Houston, We Have a Serial Killer Problem

American Psychogeography X: KPFT vs KKK, NASA and the Candy Man Killer

Only one radio station transmitter has ever been bombed in the United States. That station was in Houston, and that station was KPFT, bombed just two months after going on the air by the Ku Klux Klan. KPFT was the fourth station in the Pacifica network, a group of listener supported community radio stations run as a grassroots non-profit organization. The network had become an essential mouthpiece for the political left in the United States starting with the original flagship station KPFA in Berkeley, California and later expanding to include stations like WBAI in New York. Along with presenting news and views from the center left to the far left, and material well outside the mainstream, radio shows on the Pacifica network had long championed experimental music and alternative culture in the arts through their programming. The fact that the network had been founded by pacifists and conscientious objectors E. John Lewis and Lewis Hill probably didn’t win the new Houston affiliate any friends with members of the KKK.

The fact that Larry Lee of the Associated Press and his fellow journalist Don Gardner from the Houston Post had grown tired and became disenchanted with the way the media in the city routinely ignored the cities simmering racial issues meant they had a built-in enemy with the KKK.

The fact was that KPFT wanted to get real, get down to earth, and talk about real things that were happening to real people. In 1970 the media was obsessed with the upcoming Apollo 13 mission. The local media in Houston was particularly focused on what was going on with NASA, the aerospace industry, and the brave astronauts who would be making another attempt at landing on the moon.

The astronauts were real of course, but they weren’t down to earth. The space program was leaving its mark on the world and American psyche with its mythos of courageous exploration. It was also leaving its physical mark on the planet in terms of the amounts of resources consumed, and changes to the landscape where they parked their infrastructure.
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In 1961 NASA had opened the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It was an event that ushered in another wave of wealth, professionals, managers and bosses into the city. This time, instead of oil executives, it was electrical engineers, rocket scientists, and astronauts who ruled the roost. The first moon landing had been a massive success. That one small step had stoked the fires of belief in technology and progress. True believers became hyper focused on continuing these missions that were going to allow humanity to seek out bold new worlds and turn America into a space faring civilization. Plenty of poor working people, minorities and average citizens felt differently. The federal government was spending huge amounts of money to send people into outer space, while others were suffering, hungry, looking for work, trying to make ends meet in blighted neighborhoods where the scent of urban decay had already permeated the air.

​That was partly why KPFT had wanted to focus on what was happening down on earth, on the planet. They took to the airwaves on March 1st, 1970 with the Beatles anthem of positivity, “Here Comes the Sun.” No sun, no life on earth. One of their shows was a 90-minute evening news show called Life On Earth. Whatever was going on with Apollo 13 wasn’t as pressing as what was going on with the drafted soldiers sent straight from high school to the killing fields in Vietnam. It wasn’t as important as the intense segregation at work in city neighborhoods and the efforts to desegregate school. Plenty of other issues were affecting everyday people. Sending more people back to the moon seemed frivolous when so many challenges, predicaments and problems were reaching boiling points on earth.

After the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Gil Scott Heron was wondering what the point of it all was. He was a poet, jazz musician, and writer. Expressing his experience as an African American, there didn’t seem much point. He wrote a poem in response to the landing called “Whitey on the Moon” and it also came out as recording where his recitation was accompanied by conga drums in 1970 on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. He laid down his lament with the following words:
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“The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up|
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just ‘bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon”

​As the price of living has gone up all across the board, poor and lower middle-class whites were wonder why so much effort was being expended to put whitey back on the moon. In the year of this writing, many were singing Heron’s song again after the recent Artemis mission. In the 1970s people were tired of getting moondoggled.

While some people were having the experience of getting bit by rats without recourse to being able to pay for a doctor, the Clear Lake was being transformed into yet another suburb in the Greater Houston conurbation. This was the home of the Space Center. With NASA in the loop other aerospace agencies, public and private, started flocking to the area, helping to diversify the economy, helping to create not just a massive highway system, but setting sight for the stars in the bid to eventually suburbs full of happy, well-adjusted nuclear families on the moon.

It wasn’t enough to have suburbs spread far and wide around the city, destroying critical wetlands, bulldozing essential forest, marring the stark beauty of the deserts with prefabricated visions of prefabricated happiness. Now America had to colonize space and put up orbital suburbs, suburbs on the moon, suburbs on mars, create new destinations for middle class vacations.

Just as the engines of war have often been the engines pushing for technological innovation, so too are the phallically focused rocket boys. In their desire for deep penetration of the womb of space, the enablers of the astronaut cowboy had to create all kinds of advanced prophylactics to protect them from the dangers of leaving earth. Along the way, some of that innovation did trickle down into the lives of the people in the form of memory foam and infrared thermometers.

