Over about three years, from 1970 to the summer of 1973, boys and young men kept disappearing from the Houston Heights, an old neighborhood northwest of downtown Houston. Their parents went to the police and were told, again and again, that their sons had run away. On August 8, 1973, a 17-year-old named Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. telephoned the Pasadena police to say he had shot and killed Dean Arnold Corll, a 33-year-old electrician. Within hours Henley was leading detectives to a rented boat storage stall in southwest Houston. Within a week, the remains of 27 boys and young men had been dug up there, in woods near Lake Sam Rayburn and on the beach at High Island. The New York Times called it the largest multiple murder case in United States history, Texas Monthly later recalled.
Corll never faced a court. He was dead before the first body was found, and everything known about his part comes from the graves, from what was found in his rooms and from the statements of Henley and David Owen Brooks, the two teenagers who said Corll paid them to bring him boys. Police named Corll as the leader. Henley and Brooks were convicted for their own roles. Decades later, a forensic anthropologist working with the bones in the Harris County morgue found that some of the dead had been given the wrong names, and that the count was almost certainly higher than 27.
Corll grew up in Indiana and Tennessee, according to Skip Hollandsworth's 2011 Texas Monthly account, and moved to Texas with his mother and siblings when he was 16. A 2021 KFDM report says he grew up in Vidor, in Southeast Texas, and graduated from Vidor High School. His father was an electrician in Pasadena. His mother, Mary, married and divorced his father twice and later married and divorced two other men.
In 1962 the family moved to the Heights, where Mary opened a candy factory that made divinity, pralines and pecan chewies. Corll ran the assembly line in the building on West Twenty-second Street. He gave neighborhood children candy, offered them rides and let them use a pool table at the factory, and he became known as the pleasant, smiling candy man of the Heights. The factory stood across the street from an elementary school.
He served in the Army, where he completed radio repair school at Fort Hood, and in 1965 he received a hardship discharge because his mother needed him at home. When Mary closed the factory in 1968 and moved to Colorado, Corll stayed in Houston and went to work as an electrician for Houston Lighting and Power.
People who knew him later described a big, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and sideburns. A police officer quoted by Texas Monthly described him as quiet, well mannered, well groomed and considerate. A neighbor said he had no temper, and an apartment manager called him as good a tenant as the complex had ever had. From 1968 he dated Betty Hawkins, a single mother, who said he talked of marriage. He had no criminal record, the Texas Observer reported. Over the next five years he moved among several apartments and rental houses in Houston, including an apartment on Yorktown Street and the Place One Apartments on Mangum Road, and in 1973 he moved into his father's house in Pasadena, at 2020 Lamar Drive. He also rented stall eleven at Southwest Boat Storage, a dry-land marina in southwest Houston.
David Owen Brooks first came across Corll as a boy near the candy factory. He was about 10 or 11, by Texas Monthly's account; the Associated Press, reporting from Brooks's trial in 1975, said he met Corll at 12. His parents were divorced, and he was raised largely by his father, Alton Brooks. His lawyer, Jim Skelton, later said Brooks had idolized Corll. Brooks dropped out of Waltrip High School, and Corll gave him a green Corvette for his sixteenth birthday. According to the AP, Brooks said in his confession that Corll began paying him for sexual acts about two years after they met.
Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. came from a Heights family marked by a violent father; his parents divorced in 1970. Brooks introduced him to Corll in 1971. Henley later told Hollandsworth that Corll seemed a smart, clean-cut, nicely dressed man who listened to him and explained things. "It was important that Dean liked me," he said. Corll first talked to him about selling stolen goods, then about what he described as a ring that would pay for boys, and promised him 200 dollars for each boy he brought. Henley later asked how he, a boy who did not yet have a driver's license, had ended up "out committing murders with Dean just because I wanted to please him." He said the one reason he did not leave was his younger brothers: he believed Corll would go after them if he were not around.
A 1976 account by the writer James Conaway, quoted in a 2023 Houston Chronicle series, records Henley saying that before boys started coming around, Corll paid the two of them for thieving and for setting up places to rob. In their statements to police both teenagers described luring friends, schoolmates and neighbors with offers of rides, parties, beer or drugs. Brooks admitted he was present at most of the killings and was "supposed to help if something went wrong," and that he helped bury several of the victims, but he denied killing anyone himself. Henley admitted taking part.
