Lise Olsen: The Scientist and the Serial Killer

Dean Corll was a serial killer in Houston in the early 1970s. He kidnapped and murdered more than two dozen missing teenage boys before he was murdered by one of his accomplices. Decades later, a forensic anthropologist discovered a box of remains from the case. She spent years using scientific tools to identify some of the unknown victims. Journalist Lise Olsen tells me the story at the center of her book: The Scientist and the Serial Killer. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
And I would argue that some of these secrets that
I'm revealing right now in this book are things that
people just didn't know about the case, the reasons why
it still was important, why in some ways, Dean Coral
should be even more famous sin John Wayne Gacy because
there were all these other things going on around his murders.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, fomakers,

(01:00):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Dean Coral was a serial
killer in Houston in the early nineteen seventies. He kidnapped

(01:21):
and murdered more than two dozen missing teenage boys before
he was murdered by one of his accomplices. Decades later,
a forensic anthropologist discovered a box of remains from the case.
She spent years using scientific tools to identify some of
the unknown victims. Journalist Lisa Olsen tells me the story

(01:42):
at the center of her book, The Scientist and the
Serial Killer. I have heard of the story of Dean before,
and you know, this is an awful story that I
know has lived, I guess in infamy in Texas. There
are quite a few people who had never heard of
it outside of the state. You have a different focus

(02:03):
for this book that I think is fascinating because I
am absolutely fascinated with the work of forensic anthropologists, and
I don't know enough about them. So this is what
I'm counting on for you, is to tell me exactly
what that is and how it relates to this case.
So when you tell people at a dinner party, I've
written this amazing book and they say, what's it about.

(02:25):
What is your three paragraph pitch to them? What do
you say it is about?

Speaker 2 (02:30):
This book is about what was an infamous murder case
in the early seventies in Texas involving a man named
Dean Coral, who was around here called the candy Man,
who was linked after his murder, to the disappearance of
more than two dozen young boys and young men in
the Houston area, all of whom, with the exception of

(02:52):
one or two, had been assumed to be not victims
of any crime, but simply runaways. Their parents and their
siblings and their friends were looking for them, but the
police were not. So there was this discovery that generated
national news. The Vatican, the Zvestia, the Russian Empire issued
press releases condemning the Houston police for failing to notice

(03:15):
how many young men had disappeared, because they found them
their bones in these mass graves that were discovered only
because the person who killed Dean Coral, who was one
of his accomplices, led them to the burial grounds. And
what I say about what my book is about is
about what you never knew about that case. There was
a lot that wasn't known because Coral was killed, he

(03:38):
never lived to tell his story, and a third of
his victims were not identified for decades. And so my
story starts with a woman who comes to the Morgue
in the mid two thousands as a forensic anthropologist. Her
name is doctor Sharon Derek. She discovers these boxes of
bones of unidentified teenagers, and she is completely floored because

(04:02):
this is a case she heard growing up in Texas.
This was a case that gave Texas teenagers nightmares about
being kidnapped, about being disappeared, about being sexually assaulted and tortured.
This was all of that, and she's just as pulled
and shocked that there are so many boxes of bones
of unidentified people who are approximately her age, boys and

(04:22):
young mens who grew up in the same neighborhood where
her grandparents lived, where her cousins grew up. And so
she sets out on this journey to try to use
modern forensic apology techniques to identify who they are. And
in the course of that work, which does generate news
at the time when she makes these discovery, she on
earth's deeper truths about these cases that were never made

(04:46):
public in the seventies and I think are still really
important today, things like the fact that some of these
boys were victims of what we would call today a
sex trafficking ring, with some of those images had been
sold to a worldwide network of pedophile and the fact
that many of these boys really had been reported missing

(05:06):
partly because their families were you know, didn't have the
same kind of power as other families. Maybe they were
led by single women, their parents didn't get the same attention,
and so they were never identified even though they probably
should have been at the time. You know, there was,
of course a stigma to these crimes that persists today
in that young men who are victims of sexual assault,

(05:28):
even today, if you look at research by the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, still don't feel empowered
to talk about when they are assaulted or when someone
attempts to assault them. And so an open secret among
a generation of Houstonians and from these neighborhoods where these
boys were taken, was that there were living victims. There
were probably twice as many living victims who were still around,

(05:51):
and so many of whom I interviewed who could talk
about the near missus they had when the same pedophile
tried to come after them, and that was also so suppressed. So,
you know, I think it's an incredible story of scientific
discovery by a woman, which is something, you know, a
story I wanted to tell, but it's also a story
that resonates today about you know, we need to pay

(06:11):
more attention to the issue of the unidentified, which remains
a huge problem. You know, there's just not enough resources
to use these new forensic tools to identify people, and
then the plight of missing persons and sex assault victims
is still a big, big issue, you know. So that's
why I felt like it was worth telling this story
in a whole new way. So I tell people, you know,

(06:33):
this is a story you thought you knew if you
were a Houstonian, But I'm going to tell you a
lot of things about what you didn't know. This isn't
a who done it? It's a who was it? And
what did it mean?

