You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by doctor Katherine Ramsland and Tracy Allman,
here to talk to us about their brand new book, The Serial Killers
Apprentice, the true story of how Houston's deadliest murderer turned a kid into a
killing machine. Catherine, Tracy, thank you for joining us to We're happy
to be here. Thank you. We're just so thrilled that the two of
you seem to be getting along pretty well for you murder here strong opinions.
I will say praise he is very patient because when I'm co writing with someone,
I have deadlines and I want these things to and she was quick with
things that I needed the research. She's really one of the best co writers
I've had. That is high praise. But I think to finish that thought,
I think that both of us were incredibly passionate about this story and how
important it was, and so there was a lot of working side by side
to make sure that happened. The best world past. So tell us how
this partnership came about. What got the story on your radar, and what
made you decide that Catherine was the best person to bring in for this project.
And so basically, I had been working on a documentary series for NBC
about John Wayne Gazeho's called John Wayne Gacy Devil in Disguise, and at one
point I had discovered that he had accomplices. We'd always thought John Wayne Gacy
was a lone wolf, but he was not. When I started to think
about his accomplices, I had an invitation to talk with Elma Wayne Henley,
and I took it and I called him or he called me. We connected.
I said, I've spoken with your mother in the past. I had
considered the possibility of interviewing her for another series that I worked on as a
producer, but I had never spoken with him. And when I started to
ask him, what is the accomplice dynamic that you could possibly see for John
Wayne Gaycy, he started to explain his accomplice dynamic with Dean Coral, And
as I was listening to this, it made me realize, wait, that's
not an accomplice. You were basically sucked in by somebody who groomed you,
and that upset me because I detest grooming. I followed these cases because I'm
really upset that these sex trafficking networks from the nineteen seventies never really got appropriate
attention, and I really wanted to bring them to the four. And I
was working at the time with Catherine on a BTK documentary for Annie, and
I had heard through the grapevine that she was also interested in Elma Wayne Henley.
I knew that she was a stute professional and looked forward to approaching her
and seeing if she would want to work together, and sure enough, she
did. My interest in Henley crosses over hers because mine comes from a long
ways back. And I had initially accepted the original true crime book from Jack
Olsen, The Mammoth Candy as that's the way things happened. And then around
two thousand and five, maybe I saw a documentary where Wayne Henley was being
interviewed about his artwork, and I thought my opinion might change because that guy
doesn't seem at all like the guy that was presented in Olson's book, and
I developed an interest in wanting one day to talk with him. So after
we did the BTK documentary, the production team said to me they wanted to
follow up with another kind of thing like that, and they named three people
that I thought, none of which were feasible. But I said, but
I want Wayne Henley and they said, oh, Tracy Ollman is already talking
to him. And I said, if she'll introduce me, we can get
going. And that's exactly how it happened. There are probably going to be
some people who are not familiar with the name Dean Coral and the moniker the
candy Man case, So just very briefly, can you give us a quick
rundown of who Dean Coral? David Brooks and Elma Wayne Henley are Dean Coral
known as the Candyman because he actually did make candy with his mother. They
had a candy factory and retail business, and he would use that to hand
out candy two kids in the street. He'd size up young boys and then
invite them back to play pool or go on as motorcycle, or go to
the beach with him and whatnot. And he became like the big brother of
the neighborhood, the hangout, the place they could hang out. But what
he was really doing was looking for potential victims. And he started with David
Brooks, who was I think about twelve years old when he first met Dean
Coral, and Dean was thirty. But Brooks came from a broken home where
neither parents seemed to have much to do with him. So Coral became a
father figure to him very quickly, gave him a place to say, gave
him money. Pretty soon was approaching him about sexual favors, giving him five
or ten bucks for it, and then getting him to help with bringing in
boys that Coral could actually torture, sexually, torture, murder, and Brooks
would then be part of the burial crew, and I believe that Wayne was
brought in as a potential victim. David Brooks brought him in. David Brooks
walked up to him, befriended him and told him about Korrel, showed him
the money he could make, and brought him over. And there's a very
harrowing scene in the book of where it looks like Chorrel's moving in to actually
bind him and turn him into a victim, but he says that he told
his mother, so he was able to escape. Then. I think this
is my speculation because Wayne was a very friendly, approachable kid who had a
lot of connections in the Houston neighborhood. I think Coral saw this as another
and better potential accomplice because Brooks was a geeky, awkward kid who kind of
asocial, not really very good at doing this, and he thought that Wayne
Henley would be better. So I think that's how the three of them ended
up becoming this team killers. Henley was leveraged into it. Brooks was leveraged
as well in terms of their need, their vulnerability, their gullibility. If
you want to add anything to that, Tracy, I think that all jibes
with my experience. So yeah, I think that you've got a good explanation
of what happened, and what Kral was doing was leveraging this idea that there
was a sex trafficking network and that he was part of it, and that
if they did not comply, this network was going to be aware of it
and was going to there would be some dire consequences for them, but if
they did comply, they could get rich. Tracy, you had started by
telling us that this was part of an investigation into John Wayne Gacy. Can
you explain a little bit more that John Wayne Gacy connection and the sex trafficking
ring? Then it's the syndicate. I had no idea about any of this.
