Elmer Wayne Henley

• 1. Introduction

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  At 8:24 on the morning of the 8th of August 1973, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. phoned the Pasadena Police Department from Dean Corll's home in Pasadena, Texas. He was seventeen years old. He told the operator: "Y'all better come here right now! I just killed a man!" The dead man was Dean Corll, and Henley had been helping him for well over a year. What the police learned in the following days made this the worst example of serial murder in United States history at that time. It would eventually be linked to twenty-nine known victims from Houston and Pasadena, killed between 1970 and 1973. This documentary follows the teenage accomplice who also ended the killing. It asks how an ordinary Houston boy came to stand inside these crimes. It asks what happened on the night he finally turned a pistol on Corll, and how the courts weighed his two roles. And it asks what is left of his life behind bars.

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• 2. Houston Heights Boyhood

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  Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. was born on the 9th of May 1956 in Houston, the eldest of four sons. His parents, Elmer Wayne Henley Sr. and Mary Pauline Henley, were both still in their teens. The young family lived with Mary's parents in Houston Heights until Henley's father found work as a stationary engineer and they could afford a home of their own.

  At school, Henley typically ranked in the top quarter of his class. He was an avid reader and an attentive student. He was also markedly religious, and for a time he hoped to become a preacher. His mother and grandparents were devout Christians, and they encouraged that faith.

  Henley's father, Elmer Sr., was an alcoholic and an adulterer who beat his wife and sons. The boys were largely raised by their mother and maternal grandparents. Henley tried to protect his mother from the violence, and she in turn shielded her children. As an adolescent, he stopped one beating by pointing a shotgun at his father and shouting, "Drop it, Dad!" His memories of his father were nonetheless conflicted. He later recalled: "I have memories of my father walking me to school, and of Cub Scout and Boy Scout activities. I went to work with him, and he'd tell me about boilers and air conditioners."

  From the fifth grade onward, Henley was occasionally bullied. Even so, he stayed popular with many classmates, both boys and girls. He was drawn to the attitudes of the hippie movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout, he kept striving for his father's approval despite the belittling he endured.

  His parents' divorce in 1970 changed the household. As the eldest male at home, Henley took two menial part-time jobs to help his mother, who worked as a cashier at a parking lot and kept custody of all four sons. His grades and attendance dropped sharply. He began drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana and selling small amounts of drugs. Within a year of the divorce, he had dropped out of high school. He was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 1971 and for burglary a year later.

  At the reception for his mother's second marriage, Henley's father arrived uninvited. When Henley tried to persuade him to leave, his father shoved him to the ground and ran to his car for a gun. A friend who threw himself over Henley was wounded instead. The father was charged with attempted murder, but Henley refused to testify against him.

  In 1971, the year he left school, Henley learned that at least eight boys aged 13 to 17 had vanished from Houston Heights since the previous December. One of them was a lifelong friend, 13-year-old David William Hilligiest. Hilligiest disappeared on the afternoon of the 29th of May 1971 while walking to the Bohemian Lodge swimming pool with 16-year-old Gregory Malley Winkle. Henley joined the search. He handed out flyers offering a $1,000 reward and tried to reassure Hilligiest's parents that there might be an innocent explanation. Where the two boys had gone would be revealed to him only later.

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• 3. Brooks and Corll

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  Around October 1971, Henley was skipping classes at Hamilton Junior High School and walking toward a local pool hall when a boy one year older fell into step beside him. David Owen Brooks asked whether he was "skipping school too". Brooks said he attended Hamilton as well and was headed for the same pool hall. The two began to truant together regularly.

  Brooks puzzled Henley. He drove a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette and always seemed to have money, though he had no job and came from a family of modest means. He also spent much of his free time with an older man named Dean Corll. Henley gradually became a casual acquaintance of Corll as well.

  Corll and Brooks began meeting Henley at the gas station where he worked part-time. Henley admired Corll because he worked hard and seemed to have his life in order. Corll's moods varied. Much of the time he was affable and somewhat childlike, and Henley and Brooks nicknamed him "Deannie Weannie". Occasionally he turned agitated and serious, and he chain-smoked.