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Dean Coral was truly awful. I mean, when you hear
all of the details of what happened to these young
men and these boys, you know, it truly, truly is terrifying.
One of the things that's so disconcerting about Dean Coral
before we kind of get into that part of the story,
just so everybody has context, is that he was a
seemingly respected member of the community. You know, his parents

(07:05):
had a business. And what a great cover up it was,
and that's one of the things that alarms me is
the of course, the idea that the serial killer is
the next door neighbor. It is not the person who
might look like an Edmund Kemper or someone who you know,
like you look at it and it seems obvious, and
Dean Coral did not seem obvious. Do you want to

(07:26):
kind of go back and tell me a little bit
about the background, just so that we can understand going
forward when we meet Sharon the significance of what she found.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yes, So, Dean Coral was an electrician. He worked for
the you know, city lighting and power company. He wasn't
anybody who tracked it a lot of attention. And in
the day his as you said, his mother owned a
series of candy shops. That's why they called him the
candy man some of the kids because he ran those
shops with his mother. He literally mixed up recipes and

(07:57):
made candy, praylans and things like that. That then some
of these boys actually worked in the shops and leaned
up or delivered and over time I think this would
have attracted attention today, but in the seventies it really didn't.
He befriended a lot of these kids, and he used
these candy shops as sort of hangout places, and so

(08:18):
some of these kids hung out at his candy shops,
which tended to be near elementary schools. Most of them
were in a neighborhood in Houston called the Houston Heights,
which is a historic neighborhood with a lot of beautiful
old Victorian houses, but in the seventies it was a
little bit run down. It's kind of become a premier,
you know, where he sought after neighborhood today, but back
then there were a lot of rental properties. There were

(08:40):
a lot of kids whose dads were World War two veterans,
or parents were divorcing. There were a lot of issues,
and some of these kids, he just would befriend kids,
often poorer kids, and offer them a place to hang out,
and he would also give them all kinds of gifts,
many trips to the beach, he would let them ride
on motorcycle. And then he started really soliciting these favors

(09:03):
in return that obviously these boys didn't tell their parents about.
And ultimately then he starts to kidnap and as you said,
torture and kill other boys and uses two of the
boys he's befriended to do that.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
And you know what I had remembered about the story was,
you know, one of the boys the mother had trusted him,
and in some ways, you know, he is that man
who who, if the parents are involved, might see him
as a big brother figure, someone who could be a
positive influence. And then that goes back to focusing in
on these vulnerable victims and who he's able to exploit

(09:38):
because of you know, the way he looks in his standing.
And there are no red flags. So when you talk
about these young men being from this area and the heights,
these boys, are these people who are very involved with
their families or was it an array of involvement from
the families.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
I mean, almost all of these kids were reported missing
by their families. They weren't weren't runaways, they weren't estranged
by their from their families. The police tried to characterize
them as in some way sort of fringe kids who
to excuse the fact that they were all dismissed as runaways.
But when you look at the profiles of the children,
you know, some of them are as young as thirteen.

(10:16):
There are differences, but there are some really big red
flags that today you know, in the era of amber
alerts would have certainly roseen too the level of you know,
this is clearly an abduction. One of the kids, who
was the younger, had packed for a trip with his
family that were going to be leaving the next day.
He and his buddy went to the pool. You know,
they only had basically their swimming suits and towels and

(10:38):
some extra clothes in a bag, and they both disappeared.
This was a you know, a really good church going
kid who went to parochial school. His friend had had
a little bit of problems, but the friend was a
good kid too, you know, kid who teachers liked, was
very close to his mom and brother. And they just
disappear off the face of the earth. And those parents

(11:00):
hired a private detective. They put up flyers all over
the neighborhood. They made some of the most noise of
any parents. And yet there was no listing of these
boys as kidnap or murder victims. They were just dismissed
as his runaways. There was a pair of brothers who
disappeared together. They were only fifteen and thirteen. Their dad

(11:21):
talked with the police about suspecting that they had been
photographed by a porn ring and gave names to the police,
and the police did not follow up. I mean, it's
kind of shocking. Later on, you have kids who had jobs, girlfriends, cars,
who leave behind their jobs, their girlfriends and their cars,

(11:45):
and the police assume their runaways. Why would a kid
who was eighteen year old year old who was engaged
to be married, who had a good job, leave his
family and not even take his own car and just
disappear a few weeks before high school gra You know,
these things defy it defies logic today that they would

(12:05):
have dismissed all these kids as runaways. And that's kind
of the heartbreaking thing when you see when you read
all these old police files, in the missing persons files,
is so often it was mothers telling these stories. Fathers too,
you know, fathers too are pressing for answers, and they're
just being dismissed as this is going to you know,
this is just a runaway. We have too many of

(12:26):
these cases and the police just don't pull them out
of the pile. Now, granted, at the time and today too,
you still do have a lot of kids running away
from home. You have some kids who are estranged from
their families for a lot of reasons, you know, And
that was true in the seventies too. You know, there
were kids who were having fights with their parents over
their length, their hair, or their sexual preferences or who

(12:47):
they were dating. And that was true too. But there
were certainly a huge number of red flags that were
raised by the parents in these cases. And that's kind
of what's heartbreaking about the fact that the murders are
not discovered and tell really what I reveal, at least
thirty to thirty five boys had been killed at the time.
The official count was twenty seven, but doctor Derek has

(13:11):
proven that there were more.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Did you address in the book about the connection with
John Wayne Gacy and that part of the porn ring?
Is that something that you go into.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
John Wayne Gaysey. There was a documentary called The Clown
and the Candy Man which explores the connections potential connections
between Gaysey and Dean Coral. There were some coincidences and
some potential connections there. But I am connecting Dean Coral
to another person who was a pornographer in Houston, who

(13:45):
was prosecuted in federal court, who had in his possession
the photos of eleven of his victims, and who was
connected to other men who stayed in Houston and who
continued to exploit other teens after these were discovered, and
who were never openly questioned by police according to files
I've found, or were prosecuted as either accomplices or potential

(14:08):
accomplices to these murders, even though they were clearly involved
in exploiting these same boys at least eleven of the
boys about a third of the victims. The Clown and
the Candyman documentary does explore the idea that there might
be links between Dean Coral and John Wayne Gacy, who
were both linked to different ornography rings. I have not

(14:29):
been able to confirm that there's a direct link between
the two of them, but there certainly is a link
between what Dean Coral was doing in a pornography ring.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
If police had been paying attention and believes that they
were not just runaways, as these boys are disappearing over time,
what have it been difficult for the police to connect
these boys to Dean Coral Or was he planning this
so well that even if they were looking for something,
it would be hard because nobody saw them with him?

