Dean Corll

What the record shows

Dean Arnold Corll was a Houston, Texas, electrician who, with two teenage accomplices, abducted and killed teenage boys and young men between 1970 and 1973. He was never arrested or charged. On August 8, 1973, his accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley, then 17, shot him dead at Corll's house in Pasadena, Texas, a killing authorities ruled self-defense. Houston police attributed 28 victims to Corll, and 27 bodies were recovered in August 1973. Henley and the second accomplice, David Owen Brooks, were both convicted of murder and sentenced to life terms.

According to the Wikipedia article, which draws on contemporary reporting and later investigations, the first known victim was Jeffrey Alan Konen, killed on September 25, 1970, and the last was James Stanton Dreymala, 13, killed on August 3, 1973. Victims were aged 13 to 20, and most were taken from the Houston Heights, a working-class neighborhood northwest of downtown. They were lured with the offer of a party or a ride, restrained, sexually assaulted and killed by strangulation or with a .22-caliber pistol. The bodies were buried in a rented boat shed in southwest Houston, on the beach at High Island on the Bolivar Peninsula and in woods near Lake Sam Rayburn.

The crimes came to light on the morning of August 8, 1973, when Henley telephoned Pasadena police to say he had shot Corll. ABC13 reported that Henley told officers Corll had tortured and murdered teenagers and that he and Brooks then led investigators to the graves. Police recovered 17 bodies from the boat shed on Silver Bell Street, four near Lake Sam Rayburn and six at High Island, for a total of 27. Brooks turned himself in the day after Henley's arrest. Police halted the search on August 13, 1973, after the 27th body was found, although Henley maintained that more victims were buried at the beach and in the shed.

A Harris County grand jury returned indictments on August 14, 1973: Henley on six murders and Brooks on four. Henley was tried in San Antonio in July 1974, convicted by a jury of six murders and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year terms. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed that conviction in 1978 (Henley v. State, 576 S.W.2d 66), and he was retried in Corpus Christi in June 1979, where a jury again convicted him of six murders on June 27, 1979. The Associated Press reported in 2020 that he was serving six life sentences. Brooks was tried in February 1975 for the June 1973 murder of William Ray Lawrence, 15, was convicted on March 4, 1975, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Identification of the victims continued for decades. Forensic work led by Harris County medical examiner's office anthropologist Sharon Derrick identified Randell Lee Harvey in October 2008, Michael Baulch in 2010, Steven Sickman and Roy Bunton in 2011 and Donald Falcon in 2014. ABC13 reported in May 2025 that Derrick's research points to at least 30 victims and that at least one set of remains is still unidentified. The Associated Press reported that Brooks died on May 28, 2020, aged 65, at Hospital Galveston after contracting COVID-19 while held at the Polunsky Unit. The house at 2020 Lamar Drive where Corll was killed was demolished on February 24, 2023, according to ABC13. KPRC reported that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Henley parole on November 7, 2025, his 25th review, and set his next review roughly ten years away.

Corll was born on December 24, 1939, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and his family later moved to Houston. He worked in his family's candy businesses in the Houston Heights, including the Corll Candy Company, which closed in June 1968; the free candy he handed out to local children earned him the nicknames 'Candy Man' and 'Pied Piper'. Drafted in August 1964, he served stateside and received an honorable discharge in June 1965. He then worked as an electrician and later a supervisor at Houston Lighting and Power, and in the spring of 1973 he moved into his father's former house on Lamar Drive in Pasadena, where he died.