KPFT was a critical voice in the earth centered conversation. What was happening to those left behind in the march towards progress was important to the people operating the station. Almost two and a half months after they went on the air on May 12, 1970, the stations transmitter was bombed by the KKK. They went off the air for three weeks before it got repaired and they could resume broadcasting. About five months later on October 6th, the stations transmitter was bombed again in the middle of airing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” the singers satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft. This time around the damage to the station was much more extensive and KPFT was off the air for three months. When the station started broadcasting again on January 21st, 1971, Arlo Guthrie was in the studio and played his song live to commence transmissions.

The FBI didn’t do much of anything to investigate the bombing. Ditto the local police. In lieu of criminal investigators investigating crimes, Pacifica launched a media campaign to draw attention to the unsolved case. This led to the arrest of Ku Klux Klan member Jimmy Dale Hutton who was also plotting to blow up KPFA and KPFK. He was convicted in 1971, but his wasn’t the only madness swirling through the streets of Houston. Teenage boys and young men had started to go missing, but there was no coordinated investigation as to where they had gone. According to the police, they were probably just runaways, and in Texas, there was no law against running away. Only when the bodies were dug up did they have to admit a killer had been on the loose, and his prey had been young males primarily from the Houston Heights suburb which had fallen into squalor and blight.
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Houston had a serial killer problem and he went by the name Dean Corll. After his killings came to light, he was sometimes called the Candy Man. Corll worked in the family business, the Corll Candy Company started by his mom, and his talent for grooming young boys as a sexual predator started with his habit of standing outside his families candy factory, which happened to be right across the street from Helms Elementary School in Houston Heights, and give the sugary sweets away to kids. He was fond of offering kids candy, especially the boys. Corll had fitted out a room in the back of the factory with a pool table and he invited over teenage boys to play and listen to music. Corll liked cars and he had a Ford Econoline Van and Plymouth GTX muscle car. He would offer to take kids for rides in his vehicles, sometimes offering to take them to one of the beaches in the area.

The Candy Man posing with a kids plush toy and evil grin

​One of the kids Corll befriended was a bespectacled outsider named David Owen Brooks. He wore his hair long and wasn’t given much time of day by either of his divorced parents. His mother sent him to live with his father in the Houston Heights neighborhood. At the time Brooks was a twelve year old in the sixth grade at Helms and he was one of the people Corll gave the special praline candy. Brooks was lonely and liked the attention Corll had given him, playing pool and listening to music with him and other kids in the back room, and going on trips to the beach. Corll further groomed Brooks by giving him pocket money.

Heights and 9th street about a decade before Corll began his murder spree.

​Corll would have been around 28 when all this was happening, and two years later, when he was turning thirty, and Brooks, 14, he initiated a sexual relationship. Corll offered Brooks gifts and money in return for allowing him to give fellatio to the teenager. He soon became aware that he was just one of many teenagers who Corll paid to do oral sex.

Sometime in November of 1970, Brooks came unannounced to one of Corll’s apartments at 3300 Yorktown, just a five minute drive from the Galleria mall in normal traffic. Brooks probably wasn’t surprised to find him with naked teenagers, but he was surprised to find them strapped down to a board. Corll urged him to keep quiet. If he kept quiet, Corll would give him a big present for his sixteenth birthday coming up in February of 1971. He promised to give him a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette V8 muscle car, a promise he followed through on, and Brooks kept quiet about the assault he had seen. After the boys disappeared Corll concocted a story that he’d been paid to send the two boys to California to be photographed for a porno rag.

Later Corll admitted to Brooks that he hadn’t sold them off to child pornographers, but had actually murdered them after he was done with the rape and the torture. Knowing that Brooks was left to his own devices for the most part by his father, that he frequently had little money, he decided to offer Brooks $200 for any boy he could lure to his apartment, with the caveat that they should be kids whose families wouldn’t miss them. The down and out in Houston Heights were thus targeted, and Brooks became the older man’s accomplice in a murder spree that lasted until 1973.

The Heights had gone downhill following World War II. The writer James Conway described the area as being in 1976 a “seedy, lower-middle-class enclave with horizons limited to once-fashionable homes divided into low-rent apartments, and guarded by pickups on concrete blocks.”

It wasn’t all bad, as many of the inhabitants were just working and lower middle-class. They went to church, they tried to do right, and in the norm of the time, kids were often on their own out playing in the neighborhood, riding their bikes, running around being kids.