(15:00):
Or whatever The case might be, would they have been
able to make the connection and save lives much sooner?

Speaker 2 (15:05):
You know, we're not talking about a modern homicide detective unit,
of course. However, I think you know, looking back, you
know clearly if you look at the list of victims,
the known murder starts in nineteen seventy and the first
victim was snatched off the street. It was hitchhiking, So
I don't think they could have connected Dean Coral to him.

(15:27):
But the second and third victims, Danny Yates and Jimmy Glass.
Janny Yates brother told me that he could have identified
Dean Coral, and that his brother and he had met
Coral when they were walking with James Glass after failing
to get into a drive in Cinema. They're picked up

(15:47):
by Dean Coral and taken around until the elder brother said,
you know, you got to let us out. But after
that incident, it was a short time after that that
the other two boys who were taken by Coral and
there both disappear. Now that little brother, that boy, who
would have been fifteen at the time, said I could
have told them who that was. I would have told

(16:10):
them that my brother and James Glass had his phone number,
I could have given them a description. Nobody ever asked me,
nobody were listened to me. And that's part of what
is the tragedy of this book is when you look
at the stories of the boys and their friends, which
I try to reconstruct really by interviewing their best friends

(16:31):
at the time. Because so many people have carried these
stories of these losses for so many years, you see
that if the police had been able to talk to
more of these teens and got more information, there would
have been things that would have led them to Dean Coral.
You know, later on Victims, he took the two boys
who were washing to the swimming pool. Mally Winkle had
worked for Dean Coral at his candy shop. His friend

(16:55):
David had gone there to the candy shop. You know,
there were other kids who were directly connected to the
candy shop who disappeared from the same neighborhood or from
other neighborhoods around the heights. So if you know, if
they had done some sort of sophisticated analysis, I think
they could have they could have seen these connections to
Dean Coral. But as you say, the parents of you know,

(17:17):
Mally's mom did not suspect Dean Coral. She thought he
was a good guy. She thought he was kind of
a big brother type looking out for her kid. Later on,
he killed Billy Balch, who was a kid whose parents
also trusted Dean Coral, who Billy had delivered candy for
Coral at his shop. And Billy and his brother were

(17:38):
both killed by Dean Coral in separate abductions. But his
parents went to them, went to Dean and said, you know,
are boys missing. Can you help us? Because they thought
Dean would be somebody who could help ask questions. And
of course, you know, Deane says, I know nothing about it,
so it would it might have been difficult to solve. However,

(17:58):
you know, I show in the that the leadership at
the police department at the time were very dismissive of
these young boys missing persons and of their parents and
also you know, tried to say, oh wait, there wasn't
anything that would have connected them, even though there was
at the time a map published in the Houston Chronicle
in the Houston Post that showed how a number of

(18:20):
these victims actually lived just a couple of blocks from
one of the known accomplices. Because Coral. The murders are
discovered because a teenager named Elmer Wayne Henley kills Dean
Coral when Coral is killing yet trying to kill yet
another couple of his friends. He's already seen a whole
bunch of his other friends murdered by Dean Coral, and
he's done nothing to help them. But he decides enough enough,

(18:42):
and he picks up a gun and sheets and kills
Dean Coral. At that point, you know, the police don't
have too much trouble finding the other victims missing persons
in the case files because so many of them were
Elmer Wayne Henley's classmates, went to the same junior high school,
so many of them lived within or three blocks of
Elma Wayne Henley, and so, you know, after the fact,

(19:04):
the police acknowledged, you know, at least the detectives acknowledged
that there were there were things that would have led
them to the connections if they looked at the time,
though you know, there wasn't There weren't abe alerts, There
weren't you know, awareness of sexual predators. There weren't computers
to sort of analyze the locations of these kinds of disappearances.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
People were hitchhiking. I mean, hitchhiking was a normal thing
during this time period too, So clearly it's a much
less vigilant time period than we're in right now, particularly
with kids.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yeah, absolutely people were hitchhiking, but people also really felt
a lot more safe about just walking or riding their
bike to friends' houses. You know, a lot of these
kids were taken during the day. It was just a
different time, So I try to convey that too. I
don't think these parents were negligent. I don't think, you know,
like I think at the time the police tried to

(19:55):
claim that they were. But nearly all of these kids,
with the exception of I think on, was immediately reported
missing by their parents, and there were details provided in
the case where the boy wasn't reported missing. He was
a little older than the other victims, and like some
of the other victims, his name was Roy Bunton. He

(20:17):
had kind of fought with his mom about the length
of his hair. He was nineteen, He had a job,
and so his family did think that he had just
left home and that he had gone off to start
his own life somewhere else because there had been conflicts
and you got to remember too, of course, and I
try to paint this world for everyone. You know, this
clearly wasn't the connected world we have today where everyone

(20:38):
has cell phones a geolocation. You know, people had their
home phones and sometimes the home phones got disconnected. You know,
people moved. Some of these families used payphones or neighbors'
phones to call the police to make the reports. Clearly,
you know when a kid went missing. In the case
of one of these kids, that is the first kid
that Sharon identifies, Randy Hart, Randy was riding his bike

(21:02):
to his job at a gas station. Randy doesn't come
home the first night that his mob doesn't worry right
away because she thinks maybe Randy decided to stay the
night with one of his friends. Sometimes he did that.
It wasn't as easy to call home. They didn't have
a home phone, so she didn't worry till the next
day when he didn't come home. But that was understandable

(21:22):
at the time. It was just a lot harder to
get in touch and stay in touch.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Tell me a little bit about the accomplices, which I mean,
it's incredible that he had one, let alone two young men.
One I think you know, we've had an author on
here talking about her extensive interviews with Elmer Wayne Henley,
who was supposed to be a victim it sounded like,
and then turns out to be somebody who was forced
to work with Dean Coral. Tell me about the dynamic