  In the winter of 1971-72, Brooks told Henley that if he could leave home "without telling anyone where he was going", he and Corll would pick him up behind the Fulbright Methodist Church at 5 p.m. Henley went, and they drove him to Corll's address, likely as an intended victim. In his confession almost two years later, Henley said Brooks had lured him with the promise of "a deal where I could make some money." The plan collapsed when Henley told Corll that, against Brooks's instructions, he had let his mother and grandmother know he was leaving with Brooks.

  Corll evidently decided the youth would still make a useful accomplice. Henley came to see him as a "brother-type person" whose work ethic he admired and in whom he could confide. Corll let Henley, who had no driving license, drive his Plymouth GTX now and then. He claimed to be involved in organized theft, and he, Brooks and Henley burglarized several local addresses, with Henley paid small sums.

  Corll then tested him. He asked whether Henley would kill if cornered while burglarizing a property, and Henley answered, "Yes." Soon afterward, as the two sat in a vehicle at the corner of Eleventh and Heights Boulevard, Corll remarked: "You know, it's too bad there's not a market in people, they're everywhere." In later conversations he described a ring operating from Dallas that sold teenage boys as houseboys to wealthy clients, which he called "the Syndicate". He offered Henley $200 for any teenage boy he could lure to his apartment. Henley has always insisted he ignored the offer for several months.

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• 4. Inside the Murders

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  In approximately February 1972, Henley says, he decided to find one boy for Corll because his family was in dire financial circumstances. He went to Corll's place on Schuler Street and told him so. The pair rehearsed a ruse in which Henley would be handcuffed, free himself with a hidden key, and trick the victim into putting the cuffs on. At the corner of 11th and Studewood, Henley persuaded a dark-haired youth into Corll's Plymouth GTX with the promise of marijuana. At Corll's apartment, the teenager was bound and gagged. The next day Corll paid Henley $200 and said the boy had been sold into the slavery ring. Henley gave most of the money to his mother and bought himself a Sheridan air rifle. The identity of that first victim remains unknown.

  On the evening of the 24th of March 1972, Henley persuaded 18-year-old Frank Anthony Aguirre to come to Corll's home. Aguirre had just left the Yale Street restaurant where he worked, and the promise was beer and marijuana. Inside, Corll seized him. Henley later claimed he was startled and tried to dissuade Corll, who replied that the previous youth had been killed and Aguirre would share his fate. The following evening Henley helped bury Aguirre's body at High Island Beach. Corll and Brooks also told him that Hilligiest and Winkle had died at Corll's hands, so there was no use continuing to search. Henley kept assisting anyway.

  Less than a month later came 17-year-old Mark Steven Scott. Corll chose him because Scott had recently cheated him on a deal. On the 20th of April, Henley met Scott in a Heights alleyway close to 23rd Street and persuaded him to come to Corll's apartment. According to Brooks, Scott fought furiously but "just gave up" when he saw Henley point a .22 caliber pistol at him. Henley strangled Scott into unconsciousness before Corll finished the killing, and the body was buried at High Island Beach.

  Brooks later described Henley as "especially sadistic" in the murders at Schuler Street. Henley himself admitted he had become "fascinated" with "how much stamina people have". Corll alternately praised his accomplices and goaded them, particularly Henley, to prove their loyalty.

  On the 3rd of October 1972, Henley and Brooks enticed two boys, Wally Jay Simoneaux and Richard Edward Hembree, into Brooks's Corvette as they walked home from Hamilton Junior High School. That evening Simoneaux phoned his mother, Mildred, and shouted "Mama" into the receiver before the line went dead. Both boys were later buried in Corll's rented boat shed in Southwest Houston. On the 11th of November, 19-year-old Richard Alan Kepner was abducted on his way to call his fiancée from a pay phone. Henley is known to have assisted in that abduction and murder.

  In January 1973, Henley traveled to Florida with an uncle who drove long-haul trucks, then on to another uncle in Atlanta, Georgia. He tried to tell that uncle about Corll's crimes and his own part in them. The uncle thought Henley was either morbidly fantasizing or had a psychiatric disorder, and ordered him home to his mother. Weeks after returning, Henley went to Mount Pleasant to put more distance between himself and Corll. Two weeks later Brooks phoned, likely at Corll's behest. He said he could not guarantee the safety of one of Henley's younger brothers, or of Hilligiest's younger brother, if Henley did not come home. Henley moved back in with his mother in April.

