Wayne said that he would and Dean untied him. But, chivalrous in his own way, Wayne was unable to rape his female friend. Enraged, Dean now began to wave a gun about.
A struggle ensued in which Wayne got hold of the pistol and Dean dared him to use it. The teenager obliged and fired six shots into Dean Corll who was dead before he hit the ground. The trembling seventeen-year-old freed the unconscious captives then called the police, saying in his singsong voice ‘Y’all better come right now. Ah kilt a man.’
Investigating, the police found the torture boards and various thin white tubes plus the often-used seventeen inch dildo. They also found that Dean’s van had been made into a mobile torture chamber, with manacles set in the walls and a box with airholes which had clearly been used to keep captives in.
Neighbours told the police that Dean Corll was a good man who regularly attended church. He’d pretended to them that he was a widower so they’d assumed that Wayne Henley was his son and that the younger boys who entered the house were his son’s friends. But Wayne was now able to tell the police that Dean liked little boys and that he’d procured them for him. Being economical with the truth, he added that Dean had told him during their gunfight that he’d killed a few other boys.
For several hours the police did nothing with this information, assuming that Wayne Henley was hallucinating after his paint-sniffing session, but a
policeman who had a young male relative missing – and who knew that other boys were missing – suggested they check out his tale.
The police asked Wayne if he knew where the burial sites were and he took them to the boat shed first and they began to dig up the floor, soon finding body after body. Each was neatly wrapped in plastic which Dean Corll had stolen from his workplace and some still had their hands tied or handcuffed behind their backs. One boy’s mouth was stretched wide open in a last desperate gasp for air as he’d been strangled, whilst others had rope still tied tightly around their necks. A few were so badly decomposed that they were merely disjointed bones and skulls, but a bike found in the shed belonged to a thirteen-year-old boy who had gone missing less than a week before.
Wayne Henley was close to a nervous breakdown as the bodies were brought out so the police treated him gently, letting him phone his mother and sit in the police car to compose himself. In turn, he said that he was grateful to them for not beating him up and he began to talk. For the first time he admitted his own part in some of the murders, saying that he’d helped Dean Corll to strangle one of the victims. He added that there were more bodies at another two burial sites.
That first day, the diggers found eight corpses in the boat shed. The following day they discovered several more. Almost all of the bodies were gagged and some contained bullet wounds whilst others had cord wrapped around their throats. Sometimes the genitalia – with telltale knife wounds or teeth marks showing the means of castration – was found in a separate bag. The smallest body was that of a nine-year-old, the oldest in their teens. At the
end of the day, the investigators had found another nine bodies, bringing the total to seventeen.
Wayne now led them to the second burial site, the Corll’s lakeside retreat. It yielded up another two decomposing bodies. Later, further bodies were found at the Angelina National Forest, making a total of
twenty-seven
. Wayne said that there were more, that the total was over thirty, but investigators gave up at this stage.
The teenager was glad that his co-killer was dead and was desperate to confess further details but he shook so badly in custody that he had to be tranquillised. When asked why he did it, he said that being shot at by his own father had been pivotal. He also hinted that Dean Corll had been blackmailing him. Corll might have threatened to tell the world that he’d had sex with Wayne knowing that Wayne was outwardly fiercely heterosexual. Indeed, the teenager kept emphasising to the detectives that he’d had a girlfriend.
He also said that Dean had failed to pay him for procuring most of the boys, which suggested that he had enjoyed killing them. He admitted that two or three had been so difficult to strangle that he’d had to ask Dean to help. David Brook would also confirm this view of Wayne as someone who wanted on some level to kill, saying that Wayne had enjoyed causing the victims pain.
The abducted boys had suffered horrendously. One teenager, after being repeatedly raped, had been forced to watch his friend being strangled to death by Wayne Henley. David Brooks tried to pacify the terrified survivor, upon which Wayne shot the boy in the face. A moment later he regained consciousness and pleaded for his freedom, whereupon Wayne strangled him to death.
When the other prisoners on remand heard of what Henley had done they wanted to kill him and he had to be moved to solitary confinement for his own safety. His lawyer described him as physically and mentally ill and said that the recreational drugs and alcohol which he’d used liberally had put him into a temporarily psychotic state.
David Brooks was interviewed at length and at first denied ever seeing any cruelty taking place at Dean’s house. But later he made a full statement and gave details of many of the tortures. He added that when it came to killing the boys ‘It didn’t bother me to see it. I saw it done many times. I just wouldn’t do it myself. And I never did do it myself.’
