Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. was 17 when he telephoned police in Pasadena, a suburb of Houston, on the morning of August 8, 1973, to say he had shot a man. The man was Dean Corll, 33, an employee of the Houston electric company. Within days Henley and a second teenager, David Owen Brooks, had led officers to the bodies of 27 boys and young men in three places in southeast Texas. Police described Corll as the leader of the killings and Henley and Brooks as his procurers. The case has been known since as the Houston Mass Murders.
Henley admitted that he had brought boys to Corll for money. He was convicted of six of the murders by a jury in San Antonio in 1974, and convicted again at a retrial in 1979 after the first verdict was reversed. He has been in prison for more than five decades. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has turned him down many times, most recently in November 2025.
Henley grew up in the Houston Heights, a working-class district northwest of downtown Houston, about two miles wide and three miles deep, as Skip Hollandsworth described it in Texas Monthly in 2011. "I was born in Harris County, raised in Harris County," Henley said in court in January 1974.
The fullest early portrait of his childhood comes from the writer James Conaway, whose account appeared in Texas Monthly in April 1976. Henley had asthma as a small child, and that was a constant worry at home; his grandparents looked after him while his mother cared for his younger brothers. His grandfather, a baker, died when Henley was seven. His father was violent toward the family, and his parents divorced. Henley told Conaway that his father had beaten him and once fired a pistol at him, and that he had once struck his father with a vacuum cleaner and called the police. After the divorce he took on, informally, the job of bringing in money for his mother.
Hollandsworth's 2011 account adds that his father, according to published reports, drank heavily and was physically violent toward his wife and children. After his parents divorced in 1970, Henley dropped out of junior high school and worked part-time to help his mother. He had once been charged with assault as a juvenile. He later tried to join the Navy and was turned away because of his limited schooling. Conaway reported that Henley and David Brooks failed ninth grade together, and that Henley had tested with an IQ of 126.
In the Heights, Henley spent his time at the neighborhood swimming pool and at two fast-food restaurants, and he drank beer, smoked marijuana and chased girls, Hollandsworth wrote. He lived half a block from the family of one of the boys who later disappeared. He took a driver's education class with Homer Garcia, one of the six young men in his later convictions.
David Brooks introduced Henley to Dean Corll in 1971, when Henley was about 15. Corll, then in his early thirties, worked for Houston Lighting and Power, according to Conaway; Associated Press accounts described him as an electric company employee. He had no criminal record, the Texas Observer reported.
Henley later described Corll as a smart, well-dressed man who listened to him and explained things to him. Corll first drew him in with an offer to help him sell stolen goods, so that he could make money for his mother. Later, Henley said, Corll told him a story about belonging to a ring in California and offered him $200 for each boy he brought. Henley told Hollandsworth that he was paid the $200 after the first boy. The Associated Press, summarizing the case in 2008, reported that Henley and Brooks were paid between $10 and $200 a boy, and that they also helped kill and bury some of the victims.
Henley admitted to police that he had brought boys to Corll. By Hollandsworth's account of the confession, Henley said he learned afterward that Corll had killed the first boy, and that he did not go to the police. Among the boys he brought were friends of his own. Of the 18 victims identified by mid-September 1973, 15 lived or had lived in the Heights, according to a wire report printed in The Battalion, the Texas A&M student newspaper.
For more than two years, boys from the Heights disappeared and their families were told they had run away. Hollandsworth's reporting describes officers in the juvenile division labeling missing boys as runaways and refusing to open searches without clear evidence of foul play. One father whose two sons were among the missing recalled being asked why he had come to the police at all, since his boys were runaways. The police chief later dismissed suggested links among the disappearances as a myth "created by the media."
Families searched on their own. One couple drove the beaches near Freeport showing their son's photograph, printed 500 posters with a $1,000 reward, and borrowed from a credit union to hire a private investigator. The mother of Mark Scott, a 17-year-old high school junior and a longtime friend of Henley's who disappeared on April 20, 1972, waited on her front step for the mailman for years after a single postcard from Austin. His father later drove to High Island almost every day with a shovel, hoping to find his son.
The grand jury that indicted Henley and Brooks later criticized both the police and the district attorney's office. Its report said the investigation had left unexplored "the possible involvement of others and related criminal activities," according to Hollandsworth.
