Lullacide

Dean's family owned a candy factory in Houston, Texas. Dean was the friendliest man in the Heights neighborhood. He gave free candy to all the local boys. 'Have some more,' Dean would say with a big smile. The parents thought he was generous. He was, in a way. He was very generous with candy.

Corll's family ran a candy company. He became known as 'The Candy Man' for giving free sweets to local children and teenagers.

Dean made friends with two teenage boys named David and Wayne. He paid them money for every new friend they brought to his apartment. 'I'm having a party,' Dean would say. David and Wayne brought lots of new friends. The friends came in. The friends did not come out. David and Wayne kept collecting their money.

Corll recruited teenage accomplices David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley to lure victims to his apartment with promises of parties.

For three years, boys went missing in the Heights. Their families searched. The police shrugged. 'Runaways,' the police said. Twenty-eight boys, all runaways? In the same neighborhood? The police were not asking the right questions. They were not asking any questions at all.

At least 28 boys and young men were murdered. Police dismissed most disappearances as runaways, reflecting the era's indifference to missing youth.

One night, Wayne brought a friend to Dean's apartment without permission. Dean was furious. Wayne, who was only seventeen, decided he'd had enough. He picked up Dean's own gun and shot him. Then he called the police. 'I just killed a man,' Wayne said. 'Y'all better come see what's in the boat shed.'

Henley shot Corll on August 8, 1973, then called police. He led them to a boat storage shed containing multiple buried victims.

The police dug up the boat shed, then a beach, then a lake shore. Twenty-eight bodies. It was the worst mass murder in American history at that time. The Candy Man's factory was closed. The candy, it turned out, was never the point. But you already knew that.

The Houston Mass Murders were the worst case of serial murder in U.S. history at the time. Corll's death meant he was never tried. Brooks and Henley were convicted.