The victims were teenagers and young men from 13 to 20. Many of them knew one another, and many knew Henley or Brooks.
Jeffrey Konen, 18, had been salutatorian at St. Thomas High School and was a student at the University of Texas. On September 1, 1970, he hitchhiked from Austin to Houston to see his girlfriend and was last seen near the Galleria area. His remains were later found at High Island.
Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates, both 14, disappeared together on December 13, 1970, during a youth service at the Evangelistic Temple in the Heights. Jimmy was the son of a mining engineer; he wore loud shirts and a fringed leather jacket, and it was the jacket that later allowed his family to recognize him. Danny was the son of a union electrician and had a sister, Cyndi, and a girlfriend, Bettye McCool. Police labeled both boys runaways. The Glass family put up flyers, and Jimmy's brother Willie placed an ad in the Greensheet promising Jimmy a motorcycle if he came home. Danny's father followed a tip to Monterrey, Mexico.
Donald Waldrop, 15, and his brother Jerry, 13, vanished on January 30, 1971, on their way to a bowling alley. Their father, Everett, a divorced construction worker, said he "camped on that police department door" for eight months. He recalled officers asking him why he was there, since he knew his boys were runaways.
Randell Harvey, 15, disappeared on March 9, 1971, while riding his bicycle to his job at a Fina service station. His 13-year-old sister left a message at the morgue years later: her brother, she said, would never have left without telling them where he was going.
David Hilligiest and his friend Gregory Malley Winkle disappeared in May 1971 on the way to a neighborhood swimming pool. David was 13 according to the medical examiner's 1973 identification (Texas Monthly gives 14); Malley was 16 (wire reports give 15 or 16). Malley had worked at the candy factory. That night he telephoned his mother, Selma, a nurse's aide, and told her he was in Freeport. David's mother, Dorothy, refused to accept that he had run away. The family searched Freeport, printed 500 posters offering a 1,000 dollar reward, and paid a private investigator. Dorothy drove to a church group in Brenham and to New Orleans, wrote to the National Enquirer and to the psychic Jeane Dixon, and gave the police the license plate of a Plymouth GTX she had seen in the neighborhood. The car was Corll's. No one followed it up.
Frank Aguirre, a friend of Henley's who worked at a Long John Silver's restaurant, was 17 when he was taken, the Texas Observer reported. His mother, Josephine, a hairdresser, had already lost a son, Ronnie, in an accident in 1969, and she kept a candle burning in the hope that Frank would come home.
Mark Scott, 17, a high school junior, disappeared on April 20, 1972, leaving his Honda motorbike behind. A postcard later arrived saying he had a job in Austin, and his parents did not believe it. His mother, Mary, was a switchboard operator and his father, Walter, a carpenter. Henley had brought him to Corll, Texas Monthly reported.
Steven Sickman, 17, vanished on Wednesday, July 19, 1972. He lived in the 600 block of Jim Street, a few blocks from Henley's father's house.
Richard Kepner was 19. His mother, Joann, last saw him on November 12, 1972, when he was expected home two days later for Sunday dinner.
Billy Baulch, 17, and Johnny Delome, 16, disappeared after leaving the Baulch home to buy soft drinks. Billy had sold Mary Corll's candy door to door. His younger brother, Michael, was taken later, on his way to get a haircut.
Roy Bunton's sister long wondered whether her brother had been one of Corll's victims; she was proved right decades later.
Homer Garcia, 15, was from southwest Houston and was in a driver's education class with Henley. His parents were Luis and Doris Garcia.
William Ray Lawrence, called Billy, was 15. His father, who worked in the Houston Post mailroom, last saw him alive on June 4, 1973. A letter from Billy postmarked June 8 arrived on June 11; Texas Monthly reported that he was forced to write it.
Rusty Branch was the son of a Houston police radio technician.
Marty Jones, 18, was killed in late July 1973, Texas Monthly reported. He was a cousin of the Houston homicide detective Karl Siebeneicher. Charles Cobble was 17. His mother, Betty, delivered flowers for a living; after her son's death she kept working, and she arranged flowers for other victims' funerals.
