Dean Corll: the Candy Man, the boat shed and Houston’s lost boys

• Known as“The Candy Man”, after his family’s candy factory in the Houston Heights
• VictimsAt least 28 boys and young men, Houston and Pasadena, Texas, 1970–1973
• AccomplicesElmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, both teenagers
• Died8 August 1973, Pasadena, Texas, aged 33; shot by Henley
• TrialNone. Corll was never charged, tried or convicted
• HenleyConvicted of six murders, 1974; conviction reversed, convicted again 1979; six life terms; in prison
• BrooksConvicted of one murder, 1975; life imprisonment; died in custody, 28 May 2020
• Victims identifiedAll but one of the known victims, as of 2023

According to his accomplices’ confessions and the police and forensic investigation that followed, Dean Corll, a 33-year-old electrician who had once helped run his mother’s candy factory in the Houston Heights, abducted and killed at least 28 boys and young men in Houston and Pasadena, Texas, between 1970 and 1973, with the help of two teenage accomplices. The killings came to light only on 8 August 1973, when one of those accomplices, 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley, shot Corll dead at his house in Pasadena and called the police. Within days Henley and the second accomplice, David Owen Brooks, had led officers to three burial grounds, where 27 bodies were recovered. Because he was dead before anyone knew what he had done, Corll was never charged, tried or convicted of anything. Henley was convicted of six of the murders and is still in prison; Brooks was convicted of one and died in custody in 2020.

At the time it was described as the largest multiple-murder case in American history. What has kept it in view in Houston is less the number than the way the boys disappeared: most came from one small working-class district, many were friends or schoolmates, and when their parents reported them missing, police treated them as runaways. Half a century later the work of naming the dead is not finished. All but one of the known victims have now been identified, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, several of them only in the 2000s and 2010s, and the forensic anthropologist who led that effort believes the true toll was higher.

This account rests on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals opinions in the Henley and Brooks appeals, the Houston Chronicle’s retrospective of 2001 and a 2023 essay by the former Chronicle reporter Lise Olsen, Skip Hollandsworth’s 2011 Texas Monthly investigation, Associated Press reports from 2008 and 2020, and reporting by KTRK (ABC13), KPRC, CBS Austin, Houstonia, the Houston Press and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. Because Corll was never tried, what is known of his crimes comes from his accomplices’ statements, the remains themselves and the police and forensic investigation that followed. In line with this site’s rules, the people Corll killed, their families, the survivors and his own family are not named.

The candy man of the Heights

Corll was raised in Indiana and Tennessee and came to Texas with his mother as a teenager, according to Texas Monthly. In the 1960s his mother ran a small candy factory in the Heights, a working-class neighbourhood north-west of downtown Houston. It stood across the street from an elementary school, and Corll, who worked the production line, was known for handing out sweets to local children; hence the name by which he was later known. He served in the US Army; Texas Monthly reports that he left it in 1965 on a hardship discharge to help his mother with the business.

When his mother closed the factory and left Texas in the late 1960s, Corll stayed. He took a job as an electrician with Houston Lighting and Power and moved often between apartments and rented houses; the Chronicle counted ten addresses in Houston and Pasadena during the years of the killings. He had no criminal record, and neighbours later described him as quiet and polite.

Two teenage accomplices

David Brooks met Corll as a boy of about ten or eleven, around the sixth grade, by his own account in a statement read at his trial; the factory was near his school. By 1970 he was spending much of his time with Corll and sometimes lived with him. In that statement Brooks said he had walked into Corll’s apartment one day in late 1970 and found two boys tied to the bed, and that Corll first told him they were being sent to California and later admitted killing them.

Henley, a Heights boy who had dropped out of school, came into Corll’s circle later. In the written statement he gave on 8 August 1973, summarised in the 1978 appeals opinion, he said he was fourteen when he was introduced to Corll, who claimed to belong to an organisation that bought and sold teenage boys and offered him money to procure them. Henley said he was paid $200 for the first boy he brought. Brooks told police that it was he who had introduced Henley to Corll.

According to their confessions, the two teenagers lured boys, often acquaintances and sometimes friends, with the offer of a lift, beer or a party, and brought them to whichever apartment or rented house Corll was living in at the time. There the boys were restrained, sexually assaulted and killed by strangling or shooting. The bodies were wrapped in plastic and buried in three places: a rented stall in a boat-storage shed in south-west Houston, woods near Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas, and the beach at High Island on the Gulf coast. Some victims were made to write to their parents or call them first, saying they were safe and would be home soon.

Missing boys and the police

The disappearances began in December 1970 and went on for nearly three years. Texas Monthly found that at least twenty of the victims the medical examiner could identify came from the Heights or an adjoining neighbourhood, or were last seen there, and eleven had attended the same junior high school. Yet no one connected the cases.