Henley was convicted of the murders of six boys and young men. The Texas Observer names them as Frank Aguirre, Johnny Delone, Charles Cobble, Marty Jones, Homer Garcia and Billy Lawrence.
Frank Aguirre was a close friend of Henley's who worked at a restaurant. His mother, a hairdresser, kept a candle burning for about a year and a half in the hope that he would come home. She had already lost another son in 1969.
Johnny Delone was 16. He disappeared one afternoon together with a 17-year-old friend.
Charles Cobble was 17. Henley was first set to stand trial for his death, and the 1974 pretrial hearings were held in that case. The Battalion's reports spell the surname both Cobble and Coble. His mother went back to her job delivering flowers after his death and found herself arranging the funerals of other victims.
Marty Jones died in late July 1973, according to Hollandsworth. He was a cousin of a Houston homicide detective who was at the scene when the bodies were recovered; that detective died by suicide in 1977.
Homer Garcia lived in southwest Houston and met Henley in a driver's education class. His parents were away in South Texas when they learned of his death. Nearly four decades later they still lived in the same house and visited his grave on Sundays. His marker reads: "The day they took you, part of us went with you."
Billy Lawrence was 15. His father worked in the mailroom of the Houston Post. In a note to his father, the boy had written, "Daddy, I hope you know I love you." David Brooks was later convicted of his murder.
In the early hours of August 8, 1973, Henley and two other teenagers were at Corll's house in Pasadena. That morning Henley shot Corll dead. He told police that Corll had threatened to kill him and the other two, and he said he shot Corll because Corll was mistreating them. Both of the others survived. One of them later testified that he believed he had been marked for death and that Henley's shots had saved him. Authorities ruled the shooting self-defense, and Henley was never prosecuted for Corll's death.
The three talked about whether to call the police, and Henley agreed to make the call, the surviving young man testified in January 1974. The Pasadena police received a call that morning from a young man who said he had shot a man. Detective David Mullican, who answered it, later said the case "started out as any other homicide."
It did not stay that way. Henley told officers that Corll had boasted of killing other boys and burying them. That day he took police to a site in southwest Houston, where officers recovered 17 bodies over two days. He then took them to a site near Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas, where four bodies were found. David Brooks turned himself in the day after Henley's arrest, and the two led officers to High Island, on the Gulf Coast, where six more bodies were recovered. The total by the end of August 1973 was 27.
While police worked at the Houston site, Henley asked to speak to his mother. A television reporter from KPRC lent him the radio telephone in his car, and the station filmed the call. Henley cried, "Mama, I killed Dean." A KPRC reporter, Fred Edison, testified about the call at the January 1974 hearing; KPRC's own later accounts and the Houston Press credit the reporter Jack Cato.
At the police station Henley gave statements admitting his part. Detective Mullican testified that Henley gave a statement admitting to killing six of the 27. Associated Press accounts later said he told police he wanted to give everything up to end the ordeal.
Henley was charged with six murders and Brooks with four. Henley's case came before State District Judge William Hatten in Houston in January 1974. His lead lawyer was Will Gray; the prosecution was led by District Attorney Carol Vance and Assistant District Attorney Don Lambright.
The defense asked the court to throw out all of Henley's oral and written statements, which the prosecution called confessions, and to delay the trial for six months because of publicity. Two detectives testified that Henley had led them to the places where the victims were buried. One said he had not told Henley that he might benefit from a lawyer even if he were guilty; asked by the district attorney whether Henley had ever asked for a lawyer, he said he had not. The judge took the two surviving teenagers' evidence partly in chambers, because one of them was a juvenile.
Gray subpoenaed editors and news directors from newspapers and broadcasters in eight Texas cities, seeking all their coverage of the case. He wanted to show that publicity had made a fair trial impossible anywhere in Texas, and to learn how reporters had obtained a leaked copy of a statement in which Brooks implicated Henley. Lawyers for the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle came to court to argue over the subpoenas, and the Post's lawyer asked for an order protecting reporters' sources.