James Stanton Dreymala, 13, was the last known victim. He was lured to the Pasadena house in August 1973 while collecting glass soda bottles for the deposit money, the Texas Observer reported. His body was found in the boat stall.
Donnie Falcon moved from Corpus Christi to Houston at 16 in 1971 and vanished that August. He was identified from bone fragments decades later. His niece, Debra Christy, told ABC13 that her mother hugged his remains and cried when he came home.
Between June 1 and August 4, 1973, eight boys were killed, five of them from the Heights, according to Texas Monthly.
In the early 1970s, missing juvenile reports in Houston were shared out among officers in the police department's juvenile division. Parents were told that no official search could begin without clear evidence of foul play. Hollandsworth, who read the Houston and Pasadena police files for his 2011 article, found no officer in the reports who suspected it. He said the failure belonged partly to the era: missing child alerts did not exist, and the idea of a killer taking one boy after another was not widely understood. He still faulted the juvenile division for not looking harder.
After the bodies were found, Police Chief Herman Short said that most of the boys had been classified as runaways and that officers could not obtain a warrant or force their way into a place if they were refused entry. He suggested that the links between the victims were a media invention. Mayor Louie Welch said the police could not be expected to know where a child was if the parents did not.
On the night of August 7, Henley went to the Pasadena house with a friend, Timothy Kerley, 20, and a 15-year-old girl, Rhonda Williams. They drank beer and inhaled acrylic paint fumes, and all three passed out. When they woke, they were bound. Kerley later testified that he understood he was to be killed. Henley told police that Corll released him after he promised to help, and that Corll took Kerley and Williams into a bedroom.
According to Kerley's testimony at a January 1974 hearing, Henley told Corll, "You've gone far enough, Dean." Corll came toward him, saying "Kill me, Wayne, kill me," and Henley fired five or six shots from Corll's .22 pistol. Corll died in the house. The three teenagers argued about whether to call the police and then did so. Henley told officers he had shot Corll because Corll was mistreating his two friends. Kerley said Henley was upset and crying.
Henley also called his mother. Footage shown at the 1974 hearing captured him using the radio telephone of a KPRC-TV newsman, Fred Edison, at the boat storage site: "I killed Dean," he told her, and "You can't come, I'm with the police, momma."
Texas authorities ruled the shooting of Corll self-defense, or justifiable homicide, according to wire reports from 1974 and 1979 and the Texas Observer. Henley was arrested in connection with Corll's death, but no charge against him for it was reported. Kerley and Williams survived.
When police asked Henley about the handcuffs and the plywood board fitted with restraints that they found in the Pasadena house, he mentioned Corll's storage stall. That evening Houston detectives opened stall eleven at Southwest Boat Storage and found the first body within minutes. Detective Larry Earls, then 30, was among the officers who dug. By the next day Henley had given the Pasadena police a statement; David Mullican, a Pasadena homicide detective, later testified that Henley gave him a statement admitting to killing six of the 27.
On August 9 Brooks, then 18, walked into the office of Lieutenant J. D. Belcher of the Houston police with his father and an uncle and said he had information about Henley. Detective Jim Tucker took an oral statement from him that morning. Brooks was not warned of his rights, because he had come in on his own, was not under arrest and was not then suspected; in that first statement he admitted being present at no killing. The next day he signed two written confessions.
On August 9 Henley took officers to the woods near Lake Sam Rayburn in San Augustine County, and Henley and Brooks led them to the beach at High Island. Billy Lawrence's body was recovered near Lake Sam Rayburn that day; a photograph of him was found in Corll's bedroom and identified by his father. By the end of the search, 17 bodies had come out of the boat stall, four from the woods near Sam Rayburn and six from High Island. Of the first 18 identified, 15 had lived in the Heights.
About a week after the first bodies were found, the digging stopped. The Chambers County sheriff said he would not dig further until he had definite information on other graves. Detective Earls told Texas Monthly he had been refused permission to dig in other places, and a radio reporter, Bob Wright, said he had been told the digging stopped once the count passed the national record. The yard of Corll's father's house and the old candy factory were searched but not fully excavated. Hollandsworth wrote that he could not confirm why the search ended.
The Harris County medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, worked through the remains with dental records and with descriptions that families brought to the morgue. Some boys were identified from Social Security cards or driver's licenses found with them. The Glass family recognized Jimmy by his leather jacket.
