained that he had watched the killings and helped bury the dead but had never killed anyone himself.