Parents who went to the Houston Police Department were told, again and again, that their sons had probably run away. In that era missing-juvenile reports were divided among officers of the juvenile division, and, as Texas Monthly reconstructed from police files and interviews, officers told families that without clear evidence of foul play no search could be made. Jack Olsen’s 1974 book on the case, as summarised by Houstonia, blamed limited police resources and officers who sometimes declined to look for missing children. Lise Olsen, reviewing the old reports for a 2023 Chronicle essay, wrote that most of the boys had been reported missing by their families and that the disappearances went largely uninvestigated. One father whose two sons were later found in the boat shed complained to the Chronicle in 1973 that officers had only “poked around” when rumours of burials there reached them two years earlier; an officer on the case said he had learned of the shed only after Corll’s death.

8 August 1973

By the summer of 1973 Corll was living in a small house in Pasadena. Henley brought two friends there, a young man and a teenage girl. After a night of drinking and sniffing paint fumes, Henley said, the three woke up bound. Henley told police he talked Corll into untying him by promising to take part in killing the other two, then seized Corll’s pistol and shot him, and telephoned the Pasadena police. He said he had fired because Corll was going to kill all three of them.

Questioned about the restraints and plastic sheeting in the house, Henley told detectives that Corll had killed boys and buried them in a shed he rented. At the boat-storage stall, officers dug up eight bodies that first day and nine more the next. Henley, and then Brooks, who went to the Houston police on 9 August and gave statements of his own, took investigators to Lake Sam Rayburn, where four bodies were found, and to High Island. Within a week the remains of 27 boys and young men had been recovered, the youngest about 13. Reporters were allowed to speak to Henley at the shed, and a television crew filmed him calling his mother from a news car to tell her he had killed Corll.

Some victims were identified within days; by July 1974, according to the AP, 21 had been named.

A search called off

About a week after the first bodies were found, the digging stopped. Texas Monthly reported that the Chambers County sheriff halted the High Island search until he had definite information on further graves, and that a Houston homicide detective later recalled that Henley and Brooks had said there were more bodies, and that he had wanted to dig elsewhere but was told no. The Houston Press noted in 2009 that many people believed more remains would have been found had the police kept looking, and Olsen wrote that the district attorney’s office closed the case quickly although Corll’s accomplices said bodies had been missed.

Criticism of the police followed, from parents, local reporters and the foreign press. Houston’s police chief, Herman Short, rejected it. He told reporters, as Texas Monthly recounts, that the boys were runaways whose parents had not looked after them, and called the claims of links between the victims a media invention; the Chronicle quoted him calling the criticism a “disgusting attempt at scapegoating”. Running away, he pointed out, was not a crime. Olsen has argued that the stigma attached to Corll’s homosexuality also shaped the investigation: leads from gay men drew ridicule, and some families were reluctant to come forward.

The accomplices on trial

A Harris County grand jury indicted Henley for six of the murders. Neither accomplice faced the death penalty. Finding the pretrial publicity too great, the Harris County judge, William Hatten, moved the case on his own motion to San Antonio. There, on 15 July 1974, a jury convicted Henley of murder with malice in all six cases and gave him 99 years in each, to run consecutively.

On 20 December 1978 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the convictions. It held that the San Antonio judge had been wrong to refuse Henley a hearing on his request for a further change of venue, given the intensity of the coverage, and expressed concern that the jury had not been sequestered. Henley was retried in Corpus Christi in June 1979, convicted again of the six murders, and on 27 June sentenced to six life terms.

Brooks was tried in Houston for the murder of a 15-year-old boy whose body was found near Lake Sam Rayburn. In his written confession he admitted being present at most of the killings and helping to bury many of the victims, but said that Corll, and later Henley, did the killing. The jury was instructed that he could be convicted as a principal if he had aided or encouraged the murder. In March 1975 he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, and on 16 May 1979 the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction.

Parole and death

Henley became eligible for parole decades ago and has been refused it repeatedly; reports differ on whether eligibility began in 1980 or 1983. He was denied in 2015. According to KPRC, which cited the victims’ advocate Andy Kahan of Crime Stoppers of Houston, a request for compassionate release was turned down in 2022, and in November 2025 the parole board denied him again and set his next review ten years away. Now about 70, he has given interviews over the years in which he describes himself as having been manipulated by Corll.

Brooks spent the rest of his life in prison. He died on 28 May 2020, aged 65, in a prison hospital in Galveston. He had tested positive for the coronavirus, and a preliminary autopsy found that it had contributed to his death, the Associated Press reported.

Naming the dead

For decades the remains of three boys from the case lay unidentified in the refrigerated store of what is now the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. In 2006 the forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick, newly arrived at the office, found them and reopened the work, studying autopsy files and old missing-person reports and visiting Brooks in prison, where, Texas Monthly reported, he helped her place one of the boys. Relatives gave DNA samples in 2008, and the boy was identified. She also established that bones found on High Island in 1983 and filed as archaeological remains belonged to another boy killed in the case, raising the known number of victims to 28.