The process produced errors almost at once. Two bodies from the boat stall were released as Jerry and Donald Waldrop on the strength of their father's description of their clothing, height and teeth, and were buried near Atlanta on August 18. In September, after dental records arrived, Jachimczyk announced that the boys buried in Georgia were in fact David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle, and that the Waldrop brothers were still in the Houston morgue. Everett Waldrop said he had not misidentified anyone. The Harris County commissioners argued over who should pay to bring the bodies back; County Judge Bill Elliott refused to authorize public money until fault was settled.
By mid September 1973, Henley had been indicted on six murder charges and Brooks on four, and 18 of the 27 victims had names.
Henley's case was heard in Houston before Judge William Hatten. At a pretrial hearing in January 1974, his lawyer, Will Gray, asked the court to throw out all of Henley's oral and written statements, which the prosecutors called confessions. Detective T. E. Baker testified that he had not advised Henley that it might be in his interest to have a lawyer, and said, under questioning by District Attorney Carol Vance, that Henley had never asked for one. Rhonda Williams testified in the judge's chambers because she was a juvenile, and Kerley testified in open court. Gray opposed moving the trial, but the Harris County court, on its own motion, sent the case to the 175th District Court in Bexar County, in San Antonio, because of the publicity.
There, before Judge Preston H. Dial, Henley filed his own sworn motion for a change of venue. The judge declined to hear evidence on it before choosing a jury, and denied it once 32 jurors had been qualified. Of 124 people questioned, 64 had formed an opinion about guilt. Reporters sat in an extra jury box inside the courtroom, and the jury was not sequestered.
Testimony began on July 8, 1974. The six cases were tried together, and the jury convicted Henley of murder with malice in all six and assessed 99 years in each. The court ordered the sentences to run consecutively, a total wire reports gave as 594 years. The six victims, as the Texas Observer later listed them, were Frank Aguirre, Johnny Delome, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Homer Garcia and Billy Lawrence.
On December 20, 1978, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the convictions in Henley v. State, 576 S.W.2d 66. Writing for the court, Judge Phillips held that once the State had contested Henley's venue motion, the trial judge was required to hold at least a pretrial evidentiary hearing before ruling on it, and that refusing one was an abuse of discretion. The court did not decide whether the publicity actually required a move, but it expressed concern about the unsequestered jury and the press seating for any retrial. Judge Douglas dissented, calling the error harmless.
Henley, by then 23, was tried again in Corpus Christi in June 1979, before Judge Noah Kennedy. Pasadena officers testified that he had first admitted killing Corll on the morning of August 8, 1973. Jachimczyk testified about how each victim had been identified and how the boys had died. The prosecution rested on Henley's statements to the arresting officers and on physical evidence taken from Corll's house.
Gray had said before trial that Corll had "brainwashed" Henley. In his closing argument he concentrated instead on whether the medical examiners had proved who the victims were. The prosecutor, Doug Shaver, compared the defense's arguments to the artificial lures his father had used to catch fish. Before trial, Vance and Gray had agreed that any sentences would run concurrently, capping Henley's punishment at 99 years, United Press International reported. After deliberating for about two hours, the jury of eight men and four women convicted him again, UPI reported on June 28, 1979. His mother watched from the spectator seats. Gray said he would appeal.
News reports since then have described Henley's punishment in different ways: KHOU in 2010 said he was serving six 99-year terms; Houstonia in 2018 said six consecutive 99-year sentences; the Texas Observer in 2022 and the AP in 2020 said six life sentences.
Brooks's case also went before Judge Hatten. In November 1974, at a hearing on his competence, his two court-appointed lawyers, Ted Musick and Elaine Hocker, withdrew after a dispute over strategy. Musick wanted to argue that Brooks was insane and had been in the summer of 1973; Brooks and his father disagreed. Musick said he might have advised Brooks to accept a State offer of a guilty plea to one murder count for a 99-year term. Jim Skelton took over the defense, with Hocker. Unlike in Henley's case, Hatten refused to move the trial out of Houston, saying the defendant felt he could get a fair trial in Harris County.
