Word: corll
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such fugures as Al Capone and Leopold and Loeb; it lives on in the person of one John Wayne Gacy. Newspapers thrive on images--especially the sensationalistic kind that can dislocate even a City of the Big Shoulders like Chicago. So when Gacy catapulted past Elmer Wayne Henley, Dean Corll and Juan Corona last month to become the most prolific accused mass murderer in modern history, the story was a big one for Chicago, the biggest since Mayor Daley died two Christmases...
Although the lurid details of the killings seemed to be well established, there were few clues about the psychological factors that led to the orgy of murder. Corll, who has been painted as the evil mastermind of the operation, was dead; it was his murder by Henley (who claims that he shot Corll in self-defense when the older man threatened to molest him sexually and kill him) that brought the multiple murders to light. Both Henley and Brooks, on the advice of their lawyers, have refused to speak to a psychiatrist appointed by the prosecutor...
Oddly enough, the murder of Dean Corll seems to have been touched off by an aversion to sex with women. Henley had brought 15-year-old Rhonda Williams to Corll's house. She was strapped to a board face up (a boy was manacled to the same board face down). Corll, according to Henley, "was mad because I brought the chick over there." That led to their fatal argument. Afterward Henley protested, "I didn't go to bed with that girl...
Nonetheless, the 65 murderers and multiple murderers recently analyzed by Frazier did have some traits in common. They did not "know how to be men" because many had grown up in fatherless homes or suffered "repeated brutalization by a father who was inconsistent or unpredictably violent." Corll, Henley and Brooks all came from broken homes. Mrs. Mary Henley told reporters that Wayne, her eldest son, dropped out of high school in 1970 because his father (now divorced from Mrs. Henley) had beaten him and shot...
...also contends that they seem "normal" until that "moment when the brakes go"-when the right combination of chemical, physical, psychic and social factors sends them out of control. "In a serial crime like Houston," Ziporyn says, "it's probably safe to say that after the first murder Corll saw it was easy to kill, and the rest of his victims were not people to him, they were like dolls...