  In the spring of 1973, Henley tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy as a boatswain's mate. His application was rejected on the 28th of June because a color perception test showed he was color-blind. A later intelligence test measured his IQ at 126, yet he had little formal education. He told an interviewer in 2010: "I couldn't leave anyway. If I did go, I knew Dean would go after one of my little brothers, who he always liked a little too much."

  Corll moved into his father's home at 2020 Lamar Drive in Pasadena on the 19th of March 1973. Henley and Brooks both testified that the murders grew more brutal there. Henley likened the surge in sadism and in the frequency of abductions to "a blood lust", and he said Corll insisted that he in particular take part. On Monday, the 4th of June, Corll ordered Henley to "bring him a boy". Henley lured 15-year-old William Ray Lawrence with the promise of fishing at Lake Sam Rayburn in San Augustine County. Lawrence phoned his father to say he would be back in "two, three days... maybe Thursday." Corll "really liked" him, so he was kept alive for three days before being killed. Henley kept a lookout in Corll's Ford Econoline van as the body was buried near a dirt road at the lake.

  On the 25th of July, on Corll's instructions, Henley lured Charles Cary Cobble, 17, and Marty Ray Jones, 18, to Corll's home. Their deaths followed two days later, and Henley buried them in the center of the boat shed while Corll briefly locked him inside to fetch bags of lime. On the 3rd of August, Corll lured 13-year-old James Stanton Dreymala with a story about collecting empty glass bottles for the deposit money. Dreymala had been saving to take his first girlfriend to the latest James Bond movie that Sunday. Brooks shared a pizza with the boy and then left him alone with Corll. Five days later, the pattern broke.

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• 5. Shots at Lamar Drive

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  On the evening of the 7th of August 1973, Henley invited 20-year-old Timothy Cordell Kerley to a party at Corll's Pasadena home. Kerley was a casual acquaintance whom Corll intended as his next victim. Brooks was not present. The two youths sniffed paint fumes and drank alcohol until midnight, then left, promising to return. Back in Houston Heights, they heard a commotion from the home of Henley's 15-year-old friend, Rhonda Louise Williams. Her drunken father had beaten her, and she had packed an overnight bag and taken refuge in a laundromat. Henley found her there and invited her to join them. The three reached Lamar Drive at about 3:00 a.m.

  Corll was furious that a girl had been brought to his house. In private he told Henley he had "ruined everything." Outwardly he stayed calm while the trio drank and smoked marijuana, and Henley and Kerley inhaled acrylic paint fumes. After about two hours, all three had passed out.

  Henley woke gagged and face-down with Corll fastening handcuffs on his wrists. Kerley and Williams were bound and gagged beside him. Corll growled, "Man, you blew it bringing that girl." Waving an eighteen-inch hunting knife, he shouted, "I'm gonna kill you all! But first I'm gonna have my fun!" He dragged Henley into the kitchen and pressed a .22 caliber pistol against his stomach. Henley pleaded for his life and promised to join in the torture and murder of the others if Corll let him go. After several minutes, Corll agreed.

  Corll then carried Kerley and Williams into his bedroom and tied them to opposite sides of his plywood torture board, laid over thick plastic sheeting. He set a transistor radio between them and turned it to full volume to drown out screams. He handed Henley the knife and ordered him to cut away Williams's clothes. Then he put the pistol on a bedside table and turned to Kerley.

  Williams, whose gag Henley had removed, lifted her head and asked him, "Is this for real?" Henley said it was. She asked: "Are you going to do anything about it?" The question unnerved him. He paced the room for several minutes, huffing from a sack of paint fumes, until his eyes fell on the pistol. He asked Corll, "Hey, Dean. Why don't you let me take the chick in the other room? She doesn't want to see this." Getting no answer, Henley seized the gun and shouted, "You've gone far enough, Dean! I can't go on any longer... I can't have you kill all my friends!"

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• 6. Confessions and Graves

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  Officer Jerry Jamison arrived at Lamar Drive minutes after the call. The three teenagers were sitting on the curb, Henley rocking back and forth with his head in his hands while Williams rested an arm across his shoulder. Jamison put all three in his patrol car, went inside, found Corll face-down in the hallway, and read them their Miranda rights. Henley shouted: "I don't care who knows about it! I have to get it off my chest!" On the way to the station, an officer noted that Henley kept mentioning a warehouse or storage room where bodies were buried.