Brooks was tried only for the death of Billy Lawrence. The indictment alleged that on or about July 10, 1973, he killed Lawrence by strangling him with a cord, and the jury was instructed under the law of principals, with Corll and Henley named as the principal actors. His second written statement said he had gone to Corll's house around July 10, had found Lawrence there alive and tied, and had come back later; he said that he and Corll dug the grave a few miles from Lake Sam Rayburn while Henley kept watch in the van. Hatten allowed the State to present evidence of all the killings. Skelton argued that the State could prove no more than that Brooks was an accessory and said the jury had become a 13-member panel with the judge as the thirteenth.
The jury convicted Brooks of murder and, the following day, the eight women and four men assessed life imprisonment, the AP reported on March 6, 1975. The prosecutor, Don Lambright, had asked for 99 years or life. Brooks showed no emotion. His father called the trial "a farce." His wife, Bridgett, whom he had married a month before his arrest and with whom he had a young daughter, said she would stand by him. Brooks still faced three other murder indictments.
On May 16, 1979, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction in Brooks v. State, 580 S.W.2d 825. It found evidence of a common design among Corll, Henley and Brooks, held that the other killings were admissible to show intent and a continuing scheme, and ruled that his first oral statement to Detective Tucker was not the product of custodial interrogation. It held that the trial judge was right to refuse an accessory charge, because Brooks had confessed to being present at the killing.
Brooks served his sentence at the Ramsey Unit and kept his silence for decades. He spoke to the forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick in December 2006, identifying a boy from a map and a photograph and so leading her to that boy's family. His daughter died in a car crash. He died on May 28, 2020, at 65, in the prison hospital in Galveston, after testing positive for COVID-19; preliminary autopsy results suggested the virus contributed to his death, the AP reported.
Henley became eligible for parole in 1983, according to the AP, and has been refused it ever since. In 2011 Texas Monthly found him at the Michael Unit in Tennessee Colony, working in the prison laundry and painting; a 1997 gallery show of his paintings, at which 21 of 23 sold, drew protests from victims' families. In 2015 Texas passed a law allowing the parole board to wait up to ten years between reviews in capital felony cases, and Henley was the first prisoner it was applied to, at his review in October 2015, the victims' advocate Andy Kahan told KPRC.
In 2022 Henley asked for compassionate release. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice decided not to forward his case to the Board of Pardons and Paroles for medical parole, KHOU reported, and cited privacy laws in declining to say why. The family of Stanton Dreymala wrote that Henley had shown Stanton and at least 27 other young boys no basic humanity.
On November 7, 2025, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Henley parole again, KPRC reported, citing Andy Kahan of Crime Stoppers of Houston and a message from the Department of Criminal Justice. Henley was 69, and Kahan said it was his 25th parole review. His next review will be in about ten years. Elaine Dreymala, Stanton's mother, said Henley did not deserve ever to be free; James Dreymala said the family would keep opposing his release "till the day we die." KPRC reported that the Dreymalas are believed to be the last surviving parents of the victims. No report of his release, death or any new court action was found as of October 20, 2026.
In 2006 Sharon Derrick, a forensic anthropologist at what is now the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, began reviewing the files and the remains in a box labeled with the 1973 case, using DNA testing that had not existed when the bodies were found. In September 2007 the FACES Laboratory at Louisiana State University completed clay facial reconstructions of the three victims then still unnamed.
Richard Kepner was identified long before Derrick's work. In September 1983 his mother, Joann, saw a news report on the tenth anniversary of the case, called the number given, and identified him as one of the unclaimed victims; the medical examiner confirmed it from dental records. She said it still felt "unreal, kind of like living a dream."
In 2008 DNA from two of Randell Harvey's sisters identified him, and that November his remains were released to his siblings for burial. Derrick reworked the age and height estimates for one set of bones, which led her to Harvey. ABC13 also reported the burial of one of the remaining unknown boys, a boy recovered from the boat stall, in the Harris County Cemetery with the striped swimsuit, cowboy boots, corduroy trousers and bracelet found with him. "We are running out of time to close this case," Derrick said; the parents were elderly or dead, though most of the siblings were living.
Also in 2008, Derrick concluded that the two sets of remains buried in a single casket at Woodlawn Cemetery as Billy and Michael Baulch were not brothers. Michael's remains, KHOU reported, had been held in the morgue all along as one of the unidentified. The casket was exhumed; one set of remains was Billy, the other unknown. The reporter Barbara Gibson of Police News helped uncover the error while writing about the unnamed victims. Derrick then identified the unknown remains through DNA as Roy Eugene Bunton and told his sister, who had long feared he was one of Corll's victims. "I am very pleased to be able to offer this family answers," Derrick said.
