and sit someplace. And Miz Henley and Miz Weed, they was real nice.”
In the early evenings of spring 1973, the visitors found that Dean Corll was likely to appear at the Henley residence; he would pull up in his white Ford van as though arriving from work and enter the house in his customary cloud of silence. “He’d never say nothin’ to the rest of us,” said Sheila Hines. “I first met him in June; we were sittin’ in Wayne’s and Dean come up in his van, and we all sat around rappin’, but Dean didn’t say nothin’, ya know? He just looked at everybody. He gave me weird vibrations because of the way he’d stare, just sittin’ back and starin’ while we all talked. He didn’t react to anythin’ that was goin’ on.I’d say ‘Hi’ to him, and he wouldn’t even answer. He was like the walkin’ dead in the movies. He was just-well-takin’ up space. The rest of us would get ready to boogie off, and Wayne and Dean and David’d get in the van and split somewhere else.”
One evening the neighborhood gang was assembled in Wayne’s living room when little Ronnie Henley shouted “Hey, Dean!” and snapped a flashbulb picture of the startled man. “Dean freaked out!” Johnny Reyna said. “You could tell when the picture was developed how freaked he was: his eyes was all bugged and weird. Later the kid tried to take another picture, but Dean squirmed all over the place. He hid his face; he held his hand up to where Ronnie couldn’t take it. I kind of wondered why he didn’t want his picture taken, but I didn’t ask nothing.”
The perceptive Bruce Pittman sensed undercurrents, but he had decided months before not to bother his troubled friend Henley about the relationship with Corll. “By this time I was pretty sure Dean was a homosexual,” Bruce said. “I mean, he didn’t have feminine actions or a feminine voice, but he was messing around with a couple of seventeen-year-old boys, always giving ’em money, takin’ ’em places. Why would a normal thirty-three-year-old man act like that? You never saw him with chicks. He’d sit in Wayne’s living room and look us over, and then he’d go into the bedroom with Wayne and come back out and stare some more. If Dean had anything to say, it was strictly at Wayne, not another soul. You might could get a ‘hello’ outa him, but that was the extent of it.”
Early on a humid afternoon, young Pittman and Wayne Henley mounted their ten-speed bikes and pedaled toward a nearby pool hall, and on the way Wayne called out, “Hey, Bruce, what would yew think about bein’ a professional assassin?”
“A what?” Bruce said.
“A hired killer, like for the Mafia or somethin’.”
Bruce glanced over at his friend, expecting to see a grin or a smirk, but Wayne looked serious.
“Man, that’s a silly question!” the preacher’s son said. “Man, that’s stupid! I could never kill anybody.” He studied Wayne again. The boy’s face was intense, as though he were deep in thought. Bruce put the incident down to “just dreaming, the way all of us do once in a while,” and the subject was dropped.
In June, somebody noticed that another regular playmate had stopped coming around, and for a time children like Johnny Reyna and Sheila Hines wondered what had happened. The absent boy was Billy Lawrence, fifteen years old, six feet tall and a football player at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. Billy and his father lived together on Thirty-first Street, across the Belt Freeway from the Henleys and the Hilligiests and the rest, and in a different school district. “Man, he hated that school!” a neighborhood boy exclaimed. “He’d always come down here and play with us, and all he could talk about was the niggers at Booker T. He got beat up by ’em one time, but he’d been down on ’em long before that. Every time we’d see him he’d talk about how bad they were, how much he hated ’em, and we got tired of hearin’ the same old broken
In the early evenings of spring 1973, the visitors found that Dean Corll was likely to appear at the Henley residence; he would pull up in his white Ford van as though arriving from work and enter the house in his customary cloud of silence. “He’d never say nothin’ to the rest of us,” said Sheila Hines. “I first met him in June; we were sittin’ in Wayne’s and Dean come up in his van, and we all sat around rappin’, but Dean didn’t say nothin’, ya know? He just looked at everybody. He gave me weird vibrations because of the way he’d stare, just sittin’ back and starin’ while we all talked. He didn’t react to anythin’ that was goin’ on.I’d say ‘Hi’ to him, and he wouldn’t even answer. He was like the walkin’ dead in the movies. He was just-well-takin’ up space. The rest of us would get ready to boogie off, and Wayne and Dean and David’d get in the van and split somewhere else.”
One evening the neighborhood gang was assembled in Wayne’s living room when little Ronnie Henley shouted “Hey, Dean!” and snapped a flashbulb picture of the startled man. “Dean freaked out!” Johnny Reyna said. “You could tell when the picture was developed how freaked he was: his eyes was all bugged and weird. Later the kid tried to take another picture, but Dean squirmed all over the place. He hid his face; he held his hand up to where Ronnie couldn’t take it. I kind of wondered why he didn’t want his picture taken, but I didn’t ask nothing.”
The perceptive Bruce Pittman sensed undercurrents, but he had decided months before not to bother his troubled friend Henley about the relationship with Corll. “By this time I was pretty sure Dean was a homosexual,” Bruce said. “I mean, he didn’t have feminine actions or a feminine voice, but he was messing around with a couple of seventeen-year-old boys, always giving ’em money, takin’ ’em places. Why would a normal thirty-three-year-old man act like that? You never saw him with chicks. He’d sit in Wayne’s living room and look us over, and then he’d go into the bedroom with Wayne and come back out and stare some more. If Dean had anything to say, it was strictly at Wayne, not another soul. You might could get a ‘hello’ outa him, but that was the extent of it.”
Early on a humid afternoon, young Pittman and Wayne Henley mounted their ten-speed bikes and pedaled toward a nearby pool hall, and on the way Wayne called out, “Hey, Bruce, what would yew think about bein’ a professional assassin?”
“A what?” Bruce said.
“A hired killer, like for the Mafia or somethin’.”
Bruce glanced over at his friend, expecting to see a grin or a smirk, but Wayne looked serious.
“Man, that’s a silly question!” the preacher’s son said. “Man, that’s stupid! I could never kill anybody.” He studied Wayne again. The boy’s face was intense, as though he were deep in thought. Bruce put the incident down to “just dreaming, the way all of us do once in a while,” and the subject was dropped.
In June, somebody noticed that another regular playmate had stopped coming around, and for a time children like Johnny Reyna and Sheila Hines wondered what had happened. The absent boy was Billy Lawrence, fifteen years old, six feet tall and a football player at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. Billy and his father lived together on Thirty-first Street, across the Belt Freeway from the Henleys and the Hilligiests and the rest, and in a different school district. “Man, he hated that school!” a neighborhood boy exclaimed. “He’d always come down here and play with us, and all he could talk about was the niggers at Booker T. He got beat up by ’em one time, but he’d been down on ’em long before that. Every time we’d see him he’d talk about how bad they were, how much he hated ’em, and we got tired of hearin’ the same old broken
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