Late in January both sides agreed that Henley could not get a fair trial in Houston at that time. The prosecution called witnesses with no ties to law enforcement or the press to support a change of venue, and ten of the fifteen it called said they did not believe a fair trial was possible in Houston. Judge Hatten granted a continuance and, on his own motion, moved the trial out of the city. Gray opposed the move. "It would be fruitless to move the trial at this time," he said.
Henley took the ruling badly. He screamed and banged his head against the bars of his holding cell, The Battalion reported, and said: "I was born in Harris County, raised in Harris County and I have a right to be tried in Harris County."
The trial was moved to San Antonio. In July 1974 a jury there convicted Henley on six counts of murder, and he was given six consecutive sentences of 99 years, reported at the time as 594 years in all. The Dallas Voice, reviewing the case in 2022, gave the date of the verdict as July 16, 1974.
Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the Texas Observer noted. At the time of the crimes and the first trial, the death penalty had been halted nationally and in Texas, and Texas had not yet created a sentence of life without parole, KPRC reported in 2025, a gap that the station said has left families preparing for and opposing parole hearings again and again.
Brooks's case followed a separate path. In November 1974 his court-appointed lawyers clashed over whether he should plead insanity: one said Brooks was insane, and had been in the summer of 1973; the other disagreed. Both were allowed to withdraw, and his father hired new lawyers, the Associated Press reported. The prosecutor said the publicity in Brooks's case had been just as intense as in Henley's, and the judge moved toward a change of venue.
Brooks was convicted in March 1975 of the murder of Billy Lawrence and sentenced to life, according to the Dallas Voice; Conaway's 1976 account gave his sentence as 99 years. He was later held at the Ramsey Unit. He died in May 2020, in a Galveston hospital, of COVID-19, while still serving his sentence.
Henley appealed. In December 1978 the 1974 convictions were overturned on appeal. He was retried in June 1979 and convicted again on the six counts, and this time he received six life sentences. The Dallas Voice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have described the life terms as consecutive.
For decades Henley has been held in the Texas prison system. In 2011 he was at the Michael Unit at Tennessee Colony, near Palestine, where Hollandsworth interviewed him in the visiting area. He was 54. His day started at about five in the morning with a shift in the prison laundry, and he painted in the craft shop. "I try to keep myself busy, and I try not to sleep much," he said. "I don't like dreaming about the old days."
In 1997 a Houston gallery showed 23 of his paintings, from outdoor scenes to a pencil drawing of the model Kate Moss. Relatives of victims protested outside on opening night with signs that read "Hang Henley! Not his art!" Twenty-one of the paintings sold.
He once wrote Brooks a typed, unsigned letter suggesting they stay in touch. They never did. "In the end, what were we going to say to each other?" he told Hollandsworth. "How we wished we had never met Dean?"
Henley's accounts of himself have changed over the years. In the 1970s, Conaway reported, he spoke of himself as a "playboy" who got along with people, listed Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov and Ayn Rand among his favorite authors, and said of Corll's death, "My only regret is that Dean isn't here now, so I could tell him what a good job I did killing him." Asked about remorse, he said, "I feel remorse because I'm supposed to," and laughed.
By 2011 he spoke differently. "I'll be honest with you, it was important that Dean liked me. He was kind," he told Hollandsworth. He said he could not have walked away, because he feared that Corll would turn to one of his younger brothers. He said that he knew people would always think he was evil, but that he had become someone his mother would be proud of. A teenage niece who visited him asked about what she had read online. "Honey, I wish I could explain it to you," he said he told her.
In a later prison interview with KHOU, he said: "I was a boy who was caught."
He has been refused parole every time. Andy Kahan, the victims' advocate at Crime Stoppers of Houston, has said Henley has come up for parole 25 times. The families of the victims have written to the board each time his case or Brooks's came up, and have met board members in person. "I want to see him stay there until he dies, personally," the father of Stanton Dreymala, Corll's last known victim, said in 2011, after a parole panel turned down Brooks.
In October 2015 the board denied Henley parole and set his next review for October 2025, ABC13 and the Dallas Voice reported. KHOU reported that he was the first prisoner whose hearing was pushed back under a Texas law allowing the board to wait up to ten years between reviews.