The Scott family had been given remains as Mark Scott in the 1990s and cremated them. In February 2011 Derrick told them what she had found: the remains were not Mark's but Steven Sickman's. Jeff Scott, Mark's brother, signed the papers at a Houston funeral home transferring the remains to the Sickman family, and Steven's stepsister, Sandy Henrichs, carried the urn through their childhood home in the Heights. She had been searching since she was 14. "It's been my goal since I was 14, to bring him home," she said. Jeff Scott said his family would probably never find Mark, because a hurricane had destroyed the High Island beach where he was believed to be buried. Mary Scott, still living in the Heights at 83, told Texas Monthly: "All I'd like to know, before I die, is where that man put my son."
By 2018 Derrick had identified seven of the victims, KHOU reported. Donnie Falcon's identification came decades after his disappearance. In her 2025 book The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys, the journalist Lise Olsen draws on Derrick's work to argue that there were at least 30 victims.
One boy from the boat stall still has no name. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists him as John Houston Doe 1973, Harris County case ML73-3356. He was white, possibly with Hispanic ancestry, 15 to 18 years old, with brown hair about seven inches long, and he had probably been dead for a year or more when he was recovered on August 9, 1973. He had a mild form of spina bifida. He was wearing belted Catalina swim trunks with red, turquoise, gold and dark blue stripes, a khaki long-sleeved shirt with a peace symbol, dark blue corduroys, a knotted leather ankle bracelet and brown cowboy boots marked NEOLITE on the heel.
His DNA has been in the national database since 2005, and forensic genetic genealogy has not yet produced a match. In August 2023, 50 years after the bodies were found, NCMEC released an updated facial reconstruction. "We remain hopeful that this young man's family and friends are still looking for him," said Carol Schweitzer of its forensic services unit. Police reports had suggested the surnames Harman, Harmon or French, and a tip naming a Bobby French was never confirmed with family. The NCMEC poster still listed him as unidentified on October 20, 2026.
The case changed how Texas handled runaways. Governor Dolph Briscoe set up Operation Peace of Mind, a hotline that passed messages between runaways and their parents without revealing where the young people were; by 1980 it had handled more than 80,000 calls. A Harris County grand jury criticized the police and the district attorney for leaving "the possible involvement of others" unexplored, and some grand jurors carried out searches of their own. Senator Walter Mondale proposed a national program of halfway houses for runaways.
The families lived with the aftermath for decades. Ima Glass never recovered from Jimmy's disappearance; the Yates parents divorced; Everett Waldrop moved to Atlanta; the Garcias kept visiting Homer's grave. Dorothy Hilligiest, who said she felt compassion for the Henley family, died in 2010 at 88, and her funeral was held in the Catholic church where David's had been held 37 years before. Willie Glass told Texas Monthly: "Dean Corll didn't just kill twenty-seven boys. He killed twenty-seven families." Detective Karl Siebeneicher, whose cousin Marty Jones was among the dead, took his own life in 1977. Timothy Kerley died in South America in 2009.
In August 2021 the volunteer search group Texas EquuSearch announced a new search for victims, with the Pasadena police, and asked families whose sons had vanished in the early 1970s to come forward. Henley had given the group's leader, Tim Miller, information about possible graves, the Texas Observer reported, but searches around the Pasadena house and other sites found no human remains. The house at 2020 Lamar Drive was demolished in February 2023, and the Pasadena Economic Development Corporation bought the lot for a trailhead.
The journalist Jack Olsen published a book on the case, The Man with the Candy, in 1974. Lise Olsen's 2025 book centers on Derrick's search for the victims' names.
Proven in court: Henley's guilt of six murders (Aguirre, Delome, Cobble, Jones, Garcia and Lawrence, as listed by the Texas Observer), and Brooks's guilt, as a principal, of the murder of Billy Lawrence. Corll's part in these and in all the other deaths rests on the accomplices' statements and the physical evidence; he was never tried, and his own account was never heard. His family told the press in 1973 that he must be innocent.
