TX TX - Unidentified victims of Dean Corll, Houston Serial Killer, 1970-1973

[kline]

I read recently that the Harris county coroner still has at least three unidentified skeletons from the 'Houston Mass Murder' case of Houston serial killer Dean Corll.
This case has always facinated me .
I checked both the Doe network and the Charley Project and there doesnt seem to be any likely candidates listed.
How could three teen age boys disappear and no one report them missing after all these years?
Someone's sons have been in a body bag at the medical examiners office for over thirty years.Amazing.

 

[marysawol]

do you have any links to the unidentified victims in this case?

 

[Chloekins]

I read recently that the Harris county coroner still has at least three unidentified skeletons from the 'Houston Mass Murder' case of Houston serial killer Dean Corll.
This case has always facinated me .
I checked both the Doe network and the Charley Project and there doesnt seem to be any likely candidates listed.
How could three teen age boys disappear and no one report them missing after all these years?
Someone's sons have been in a body bag at the medical examiners office for over thirty years.Amazing.

There is a very high rate of teenage runaways that congregate in the Montrose/Heights area today. I dont know if it was the same situation in the 70s but I assume that it was. This could be why there are problems identifying these boys. They could be runaways from foster families or from abusive situations that never bothered to report them missing.

 

[kline]

Yeah,I guess thats definately a possibility.
From what Ive read the situation in the Heights was very simular in the early '70's .
It just seemed to me that as high profile as that case was in 1973 that anyone who had a missing child with any connection to Houston would have been on it immediatly.
From what I understand the coroner's office had made a gesture to Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. that if he could shed some light there would be no charges pending.
Apparently he's too busy (In true borderline sociopath fashion) playing the sensitive 'artiste' these days to feel any obligation to aid in the sordid business of indentifying a child he helped torture to death 30 years ago.
Not when he has more important things to do like paint another amaturish Seascape.
He declined through his attourney.

 

[loganone]

do you have any links to the unidentified victims in this case?

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1008umtx.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1009umtx.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1010umtx.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1009umtx.html

and is this a possible match for 1009umtx

http://charleyproject.org/cases/p/prater_norman.html

 

[Sugie]

What about these young men? They aren't from Texas, but do resemble the reconstructions. Do we know if these monsters strayed outside of Texas?

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/3dmil.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/576dmca.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/894dmca.html

 

[loganone]

What about these young men? They aren't from Texas, but do resemble the reconstructions. Do we know if these monsters strayed outside of Texas?

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/3dmil.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/576dmca.html
http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/894dmca.html

With what little I have read, it seemed like most victims were friends of Wayne Henley and David Brooks BUT that doesn't mean anything.

 

[Sugie]

Just breaks my heart that these three are yet to be identified. If they were from Texas, looks like someone would have identified them by now. I guess it is possible that they were kids of the street, with no one to care about them.....how terribly sad.

 

[marysawol]

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1008umtx.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1010umtx.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/1009umtx.html

and is this a possible match for 1009umtx

http://charleyproject.org/cases/p/prater_norman.html

I think Prater is a perfect match to 1008umtx!

 

[kline]

I think Prater is a likely candidate too,I know Dallas is a long ways from Houston but I also know that on a couple of occasions Corll had managed to postmark letters from Austin that he had forced a couple of victims to write to thier parents to try and make it appear they had got jobs out of state and simply left town in order to lay cover for himself.
So I think he's a distinct possibity.
Somebody else brought up Dermot Kelly on another thread I have real strong gut feeling about him.
I have to wonder if after he left his parents house (It doesnt say under what circumstances..a fight?)he possibly didnt eventually end up in Houston and perhaps he may have been a victim that Brooks and Corll picked up hitchhiking? Brooks mentioned such an incident in his statement to police.