In 2022, at 66, Henley asked for compassionate release on medical grounds. Families received letters about the request, the Texas Observer reported, and the state prison agency declined to discuss his health, citing medical privacy. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice decided not to forward his case to the parole board for medical parole review, KHOU reported. "He does not deserve to have any compassion for his illness," Stanton Dreymala's family said in a statement.
His regular review came in the autumn of 2025. On November 7, 2025, KPRC reported that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had again denied parole and had given him a 10-year set-off, so that his case will not be considered again for about a decade. He was 69. Kahan, speaking for more than 25 victims' families, thanked the board. "Henley deprived over 20 boys of their lives and all we can do in return is deprive him of his liberty," he said. "The only reason Elmer Wayne Henley took down Dean Corll was to save his own skin, period."
Stanton Dreymala's mother described the sleepless nights before each hearing. She said Henley seemed to see himself as a victim because he had also been young, but that he had chances to leave and did not take them. "I don't feel he deserves to ever be free," she said. His father said they would keep going to the hearings "till the day we die." KPRC described the couple as believed to be the last surviving parents of the victims.
The number of victims has never been settled. Twenty-seven bodies were recovered in August 1973. KPRC and KHOU put Corll's victims at no fewer than 28. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, renewing its appeal in 2023 for help naming one young victim still unidentified, also gave at least 28, aged 13 to 20, and said the true toll would most likely never be known.
In August 2021 the volunteer group Texas EquuSearch began a new search for victims never found, working with the Pasadena police. The Texas Observer reported that Henley had given information about other possible graves to the group's founder, Tim Miller, and that searches in Pasadena found no human remains. In May 2025 the journalist Lise Olsen published The Scientist and the Serial Killer, built on more than 20 years of identification work by the forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick; ABC13 reported that the book puts the number of victims at no fewer than 30.
How many people Henley himself killed is not settled. The courts convicted him of six murders. Detective Mullican testified that Henley admitted killing six. The Associated Press reported in 2008 that Henley and Brooks helped kill and bury some of the victims, and David Brooks made statements to police against Henley, according to Conaway; those statements were never tested in court against Henley beyond the six counts.
Henley's claim that he stayed with Corll to protect his younger brothers rests on his own later account; other reporting neither supports nor refutes it. The other surviving young man from August 8 testified that Henley had told him he had killed four or five other people, but under questioning he said Henley had not said so directly and that this was his own interpretation.
Payment is reported differently: $200 a boy in Henley's own account and in pretrial reporting, and $10 to $200 in the Associated Press's 2008 summary. Accounts also differ on the 1979 sentences, described as consecutive by some outlets, and on which KPRC reporter lent Henley the telephone on August 8, 1973.
Whether Corll had other accomplices before Henley and Brooks has been raised by the 1974 grand jury, which said the possible involvement of others was left unexplored, and by Hollandsworth, who speculated about earlier accomplices without evidence.
1970: Henley's parents divorce; he leaves junior high school and works to help his mother.
1971: David Brooks introduces Henley, about 15, to Dean Corll.
April 20, 1972: Mark Scott, a friend of Henley's, disappears in the Heights.
Late July 1973: Marty Jones is killed.
August 8, 1973: Henley shoots Dean Corll dead in Pasadena, calls police, and leads them to the first bodies in Houston.
August 1973: Bodies are recovered in Houston, near Lake Sam Rayburn and at High Island; 27 in all. Brooks surrenders.
January 1974: Pretrial hearings before Judge William Hatten in Houston; the trial is moved out of the city.
July 1974: A San Antonio jury convicts Henley of six murders; six consecutive 99-year terms.
November 1974: Brooks's lawyers withdraw in a dispute over an insanity plea.
March 1975: Brooks is convicted of the murder of Billy Lawrence.
December 1978: The 1974 convictions are overturned on appeal.
June 1979: Henley is convicted again on retrial; six life sentences.
1997: A Houston gallery shows Henley's paintings; families protest.
2011: Interviewed at the Michael Unit, Tennessee Colony, by Texas Monthly.
October 2015: Parole denied; next review set for October 2025.
May 2020: David Brooks dies in custody.
August 2021: Texas EquuSearch begins a new search for missing victims.
2022: A request for compassionate release is not forwarded for review.
November 7, 2025: Parole denied again, with a 10-year set-off.