Excerpt
The Scientist and the Serial Killer
Chapter 1The Death of a KillerPasadena, Texas, August 8, 1973Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., woke with a jolt as cold steel clicked against his wrists.
He’d caught only three hours’ sleep, and now the first rays of dawn were creeping through patterned drapes that shrouded the living room windows. The seventeen-year-old lifted his shaggy head and locked eyes with Dean Corll, a man he revered as a mentor, now clamping handcuffs on him. “Hey, what are you doing?” he said.
Corll towered above him, sober and scowling. “You pissed me off by bringing that girl here,” Corll growled, his gray eyes never shifting from the teen’s frightened face.
Henley, who went by Wayne, dared glance only briefly at the people he’d brought to this sparsely furnished place to party, now hog-tied and handcuffed beside him on the stubbly shag carpet: fifteen-year-old Rhonda Williams and twenty-year-old Tim Kerley. Fighting a fog of intoxication, he didn’t remember being manhandled or tied up. The living room where he and his friends had passed out held only a few chairs clustered around a black-and-white TV, along with the beer bottles, paint cans, and detritus from their late-night revels.
“Wake up, bitch!” Corll said, kicking at the tiny young woman, half hidden in a veil of curly hair, who still slept despite the cuffs on her wrists and ropes around her ankles.
“You blew it,” Corll told Wayne. “I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
By the summer of 1973, Wayne had abandoned the crowded Houston Heights bungalow he shared with his mother, grandmother, and three younger brothers to live with Corll, a thirty-three-year-old electrician. Wayne had a key and came and went from this low-slung home along muddy Vince Bayou in the city of Pasadena, a mostly blue-collar suburb that hugged Houston’s industrial Ship Channel. He admired Corll, a clean-cut U.S. Army veteran who held a steady job and, at least to Wayne’s eyes, seemed so superior to his father and namesake, Elmer Wayne Henley, Sr., a laborer who often got drunk and beat Wayne’s mother, and had repeatedly fired a gun at him.
Now Wayne and his friends were locked inside the nightmare he had helped Corll create.
Rhonda and Tim immediately awoke, but neither could speak, since Corll had slapped duct tape across their mouths. He fixed them with his penetrating stare and grabbed a boxy transistor radio, placed it between their bodies, and cranked up the volume, blasting music from an AM station. Then Corll hoisted Wayne to his feet and pushed him, shirtless and sweating, into the cramped kitchen with its Formica dinette set. Still wasted from a long night of partying, Wayne stood no chance in a fight against Corll, who was stronger and well armed. Corll usually enjoyed hosting parties for teens and kept his house stocked with pills, paint, pot, and beer. The night before, he’d expected Wayne to bring over Tim. But he’d already fallen asleep by the time they went to pick up Rhonda, and had awoken furious to see a girl in his house.
Wedged up against dark stained cabinets where the others could not hear his humiliation, Wayne begged for forgiveness. “I’ll do anything you want me to if you take off the cuffs.”
Dean Corll brandished both a .22 revolver and a saber, a replica of one used by the Japanese military, with a curving eighteen-inch blade.
Wayne didn’t have to fake his fear: He groveled and made more promises. They were alone in the kitchen negotiating about thirty minutes before Corll relented. “I’m going to let you loose, but I’ll keep the gun and knife.”
When they returned to the living room together, Wayne, now free, watched Corll deadlift two-hundred-pound Tim Kerley and tote him, still tied up and handcuffed, down a narrow hallway and into a nearly empty spare bedroom. The floor inside had already been covered in a thick sheet of polyurethane and held a rectangular sheet of plywood. Corll dropped Tim with a thud, tying him facedown and spread-eagled to the board. Then Corll brandished his saber. “I’ll lop off your arm if you move,” he said.
Corll returned to the living room for Rhonda, now fully awake and terrified though groggy from the beer and pills Wayne had slipped her the night before. Corll hauled the petite fifteen-year-old to the spare room and laid her faceup beside Tim. He bound her with practiced precision, using braided ropes and more handcuffs, to the board. That handcrafted oddity was Corll’s own invention, a sheet of thick marine-grade plywood nearly the size of a twin bed with holes through which handcuffs could be fastened and ropes could be laced to immobilize any unlucky house guest. Some later called it the “torture board.”