I had never heard any of this. This was fascinating and harrowing.
Can you go ahead and get into a little more detail about that. But
it is harrowing and it's very disturbing to know that such a massive sex trafficking
ring did exist, not just in our country, but it was worldwide.
What had happened with John Wayne Gacy. I was approached at one point by
somebody who had worked as a managing editor at the Chicago Reader, Alison true,
and she said, we were looking into a property in the city of
Chicago where John Wayne Gacy worked as a manager, and we're wondering if there
are more bodies at that property. And I thought that should be an easy
answer. If there are, they would have taken them out, and if
they're not, then we should have some evidence that somebody looked into it.
And as we looked into that, we realized, holy cow, not only
does it look like every report shows there are going to be more remains in
the yard of this property, but then you had to figure out why wouldn't
police go ahead and take these remains out of the ground. So it was
ten years that we spent trying to figure out the answer to that question.
And ultimately, as we looked into it, we discovered a man by the
name of John David Norman. And John Norman was an individual who had started
a lot of child pornography and sex trafficking out of San Diego, California,
and he had had a multitude of arrests over years where he just kept being
sprung out of prison and we couldn't figure out why he never stayed in prison.
He was an incorrigible repeat offender. In sex crimes, when there are
probably a variety of reasons why he didn't. But then you start seeing he's
in Dallas in nineteen seventy three when Dean Coral says he's got this syndicate.
He's arrested four days later because an individual from his organization in Dallas calls police
and says, I was supposed to be shipped to Dean Coral and he was
horrified. So where there's smoke, there's fire. And if this individual said
that was his concern, he knows it from the inside. They'd go to
John David Norman's house and they find literally tons of child pornography and all sorts
of of different paraphernalia that would show this is much wider or organization. There
were potentially fifty to one hundred thousand names on lists that had been compiled by
Norman. Norman is arrested, pays his bond, and leaves Dallas for Chicago,
where he's put up, and he starts crossing paths with John Wayne Gacy.
And once you see that John Wayne Gacy and John David Norman they share
people in common. In some of John Wayne Gacy's pacelips, he's paying a
man named Phil Pasky, and Pasky tends to be referred to as John David
Norman's right hand man. A lot of these people that are in sex trafficking,
they hang together. They've got a double bind, and especially when it
comes to men who are attracted to boys and young men. And so when
you look at John Wayne Gacy, you start to see him with accomplices and
with a variety of victims. It makes sense that he's more in a kind
of pimp position than he is how he was portrayed as a lone wolf,
as somebody who was just evil and somebody who went to his death to pay
for his crimes. But then when you start really seeing both of these pictures
where you've got John Wayne Gacy as part of a much larger network of sex
traffic hearing people have to perform all sorts of roles in order to facilitate this,
to empower this John Wayne Gacy having six and seven felonious sexual assaults before
he's actually arrested, and he's not arrested in Chicago where he lives. He's
arrested in a suburb. When it comes to Deaned Coral, this is probably
a person that is rubbing shoulders with people that have some sort of power.
The victims that he's taking are generally from a two and a half mile squared
area in Houston called Houston Heights, And every report filed by a parent has
the same response as you've got in Chicago to John Wayne Gacy's victims. Your
child's are runaway, your child is probably doing drugs. It was putting the
onus back on the parents. You've done the wrong thing. There's a lot
of shaming going on, and nobody's really got answers until these things blow up.
And at the time they dug up twenty eight bodies, I think twenty
seven at the outset. But this was the largest mass murder in US history
at the time. When you think about how could that happen just under somebody's
nose, it doesn't. There are multiple people involved and multiple people who end
up being culpable, and that for me was just horrifying, more horrifying than
if you just had a lone wolf. And I think Terracy mentioned something important
here that I didn't. You say choral. Maybe people haven't heard of Kral,
but in nineteen seventy three, this was the worst mass murder case before
they're even using the word serial killer, and they're stunned by all these bodies.
Nineteen you're seventeen found in a boat shed, six more on a beach,
and four more out of the lake. It was just astonishing, and
probably more than they even were able to exhum. Nobody knew what to make
of a case like this. It just defied any ideas that this is before
Gaycy. By the time Gaysey rolls around, we've had the Coral case.
