Dean Arnold Corll was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on December 24, 1939, and moved with his family to Texas as a child. He worked in his mother's sweet company in Houston Heights, where he handed out free pecan candy to local children and picked up the nickname that stuck to the case. He served two years in the Army, came back, and took a job as an electrician at Houston Lighting and Power.
Between 1970 and 1973 he killed at least twenty-eight boys and young men, most of them from the Heights and most between thirteen and twenty. He did not find them himself. He paid two local teenagers, David Owen Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, a bounty of up to two hundred dollars a head to bring friends and neighbours to whichever address he was renting. Victims were offered a party, given drink and solvents, and handcuffed to a plywood board Corll had fitted with restraints. They were raped and tortured over hours or days, then strangled or shot, and buried in a rented boat shed on Silver Bell Street, on the shore of Lake Sam Rayburn, or at High Island beach. He was called the Candyman, after his family's sweet factory.
The dead named in the record include Jeffrey Konen, eighteen; Danny Yates, fourteen, and James Glass, fourteen; the brothers Jerry Waldrop, thirteen, and Donald Waldrop, fifteen; Randell Harvey, fifteen; David Hilligiest, thirteen, and Gregory Malley Winkle, sixteen; and Ruben Watson, seventeen.
The boys came from a few streets in one neighbourhood, and their disappearances were largely written off as runaways in a period when Houston police were logging a great many of them. Several families reported children missing repeatedly and got nowhere. Two of the victims were brothers. So were two others.
It ended on August 8, 1973. Henley brought a girl, Rhonda Williams, to Corll's house in Pasadena along with another boy, and Corll was enraged that Henley had brought a girl. He handcuffed all three at gunpoint. Henley talked him into calming down, was released, and then picked up Corll's .22 pistol and shot him six times. He telephoned the police himself, and then told them about the boat shed.
Officers and trusties dug for days. Seventeen bodies came out of the shed, four more from Lake Sam Rayburn, six from High Island. Identification took decades; the last known victim was not named until 2011. Henley was convicted in 1974 of six of the murders and given six ninety-nine-year sentences, retried in 1979 and convicted again. Brooks was convicted of one murder in 1975 and sentenced to life. He died in prison of COVID-19 in 2020. Both remain incarcerated or died there, and neither has ever been released.