(21:49):
between Coral and these two young men who were involved here,
and ultimately, you know, Henley ends up shooting and killing Coral.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
So Coral has a county shop, like I said, in
the heights, near an elementary school. And one of the
kids who goes to a shop's name is David Brooks.
And David Brooks parents had a messy divorce. His mom
moved to Beaumont. She was a nurse. He tried living
with his mom for a while. They didn't get along.
He moved back with his dad, who had another wife
and other children from another mother. He didn't get along

(22:20):
very well with his dad, so he started hanging out
more and more with Dean Coral. Coral does what we
now would call grooming. He pays David to accept blowjobs,
you know, and David, as a young kid, sort of thinks, well,
this is an easy way to make money. Over time,
David Brooks becomes aware that Dean Coral is snatching and

(22:44):
killing other kids, and he doesn't do anything about it.
At that point, Coral is sort of his surrogate father.
He's basically living with Coral. He becomes involved in inviting
kids to quote party at Coral's place. Corals Squirrel really
doesn't drink himself, but he always has alcoholic drugs a

(23:04):
plenty for kids in the neighborhood. You know, in the
old days, he would have candy it his candy shop.
He would offer to take kids to the beach or fishing,
and the parties were part of that lure. David becomes
somebody who invites people to parties. So David invites his
friend Elma Wayne Henley to one of those parties. And
Henley's version is that he thinks the first time he

(23:25):
was supposed to be a victim. But in Henley, Coral
finds someone who's even more willing than David Brooks to
invite people he knows David prior to bringing Henley to
Coral's house, and you know, of course, there were a
lot of kids who partied with Coral who were never killed.

(23:45):
Henley starts inviting people he knows even more than Brooks.
I think Brooks from the get go, is a little
worried that if he invites friends of his or people
he knows directly, you know, that could be traced back
to him. But Henley seems to be have no compunction about,
you know, inviting his neighbors Mally Winkle and David Hill.

(24:06):
The guys do we talked to the two boys who
were wearing their swimming suits. He claims he didn't know
about that. But anyway, by the time he's involved, his
friends have already been killed by Dean Coral, and he
gets involved in in inviting people he does know well
to party with Coral, including Franka Gary, and after Franka
Gary is tortured and killed, Elmer Wayne Henley becomes the

(24:29):
boyfriend of Frank's girlfriend and then and then Elmer Wayne
Henley brings in another neighbor of his, Mark Scott. He's there.
He's part of it, either in the body disposal crew
or the recruitment clew and two other boys from his
neighborhood who went to school with our broad end. The
murders accelerate when Henley comes aboard and how Antley tells

(24:50):
Sharon uh doctor Derek he came to enjoy killing it
became something he liked. David Brooks was never as fourth
in interviews as Henley was. Henley sort of enjoyed doing
a lot of interviews. Lately, the Texas prison system has
cut down those interviews. He's not allowed to talk to
the press anymore, but for years he took some pleasure

(25:12):
in it. Maybe that was his way of compensating, or maybe,
you know, helping to identify the victims was his way
of coping. I don't know, but there's no question that
there were a lot of people. The number of murders
accelerated after Elmer Wayne Henley became involved. But we also
know more about who was killed because Elmer Wayne Henley
cooperated with police and provided information about the names of

(25:33):
the victims.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Why do you think that Dean Coral is not as
well known as John Wayne Gacy? First I thought homophobia,
but that would not be the case. Is it the
vision of boys being buried in Gaysey's house yard wherever
it was, versus Dean Coral who had kind of taken
them off site, or what do you think that that is?

(25:58):
Where there's this war around John Wayne Gacy, but really
not around Dean Coral. At least the people that I
know outside of the state of Texas were not that
familiar with this case.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
I think it's because Dean Coral was killed in nineteen
seventy three. He didn't have three decades to develop a
following as a serial killer, you know, he didn't. In fact,
there's an episode in the book where I talk about
how a prosecutor at Elmer Wayne Henley's retrial because Elmer
Wyne Henley did it get a lot of publicity at
the time. But he wasn't the main killer. He wasn't

(26:31):
the guy who did all of these murders. You know,
he was connected to maybe half, but he wasn't this
main killer. He wasn't the instigator of everything. He was
a henchman, you know, or a victim, depending on how
you want to look at things. Dean Coral is dead.
He never can tell his life story. His family doesn't
tell his life story. They don't go after the accomplices,

(26:51):
so that doesn't come out. Only some of the murders
are discussed at a trial. There's only six or seven
of the cases that are discussed. Trials are held in
the early seventies and the appeals are you know, quickly
dispatched that no one was sentenced to death. You know,
Gaysey was sentenced to death, and the death penalty generates

(27:12):
more attention. You know, Elma, Wayne Henley is serving life
sentences and David Brooks never gave any interviews and died
of COVID. So there are reasons that And I would
argue that some of these secrets that I'm revealing right
now in this book are things that people just didn't
know about the case. That the reasons why it still

(27:33):
was important, why in some ways Dean Coral should be
even more famous than John Wayne Gacy because there were
all these other things going on around his murders. During
Ellmerwayne Henley's retrial, as I said, for a while, Emma,
Wayne Henley was just sucking up the publicity and really
excited about maybe being a movie during the retrial because
his first convictions were overturned because there was some there

(27:54):
was a lot of communication between the press and the
members of the jury, and so I judge Grantedwayne Henley
retroll and corpus Christie and they have it at this
courthouse that in the seventies was very modern. It looked
like a Jetsons movie set. Fear to do live action jetsons,
you would set it at the Corpus Christie Courthouse. But anyway,

(28:15):
there's this weird scene where Henley during the trial, passes
the prosecutor on the way to the bathroom and he
says to the prosecutor, you know, he's kind of upset
about the fact that Gasey has broken his record for
the number of victims because at the time, you know,
in the modern era of homicide investigations, Dean Coral was considered,