Corll slashed at Tim’s clothes with the saber and stripped him. Then he handed Wayne the blade and ordered him to cut off Rhonda’s clothes as well.
Immobilized, Rhonda was dazed after snatches of drugged sleep, but recognized the danger she and Tim faced. Unable to speak with tape across her mouth, she used her eyes to plead with Wayne. The two had known each other since early childhood, and only recently begun to date. They had grown up together in a picturesque neighborhood called the Heights—a place she considered a “ten-speed society,” where kids walked or rode bikes everywhere and hung out on esplanades, parks, and ballfields. But inside that seemingly idyllic community, Rhonda inhabited a private hell: Her father regularly beat and bloodied her. So, whenever he began to drink heavily, she’d learned to sneak out of her two-story white house with its tall columns. That’s how she’d ended up at Corll’s place. She’d summoned Wayne for help and he’d scaled an exterior wall to reach her second-floor bedroom, climbed inside the window like a lover from a romance novel, and spirited her here. She did not want to believe her hero would betray her now.
Wayne leaned over Rhonda and whispered not to worry, yet Corll’s commands held sway. He didn’t question orders; he’d become “Dean’s little soldier.” With a few slashes of the saber, he cut away her blue jeans and panties, never breaking the skin. He tried not to watch as Corll fumbled with Tim beside them.
Tim was terrified. He’d watched Corll change from a quiet intelligent introvert into a glaring, tense madman. “It was like a man growling, taking a deep breath, expanding his eyes and going into this second personality,” he later explained. He was sure Corll planned to kill him, but tried to keep Corll talking.
Corll urged Wayne to go ahead and rape Rhonda. Instead, he stood. He paced. He dithered. He’d had sex with Rhonda before, but never like this. At least twice, he left the bedroom in search of acrylic paint from one of the cans still strewn throughout the house. He sprayed fumes into a brown paper sack, placed the bag full of intoxicants over his mouth and huffed, trying to numb himself. A paint thinner high came on quickly, though it didn’t last as long as expensive drugs and burned out more brain cells. Briefly, everything would go smooth, as if Wayne were only slipping through the world. By the last time Wayne returned from “bagging,” the fumes had done their work. He was stumbling and incoherent, yet he still knew exactly what Corll had planned.
Corll was hovering and poking at Tim, who kept squirming despite the ropes and cuffs that bound him. Trying not to look at them, Wayne politely requested Corll’s permission to remove the tape from Rhonda’s mouth, and his request was granted.
Wayne slumped down beside Rhonda in a stupor. With her mouth free, she begged for help. “Aren’t you going to do anything?” she asked, not caring if Corll heard.
Slowly, Wayne rose again. Instead of seeking another fix, this time he lurched toward the shiny .22 revolver Corll had abandoned on top of a dresser, the only furniture in this unwelcoming room. He grabbed the gun and pointed it at Corll.
“I’m not going to let you do this anymore,” he said. “I can’t have you kill all my friends.”
Corll immediately stood, towering six inches above Wayne’s scrawny five-foot-six frame. Tim, still strapped to the plywood, watched as the somewhat flabby thirty-three-year-old seemed to transform. “I saw him change into a different person. His body swelled up; his eyes got big. He was a completely different personality. I would call it demonic,” Tim would long remember.
Dean Corll raised his arms and charged, delivering another taunt: “Kill me, Wayne, kill me!”
Wayne did not hesitate. He raised the revolver and fired. His first shot struck Corll in the forehead, just above the left eyebrow. The second copper-nosed bullet caught the thick muscle of Corll’s left shoulder. Neither of these wounds by itself would have been fatal, and Corll kept moving as Wayne kept on shooting. The third bullet blasted through Corll’s thickened midsection, struck the liver, and lodged in the stomach, halting his advance.
Corll spun and staggered.