The number of victims has never been settled. Twenty-seven bodies were recovered in August 1973. Most recent sources say at least 28; NCMEC and others say at least 29, counting Mark Scott; Derrick's work, as described by Lise Olsen and ABC13 in 2025, points to at least 30. Texas EquuSearch's Tim Miller suggested in 2021 that there could be many more, some never reported missing. Hollandsworth wrote that Corll may have had accomplices before Henley and Brooks, and Olsen argues that authorities concealed other accomplices and that Corll had ties to a pornography ring. None of this has been tested in court.
The reasons the 1973 search ended after about a week are disputed: one retired detective said superiors stopped it, and Hollandsworth wrote that civic embarrassment may have played a part but that he could not confirm it.
The accomplices' accounts differed and served their own interests. Brooks always denied killing anyone; Henley admitted taking part but has also said Corll manipulated him and has refused to discuss some burials, KFDM reported in 2021.
Details that vary between sources: David Hilligiest's age (13 or 14) and Malley Winkle's (15 or 16); Frank Aguirre's age (17 in the Texas Observer); the spelling Delome or Delone; whether Corll was hit by five or six shots; the number of bodies at High Island (six in 1973 reports, seven in a 2022 KPRC count); the year the Scott family received the wrong remains (1993 or 1994); and Henley's and Brooks's sentences as later reported.
1962: Corll's mother opens a candy factory in the Houston Heights; Corll runs the assembly line.
1965: Corll receives a hardship discharge from the Army.
1968: his mother closes the factory and moves to Colorado; Corll works as an electrician for Houston Lighting and Power.
September 1, 1970: Jeffrey Konen, 18, is last seen hitchhiking to Houston.
December 13, 1970: Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates, both 14, disappear from a church service in the Heights.
January 30, 1971: Donald and Jerry Waldrop disappear on the way to a bowling alley.
March 9, 1971: Randell Harvey, 15, disappears on his way to work.
1971: Brooks introduces Henley to Corll.
May 1971: David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle disappear on the way to a swimming pool.
April 20, 1972: Mark Scott, 17, disappears.
July 19, 1972: Steven Sickman, 17, disappears.
November 12, 1972: Richard Kepner, 19, is last seen by his mother.
June 1973: Billy Lawrence, 15, is last seen by his father on June 4.
Late July 1973: Marty Jones, 18, is killed.
August 1973: Stanton Dreymala, 13, is lured to the Pasadena house.
August 8, 1973: Henley shoots Corll dead at 2020 Lamar Drive, Pasadena; police open the boat stall that evening.
August 9 and 10, 1973: graves are opened near Lake Sam Rayburn and at High Island; Brooks goes to the Houston police and then signs two confessions.
August 18, 1973: two boys wrongly identified as the Waldrop brothers are buried in Georgia.
September 1973: the medical examiner corrects the identifications; Henley is indicted on six murder charges and Brooks on four.
January 1974: pretrial hearing in Houston; Kerley testifies.
July 8, 1974: testimony begins in Henley's trial in San Antonio; he is convicted of six murders and sentenced to 99 years on each, run consecutively.
Early March 1975: Brooks is convicted in Houston of Billy Lawrence's murder and sentenced to life.
December 20, 1978: the Court of Criminal Appeals reverses Henley's convictions.
May 16, 1979: the same court affirms Brooks's conviction.
Late June 1979: Henley is convicted again in Corpus Christi.
September 1983: Richard Kepner is identified.
2006: Sharon Derrick begins reviewing the remains; she interviews Brooks in December.
2008: Randell Harvey is identified by DNA; the Baulch misidentification is found.
February 2011: the remains returned as Mark Scott are found to be Steven Sickman's.
October 2015: Henley becomes the first prisoner given a ten-year parole set-off under a new state law.
May 28, 2020: Brooks dies in the Galveston prison hospital.
August 2021: Texas EquuSearch announces a new search.
2022: Henley's request for compassionate release is not forwarded to the parole board.
February 2023: the Pasadena house is demolished.
August 7, 2023: NCMEC releases a new reconstruction of John Houston Doe 1973.
April 2025: Lise Olsen's book is published.
November 7, 2025: Henley is denied parole.
October 20, 2026: Henley remains in prison; the last unnamed victim remains unidentified.