(28:35):
you know, the number one killer in terms of the
number of victims. And so Henley says, you know, this
bothers me that Gasey, you know, is now being creudits
having more victims. If you give me a deal in
this case, I'll tell you where some more bodies are.
So there's this sense of, you know, he did want
to be infamous. Yeah, but you know the killing of

(28:56):
Kral made the tension and the interest in Coral of
short drays. You know, his story is sort of lost
when his life ends.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Did the prosecutor take him up on that? I guess
Shorthand what happens after there's this confrontation with Henley and Coral.
Coral ends up dead. My memory is that Henley was
the one who, you know, was able to tell them
about the boat house where a lot of the bodies were.
And then I can't remember did he turn in David
Brooks or did David Brooks realize something was happening and

(29:27):
he spoke to the police first.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
So you're right, you know, Elder Wayne Henley kills Coral
when cREL tries to kill two more of his friends,
finally cracks. They called the police, and then he decides
he tells the police. He doesn't tell them that he
helped korl kill people, but he tells police that he
knows where Coral kept a lot of other bodies. I mean,
he leads the Pasadena police to this boat shed that

(29:51):
Coral had rented in Houston, and it's every bit as
grizzly as the Gaycy murger scene. You know, there's awful,
a huge excavation that last for two days and they
on earth what they think are fifteen bodies, but there's
even more there. Later they find extra bones and they realize,
you know, the medical examagers at the time realized they
probably left some behind. And that's part of the revelations

(30:13):
of the book what was really in that boatshed? And
then David Brooks separately, when he's starting to hear about
what's happening at the boatshed, he goes to Houston Police
and offers to give a statement, and he gives a statement,
and then eventually he and Elmr Wayne Henley, not eventually
but very quickly go and lead police to two other locations.
Actually Henley does shows them a couple more bodies in

(30:36):
a woods in an area near Coral's family had a
fishing cabinet in East Texas. And then Brooks and Henley
together help the police search this big beach on the
Gulf of Mexico where they find more graves. So Brooks
is assisting as well. Brooks, though was never as forthcoming
about his involvement in the murders to his death, he

(30:58):
claimed that he was more accessory after the fact that
he was coerce, that he was controlled by this man
who was so much older than him and had so
much impact on his life. Now, I think you know,
Brooks was obviously an accomplice as guilty as Henley was
in many ways, but Henley was more forthcoming about his
involvement and what he did, and his active involvement in

(31:19):
killing people.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
He knew we're in Texas. Why was this not a
death penalty case? I mean, not taking politics out of this,
I'm surprised that either of these men were not put
on death row or am I wrong about that?

Speaker 2 (31:32):
If you remember in the seventies that death penalty was overturned,
Oh yeah, by the Supreme Court for a period, and
these murders occurred during the period when the penalty had
been overturned. The Texas legislature was putting in a new
death penalty statute that would pass muster and not be discriminatory.
That death penalty was overturned because so many more people

(31:54):
of color were being put to death, particularly in the South.
They passed a statute that the prosecutor at the time
determined could not be applied to this case. That the case,
the period of time, and the wording the statute made
it impossible for Harris County, which was is still one
of the counties that most often sought the death penalty.

(32:16):
They felt it was impossible for them to prosecute either
of these teenagers for capital murder with the penalty of death. Yeah, okay,
so it's kind of a fluke procedural blip in the
history books that these two boys are exempt from the
death penalty. Now, today they would not have been prosecuted either,
because the death penalties not applied to juveniles. But in

(32:40):
the seventies, it certainly was, in the eighties, it certainly
was in the nineties, it certainly was.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
Let me kind of switch over to the end of
that story and the beginning of doctor Derek's story. So
they both are given life in prison, both them, both
of these young men. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (32:57):
That's right?

Speaker 1 (32:57):
And you said Brooks died of COVID, but Henley is
still alive. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yes, he is still alive.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
So now that we think case closed. And then you've
described the scene where tell me the year again, where
doctor Derek sees these this box of bones and kind
of reopens this case. How does that story start?

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Well, so it's in the early two thousands when she
gets this job at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office,
and she's thrilled because she has just become a forensic anthropologist,
and she's really she knows that the Harris County Medical
Examiner's Office has this backlog of three hundred to four
hundred unidentified people. She knows about that because she's been

(33:41):
in Harris County working with the health department doing analysis
of murderers and deaths of young children and trying to
do preventive work. And then she talks the me who
she knows from other work into trying to assign her
as an anthropologist, and somebody is working to develop more
of us secialten forensic anthropology to work on those cases,

(34:03):
because she knows that A, there are murders that are
not being solved because of all that backlog of unidentified.
B that there are families out there who still need answers.
And see, she knows that the technology has evolved, you know,
and that so that so many of these cases are
from the seventies, the eighties, the nineties when DNA wasn't available,

(34:24):
and so since you know, the late eighties, early nineties,
DNA becomes a tool for identifications. Of the seventies, the
main tools they had really were teeth, you know, dental work.
Did the kids go to a dentist or not. If
they didn't, boy, it could be really hard for them
to be identified. If they broke a bone, an next
ray it might help. But with the kind of remains

(34:44):
that were found in this case, you know, which were
pretty seriously decomposed remains. Even though there were some kids
who had been killed the same summer that the bodies
were found, most of these kids had been dead for
as long as two three years and they were only bones.
So knows as a forensic anthropologist, you know, when she
finds these boxes of bones, it's part of this greater

(35:06):
work that she's tried to take on of, you know,
looking at this backlog of unsolved dead people. But when
she sees those boxes, she has a lot of hope
that she can apply tools that weren't available in the
seventies to help solve these cases. And that turns out
to be true.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
That's incredible, And you know, I told you at the
beginning of this I'm so fascinated with forensic anthropology. For
one of my first shows, I went to the what
I hate the phrase, the body farm, you know, at
Texas State University and met with the head of the
program there, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
He's an incredible guy.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, he's so kind and you know, it
was not easy walking around in the field. He took
me out into the field to show, you know, where
the bodies go and the kind of research they do.
And I think when I was out there, they were
maybe building a mock house and setting it on fire
for the FBI or somebody to kind of show the
way that you know, bodies burn so that they can

(35:59):
solve cases. I asked Daniel to please give me the
boundaries between when does the work of a medical examiner
pathologist end and when does the work of an anthropologist begin.
How do you know who to call in for what case?

