The Scientist and the Serial Killer by Lise Olsen

The Scientist and the Serial Killer:

The Search for Houston's Lost Boys

by Lise Olsen

Random House 2025

Although he was the dark forerunner of famous serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, the murderous “Candyman” of Houston, Dean Corll, is largely unknown today except to Houston residents of a certain vintage or to true crime aficionados. From 1970 to 1973, Corll captured, raped, tortured, killed, and buried at least 30 young men and boys from the Houston Heights neighborhood of city and other areas. He committed a great many of these murders with the help of two young accomplishes, David Brooks and Wayne Henley, who'd lure in boys and work to soften the oddness of Corll, in his early 30s, wanting to party with teenage strangers. Scrawny little Henley graduated to helping Corll murder his victims (some of whom were Henley's friends) and ended up murdering Corll himself on August 8, 1973, in Corll's house in Pasadena, in order to stop Corll from torturing and killing his latest victims, two friends of Henley.

When they were arrested after Corll's death (Henley volunteered a confession, or it's likely that none of this would be known to anybody), the two accomplices helped police to find the bodies of their victims. Many were buried in the boat shed Corll rented, others were buried at Lake Sam Rayburn or under the sand at High Island. And when talking to the police, Henley made it clear that Corll was perfectly capable and even sometimes desperate to kill victims on his own and dispose of their bodies; Henley and Brooks couldn't identify all of the remains the police found, and it's entirely likely that Corll had victims only he knew about.

This touches on one of the most cruel and subtle long-term damages that so many serial killers inflict: the doubt, the gnawing, mostly unresolved doubt, the vacancy, the great void in a family's past. Did Dahmer have victims he didn't mention and science can't trace? Gacy almost certainly did. And in addition to the likelihood that Corll killed people without the involvement of his Renfields, he also inflicted that kind of long-term damage. For years, before the development and refinement of DNA testing, many of the remains of his victims were unidentified.

The quest to put names to old bones is both bleak and heroic, and it's the heart of journalist Lise Olsen's vital, impressive new book The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys. In these pages, Olsen profiles forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick and follows her from the moment she finds boxes of bones in an old evidence locker to all the intrepid efforts she makes to use modern forensic tools in order to learn the names of the Candyman's victims, primarily one nicknamed “Swimsuit Boy” because of the sad paraphernalia unearthed with his body.

Along the way, readers meet dozens of other people involved in one way or another with this kind of long justice, from Sgt. James Anderson, “a pleasant man with a ready laugh and a knack for navigating police politics and getting people to say more than they mean to” to Pat Paul, who mentions that the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office did not allow relatives to view decomposed bodies or skeletal remains except later, after mortuary reconstruction (warning those relatives, “Once you look, you can never unsee that”) to former Heights resident Bernie Milligan, who narrowly avoided being captured by Corll and his henchmen and is one of the many people in the book who raises similar ominous issues. “There was a hell of a lot of stuff going on in the Heights that I knew nothing about,” he tells Olsen. “People were protecting people.”

This note echoes something Henley and Brooks said about Corll: that he often alluded to being part of a ring, a dark association of pornographers extending far beyond Houston and heavily involved with the organized crime of Harris County. “Paper trails of documents, newspaper articles, and the tales of surviving victims,” Olsen writes, “suggest that other players linked to Corll's schemes continued to exploit and sexually assault teens for decades, and indeed retained a strong presence in the Heights.” One of these was a man named Roy Ames, “a known associate of Corll's” who “had subsequently been arrested with pornography that featured eleven of Corll's murder victims.” Houston police at the time lacked the resources (and the jurisdiction) to investigate this kind of shadowy organization, but, as Olsen asks, what about the FBI?

There's a little vindication when it comes to Swimsuit Boy, but surely quite a few readers will finish The Scientist and the Serial Killer with perhaps appropriately conflicting reactions. One the one hand, Olsen has crafted here a meticulous and utterly absorbing account of both the posthumous shadow of one of the worst serial killers in US history and one woman's valiant attempts to banish that shadow. But on the other hand, the book regularly raises a different, maybe more disturbing shadow, the possibility that Dean Corll himself took some very damning secrets with him to his early grave.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News