His father proved very supportive to him when he was in custody. The older man wept as he realised that his son had procured some of these boys, knowing the atrocities which awaited them – but said he was relieved that David hadn’t actually taken a life.
David Brooks was deeply involved in the deaths though, telling investigators how he’d seen boys tied to the bed and had helped carry their corpses to suitable burial sites.
Wayne Henley had initially told detectives that he’d ‘be about forty when he got out’ but in August 1974 he was sentenced to 594 years, a sentence that was later overturned due to legal irregularities. Tried again in June 1979, the alcoholic teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment. David Brooks also received a life sentence in March 1975 for killing one of the boys – and life in his case is liable to mean just that.
Meanwhile, Mary Corll continued to protest her dead son’s innocence, describing him as asexual rather than homosexual and suggesting that he just wanted to please
everyone all the time, that he didn’t have a sadistic bone in his body. She said that Dean was innocent and that Wayne and David wouldn’t have committed the killings if they’d gotten religion. But Dean and Wayne had both gone to church and had lured two of Dean’s victims from a religious rally, and sex offenders are more likely to come from restrictive religious households than from secular ones.
Wayne Elmer Henley – now in his late forties – is still in prison. He is eligible for parole consideration every three years but the authorities are considering changing this to every five years as he’s such an unlikely candidate for freedom.
Wayne told a curiosity-seeker who wrote to him that he found it easiest to isolate himself in prison rather than become intimate with anyone. He expresses himself creatively and has become a respected painter of flowers and landscapes. His Houston art shows have quickly sold out and he recently featured in a documentary about people who produce or collect serial killer art.
He has undoubtedly bettered himself in prison but – given that he contributed to the deaths of up to thirty boys – it is unlikely that he’ll ever be released.
DIANE ZAMORA & DAVID GRAHAM
The murder that teenage lovers Diane Zamora & David Graham committed must be one of the most senseless in American history. During a row with Diane, the inexperienced David pretended that he’d had sex with an attractive schoolmate. Diane became hysterical and said that the other woman must die…
Diane was born on 21st January 1977 to Gloria and Carlos Zamora in Fort Worth, Texas. Her father was an electrician and her mother a shop assistant. Her grandfather was a minister so the family went to church twice weekly and enrolled Diane in the choir and Bible study group. Luckily she also managed to do some of her schoolwork there as she was desperate to excel academically.
Diane joined the Girl Scouts and excelled there as well. She was a serious child who would start studying at six in the morning. By the time she was twelve her parents had produced three more children who she’d babysit at night. At twelve she joined the choir and sang along with her mother. The family were Hispanic so she learned numerous Biblical verses in Spanish and in English. She was pretty and petite but seemed old before her time.
By thirteen she’d joined the Civil Air Patrol. She hated all the marching and authoritarianism but stayed with it as she’d heard it was a good way to get into the Air Force. She was taking on an increasingly heavy academic and social workload, working as hard as her impoverished parents were.
With four children to feed, Gloria and Carlos Zamora had to work full time. Gloria decided to go to nursing college in order to better herself and also sold cosmetics to bring in extra money. They were commendable decisions but left her little time to spend with Diane whom a relative would later describe as ‘starved of love.’
Meanwhile Carlos Zamora had found a new love at church and started a torrid affair. He left Gloria and the children twice for his mistress. Worse, the extended family knew about his indiscretions. Gloria and fourteen-year-old Diane talked about the situation far into the night. Diane even confronted her father after finding him in bed with his mistress, telling him in no uncertain terms what a cad he was.
To make matters worse, Carlos lost his job and the family filed for bankruptcy and lost their home. They lost another home and would ultimately file for bankruptcy four times. Sometimes the electricity was cut off for
non-payment
and Diane would do her studying by candlelight. On other occasions they were evicted from their home and lived with Gloria’s dad. By now Diane had begun to
self-harm
, cutting her arms as a way of relieving emotional pressure. Outwardly however she was still the controlled teenager who was in the top ten percent of her class.
Gloria decided to confront Connie, the mistress, and took Diane along with her. The pair saw Connie’s car parked outside an apartment, entered and ransacked the place before realising that they were in the wrong house. By then, they’d unwittingly terrorised the apartment’s elderly bedridden occupant. They fled but not before taking several expensive items from Connie’s car.