Those kids started going missing. In the early seventies Corll had an advantage over the teenagers and young men he brutalized. Runaways weren’t treated as missing people in Texas. Parents looking for children had no recourse, except to private investigators and their own searches. Ruanaways existed in a kind of legal gray zone and limbo. It wasn’t a crime to be a runaway in the state, and so police had little incentive to look for children. When parents reported their kids missing, instead of thinking they actually were missing, most of the time the police wrote them off as runaways. There were approximately 5,000 to 6,000 runaways a year during the time of Corll’s murders in Texas. Distraught parents felt abandoned by the police, by the federal government, and others who were supposed to have the interests of children at heart. In turn, police and government often felt that it was a family problem. And while Corll had certainly murdered some hitchhikers and runaways, many of the kids he plucked off the street were normal teens doing normal teenage things, going to the pool, hanging out, trying to sneak a beer or a joint, and got lured in with the promises of getting stoned, free booze and a place to party.

It’s hard not to wonder if the police might have looked harder if the alert to a pattern of missing kids and runaways had come from a more affluent place, such as the suburb of Clear Lake where many parents had jobs related to the space program.
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Brooks, for his part, didn’t participate in the torture and rape of the victims, or their killing. He had money, and above him a psychopath who had been subtly swaying him since their first encounter. He had been prey himself to this man, and through that manipulation had transformed into his willing accomplice. He wasn’t pulling the trigger or doing the stabbing, but he was actively luring people around his own age to their deaths.
Corll and Brooks soon picked up a third player in these sadistic activities starting in October, 1971. His name was Elmer Wayne Henley, a child of an alcoholic mother who couldn’t make ends meet. He skipped school with Brooks one day and wondered how Brooks had so much cash to run around with, when he didn’t even seem to work. Hunley worked at a gas station, and did other odd jobs. He tried to do what he could for his household because his mom couldn’t. He didn’t have running money, especially not after he gave what he had to his mom so they could eat, make rent, and her probably keeping some aside for her next bottle. Brooks introduced Henley to Corll and they all started partying together, though Henley wasn’t keen on Corll being gay, which was obvious to him. Hunley started to suspect that Brooks was getting his money from being a hustler.

Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks

​Yet Henley wanted to make more money, and he didn’t want to peddle his ass. Brooks had told him the lie that he and Corll were involved in robberies and organized theft, with initial plans to make Henley a victim. Yet the situation started to unravel, and they realized they somehow had to get him to think he was helping out on a crime job, only to kill him. Henley started hanging around in the hope of a pay off from participating in a robbery.

One day Corll and Henley were sitting in a car together at the corner of Eleventh and Heights Boulevard when the killer made a chilling remark. “You know, it’s too bad there’s not a market in people, they’re everywhere.”
He later modified his story that he Brooks were robbers, and told Henley that he was actually involved in a white slavery ring operating out of Dallas. Just like Brook’s he offered Henley $200 dollars a pop per young male. The possibility that Corll actually was involved in human trafficking outside of being a serial killer was breached by researcher Jacqueline Bynon in her two-part podcast The Candyman and the Clown.

Henley started luring young boys and teenagers into Corll’s Econoline Van or his Plymouth GTX. Where Brooks would often leave the room when the murders took place, Henley gradually started participating in the torture of the victims. Yet it all spiraled out of control, and after one last party, when Henley made the mistake of bringing a girl with him, his friend Rhonda Louise Williams, the killer threatened to kill his accomplice for having “ruined everything” by bringing a female.

To try and get out of this situation, as he and Williams begged for their lives, Henley said he would help him kill his friend. She begged him not to, and in a moment of mercy and conscience, he was able to grab Corll’s gun and shoot him.

Henley yelled “You’ve gone far enough, Dean! I can’t go on any longer ... I can’t have you kill all my friends!” The first shot hit Corll in the head, the next two in the shoulder, and the final three in his lower back and shoulder as Corll attempted to flee while he coughed up blood, tripping on the wire from a rotary telephone.

The Candy Man was dead. It was August 8th, 1973, four years to the date after the Tate and LaBianca murders had been committed by members of the Manson family.

Henley called the police, and the process of confession began. Brooks was brought in, and the pair started telling the authorities where all the bodies of the missing kids were buried. At least 28 had been murdered, and many of them had were in the ground and covered in lime at a rented boat shed in Southwest Houston. Others were at a beach on the Bolivar peninsula, at a beach in Jefferson County, and in the woodlands near a lake where the killer’s family owned a cabin.