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (36:15):
Once they're at the bone level that that's where you
would bring in an anthropologist.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
That's a good question. I mean, pathologists do the autopsies.
They're the physicians, and they you know, do the plected,
did the data, you know, they analyzed the work ins,
They order the tests of say, you know, to see
if someone is had consumed drugs or not, you know,
and they make the determination of manner and cause of death.

(36:41):
You know, was this a murder victim, was this an
accidental death, Was this a natural death? Or was this unknown?
You know, they do that their work often contributes to identifications.
Always in the bigger cities, there were people called investigators
who were sort of more like detectives. And my book
has a really, i think an interesting story of a

(37:02):
young woman who started out as a secretary because that
was what they used to hire women as in the seventies,
but who was an aspiring investigator and becomes eventually the
chief investigator, who helped dig up clues on these cases,
who helped try to find the dental records. And at
the time, even in the seventies, the Harris County office
had at guiding Joe j. Hempstek, who was a really

(37:24):
kind of famous medical examiner and the time, who was
pretty cutting edge because he had a forensic dentist helping him,
who was doing sort of what you think of anthropologists
doing today, looking at the tee, looking at bones. They
were doing some of that. So flash forward and you're right,
there's this movement among anthropologists who start who are initially

(37:48):
who are studying bones from prehistory and history in the
Smithsonian other places, and the FBI starts to ask them
to consult in these more difficult cases involving bones bones
only because pathologists have trouble with those cases that often
those are considered, you know, just impossible to solve, and
these forensic anthropologists develop out of the bigger group of anthropologists,

(38:11):
and they start to develop, like you said, the research
at places like the original body Farm, which is in Tennessee,
and then places like the Body Ranch which you're describing
in San Marcos, Texas and other places where they collect
a lot of data on how people decompose, how body.
They study things. These forensic anthropologists study things like the
rate of decomposition in different situations, like if they're in

(38:35):
a burning house, or if they're in a car buried
or not buried, what predators might do, so that they
collect scientific data on decomposition on bones that allows for identifications,
allows for clues to be gained from the analysis of
bodies that mees, especially in the seventies, would never have

(38:56):
been able to gather on their own, you know. Like
for example, Sharon figures out fairly quickly on in her
research on the first case, which involves the boy, turns
out to be Randy Harvey, who I call in the
first part of the book the boy with the boots
because he had a set of boots that were very
seventies and she bailed bell bottomed jeans. And she realizes

(39:18):
that in looking at the databases she has from all
this research and after doing her own examination of these bones,
that this boy was probably a lot younger than they
thought in the seventies. That he was simply a kid
who at age fifteen had already gotten pretty tall, was
about six feet, but he clearly had other characteristics in

(39:38):
his bones that she could tell and in his teeth
that he was likely a younger teen. And so when
they did the analysis on his bones in the seventies,
they might not have considered Randy, who was a missing person,
as a possible match for that set of remains because
they presumed he was older than he was based on
his size. So that's an example. But you know, there's

(40:00):
a lot of other data that forensic anthropologists can use
to kind of solve these cases that is really amazing,
And I try to go through a lot of that
technology without being too you know, in the weeds in
the book, but to try to give you some ideas
about how they could use a lot of different amazing
tools to figure out who people are based on their

(40:21):
bodies or their bones. So one of the things that
becomes an important clue for Sharon is I think really
interesting to me is that we think of race as
you know something, you check a box. Forensic anthropologists see
race as a kind of a continuum, and it's more
based on ethnicity. So one of the clues that I
think becomes important in one of these cases I think

(40:42):
is really interesting is she looks at the characteristics of
the teeth of two of the boys, and it's a
combination of teeth that more frequently occurs in people who
have some Native American heritage and maybe some wow European
heritage mixed, which of course is not incommon in the
United States. But there were just two boys in the

(41:03):
group of you know, thirty who had that same combination
of teeth, and that was one of the factors that
allowed her to start to develop a hypothesis that really
came from a kind of a citizen tipster, a journalist
who had looked at some of these cases, who said,
you know, one of these boys might be misidentified. She
started to think that that might be true because she

(41:24):
noticed that this boy's teeth were similar to another boy,
and that they could actually be brothers, and that there
were two sets of brothers that were murdered, but one
of the sets of brothers did seem like they were
the right brothers the other set. When she looked at them,
she could tell from the combination of teeth and what's
known now about ethnicity, you know, characteristics, that the two brothers,

(41:44):
the second set of brothers were probably not correctly identified,
that in fact, the second brother was probably yet another
unidentified corpse, and she corrects that mistake by using teeth. Wow. Yeah,
So there's a lot of different things can be factors
in forensic anthropology research, and you know, they relate to

(42:05):
a lot of times to the kinds of research that
are done at places like the body ranch that you
described in San Marcus, because that they're not just doing
research for fun. You know, they're trying to figure out
things that can help people solve cases or like you said,
identify immigrants. Yeah, and she goes through some of the
pitfalls and some of that. You know, some of that

(42:25):
research is very tricky, but it can help rule out
people too as much as it can help find the
right match.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
One of the things that Daniel Wescott told me when
I interviewed him was oftentimes his work as a forensic
anthropologist is to exclude things, not include. He said, very
rarely am I able to say definitively yes, this person
did this or that he said. I can oftentimes say, though, no,
this is not the case. Is she finding these, you know,

(42:55):
like the brother or Randy, finding these people who might
have been previously not ident and then following up with
DNA testing a decade later? Or how is tell me
the process? She finds bones, She has no idea who
this is and then where does it go from there
for her to figure it out?