Police involvement with the Zamoras continued after
Gloria made a series of phone-calls to Connie. The other woman filed for harassment. The next day Gloria
countersued
her husband’s mistress, claiming that Connie was the nuisance caller. Diane was learning at first-hand that a wronged wife should blame the other woman and take revenge.
To make matters worse, she originally hated her senior officer at the cadet programme, David Graham. He was secretly attracted to her but had no way of showing it as he was hopelessly awkward around girls. He shouted at Diane and criticised her marching, dress code and attitude. In turn she told other cadets that he was a pig.
David was born on 2nd November 1977. Like Diane, he was from a family of four but in his case he was the youngest. His father Jerry was a school principal whom author Peter Meyer (in an interesting book on the case) would describe as ‘passive and pleasant.’ His mother Janice was ‘the tightly wound mover and shaker of the family’, who stayed at home until her children moved into their teens. AW Gray, who wrote an equally gripping study of the cadet murder, noted that Janet was the family disciplinarian. David’s father was twenty years older than his mother, an age gap which – along with arguments about disciplining David – would eventually strain the partnership to breaking point.
The family’s life revolved around the Southern Baptist Church and they attended church every Wednesday and twice on a Sunday. David also attended a religious summer school and studied the Bible at night.
Janice (who would later train to be a teacher) taught
him at home for his first few years and many people described them as close, but he would later tell Diane that he came from a violent family and that his mother had stabbed him in the elbow with a fork for putting his elbows on the table. He’d also tell her that he developed into a violent boy who murdered the family dog. Whatever the real story, all of the Grahams were academically gifted and his siblings graduated with flying colours and got top jobs, one becoming a lawyer. David too did brilliantly in his early exams and was expected to go far.
When he was still a little boy his father took him to an airshow and he became obsessed with becoming a pilot. He made increasingly sophisticated and detailed drawings of planes for the next few years and was desperate to become old enough to take to the air. And he succeeded in his goal, signing up for the Civil Air Patrol at age thirteen and gaining his pilot’s licence by fourteen, a remarkable feat. Deferential and dedicated, he became one of their most decorated cadets. With his short hair, immaculately pressed clothes and insistence on calling everyone sir or ma’am he was an old-fashioned boy who was mocked by his school’s more streetwise kids.
The girls largely ignored him and the boys thought that he hated females, but he was just desperately shy in their company. By age sixteen he was making up stories about his sexual prowess, stories which no one believed. He also stole his father’s credit card and bought thousands of dollars of stereo equipment, perhaps in an effort to look adult to his peers or to cheer himself up.
By now he and his parents were having regular screaming matches where he was beginning to stand up for himself.
He was becoming a young man rather than a child and had grown to six-foot three. With his hazel brown eyes and neat appearance, he was reasonably attractive. But he was still nervous and awkward around females and must have inwardly despaired of ever finding a girl to love.
His luck was to change when he went on an exchange visit to Ottawa. There he was the highly decorated air cadet, rather than the geeky schoolboy who still went to church with his mother. He revelled in the attention of a Canadian girl and lost his virginity to her at the age of seventeen.
By the time he returned to the states his imagination had gone into overdrive and he suggested that he’d had sex with
two
girls and that they’d virtually performed the Kama Sutra on him. However, this loss of virginity does seem to have been genuine, and he wrote to the girl until the long-term romance reached a natural end.
Sadly, his parents’ marriage was also coming to a natural end and Janice Graham walked out one day leaving a note on the kitchen table, a note which David found when he came home from school. It said that she was leaving because David’s father refused to discipline him. There were rumours that she’d left because of David’s violence and other rumours that she wanted to start a new life. By now David’s father had resigned as school principal and had become a driving instructor so it was a time of change for the unhappy seventeen-year-old.
He began to flirt with Diane Zamora and, much to everyone’s surprise, she reciprocated. Soon they were going steady. It was against the rules for seniors to date juniors, but love has never been a respecter of rules.
Diane had seen her father leave her mother twice (albeit briefly) and David had seen his mother leave for good, so both teenagers were particularly motivated to make their own affair permanent. They began to spend all of their spare time together, forming a relationship that others thought suffocating but which was probably relatively normal for their age. First love is always an incredibly powerful state of mind – and before meeting David, Diane had only been on three dates.
Teenagers have an enormous influence on each other, and Zamora and Graham were no exception. He began to act more like a normal teenager, growing his hair longer and wearing T-shirts with anarchic logos. In turn, she became more disciplined at the cadet academy, deciding that the marching, canned foods and survival routines weren’t so bad.