They had one in California, Roun Corona who had murdered twenty five migrants and
put them into mass graves. But that wasn't anything like picking boys at a
big, basic neighborhood and the police doing nothing about it. One thing you
referenced a moment ago was the delay in searching the property that Gaysey was associated
with. What led to the delay. So you have this property, which
is in a suburban neighborhood in Chicago, and you have at least two victims
where the parents have said the last person my child saw was his employer,
John Wayne gay There is no follow up from what I know. It's just
based upon John Wayne Gacy's word that he absolutely has not seen this individual.
He doesn't have any of his belongings onny victim's belongings which he collected avidly.
They're putting the onus on this person who's a socio sexual serial killer to tell
them honestly, Whereas this individual, instead of ever going into the property doing
the search, they just take his word for it each and every time,
every time that he's committing a sexual assault. He says that kid's lying,
and they try to dispel responsibility by saying, you know how records were done
in the nineteen seventies, we didn't have access to digital records. They actually
did. There's just no way you can make an excuse for that many bodies
piling up in one location and not having police intervention. The only reason there
was police intervention in my research is that it was a different police department that
had not had any contact with John Wayne Gacy. It was a child who
went missing that was a personal friends child of the police chief in displays,
and so he has a great motivation to get to the bottom of things.
While they're trying to figure out what's going on in this house. They are
not taking no for an answer. Whereas you start to see how politically connected
John Wayne Gacy was and how much people would defend his quote unquote honor.
In Chicago, you had mentioned that there was a list with literally thousands of
names on it. What happened to the list? So basically, this list
is given to Dallas Police after they find it at John David Norman's property.
The list is reviewed and it's found that the list incorporates a number of elite
people, people in power, judges, and they give the list over to
the State Apartment because two of the people listed are members of the State Department.
The list goes to their council, and a couple of years later,
in nineteen seventy seven, when they're reviewing this as part of a senatorial report,
they say that they have destroyed the list without making a copy because there
was some flooding, and so the list regenerated in Cook County jail. So
ultimately, John David Norman makes it up to Chicago, can't help himself.
He's almost immediately arrested for assaulting other young men, and he ends up in
jail and the list begins again. He gets access to the law library and
starts communicating and sending out a newsletter of all of his new cadets to at
least five thousand other people, and that list is ultimately confiscated. But he
couldn't have operated in the law library without having some facilitation. We know that
David Brooks died in twenty twenty, but Elmer Wayne Henley is still alive,
and he was willing to work with you and talk about this accomplice dynamic.
Can you both talk a little bit about how many meetings you had with Henley,
what did your interview sessions look like, and how did this all eventually
shake out in terms of the interview process. Basically, when I called Amo
Wayne Henley and I said I wanted to know about the accomplice dynamic, and
he started to tell me his anecdotal experience, I thought to myself, this
strikes me as grooming. This is not somebody who's fully participating. Luckily,
not long after that I met Catherine. One thing that he made me promise
was that I was never going to interview him about the murders. And I
kept that promise, but I did not promise that Catherine when I made the
introduction, and so Katherine was going to act in our relationship as somebody who
was going to be giving him something like therapy. While she would be interviewing
him, she would also be helping him understand his memories, whereas for me,
mine were strictly journalistic questions. There was a certain amount of finesse to
get around his resistance. It initially was, and it was on the phone.
I didn't do this space to face. It was on the phone.
We first started through letters. I wrote to him very similar the way I
started with Dennis Rader. Wrote to him, talked about what I wanted,
relied on his relationship and his trust in Tracy, that she trusted me,
and that maybe that would transfer. And he immediately said, when we first
talked on the phone, I will help you because I want what happened to
me to count for something. But I'm not going to change my mind about
what I feel. I am complicit, I'm guilty. I don't want you
to do anything that would mitigate that. So I listen, let him talk,
and little by little I would say, would you consider reading this piece
or something that I was writing or thinking about working on regarding the case,
And he would and then he'd come back and he'd talk about it. And
it did evolve within a couple of months into more like therapy, which he's
been in prison fifty years and never had any kind of therapeutic intervention. Wow,
And suddenly I think he saw me as a valuable resource for him,
and we began to have some very long Sometimes he was in one facility where
he could be on the phone for hours, and all I had to say
that the others was I'm talking to my therapist, even though I wasn't officially
and I will like to say, I'm not a clinical psychologist. I have
background as a therapist, and so I wasn't officially his therapist, but I
was doing some amount of therapeutic intervention for him. And as a result,
he started processing things in a very different way and thinking differently about his own
case and his vulnerability as a teenager at the time fifteen years old when he
first was really leveraged into it, and began to understand that maybe there was
some mitigation here that helped him a lot. I think to begin to look
at his case differently and to talk to us. Let me ask a couple
of logistics questions here for a second, Catherine, you were not limited in
how long you could talk in other words, the meter wasn't running, which
it often is when someone's in cars. Rat were you permitted to record these
lengthy calls? I was permitted by him. I did not ask any prison
person, right, but he knew you were recording. And obviously there's a
tremendous exchange of information back and forth, and you're always aware that the prison
is recording stuff and they have access to everything you're saying. You always know
that as well. The same thing happens with any offender I'm talking to in
prison. So that's why Dennis Raider and I always use codes. But Henley
didn't want to. He said, no, no one's ever stopped me from
saying whatever I want to say, and there weren't any, as far as
I know, any repercussions about it. I asked him permission. We talked
for a while before I actually started recording, so I did not record everything
that was said, but at the time he gave him permission that I began
to record it. So, Catherine, how similar was this process to the
work that you did with Dennis Raider. Not at all time, Not at
all, Okay, because Raider was proud of his murders. He's a serial
killer, and Henley was horrified. He had wanted to be a minister as
a kid. He carried a bible in his shirt pocket. This is not
somebody who ever thought about killing anybody, and here he is being part of
this killing crew. And also he is more articulate because he has self taught.