In the aftermath of the murders suspicion fell on a possible connection between a man named John David Norman and the Candy Man. Norman would go on to accrue multiple convictions for pedophilia, child pornography and sex trafficking between 1960 and 1998. It is as sickening to think of how often he was able to get out of jail or trouble and have the chance to re-offend again across the course of his long sick life. The FBI had been tipped off about Norman a few days after Corll and had been killed and the news that a serial killer had full reign in a Houston neighborhood was hitting the media and a disgusted and sorrowful public. The tip had come in from 21-year-old Charles Brisendine, who was urged to do so by journalist Rob Shivers who worked as the Dallas correspondent for pioneering gay magazine The Advocate.

Brisendine had initially come to Dallas at the invitation of Norman’s group The Odyssey Foundation. They were operating under the cover story of being a support group for gay men. Membership in the group involved “fellows” and “sponsors.” Members would be solicited through gay magazines, small publications Norman put together himsefl, and other more direct means. The “fellows” were young men whose picture would be taken to put into pamphlets for the perusal of the “sponsors” who could then request one of the “fellows” to take home or to a hotel for a period of time before going transferred on to the next sponsor. These sponsors were willing to pay large sums of money for the service of the fellows. They were often wealthy enough to fly minors out of one state and into another.

The Odyssey Foundation made a practice of targeting male youths at Greyhound Stations. The Trailway station bus stop in Dallas was known as a hangout for runaway teens. Since there were so many runaways in the state, and since they weren’t considered missing from their families by police, it meant there was a steady supply of kids to groom. Many were already down on their luck, leaving homes where physical, sexual and verbal abuse was the norm.

When Brisendine came into Dallas, he was picked up by a sponsor who just happened to be the man who was organizing it all in the first place, John David Norman going under the unlikely alias of Alan Hitchcock. He went home with Norman and they had a one-night fling. Brisendine got creepy feelings from his sponsor pretty quick and started thinking that Norman was preying on the vulnerable to push them into prostitution. Somehow he managed to find and look through Norman’s files of the people he was pushing through the Odyssey Foundation. Several had been marked by Norman as missing persons. It chilled him when he saw the word “kill” stamped on the files of other young men.

Brisendine started to wonder if Norman was connected to the what had just hit the news that week in Houston and around the country: the Candy Man killer. The FBI and Shivers were of the opinion that the “kill” stamp Brisendine had seen on the files meant the files themselves were to be thrown in the trash, not that the fellow was someone they were going to kill. That opinion didn’t stop Dallas police from raiding Norman’s apartment to see if there was an actual connection.

Dallas police proceeded to seize voluminous booklets that had photographs and contact info for teenagers and young men. Norman also had 30,000 index cards that listed between between 50,000 and 100,000 clients across the United States.

Lt. Harold Hancock of the Dallas PD, later told the Chicago Tribune in May 1977 that many federal employees and many public bigwigs were in Norman’s list. They sent the cards to the U.S. State Department. This was confirmed by State Department Counselor Matthew Nimetz. Nimetz who also said the State Department destroyed this massive contact list. They had been looking for proof about trafficking people across borders but didn’t find “any fraud involving a passport.” The federal government clearly didn’t like what was on those index cards. It makes a person wonder just how main oil executives and NASA employees and other titans of Texas industry might have been on them, along with the names of other government sickos and their lackeys.
Norman got off easy. He was charged with marijuana possession, conspiracy to commit sodomy, and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. He was released on bail and told to stay in the state, but he skipped out and went to the Homewood, Illinois suburb of Chicago where he remained during the same time as the John Wayne Gacy murders were taking place.
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In the Candyman and the Clown, Bynon focuses on the connection of serial killer John Wayne Gayce to child pornographer Phillip Ronald Paske. Gayce had employed Paske briefly in his construction company. In the mid-1970s Paske was also the closest person on the inside to convicted sex trafficker John David Norman and his pedophilia operation. Dean Corll made numerous references to white slavery, a market for people, and selling kids to pornographers.

Two years after the end to killings and the confessions of Brooks and Hunley the Houston Police Department found a large stash of pornographic pictures and films. Some of the boys were as young as eight years old. It was confirmed that many of these victims were from the Houston Heights neighborhood. Eleven of those appeared to have been known and identified victims of the Candy Man.

This raised again the question of whether or not Corll actually had been involved in human trafficking. The material did lead to the arrest of five people in Santa Clara, California. Corll had told Brooks he was going to send the two teenagers he had initially discovered him with to California to be photographed. Another person who was uncovered by the discovery was Roy Ames. He owned the warehouse where the material had been found. The police had previously found the name Roy Ames on a card in Corll’s wallet. Yet nothing specific could be proved, and the police dropped pursuing a direct link to the murderers. They felt that the families of his victims had suffered enough, and this is certainly true. Yet truth is often inconvenient, and the fact that those links were not pursued in an official investigation is itself suspicious when the crimes themselves were so despicable and treacherous.
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Deep in the heart of Texas.