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Well, she initially finds three sets of bones, and she
later discovers more. You know, she does what they did
in the seventies. She looks at the old case file,
she looks at the old missing persons reports, and she
does new examinations of the bones, new examination of the
bones to see if there was anything missed in the
seventies or anything any estimates of age that might be

(43:34):
different than what was determined in the seventies. And so
she does find things that seem off in terms of
height estimates or age estimates that allow her to widen
the net in terms of who they could be. And
that's what's so important with that age estimate change in
the Randy case, because she sees Randy's name as a

(43:55):
missing person in one of the police reports that's in
the stack from the seventies file. She sees his name
referenced in one of the old police reports that she
gets from the DA's office. She is, you know, doing
some kind of quote unquote detective work along with her
forensic work to try to see if there are potential
matches in that universe of missing persons from the segnenties.

(44:17):
And of course then she tries to use some databases.
She happens to be a little bit of a database nerd,
and she tries to see if any of these kids
then popped up as a live later you know that
they just in the seventies were listed is missing, but
there's no trace of Randy Harvey. You know, Randy Harvey's
missing forever. And then she goes ahead and tries to
find his family because if you can find a parent,

(44:41):
a DNA match can be a pretty easy thing to do,
which is to verify a potential identification. So what she
does with Randy Harvey, she looks through his missing person
file and she discovers that yes, his age, his estimated height,
and the clothes that he was wearing at the time
he went missing seemed to match what she has, but
to really know for sure that he is this case

(45:04):
that has been unidentified since nineteen seventy three, she has
to try to find either his parents or his siblings,
and she knows that there's a chance that his mother
and father are not alive, and she only has his
mother's part of his mother's name on an old report,
and she starts looking for his mother, and she has
one of his sister's names that one of his sister's

(45:25):
kind of heartbreakingly called the morgue when she was a
teenager asking about her brother, and so she finds the
sole message, the while you were out note from the sister.
So she tries to find Leonore, Randy's little sister. It
takes a while because Randy, it turns out, was his
name was spelled Randell, and so she doesn't find it

(45:47):
the first time she's looking for his name in public records.
His mother's name was Francis, but her full name was
Love Francis, so it takes a while before she can
find the names. And then when she finally does find
Francis Harvey, his mom, she's just recently died, and that
really sends her into a tailspan but then she looks
for his sister, and it's through a whole lot of research,

(46:10):
looking through a lot of obituaries of other people named Harvey,
that she finds someone who seems to possibly be his sister,
and she just calls. She calls a lot of people,
and finally one day she gets a kind of a
distant cousin who says, yes, I know I know Leonora Harvey,
and I can give you her phone number. And it
turns out Lenore lives just about an hour north of Houston,
So all this time his sister has been only an

(46:33):
hour away. And he actually has two sisters who are living,
one full sister and one half sister. But that makes
the process of identification tricky because a sibling match in
DNA can be trickier. His siblings don't share as much
DNA as parents and children do, and so identifications can
be verified better if you have more than one sibling.
It turned out in this case one of the siblings

(46:55):
was a full sibling and one was a half sibling,
so there was some question about that. So, you know,
DNA isn't the exact magic formula for identifications. We hope
it would be. It's pretty amazing if you have a parent,
but these kids had been gone for so long that
very few of the parents were still alive. She did.
Some of the identifications she made, she was able to

(47:16):
get the mothers or fathers, but most of them she
made through verified through sibling DNA matching, which required more
than one sibling in most cases.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
So that confirmed Randy, then.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Yes, it did. It did that along with the characteristics
in his case. A lot of the other boys, there
were no personal effects found, but in Randy's case, there
were personal effects found that also helped verify his physical characteristics.
She could still see the size of his belt, she
could still see the size of his shoes. His sisters
could still look at what he was wearing and recognize

(47:49):
it as a uniform that was issued by the gas station,
the jacket that where he worked the day he was missing,
so those were there were additional clues for Randy's case,
and his full sister happened to share sort of some
unusual facial characteristics. They had both had kind of long jaws.
That was something that counted. So in a way, it

(48:09):
was the combination of factors that allowed her to figure
out who Randy was. Randy was also very associated with
the case. He had been considered by police at the
time to be a possible murdered victim, that they just
hadn't made the connection.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
So what was the reaction the sisters once Sharon? I mean,
normally a detective would disclose this, but now you've got
this forensic anthropologist calling and saying, I think I can
identify your brother who's been missing for more than thirty years.
Was it relief from them or what was it? Do
you think?

Speaker 2 (48:40):
I think in most of these cases there was a relief,
a tempered kind of happiness. I mean, you can't say
that this makes someone happy to know for sure someone's.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
Dead, especially in this way. How awful, I mean, to
know what he did, how awful.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
But so many of these families had suspected that their
siblings were victims of this killer for different reasons. To
finally know for sure after so long, to be able
to actually have a burial ceremony, to commemorate the memory
of your brother, those things brought a lot of I
think relief to the two sisters, and they certainly gave

(49:18):
answers and they addressed I think what had for a
lot of people in other cases been sort of the
state of suspended animation, of not knowing, and so that
not having any ability to sort of move on or
have any answers. And so I didn't talk to all
of the siblings in these cases. I did talk to

(49:39):
some of them. A lot of them expressed at least
a relief at finally being able to know what had happened.
It's an answer, an answer, an answer, and an ability
to have a ceremony to know for sure that the
person was dead. There were different circumstances with each of
the people she identified, but in most cases I think

(49:59):
there was a relief, and in some cases there was
also the knowledge that a misidentification had been made, but
that misidentification allowed another family to understand what had happened
to their lost loved one, And so some families had
a sense that the you know, the revelations in their
cases were leading to other families getting answers, and so