He does a lot of reading. He has an IQ of one twenty
six. I believe, very different experience from talking to an offender who really
wants to talk about now Dennis Raider, I will give him some credit.
Was reflective, wanted to think about why did I do this? But he
had certain limitations in terms of what we were trying to do with that particular
book. He wanted to record his dark journey, as he called it.
That was not Henley's intent by any means. Henley wanted this to be something
that would be useful in a broader way, so that it's like a cautionary
tale rather than just an autobiography. So very different. Would you classify as
ininctive for him with redemptive has religious connotations, I'm not sure I'd say redemptive
so much as he now has a story that he can be remembered by in
a way that isn't the terrible things he did as a teenager, that there's
more to the story, and that he's able to help us to figure out
how predators operate, especially with vulnerable teenagers. He's able to confirm our list
of cautions that we supply in the last chapters for counselors and parents and teachers.
So ultimately, it is redemptive, but it's not something he was looking
at as a vehicle for redemption. Although it's interesting here's a guy who has
a Bible in his pocket, as you mentioned, and yet isn't seeking redemption,
absolution, forgiveness. He's changed, and I think Tracy can maybe talk
more about this. He's changed his position on religion, as we all do,
I think through our lives. I think at this point he's a very
rational thinking individual. I think that he did leave his religious practice after all
of this was said and done, because ultimately, Dean Coral had a way
of reminding him, where's your God now? How is your God intervened to
prevent these murders? For him to live through that type of trauma, he
had to separate himself from a God who was doing nothing to prevent this.
Another thing that I wanted to add to what Catherine was saying. While she
was talking with Wayne, I was interviewing his friends and other people that were
historically involved with the case, but not on the law enforcement end. And
what we started piecing together, and this was the same thing that happened in
the John Wayne Gacy case, was that you have records that show the syndicate
was being talked about, that child pornography had been shown to police involving the
victims, which would give an indication that there was a wider distribution network.
You start to see that maybe individuals are either complicit in law enforcement or in
other ways in which we rely on them in our darkest moments, in our
moments of need, and they're actually actively preventing the distribution of information that would
help really get to the bottom of what happened here. You're listening to Mind
over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're
back here at mindover Murder. From a journalistic standpoint, this must have been
pretty difficult. There is not a lot of information available on Jane Quarrel because
it wasn't until after he was dead that his crimes were discovered, and there
didn't seem to be a lot of people who were willing to talk to police
about him. So can you both speak to the kind of challenges that a
birth of information on a subject presents for you when you're actually trying to do
reporting on him on tra season and then trying to understand him on Catherine's end.
I think it's important to point out that Wayne is the only accomplice to
a serial killer to have killed the killer to end it. That speaks to
his character. That was self defense, but also saving two of his friends,
and then he killed Dean and as a result, Dean Coral never went
to trial, and the irony is had he lived, Wayne would have been
on the prosecution side as the witness against him, right instead of serving basically
serving Dean Coral's prison term, which is what he ended up doing. The
fact that Coral was killed, and that he had been a very secretive man
in the first place, and then basically all anyone knew about him was this
facade of nice guy that he put on as a manipulation of the entire community.
It was really hard to dig in and find stuff. We did find
some things. There were a few early true crime accounts. So there were
newspaper articles, There was a little bit of a police report. They interviewed
his father, mother, brother, so there was some and a pseudo fiance
and I'm saying pseudo because she was a front for him. She didn't know
she was, but she was a friend for him. She had some things
to say. There was a guy that he had a relationship with. So
we found some things. But most of what you're going to know about Dean
Coral, his speculation and the way he operated based on things that Brooks and
Henley said in their police statements, and other people who were found by police
said about his approach to them. These are the things that help us to
piece together who he was based on what we do know about sexual predators.