  At the Pasadena station, Henley first described a killing in self-defense. Kerley and Williams corroborated his account, and the detective questioning him believed it. Then investigators pointed to the thick plastic sheeting on the floor and to handcuffs, binding tape and other items found in the house. Henley explained that since the winter of 1971-72 he had taken part in abductions and later murders. He said David Brooks had been an active accomplice for even longer. Police were skeptical until he named three boys he and Brooks had procured: Cobble, Hilligiest and Jones. A call to Houston police headquarters showed all three had been reported missing from Houston Heights. Hilligiest had been gone since the summer of 1971, and the other two for just two weeks.

  Henley agreed to lead police to each burial site, beginning with the boat shed in Southwest Houston. Seventeen victims were recovered there on the 8th and the 9th of August. Many bore evidence of torture, and two carried identification cards naming them as brothers Donald and Jerry Waldrop.

  As the first bodies were unearthed, Jack Cato, a reporter for Houston's NBC affiliate KPRC-TV, overheard Henley begging investigators to let him phone his mother before she heard the news from the media. Cato offered the use of his mobile radio telephone. When Mary Henley answered, her son said, "It's Wayne." She replied, "Yes, this is Mama, baby." He then blurted: "Mama... I killed Dean." The conversation was filmed and broadcast nationwide on NBC Nightly News that evening.

  David Brooks arrived at police headquarters that same evening with his father. He said he had known Corll since 1967. At first he denied any part in the murders, though he admitted knowing that Corll had killed two teenagers at an apartment on Yorktown in late 1970. He said Corll had bought him the green 1969 Corvette in return for his silence.

  On the morning of the 9th of August, Henley gave a full written confession. He admitted taking part in approximately eleven abductions and personally killing several victims by strangulation or shooting. He said Brooks "was with us on most of them". He also stressed that after the first $200, Corll never paid him again. He told his mother he had confessed everything and urged her to "be happy for me, because now, at last, I can live". That afternoon he led police to Lake Sam Rayburn, where two more bodies lay in shallow, lime-soaked graves. Inside the lakeside log cabin owned by Corll's family, police found a second plywood torture board, plastic sheeting, shovels and a sack of lime.

  Brooks gave his own full confession on the morning of the 10th of August after conferring with his father. He admitted being present at several killings and helping with burials, but denied killing anyone. He said he "never actually killed anyone but was in the room when the murders occurred and was supposed to help if something went wrong". He estimated that Corll had killed between twenty-five and thirty boys. Two more bodies were found at the lake that day, and two at High Island Beach. Four further victims were located at the beach on the 13th of August, bringing the known total to 27. All were male and between thirteen and twenty years old.

  The count was later trimmed. Harris County Medical Examiner Joseph Alexander Jachimczyk testified that 17-year-old John Manning Sellars, killed by four rifle shots, "probably was not" a victim of Corll and his accomplices. All the other victims had been strangled or killed with the same .22 pistol Henley used on Corll. The official tally dropped to twenty-six in 1974. Neither Henley nor Brooks had led police to Sellars, whose grave a truck driver revealed on the 13th of August, more than two miles from the other five at High Island.

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• 7. Courtrooms

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  On the 13th of August 1973, a grand jury convened in Harris County. It heard Rhonda Williams and Timothy Kerley describe the night of the shooting, and officers recite the confessions and the trips to the burial sites. It also heard from William Ridinger, a youth abducted by Corll, Henley and Brooks in the summer of 1972, who described his abuse before Corll released him. After more than six hours of testimony, Henley was indicted the next day on three counts of murder and Brooks on one. By the 7th of September, Henley faced six counts and Brooks four. Prosecutors ruled on the 18th of September that Corll's death had been self-defense, so Henley was never charged for it. At an arraignment on the 8th of October, both pleaded not guilty, and Judge William Hatten ruled Henley's written confession admissible.

