Elmer Wayne Henley junior was born in Houston on May 9, 1956, to a violent alcoholic father, and left school at fifteen to work and help support his mother and brothers. He was introduced to Dean Corll by David Brooks in 1971, when he was fifteen, and was offered two hundred dollars for every boy he brought.
He brought a great many, most of them from his own street and his own circle in the Houston Heights, including friends and the brothers of friends. He also took part directly in the assaults and killings, which he admitted. Twenty-nine boys and young men are known to have died in the Houston Mass Murders between 1970 and 1973.
The boys he was convicted of killing were Frank Aguirre, eighteen; Johnny Delone, sixteen; William Ray Lawrence, fifteen, kept alive for three days because Corll liked him; Homer Garcia, fifteen; Charles Cobble, seventeen; and Marty Ray Jones, eighteen.
On August 8, 1973, he arrived at Corll's house in Pasadena with a girl, Rhonda Williams, and another boy, Timothy Kerley. Corll was enraged that he had brought a girl and handcuffed all three at gunpoint, telling Henley he was going to kill him too. Henley talked him round, was released, and then picked up Corll's .22 pistol and shot him six times. He telephoned the police himself, waited, and then told them about the boat shed on Silver Bell Street.
He was tried before Judge Preston Dial in San Antonio from July 1, 1974, charged with the murders of six boys he had lured to Corll between March 1972 and July 1973. The state read his August 9 confession and called twenty-five witnesses; a detective recounted him saying that strangling someone was not as easy as it looked on television, and that when they killed Marty Jones he had needed Corll's help. The defense called no one, and Henley did not testify. District Attorney Carol Vance apologized to the jury that he could not seek death and called Henley a monster. On July 16 the jury deliberated ninety-two minutes and convicted him, and he was given six consecutive terms of ninety-nine years. The conviction was overturned on December 20, 1978, over his trial in San Antonio. Retried before Judge Noah Kennedy in Corpus Christi, he was convicted again on June 27, 1979, and this time sentenced to six life terms, to run concurrently. No charge was ever brought over Corll's death, which prosecutors treated as self-defense.
He first came up for parole on July 8, 1980. He has been refused every time since, most recently on November 7, 2025, and has said he does not expect to be released. He is held at the Telford Unit in Bowie County. David Brooks, convicted in 1975 of the murder of William Ray Lawrence, died of COVID-19 in 2020; the two men exchanged letters once. "In the end, what were we going to say to each other?" Henley said in 2011. "How we wished we had never met Dean?"