This is someone who's operating in the early nineteen seventies as so far as we
know. As a journalist, my goal was not just to look at Dean
Coral, but to find evidence that there was trafficking. What kept me going
initially was that I found newspaper articles from nineteen seventy five in nineteen seventy six
showing that a number of the victims who we expected went right away to their
deaths had actually been photographed and that there had been pornography made of them.
So that indicates that Dean Coral isn't simply operating alone. He's got somebody who
took receipts, receipt of these photos, and that these photos are then printed
and distributed. You're finding them in Houston, you're finding them in California.
You've got another individual by the name of Roy Clifton Ames who is found to
have just tons of child pornography in Houston and a huge warehouse. And they
try to get Roy Ames to give them a heads up to what they know
is a massive sex trafficking ring, and he basically told them I'm not going
to give you anything because I can operate just as well from prison. So
this is somebody who was making a lot of money and knew his business.
You never hear these names. You don't understand the investigation except for what we
can piece together. Almost fifty years later, nobody came out with this.
There were some journalists at the time who had a clue. There was a
man by the name of Ken Wooden who worked for sixty minutes and he did
a piece kiddie porn for sixty minutes in nineteen seventy seven. He was aware
he had seen the list in the Dallas Police Department of the Johns that John
David Norman had. He understood the gravity of how big this was, and
actually part of my investigation with Alison True showed that you had satellites in Nebraska,
you have it in North Fox Island in Michigan. You have another one
in New Orleans, Causiana. You have another one in Connecticut. It was
absolutely massive. A lot of these organizations, including John David Norman's Core,
would get state and federal funding as five oh one C three's because for the
young men that they were abducting and educating, they were getting funds to help
with this education. So it's an incredibly cynical This is all way before the
Internet. How are these horrific images being moved around the country and what's happening
at the same time with the surviving victims. What's the method of distribution here?
So the method of distribution that we identified was that you basically have ads
going into magazines like The Boy Scouts, Boys Life, and in the back
they would be encoded asks and other pedophiles would understand, oh, I could
get a copy of this kid's photo and brown paper bag it to your house
through the United States Postal System. I avoided the United States Postal System looking
to see their investigation for John David Norman, and I was told I could
not get those files because he has a surviving child. It would be an
invasion of his privacy. I was a Boy Scout, I was an Eagle
Scout. I was an explorer. I had a subscription to Boy's Life for
years since I was about I don't know when did I join the Cub Scouts
sixth to the time I was probably eighteen and went off to college. There
were ads in Boy's Life that obviously we as kids, weren't paying attention to.
What would they say? How would you code language in a general interest
magazine read by kids and Scout leaders. So in Franklin County, Tennessee,
you had an organization called Boys Farm, and Boys Farm was to help young
men in the cities who didn't have exposure to the outdoors to come on in
and join Boys Farm. That's really all they needed to say, and that
was a wink to somebody else who then come to Boys Farm and find those
boys. It's absolutely terrifying the ways in which these people operated, and I
don't always know that it was under the radar, and who in law enforcement
may have had a clue. Some of the people in law enforcement that I
contacted seemed to have an idea of what had been going on. They knew
that it wasn't something that they were going to be able to dig into.
If they found something, they weren't always granted an investigation, And it really
depends on those people in power and what their agendas are to make that happen.
So it is. It's very tricky stuff, in my opinion, and
it's so important for us to recognize as humans that our base instincts are drives,
some of them which in civilization we determined to be perverted damaging. Some
other people see as a basic need or that's part of their psychological emo,
and they're going to do what they have to do to make it, and
there are victims that are scattered all around them. Unfortunately, I've never seen
one of the ads. I know it was coded. There were labels given
to these candidates. They were clothed in things like vacations, getaways. Really
that hard to make these communications. First of all, there wasn't any Internet,
There weren't any CCTV cameras. You got enough names on a newsletter mimeographed
newsletters, even though mimeographing is anymore, but that's basically what they were.
Yeah, And they were coded in order to communicate with one another. They
looking for one another. They couldn't meet in chat rooms. There weren't anything
like that, but they could figure out where to find these publications. And
the publications always came across as seemingly innocent young men, not boys, even
though they obviously from the pictures were boys. So they would find any way
they could to make it seem innocent. It's predatory. What predators do.
They disguise themselves, and they work within the system because that's the easiest way
to do it. No one's looking at something that looks normal. I think
that's probably as much as I can say about that part. And the other
big thing is this definitely generates a lot of money. You've got a lot
of money to pay people off to look the other way. You've got a
lot of money to facilitate these occasional overseas trips by older men who are just
concerned for the growth of young boys. You look at how big this ends
up being, and it is it's very intimidating all to realize this lays the
path for these child pornography photos at the very beginning of the Internet, and
that the draw just recycles over again, and new skills are learned, how
to navigate, use secret language, and the anonymity just expands the reach.