  Henley's trial opened on the 1st of July 1974 in San Antonio before Judge Preston Dial. He was charged with the murders of six teenage boys he had lured to Corll's apartment between March 1972 and July 1973. Carol Vance and Donald Lambright prosecuted, and William Gray and Edwin Pegelow defended. The state presented 96 pieces of evidence, including the confession, the plywood board and a wooden box used to transport bodies. Twenty-five witnesses testified. Detective David Mack Mullican recalled Henley telling him that strangling someone "was not as easy like they show on TV", adding: "When we killed Marty Jones, I had to get Dean to come and help me."

  On his lawyers' advice, Henley did not testify, and the defense called no witnesses. His attorneys raised objections on more than 300 occasions, and almost all were overruled. In closing arguments on the 15th of July, Vance apologized that he could not seek the death penalty. He called Henley "a monster who should be removed from society" and the case the "most extreme example of man's inhumanity to man I have ever seen." Pegelow did not dispute Henley's role. He stressed that Henley had ended the killing by shooting Corll, then volunteered what he knew and helped find the bodies when he could have stayed silent.

  The jury retired on the 16th of July and returned after 92 minutes. Henley was found guilty and sentenced to six consecutive 99-year terms. His lawyers appealed on the 25th of July, citing the denial of an evidentiary hearing, an unsequestered jury, the refusal to move the trial from San Antonio, and news media in the courtroom. The conviction was overturned on the 20th of December 1978. Henley was retried in Corpus Christi before Judge Noah Kennedy, again with Gray and Pegelow defending. On the 27th of June 1979 he was again convicted of six murders. This time he received six life terms to run concurrently.

  David Brooks went on trial before Judge William Hatten in Houston on the 27th of February 1975, charged only with the June 1973 murder of William Ray Lawrence. His lawyers, Jim Skelton and Elaine Brady, argued that he had killed no one and cast Corll, and to a lesser degree Henley, as the killers. Assistant District Attorney Tommy Dunn answered that Brooks had been in on the "murderous rampage" from the beginning. Dunn said Brooks described himself as "a cheerleader if nothing else". Lambright pointed out that, unlike Henley, Brooks had profited from the deaths through "gifts and gratuities" from Corll. Skelton argued the state had proved Brooks was an accessory to murder, "not murder". The jury deliberated for 90 minutes. On the 4th of March, Brooks was sentenced to life, and his appeal was dismissed in May 1979.

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• 8. Prison and Art

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  Henley first became eligible for parole on the 8th of July 1980 and was denied. He has been denied at every hearing since, most recently on the 7th of November 2025. He has said he does not expect to be released. He is held at the Telford Unit in Bowie County, Texas.

  Shortly after his conviction, Henley began to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which went undiagnosed at first. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he filled his days with prison jobs, often working from 5:30 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. In 2011 he said: "I try to keep myself busy and I try not to sleep much... I don't like dreaming about the old days." He gradually earned a reputation as a model inmate. He describes himself as a voracious reader who closely follows current events. He has granted many interviews but often declines to discuss his crimes in detail.

  By the late 1990s he had accepted that he would most likely never be freed. In 1997 he said: "Don't think I don't have my bad nights and think, 'God, if only I had it to do all over again', but I don't have that - I have today. I'm at a point where I can stand before God and say, 'Here I am' instead of hiding. Maybe this is where I'm supposed to be."

  In 1994, a Louisiana art dealer suggested that Henley try painting and craftwork, partly to earn income for himself and his mother. He has since devoted much of his free time to art, working mostly in acrylics and graphite, and he has also designed custom jewelry. His first exhibition opened at the Hyde Park Gallery in Neartown Houston in 1997 and drew outrage from some victims' relatives. In 1999, the city of Houston expressed interest in a monument to victims of violent crime. Henley said he would help pay for it with part of the proceeds from a second art show. Because he cannot clearly tell reds from greens, any people he paints appear in black and white, while his other works are usually in color. He refuses to paint violent or exploitative images. Many of his works show landscapes, buildings, flowers and surrealistic scenes.

  Filmmakers have returned to the case. Freak Out, loosely inspired by the Houston Mass Murders, was released in 2003. Brad Jones directed it and also played Corll, and it centers on Corll's last night. A second film, In a Madman's World, finished production in 2014 under director Josh Vargas. It follows Henley's life before, during and just after his involvement with Corll and Brooks. Limited edition copies were released in 2017.

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