Olsen wrote in 2023 that about a third of the victims had remained unidentified into the 2000s and that seven had been named relatively recently. DNA testing also showed, Texas Monthly reported, that at least one boy had been misidentified in 1973 and that another family had buried remains that were not their son’s. As of 2023 one victim, recovered from the boat shed, remained unidentified; the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children released new reconstructions of his face and clothing that year, and his DNA has been in the national database since 2005.

How many people Corll killed is still not settled. Derrick has concluded that there were at least 30 victims, according to Olsen; some investigators have suggested as many as 40, and in 2021 the volunteer group Texas EquuSearch began a new search of the old sites, saying there could be up to 20 more. None of these higher figures has been confirmed by recovered remains.

Where the accounts differ

• The total: the AP (2020), KPRC, CBS Austin and the NCMEC say at least 28 victims; Olsen, citing Derrick, says at least 30; the Chronicle’s 2001 retrospective gives 26, and the bodies recovered in August 1973 numbered 27 according to the AP (2008), ABC13 and Texas Monthly.
• When Henley called the police: ABC13 says Henley called the Pasadena police on the morning of 8 August 1973; the Chronicle’s 2001 retrospective says the evening of 8 August, at 8:24 p.m., too late for that day’s paper.
• When digging began: the AP (2008) and ABC13 say eight bodies were dug up at the boat shed that same day and nine the next; the Chronicle (2001) says Henley led officers to the shed the next day, 9 August.
• Where the shed was: Texas Monthly, the AP and ABC13 place the boat shed in south-west Houston; CBS Austin’s 2021 report calls it the boat shed in Pasadena.
• How many victims came from the Heights: Texas Monthly says at least twenty of the identified victims were from the Heights or an adjoining neighbourhood, or last seen there; the Chronicle’s 2001 retrospective, recalling its 1973 reporting, says the neighbourhood had been home to nine.
• The victims’ ages: about 13 to 21, according to the AP (2008); 13 to 20 in Texas Monthly; the Chronicle (2001) says the bodies in the shed were aged 12 to 17.
• Henley’s first verdict: the appeals court records the guilty verdicts as returned on 15 July 1974; the Chronicle (2001) says he was convicted in August 1974.
• Henley’s sentence: Houstonia (2018) says he is serving six consecutive 99-year sentences, the punishment from his first trial, which was reversed; the AP (2008 and 2020) and CBS Austin say life, and the photo caption from the 1979 retrial records six life sentences.
• Brooks’s sentence: the appeals opinion, the Chronicle (2001) and the AP (2008) record one murder conviction and a life sentence; the AP’s 2020 report of his death and KPRC (2025) say he was serving six life sentences.
• The story Corll told his recruits: in Henley’s 1973 statement, as summarised in the appeals opinion, Corll said he belonged to a Dallas organisation that bought and sold boys; Texas Monthly says he told both teenagers the boys were going to a pornography ring in California, which is also what Brooks said in his statement at trial.
• Henley’s parole eligibility: since 1983, according to the AP (2020); since 1980, according to CBS Austin (2021).

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Corll smiling under a peaked cap with a badge, surrounded by sweets: lollipops, wrapped candies, candy canes and chocolates, a reference to the family candy business. A large roll lies at his shoulder, and medallions at the side hold a coil of rope and a pistol. In one corner is a map of the United States with Texas shaded and labelled; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figure 27+. The nameplate, framed by revolvers, reads “Dean Arnold Corll”, “The Candyman” and “1970 – 1973”, with a judge’s gavel beneath it and the words “Shot by accomplice”. For other case files, see John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Douglas Gretzler.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. The Lost BoysTexas Monthly (Skip Hollandsworth), April 2011
2. Henley’s slaying of Corll exposes murders of 26 boysHouston Chronicle, 29 July 2001
3. Henley v. State, 576 S.W.2d 66Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 20 December 1978 (Caselaw Access Project)
4. Brooks v. State, 580 S.W.2d 825Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, 16 May 1979 (Caselaw Access Project)
5. Elmer Wayne Henley, in 6/5/79 photo, was found guilty and given six life sentences (news photo caption)Bettmann / Getty Images, 27 June 1979
6. Mass killer’s victims unknown for 35 yearsCBS News / Associated Press, 9 June 2008
7. Former henchman of Houston killer Corll dies of COVID-19NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth / Associated Press, 11 June 2020
8. Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley: Houston’s most notorious serial killersKTRK ABC13, 7 August 2020
9. Why Houston’s ‘Candyman’ killings should still give you nightmaresHouston Chronicle (Lise Olsen, opinion), 19 August 2023
10. The Candy Man Who Wasn’t So Sweet After AllHoustonia (Timothy Malcolm), 26 November 2018
11. Houston 101: Summer of the Candy ManHouston Press (Richard Connelly), 22 October 2009
12. New search starts for Southeast Texas serial killer victims 48 years laterCBS Austin (KEYE), 11 August 2021
13. Candy Man victim: new clues in serial killer mysteryNational Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 7 August 2023
14. Accomplice of Houston’s infamous ‘Candy Man’ serial killer denied parole once againKPRC 2 (Robert Arnold), 7 November 2025

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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