And now with the Internet, the dangers are exponentially enhanced in terms of how
they can meet together, the kind of language they can form to communicate,
the access they have to the prey that they want, the ability to disguise
themselves and use disappearing things like Snapchat and whatnot. There are all kinds of
dangers today that certainly weren't around in the nineteen seventies. But we're set up
by these networks back then, and I want to make sure that we get
to what I think is one of the most incredibly informative and helpful parts of
the book, which is this massive wealth of information and it's for any adult
with a child in their life that they want to protect. So I would
say that what you guys have set up in terms of guidelines would be good
for parents, family members, educators, counselors, law enforcement, you name
it. You offer this list of fifteen different guidelines to help adults keep the
children in their lives safe from predators. Prior to that is a chapter to
show this isn't isolated. There are other predators doing these things to kids,
and I go through a number of other kinds of affiliations like this. I
also developed an idea called murder like a radar that predators use to figure out
who's vulnerable and how can they manipulate that and room those kids. And then
also talk about the temporary psychopath that is taking kids who've already been through abusive
situations so they've developed a callousness and manipulating that to turn them into kids who
will do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, but they will do so under the
influence of this very dominating predator. I wanted people to understand this is not
an isolated thing. This goes on. It's going on today. It isn't
just kids who are preyed who are vulnerable, but kids are vulnerable to being
picked up and pulled into partnerships. And so that leads the way to what
happens in the final chapter with the list I don't have kids of my own,
but I teach one hundred and fifty of them every year, and this
is the most important single piece of information that I would give to everyone that
I work with. They'd think I was being a weirdo, but I would
be like, no, seriously, this is really important to know and understand.
And as I was reading all of this, these wonderful guidelines and all
of the information you just talked about, Catherine, I was just nodding my
head and going Every adult that I know needs to read this, whether they
have kids or not. But if you work with kids and around them,
the little little all the way up to the big ones that I work with,
people need to know and understand this. Anybody can be groomed, and
it really depends on their vulnerability at the time. It doesn't mean that they
have to be young and naive. They could be at a place in their
life where they're very lonely, they're looking for some companionship, and they end
up with a companion that happens to be a psychopath. I think one of
the bigger things that we latched onto in this list was hearing Wayne's story about
trying as hard as he could to tell the adults in his life what was
going on for him. Not once, not twice, but three times.
He told three different adults in his life, look, this is what's happening.
And it sounded so outrageous that they attributed his telling of the story to
drugs or some form of mental illness. But child's coming to you and telling
you that an individual in their lives is derailing them, Believe it and take
action. I think that was something when I spoke with Wayne's mother that she
regretted to her dying day that she didn't save the letter that he had written
detailing exactly what had happened and turned it over to police so that they could
start to unearth this terrible tragedy instead of letting elmoy and Henley at the age
of seventeen, have to decide I'm going to have to kill this man or
this will go on forever. The other big, I think, really big
point that maybe I learned through this was that how predators don't just groom the
kid, They room the community because they want to be sure when this kid
does come and tell the community won't believe them because the community thinks this is
a good guy Wayne's mother thought she thought he's a little dicey, but she
thought he's like a boy Scout leader. I don't see anything off about it.
And it gives Wayne a place to go and do things and resources and
whatnot. So they groom the community to seem trustworthy, even to seem important
to the community, so that when adults are told, they're more likely to
side with the predator than the kid. That's something I think all adults have
to keep in mind. Listen to the child, because you might have been
duped by somebody. And these predators show up as oy scout leaders, youth
pastors, teachers, at any place they can find to get close to kids
and to seem trustworthy. They will be developing those relationships as much as they
are grooming the child. Everything that I was reading through here on this list,
it was like a light bulb was going off for me and realizing this
is so important. But I bet most adults outside of the true crime space
don't think about this sort of thing. Yeah. Also, the amount of
information that parents put out there about their families and there, oh my gosh,
yes, astonishing how predators are looking for those items and going, oh
boy, I can I know where that kid's going to school, I know
when they come home for lunch, I know where they play in the playground.
There's all kinds of things that people put on these social media sites innocently,
and not just the kids, but their parents too, thinking this is
a way to garner community, and it is, but it's also a way
to attract predators. Even just the stickers that are on the back of a
car, you can tell a kid's team if you've got a stick figure family
with the names of the kids. There's so much on there, and you
can learn so much about somebody just from looking at the stickers on the back
of their car, which is it's just a little profiling game that I play
for myself. If I'm in traffic, I'll look and see how many things
that I learn about this person right now who's got seventeen bumper stickers in her
kids' names on all of them. And people are going to resist this advice
because they like doing these kinds of things. They don't really believe they're putting
their child at risk. But ask the kids. You mentioned that you really
were taken by the last thing that wanes in the book, Yah, and
I'll tell you a little story about that, because I wanted something from him
to end the book, and I'm going to tell you that he came out
with this and it is verbatim. I did not do any corrections or work.