 

[believe09]

I think Prater is a likely candidate too,I know Dallas is a long ways from Houston but I also know that on a couple of occasions Corll had managed to postmark letters from Austin that he had forced a couple of victims to write to thier parents to try and make it appear they had got jobs out of state and simply left town in order to lay cover for himself.
So I think he's a distinct possibity.
Somebody else brought up Dermot Kelly on another thread I have real strong gut feeling about him.
I have to wonder if after he left his parents house (It doesnt say under what circumstances..a fight?)he possibly didnt eventually end up in Houston and perhaps he may have been a victim that Brooks and Corll picked up hitchhiking? Brooks mentioned such an incident in his statement to police.

Kelly and Prater look spot on...amazing. Did anyone contact authorities? I have a missing cousin since 1978, and I can't believe what it might be like to put it to rest, how ever it ends up.

 

[loganone]

Kelly and Prater look spot on...amazing. Did anyone contact authorities? I have a missing cousin since 1978, and I can't believe what it might be like to put it to rest, how ever it ends up.

I have sent an email to Doenetwork.

 

[believe09]

I have sent an email to Doenetwork.

You are wonderful.

 

[kline]

Awesome.Sugie is working contacting Harris county as well.
Even if nothing comes of this at least somebody is trying to do something for these kids.I think it counts alot.

 

[cold case lady]

i have a great book on this case and it states that in all 27 bodies were recovered before the police gave up the search,but not all could be identified.A total of 42 young males had gone missing from the houston area since 1970.

 

[kline]

Ive never believed that 27 victims was Corll's total.
I think He had killed plenty way before he involved David Brooks and Wayne Henley.
David Brooks claims he stumbled in on Corll at one of his apartments and Corll had two boys shackled to his 'Torture Board'.
This was sometime in 69 or 70. He later bought Brooks a car to keep his mouth shut and admitted that he later killed the boys and they were "shipped off somewhere to California".
That indicates to me his M.O. and ritual was fully developed before he involved Henley and Brooks.
That takes trail and error and a number of victims usually.
Corll always maintained to Henley and Brooks that he belonged to an organization based out of Dallas that "Bought and sold boys."
Neither one of his accomplisses believed him and neither did Law Enforcement but who knows?
Speaking of L.E...it is absolutely shameful the half hearted way they investigated this case under Chief Short's administration.
They seem to have just wanted the case and the subsequent criticism to just go away.
Reading contemporary news quotes from Short and other Law Enforcement officials its obvious that they wrote off the victims as white trash little hippie creeps who got what they had coming and their parents as idiots who should have raised their kids better.
Its not surprising the officers in the field took their cue from their supervisors.
One would hope that todays Houston Police Dept. has a more enlightened attitude.
But to my original point,I still believe that Corll not only surpassed John Wayne Gacy in sheer savagery but in his body count as well.
One of the detectives still maintains that there are bodies in the boat shed Corll buried the majority of his victims in.
But they couldnt get any decent digging equipment from the city of Houston to thoroughly excavate it so they just stopped at Henley's estimation of how many were buried there.
In the months subsequent to his death,Corll had been bugging the lady who owned the boat storage business he rented from.
He told her he wanted to rent another unit because the one he had was full.

 

[cold case lady]

considering he was born in 1939,he could have started to kill from a very young age.LE could look back to the mid 40s and where he lived to see if there are any connections.Run aways are alot harder.These were the days when people didn't lock their houses and the world was generally thought to be much safer!

 

[cold case lady]

those doe network cases.Where the three boys found in the same spot on august 8?

 

[kline]

Since,August 8th was the day Henley shot Dean Corll and they started digging in the boat shed that afternoon,I would assume that,that's where they were found ,apparently among some of the last killed .
They also found that day James Stanton Dreymala 13,Corll's last victim,who Corll lured to his Pasadena home with the promise of pop bottles to return for the refund money,and Charles Cobble and Marty Ray Jones,two aquaintances of Wayne Henley.
I dont know who all else they found that first day.

 

[cold case lady]

brooks went to the police and volunteered a statement,when he heard about the shooting of corll by henley in the news.Brooks told police that he was one of the local boys that had been offered candy by corll,beginning in 1967 when he was 12.Three years later he moved in with corll,who paid him a few dollars for oral sex.