The couple got engaged though they knew it would be five years until they could marry, choosing a date in August 2000 when they’d both have graduated. Diane now gave David her virginity. Her parents’ religion forbade this and afterwards she felt guilty and told her mother. But she convinced herself that everything was fine because David was
The One
.
The teenagers, who attended schools twelve miles apart, continued their intense affair but it also became increasingly violent. She hit him and he stabbed her in the knee. They bit and kicked each other and on another occasion he tried to strangle her with a belt. But they always made up after these terrible fights and were so
overprotective
that visiting relatives couldn’t get close.
Their own closeness deepened after Diane was driving
David’s car and had an accident where she almost lost her left hand. Surgeons worked tirelessly to save her fingers but three of them would never open properly again. Both Zamoras were devastated by the fact that they could have lost their beautiful daughter. Carlos, aware that she needed transport of her own, bought her a car.
The seventeen-year-olds’ troubled relationship continued. Diane was constantly asking David about his previous girlfriends and how much they’d meant to him. One day she thought that he was looking particularly troubled and asked him what was wrong. In truth, he was withdrawn because he was in serious trouble at his cadet patrol for dating Diane and for neglecting his duties. But, perhaps in a bid to feel popular or free to do as he chose, he told Diane that he’d given another student called Adrianne Jones a lift home from a track event in his station wagon and that they’d made love in the back seat.
Upon hearing this, Diane Zamora went berserk. She attacked him with a brass bar then began to batter her head off the walls, screaming hysterically for a full hour. She kept begging him to ‘kill her’ (meaning the other woman) and eventually he said yes. He was unwilling to admit that he’d invented the adulterous union – or perhaps he knew that the obsessively jealous Diane wouldn’t believe him if he now told the truth. The teenagers’ love hadn’t made them as happy as they’d hoped. How could it, when they had so many unresolved issues from their difficult childhoods? But now they could blame a third party and convince themselves that killing her would restore the purity of their love.
On 3rd December 1995 David put a rope, barbells and his pistol in a bag, phoned Adrianne and asked her to sneak out of her house to meet him after her parents had gone to bed. (Adrianne often sneaked out late to meet friends.) Shortly after midnight she did just that. They drove off together to the lake, Adrianne still in her gym wear as she’d earlier worked out with her mother. The luckless sixteen-year-old had no idea that he planned to kill her and that an equally vengeful Diane Zamora was in the trunk of the car. The plan was to break Adrianne’s neck then weigh her body down with the barbells and put it in the lake but David got lost and couldn’t find the water, so he parked in a quiet lane instead.
At the same time he signalled to Diane to leave the trunk and slide into the back seat. When she did, he grabbed Adrianne by the neck and she started screaming, asking what he was doing. Her neck was becoming bruised but it didn’t snap.
Diane now struck her rival on the back of the head with one of the weights and struck her again, shattering her skull and driving pieces of bone deep into her brain. Adrianne’s left hand was also smashed when she raised it to deflect another blow.
Somehow she managed to push herself backwards out of the car window, stumble away from her tormentors and climb over a barbed wire fence, collapsing on the other side of it.
David followed then ran back to Diane and said that she was dead – but Diane told him to play safe and shoot her. So David Graham went back with his pistol and shot the badly injured teenager twice in the face at close range.
Shortly afterwards, they noticed Adrianne’s blood all over the car. David became nauseous but Diane remained controlled enough to clean it up, then the trembling killers made their way to one of David’s friends and swore him to secrecy about their visit. They were blood-spattered and obviously upset as they hurried into the shower. The friend assumed they’d been in a motor accident and helped out as best he could. Now it was Diane’s turn to go to pieces, and she lay there in the friend’s bedroom, crying and shaking. Both teens expected to be arrested at any moment so for the next few days they were unnaturally quiet.
Police knew that Adrianne had talked to someone called David on the phone late the night she was killed so they asked David Graham for his alibi. He replied truthfully that he’d been with his fiancée, Diane. The police had also heard that Adrianne had been kind to a troubled young teenager who used to hang about the fast food outlet where she had an after-school job. After a couple of interviews, they battered down his parents’ door in the early hours of the morning and took him into custody. The innocent seventeen-year-old, who was on medication for a bi-polar condition, was sick twice on his way to the station and his parents were in shock.