The Candy Man

◆Part 1: Houston Heights

Houston Heights, Texas. 1970. A working-class neighbourhood of brick houses, corner stores, and kids who played outside until dark.

The area sat northwest of downtown Houston, a low-income grid of streets where families knew each other and nobody locked their doors in the afternoon. Boys rode bikes. They walked to school in groups. They played at the corner lots and came home when the streetlamps came on.

Dean Arnold Corll lived nearby. He was 30 years old. He worked at Houston Lighting and Power as an electrician. His landlord called him the best tenant he had ever had. His co-workers described him as reliable. His neighbours liked him.

His mother Mary had run a small candy factory on West 22nd Street. Corll had worked the assembly line, running machines, packing product, managing the place. After school, neighbourhood children would come into the factory. He gave out free sweets. He had set up a pool table in the back room. He let the kids use it.

They called him the Candy Man.

Between 1970 and 1973 he murdered at least 28 of them.

◆Part 2: The Factory

The Corll Candy Company specialised in divinity, pralines, and pecan chewies. Mary West started it in the garage of their home in Vidor, Texas in the 1950s, and by the time the family relocated to Houston in 1962 it had grown into a small operation on West 22nd Street in the Heights.

Corll ran the place. He worked day and night. He was meticulous and generous and the children from the neighbourhood school across the street came over constantly. He invited them in. He showed them the machines. He gave them samples. He let them hang around in the back room where he had put the pool table.

The factory closed in 1968 when Mary remarried and moved to Colorado. Corll stayed in Houston. He took the job at Houston Lighting and Power. He stayed in the neighbourhood.

He had already identified what the neighbourhood contained and what it would give him access to. He did not need the factory anymore. He had already built the relationships he needed.

The pool table had done its work.

◆Part 3: The Accomplices

Corll did not work alone. He recruited two teenage boys and built a system around them.

David Owen Brooks met Corll at the candy factory when he was 12 years old. His parents were divorced. His father, a paving contractor, largely ignored him. Corll was the first adult male who did not make fun of him. According to Brooks's former attorney Jim Skelton, David idolised Corll completely. He told me that Dean was the first adult male who didn't make fun of him.

Elmer Wayne Henley met Corll later. He was 15. Corll began paying him money for each boy he delivered. Henley later claimed he initially believed it was a trafficking operation — that the boys were being sold, not killed. By the time he understood what was actually happening he was already implicated.

Together the three of them built a machine. Brooks and Henley would approach boys from the neighbourhood. Friends. Classmates. Boys they had known for years. They offered parties, rides, somewhere to hang out. Corll would be waiting.

Henley was paid per delivery. He later said he couldn't remember exactly how many boys he had brought to Corll. He thought the number was around 15. He was not certain.

◆Part 4: The Method

Corll's victims were typically lured with an offer of a party or a lift to one of the various addresses where he lived between 1970 and 1973. He moved frequently — Pasadena, Deer Park, multiple apartments across the Houston area.

Once inside, victims were restrained either by force or deception. Corll used a plywood board fitted with handcuffs and rope. He kept a torture kit. The implements were found in his home after his death.

He killed his victims by strangulation or by shooting them with a .22 calibre pistol. The bodies were then transported and buried.

Eighteen victims were buried in a rented boat shed on Silver Bell Street, nine miles southwest of downtown Houston, unit number 11 at Southwest Boat Storage. Four more were buried in woodland near Lake Sam Rayburn. One was buried on a beach in Jefferson County. At least six were buried on the Bolivar Peninsula.

The shed was rented under Corll's name. He visited it several times a week. He told the storage facility manager it was almost full and asked about renting additional space.

The manager did not ask what was in it.

◆Part 5: The Victims

All of Corll's confirmed victims were male, aged 13 to 20. The majority were in their mid-teens. Most were abducted from Houston Heights or the surrounding working-class neighbourhoods.

Jerry Lynn Waldrop, 13. The youngest. Strangled January 30, 1971, the day after his abduction, and buried in a common grave with his brother in the boat shed.

Donald Waldrop, 15. Jerry's brother. Their father Everett was a builder working on the apartment next to Corll's at the time both boys were killed.

David William Hilligiest, 13. One of Elmer Henley's earliest childhood friends. Last seen walking to a local swimming pool on May 29, 1971. He climbed into a white van.

Randell Lee Harvey, 15. Disappeared on his way to his job as a gas station attendant. Shot once in the head. His remains were not identified until 2008.

Billy Gene Baulch Jr. Strangled and buried near High Island in Chambers County. A former employee of the Corll Candy Company.

One victim has never been identified. A boy, estimated 15 to 18 years old, found in 1972. Brown hair, approximately seven inches long. Catalina swim trunks with vertical red, turquoise, gold and dark blue stripes. The letter C on the silver belt buckle. A khaki-coloured long-sleeved t-shirt tied in the front.

He has no name. As of 2025 he remains unidentified in the official record.

◆Part 6: The Families and the Police

The parents knew something was wrong.

Everett Waldrop lost both of his sons, Donald and Jerry. He went to the Houston Police Department for eight months. Every time the same answer: your boys are runaways. We cannot help you. Running away from home is not a crime.

In Texas in the early 1970s, that was the official position. Running away from home was not a violation of any law. The Houston police chief later used this as his public justification. Until the bodies of victims are discovered, he said, there was no evidence of foul play in any of the disappearances.