It all came pouring out from his own passion at this message, perfectly
poised to deliver the message from his heart. And I thought it was just
such a fabulous way. I was happy that you said you really noticed that.
The final quote of the book, which I really do think was the
strongest way that you both could have ended it is from Henley and it reads
this quote, I wake up every day and I'm still under Dean's thumb.
I'm still living Dean's life. I understand why people are mad at me,
but be mad at me for what I've done. Be mad at me because
I was weak, because I was young and made poor choices. Don't be
mad at me for Dean's crimes. That's amazingly evocative. But I'm very curious
about his word choice there, when Henley says that he was weak, Do
you feel like that's the right word choice, Because if you're being groomed or
dominated or coercively controlled, or whichever term tends to fit best. Does that
make you weak? He has trouble accepting the vulnerability. When you're a kid,
you think you know everything, and he thought he should have known what
to do and done it. But he also was in this religious frame up,
and we all have free will, and so everything we do, it
comes back. It's our responsibility. He did not understand the teenage brain stuff
that we now know, the kind of home he came out of it,
with the adverse circumstances that had prepared him for someone like Dean. He didn't
understand any of that. So no, week isn't the right word when you're
looking at it objectively. It's his word because he still needs to embrace that.
He feels responsible for certain things that happened early on when he thought I
should have gone to the police. But even when he thought he should have
gone to the police, he thought, who's going to believe a kid against
this adult? And what if they do arrest him and then he gets out
and the syndicate comes after me and my family. What am I supposed to
do? He's kept that very limited frame of a fifteen year old because he
was fifteen when this started. But you don't know that as a fifteen year
old. So he's still thinking I should have done something, I should have
known better. So he says weak. It's not weak, but I allowed
that as the person who was working therapeutically with him. That's the truth that
he knows. But he also has changed considerably in terms of being more educated
about where kids are at with these kinds of situations. And even Brooks.
I don't think Brooks would have ever turned dean in. I think Brooks had
had more antisocial personality and I think he would have just continued to go on
with the stuff. But nevertheless, he was quite young, with no parental
resources whatsoever. His father even said to Wayne, don't hang out with my
son. He's going to come to no good. I think there's some excuse
there even for David Brooks, though I think he's much much more complicit because
he saw a lot, but he allowed himself to be bought by a new
car. Okay, I'll keep my mouth shut, even though I know the
kids that were just here are dead. But I still think you can make
some room for mitigation for him as well. Tracy, any thoughts about now
that you've spent time with Henley, any thoughts about that final quote from him.
I really feel for him at this point. I've been in touch with
him for over four years. I speak with him reg lily. We just
lived through the death of his mother, who I'd been talking to the same
amount of time. When you look at his familial situation, his mother always
wanted to have kids. She had four sons. Unfortunately she had an abusive
husband. This is not unheard of, and so here she is left alone
with four sons and the oldest son, Wayne feels responsible for the others,
which isn't unusual either, and so he's trying to guide their lives and be
the big brother that they always needed. And then suddenly he finds himself in
this situation where he's being offered some money if he could just make introductions to
Dean Coral. Dean makes this a business proposition, initially to a kid who
really doesn't have a father figure and his mother is struggling financially to take care
of her brood. It's true that initially Dean Coral is introduced to Mary Henley.
They're the same age. There's no doubt that Wayne sees him in more
of a father figure. This is somebody who initially seems much kinder than the
man who took out a gun and almost shot him, and who ad write
the family regularly. And Wayne's had to live with all of that, and
he's thinking he's got a solution in his young mind, but he doesn't.
I look at his situation with a lot of compassion. Don't get me wrong.
I have a great amount of compassion for every one of the families who
had victims, and that the point that we're making in the book is not
to ignore the families that suffered through this and ignore the violence. We are
not here to prop up Elma Wayne Henley as a poster child. But what
we are trying to say is this situation was tragic all around, and that
we have to start looking at grooming as another part of the equation. I
think that Elmawayne Henley, in my opinion, was used by law enforcement as
somebody that everybody could apportion blame to. And at seventeen year years old,
he bore the weight of this, and people still harp on about it.
He killed twenty seven twenty eight people. He did not kill twenty eight people.
This lies firmly with Dean Coral. He was the foster mind, there's
no doubt about it. But still Wayne doesn't have a defense. He can't
say no, I didn't do that, because he's still the public enemy number
one in the state of Texas, where they still very much know his name.
