The boys came off a handful of streets in Houston Heights, and for three years the Houston police department classified them as runaways. David Hilligiest was thirteen. James Glass and Danny Yates were fourteen. Jerry Waldrop was thirteen and his brother Donald was fifteen. Families reported them missing, came back, reported them missing again, and were told what a city logging thousands of runaways a year tells parents. The Hilligiests hired a private investigator and printed flyers themselves. Nobody connected the disappearances to each other until one of the two teenagers who had been delivering the victims shot the man buying them.
Dean Arnold Corll killed at least twenty-eight boys and young men between 1970 and 1973, in Houston and then Pasadena. Twenty-seven have names. The twenty-eighth is still filed as John Houston Doe, reference ML73-3356, and known to the investigators who have worked him for fifty-three years as the Swimsuit Boy. He was between fifteen and eighteen. He was pulled out of a mass grave in a rented boat shed in 1973 and has never been identified, and in August 2023, half a century after he was found, a fresh facial reconstruction of him was released in the hope that somebody would recognize a face.
Corll was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana on December 24, 1939 and came to Texas as a child; he graduated from Vidor High School in 1958. He worked in his mother's candy company in the Heights, handed out free pecan candy to local children from the factory door, and acquired the nickname that has followed the case ever since. He did two years in the Army and came home. By 1970 he was an electrician at Houston Lighting and Power, a polite, neatly dressed man in his early thirties with a steady job.
He did not find his victims himself. He paid two local teenagers, David Owen Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, a bounty of up to two hundred dollars a head, a figure both later testified to, to bring him friends, neighbors and boys from around the Heights. The victims were offered a party. They were given drink and solvents to inhale, and when they were insensible they were handcuffed to a sheet of plywood Corll had fitted with restraints at the corners. Newspapers called it the torture board. They were raped and abused over hours or days, then strangled or shot with a .22 pistol, and buried in the boat shed on Silver Bell Street, along the shore of Lake Sam Rayburn, or at High Island beach.
Henley and Brooks were not hunting strangers. They were selling people they knew. Frank Aguirre, eighteen, was Henley's own friend and the fiancé of Henley's friend Rhonda Williams. Billy Baulch was seventeen and his younger brother Michael was fifteen, and both were delivered. Two sets of brothers died in this case, the Baulches and the Waldrops.
The dead, as far as they are known: Jeffrey Konen, eighteen; Danny Yates, fourteen; James Glass, fourteen; Donald Waldrop, fifteen; Jerry Waldrop, thirteen; Randall Harvey, fifteen; David Hilligiest, thirteen; Gregory Malley Winkle, sixteen; Ruben Watson, seventeen; Willard Branch Jr., seventeen; Frank Aguirre, eighteen; Mark Scott, seventeen; Johnny Delome, sixteen; Billy Baulch, seventeen; Michael Baulch, fifteen; Joseph Lyles, seventeen; Billy Ray Lawrence, fifteen; Ray Blackburn, twenty; Homer Garcia, fifteen; Steven Sickman, seventeen; Wally Jay Simoneaux, fourteen; Richard Hembree, thirteen; Richard Kepner, nineteen; John Sellars, seventeen; Marty Jones, eighteen; Charles Cary Cobble, seventeen; and James Stanton Dreymala, thirteen, who was riding his bicycle in his Pasadena neighborhood when Henley lured him away. Mark Scott's body was never recovered at all.
It ended on August 8, 1973 at Corll's house in Pasadena. Henley arrived with Timothy Kerley and, fatally for the arrangement, with Rhonda Williams, and Corll was enraged that a girl had been brought. He pacified them, waited until all three had passed out, and handcuffed them. He then talked Henley round by offering him a share in killing the other two, and released him. Henley picked up Corll's .22, told him he could not go on and could not let him kill all his friends, and shot him six times, in the chest, the back and the lungs. Corll bled to death on the hallway floor. He was thirty-three. Henley telephoned the police himself, and when they had finished with the shooting he told them about the boat shed.
Officers and jail trusties dug for days in August heat. Seventeen bodies came out of the shed on Silver Bell Street, four more from Lake Sam Rayburn, and six from the beach at High Island on the Bolivar Peninsula. It was, at the time, the largest series of murders known in American history, and the first many of the families heard of it was a knock at the door after three years of being told their sons had run away.
Then the misidentifications began, and one of them took forty years to correct. In 1973 a family buried remains they had been told were Michael Baulch, laying him beside his brother Billy, who had also been killed by Corll. In 2011 modern testing established that the remains in that grave were not Michael Baulch at all. They were Steven Sickman, seventeen, another of Corll's victims, whose body the medical examiner's office had simply confused with Michael's in the chaos of 1973. Michael Baulch had been sitting in a morgue as an unidentified John Doe for nearly four decades.
Two families had to do all of it again. Jeff Scott, Michael Baulch's brother, signed the paperwork handing the exhumed remains over to Sandy Henrichs, Steven Sickman's sister, who had been looking for her brother since she was fourteen years old, and who carried his ashes through her childhood home in an urn. Roy Bunton's remains had been misidentified in 1973 as well, and were also put right in 2011. Joseph Lyles, buried at a beach in Jefferson County, was not found until 1983 and not named until 2009.
Corll was never charged with anything. He was dead before the first body came out of the ground, and the Harris County record against him consists of the graves, the board, the handcuffs and the testimony of the two boys who had been paid to fill the house. What the law reached instead were the accomplices.
Elmer Wayne Henley was seventeen when he killed Corll. He was tried in 1974, convicted of six of the murders and given six ninety-nine-year sentences, retried in 1979 and convicted again. He has been in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice ever since. He applied for medical parole in 2022 and was refused; the family of James Dreymala, the thirteen-year-old killed days before it ended, wrote that he did not deserve compassion for his illness, having shown their son and at least twenty-seven other boys no basic humanity. Stanton Dreymala's family had pressed for the Texas law that lets the parole board put off a killer's next review for as long as ten years. In October 2025, at sixty-nine, Henley came up for regular parole for the first time in a decade; James Dreymala, Stanton's father, told reporters he hoped to outlive Henley by a single day. On November 7, 2025, the board denied parole, citing the brutality of the offenses and the conscious selection of vulnerable victims, and set his next review for November 2035.
David Owen Brooks was convicted of a single murder in 1975 and sentenced to life. He never got out either. He died of COVID-19 in a Galveston hospital in 2020.
In 2025 Henley gave his first public interview in fifty years, for a television documentary, and said what he has said before: that he was horrified the first time, when it was Frank Aguirre, and that he knew right from wrong and should have gone to the police. A month after Frank Aguirre he helped kill Mark Scott, and he went on delivering boys for another sixteen months.
What is left is the boy in the boat shed. Forensic researchers were still working on the Swimsuit Boy in 2025, and there has been talk of a twenty-ninth set of remains. Investigators have a probable age range, a probable year and a reconstructed face, and no name to attach to any of it. The families in the Heights who were told for three years that their sons had run away at least eventually learned what had happened to them. One family somewhere has never been told anything.