(50:21):
there was some you know, then there becomes some sort
of a purpose that I think sometimes is helpful. And
in Randy's case, there was also a law in Texas
named for him, because the law in Texas that gave
crime victims some money for burial or for expenses had
formally excluded anyone before the law was passed, and after

(50:44):
this case became public, that legislature changed the laws so
that someone who was identified after that law was passed
could still obtain victim assistance money for a funeral, because
this family had no assistance for a funeral for Randy.
And so that's part of how I think his memory
was in a way honored and celebrated after Sharon made

(51:08):
this discovery, and of course the fact that he was
identified brought in a lot of other tips about other
missing teams from the seventies that helped her identify other kids.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Tell me the total, how many initially were confirmed? I
know more than twenty eight was the number I had read?
What was the number that she added to that when
it was all said and done.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Twenty eight includes one of her identifications that twenty seven
was the official number initially. You know, there were three
others whose identities she's confirms that were not initially counted,
and then there were ones that she you know, and
obviously of the twenty seven, so she adds to the
victim list three names. But of those original victims, she

(51:54):
identifies on two, three, four, five, she identifies five of them,
so she's you know, works on eight eight cases really
intensely and has discoveries, not all of which have been
announced to the public, by the way, so people reading
my book will learn about a couple of things that
haven't been announced before.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
I was wondering where we are. I didn't know if
this was the end of the case for her, or
is this work going to continue on this particular case.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Well, she left the office a few years ago. She
still she teaches and works on forensic anthropology cases as
a consultant, but she left the Harris County office, and
there are other forensic anthropologists who have worked on these cases.
But after she left, really there was no one bringing
that same body of knowledge and focus to these cases.

(52:44):
So I think that's why some of these latest discoveries
that were confirmed were not announced.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
When you were done with this, you know, you've done
all your reporting, You've done all your writing. First of all,
I think this must have been a very difficult book
to write, simply because the details Dean Coral's crimes were
so to me horrific. But after that's all said and done,
what do you take away from this? What does this
add to you as an author, in your understanding of

(53:12):
crime and forensics and who we are as a society.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
You know, my interest in unidentified and missing persons goes
back further. It goes back to when I lived in Seattle,
which was at the time I lived there, still plagued
by the fact that the most prolific known serial killer
in American history, the Green River Killer, had preyed upon many, many,

(53:39):
many women, depending on who you believe, the total somewhere
between forty and sixty and many of those women had
not been identified right away, some more identified after he
was eventually caught and prosecuted, I mean decades later. But
they had one of the first forensic anthropologists of any
county the state had a forensic anthropologist who worked with

(54:01):
them on those cases, and they were doing some really
cutting edge things. And I met her when I lived
in Seattle and worked in Seattle, and a reporter named
Lewis cam who's still in Seattle and works for NBC,
and I did a statewide look at every missing person
that was had a case file anywhere in Washington, so
much smaller state than Texas, and we wrote about what

(54:23):
were some of the reasons that some of these cases
weren't being solved, and one of them was you know
that many of these were in ural jurisdictions where there
isn't money or knowledge necessarily of the need for forensic
anthropology or even something as simple as doing a good
drawing of the person's face and putting it on the Internet.
And so we wrote about how people get forgotten about

(54:46):
and how then that allows killers to go and prosecuted.
And we did a series of stories and because of
those stories, we were able to help forensic anthropologists and
investigators identify I think it was eight different people. Two
of them were mother and child murder victim from the
eighties who who remained unidentified for decades, and that was

(55:07):
the story that I worked on. And I had moved
to Houston when I got a phone call from Australia
and it was the brother of the murder victim, the
woman who had recognized a sketch that I had gotten
a forensic artist to do for us as part of
our series as a picture of the baby, the toddler

(55:27):
who belonged to his missing sister. The police followed up
on that lead and that was a DNA match. The
idea that there are so many people whose cases are forgotten,
and there are so many families who remain without answers.
Was really a personal one for me when I moved
to Houston. When I moved to Texas, and I knew
about the huge caseload that Harris County had because when

(55:48):
I was in Seattle, they were talking to me about
how you know, there were certain counties in America that
had huge case loads. And one of the reasons they
had such a huge caseload was though that the Mammy's
Office had done so a good job of documenting the
unidentified with the hope that someday the technology would allow
for them to be identified. It was an issue I

(56:09):
cared about, and I knew that there was a power
for the press and for science to help solve these
cases back then, and I met doctor Derek Sharon when
I first moved to Houston and talked to her about
her work, and it was just unfolding then really as
I got to Houston, and it kept unfolding over a
long period of time, and at some point we started
talking and I said, have you ever thought about writing

(56:31):
a book?

Speaker 1 (56:32):
And you know.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
It seems like there might be something to say about
your work, and we ended up working on this book together.
You know. She provided a lot of research and provided
fact checking. I did all the writing and other reporting.
It took a lot longer than I expected, and I
ended up interviewing one hundred people because I think these
stories are important because of the people who get the

(56:54):
answers and the people who were unidentified. So my challenge
in this story, to me was to bring back to
life as much as I could these eight boys these
cases she worked on, talked to their friends. I had
teenage boys myself, and I thought, if I'm going to
learn anything about them, I need to find their best friends.
And that was hard, but I was rewarding too, because

(57:15):
a lot of people told me stories they had never
told and people who thought these stories were still really important.
There were a lot of people who said, you know,
the real full story of these cases and what was
covered up about these crimes needs to be out there
for us and for other people to heal and for
us to accept what happened. You know, I'm hoping that

(57:37):
my book serves the purpose for that greater community of
the friends and family of these those boys. I know
there's some people who will be harmed by these stories
being retold, but I'm hoping that there's a greater value
in the stories being shared.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.

(58:25):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.