I look at his situation and I think that we have to be more
measured, if we are truly civilized. We have to give him some credit
for doing what he could with the resources he had when he was seventeen to
stop this. And also I think we have to point out the original business
deal that Dean offered was everybody wins, including the kid being brought to Dean,
because the idea was that Dean was going to sell him into a trafficking
I had a sex trafficking network, a trafficking network where the boy would be
sent to California to become some rich person's pooh boy. Wayne would make some
money on the deal, Dean would make some money on the deal. The
kid would be far better off over in California than he would be staying in
Houston Heights. So everybody wins. That was the original idea of this deal.
So when Wayne finally succumbed and thought that doesn't really sound that bad and
I do need the money. That was how Coral leveraged him, because Coral
killed that kid and then said, now you're part of this. Was Wayne
able to steer his siblings away from this horrible lifestyle that he'd been drawn into
as much as he could. One of them did end up hanging out with
Dean, going to his house. His siblings resented him and thought, you're
over there partying and having a great time and not sharing with us, and
some of his friends thought the same thing. And what he was really trying
to do was prevent them from becoming Dean's victims, because Dean would say things
like, Oh, I saw your little brother the other day. He's real
cute, and you can imagine what that would be like because Wayne knows what's
going to happen to anyone that Quarrel manages to get in there to tie up,
to torture and kill. My final question for you, guys is about
the title of the book itself. It's The Serial Killers Apprentice. What made
you choose the word apprentice rather than accomplice or a victim or something other than
that? What made apprentice stick with you? I thought it had a strong
ring to it. Now, apprentices aren't always willingly apprenticed somebody. They're often
indentured, and they have to do this in order to pay off a debt
or to make to learn a trade so they can make a livel with it.
But it's not something they necessarily want to do. They tend to live
with the master, and the master makes all the decisions and whatnot. So
I think I thought apprentice actually was a fair description because in a way,
it's more an apprenticeship than it is an accomplice, because it is like he's
in this, he's being trained to play a certain role for the master,
like it or not, he is learning to do it, and he is
doing it as part of Dean's ownership of him. So I thought apprentice was
an appropriate way to look at this. And I did that because I wanted
we tend to group all of all accomplices together as if they're all the same
thing, and that one of the things I did was breakout categories of the
different kinds of teams that we see. That was so helpful. Yeah,
we see the coequals. You both want to be in this and you know,
can't wait till the next victim. And I gave some examples of that,
like to Kurnoris. We see the foe accomplice, the one who,
once they're caught, claims, oh, I was just the it wasn't my
idea, and it really was, but they somehow pass themselves off as being
the lesser of the two. Then we see the compliant accomplice, the reluctant
accomplice who really is in a situation like Wayne and David Brooks work, so
they're in it, but they don't really this isn't really what they want to
be doing. And then we see the forced accomplish like at gunpoint, you're
going to help me bury this body, and we have a few examples of
that. So they're in that compliant stage, and it's very important to distinguish
that from co the kind of team where they really are co equals in their
deviant desires and their love of violence and sadism and things like that. So
I wanted to make it clear. But even at that, the apprenticeship is
different than some of the other accomplices. We have accomplices who are very they're
compliant, but they're in love, let's say, so they're afraid of losing
the guy. Many of the male female teams are like that. That's different
than what we have for Wayne Henley. Even Wayne Henley is different from David
Brooks. So I thought the apprenticeship idea got at it a little bit more
clearly, this chilling idea of the syndicate. Here we are. We're having
this discussion with the four of us in April twenty twenty four. The book
looks back at a time and a place and tells us these very chilling stories
are things that different in twenty twenty four, they're worse. I'll let Tracy
take this way far worse. They're just an extrapolation by one hundred times over
because now instead of having to sneak in the back of a magazine, networks
exist all over the place where they're trading photographs, where they're exploiting children.
I can't even begin to tell you my work with law enforcement and them explaining
some of the cases that they've had whereby biological children are used. Sometimes biological
children are made for this purpose. We look at this and we think,
not in my backyard. It literally is in our backyards. And I think
that it's good as a society to pay attention to what's going on around us,
and to understand the difference between something like a conspiracy theory like Pizzagate and
the actual machinations that it takes on in our communities, in our real lives,
so that we're able to look at more squarely in the face. I
think that we saw the same thing with Oh my goodness, the Boy Scouts.
I can't believe that this happened to such a storied organization, and you
think to yourself that this was the perfect organization for pedophiles to infield. The
Catholic Church had a perfect way of making their pedophiles disappear and recycle them.
When you look at our way of ignoring some of the troubling signs that are
coming at us, why not be aware, why not call it out,
and why not be proactive in understanding how to protect our kids in our communities?
Well, the book is The Serial Killers Apprentice, the true story of
how Houston's deadliest murderer turned a kid into a killing machine. Thank you both
so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. It is a fascinating
book, available wherever books are sold. On April sixteenth, Tracy Catherine,
thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm
happy to be here again. That's going to do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Over Murder
is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are
Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our
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Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.