As recorded in the 1975 book Harvest of Horror, Waldrop said: I camped on that police department door for eight months. But all they did was say, why are you down here? You know your boys are runaways.

Dozen of boys vanished from the same neighbourhood across the same three years. Same streets. Same area code. Same police district. The department logged them as runaways and closed the files.

The police chief who oversaw that department was voted out of office at the first election held after the truth became public. By then 28 families had already buried their sons.

In 1975 the Houston Police Department issued a statement confirming that handling of missing and runaway juveniles remained substantially unchanged since the murders.

◆Part 7: The End

August 8, 1973. Corll's apartment in Pasadena, Texas.

Henley brought two friends that night — Rhonda Williams and Timothy Kerley. Corll had not sanctioned it. He was furious. The situation escalated rapidly inside the apartment.

Corll produced a firearm. In the struggle that followed, Henley got control of it. He shot Dean Corll six times.

Then he called the police.

When detectives arrived Henley told them everything. He described each burial site. He led investigators to the boat shed on Silver Bell Street.

The doors to unit 11 were opened in the late afternoon. Two faded carpets, one green, one blue, lay over an earthen floor. An empty appliance carton stood against one wall. A canvas-covered shape sat in the rear corner.

By midnight of the first night, eight bodies had been recovered.

One officer later described the scene in language that has been quoted in every account since. They had all seen death, he said. None had encountered the wholesale transformation of boys into what they found beneath those carpets.

Within one week, 27 sets of remains had been unearthed from four separate sites across the greater Houston area. It was the largest serial murder case in United States history at the time, surpassing Juan Corona's 25 victims.

A 28th set of remains was found in 1983 and identified by DNA testing in 2009.

◆Part 8: The Trials

Elmer Wayne Henley was tried in 1974. He was convicted of six murders and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year terms.

He appealed. A retrial was ordered. He was convicted again and received the same sentence.

David Owen Brooks was convicted of one murder and received a life sentence.

Both men remain in the Texas prison system.

Brooks died in prison on August 28, 2020, of COVID-19. He was 65 years old. He had served 45 years. He never spoke publicly after giving his confession in 1973.

Henley has given interviews over the years. In one, when asked about Corll, he said: My only regret is that Dean isn't here now, so I could tell him what a good job I did killing him.

As of 2025 Henley remains incarcerated at the John B. Connally Unit, a maximum-security prison in Texas. He has periodically offered to assist investigators in locating additional burial sites.

Dean Corll was never charged with any crime. He was never arrested. He was never tried. He died in his apartment at 33 years old and was buried in Vidor, Texas. His family maintained for years that he was a victim of the two teenagers. Police dismissed this position the moment they opened the boat shed.

◆Part 9: The Search That Continues

The case did not end in 1973.

Forensic anthropologist Dr Sharon Derrick spent decades working to identify Corll's unidentified victims using modern DNA testing. Her work, documented in investigative journalist Lise Olsen's 2025 book The Scientist and the Serial Killer, represents one of the most sustained forensic identification efforts in American cold case history.

As of 2025, Derrick's work has resulted in new identifications from remains that had been held in evidence for over 50 years. Families who spent decades without answers have received them.

The boy with the Catalina swim trunks and the letter C on his belt buckle remains unidentified.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children continues to list him. He died in 1972 or earlier. He was between 15 and 18 years old. He was between five feet two inches and five feet seven inches tall. He had brown hair approximately seven inches long.

His name is unknown.

No one has ever explained to the satisfaction of investigators how many victims Corll actually killed. Henley has suggested the number could be significantly higher than 28. Investigators believe there may be burial sites that were never found.

The boat shed on Silver Bell Street is gone. The candy factory on West 22nd Street is gone. The Heights has changed. But the families are still there, and some of them are still waiting.

◆Part 10: What the Record Shows

The Houston Mass Murders case is frequently described as a failure of detection. The official record suggests it was also a failure of decision.

Dozen of boys disappeared from the same neighbourhood across three years. Their families reported them missing. They were logged as runaways. The files were closed.

In the early 1970s Houston had no centralised missing persons tracking system that would have connected the disappearances geographically. That is a structural fact. But it does not explain away the eight months Everett Waldrop spent walking into the police department. It does not explain the repeated assurances that running away was not a crime and therefore nothing could be done.

The boys who vanished were working-class. Some were from troubled homes. Some were known to drift. The category of runaway was available and it was applied and it closed the file and the file stayed closed.

In 1975 the Houston Police Department confirmed that its procedures for handling missing and runaway juveniles had not changed following the discovery of 28 murdered children from their city. The chief who presided over those procedures had already been removed by voters. His replacement inherited the same system.

Dean Corll operated for three years. He buried 18 bodies in a storage shed he visited multiple times a week and asked about expanding because it was getting full. He had a plywood torture board in his apartment. He had two accomplices who were known to the neighbourhood.

He was not found. He was shot by one of his own accomplices who had run out of options.

The city found out when Henley called from a payphone.

28 boys. One neighbourhood. Three years. A police department that filed it under runaways and left the cabinet drawer shut.

The record is not ambiguous about what happened. It is only ambiguous about who was responsible for letting it happen for as long as it did.