Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them. Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 1: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening, the true story of how one dedicated forensic
Speaker 2: scientist restored the long lost identities of the teenage victims
Speaker 2: of the Candyman, one of America's most prolific serial killers. Houston,
Speaker 2: Texas in the early nineteen seventies was an exciting place,
Speaker 2: the home of NASA, the City of the Future, but
Speaker 2: a string of more than two dozen missing boys hinted
Speaker 2: at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for far
Speaker 2: too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they
Speaker 2: had gone, the Houston Police Department dismissed them as runaways
Speaker 2: fleeing the Vietnam Draft or conservative parents likely looking to
Speaker 2: get high and join the counter culture. Was only after
Speaker 2: their killer, Dean Coral, was murdered by an accomplice that
Speaker 2: many of those boys bodies were discovered in mass graves.
Speaker 2: Coral known as the Candyman, was a local sweet shop
Speaker 2: owner who had enlisted two teens to lure their friends
Speaker 2: to parties where they would be tortured and killed. All
Speaker 2: of Coral's victims' bodies were badly decomposed, some were only skeletal,
Speaker 2: known collectively as the Lost Boys, Many were never identified,
Speaker 2: and some remained undiscovered decades later. When forensic anthropologist Sharon
Speaker 2: Derek discovered a box of remains marked with the year
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three in the Harris County Medical Examiner's office,
Speaker 2: she recalled the horrifying crimes from her own childhood and
Speaker 2: knew she had to act. It would take prison interviews
Speaker 2: with Choral's accomplices, advanced scientific techniques, and years of tireless
Speaker 2: effort to identify these young men. Investigative journalist Lisa Olsen
Speaker 2: brings to life the teens who were hunted by a
Speaker 2: killer hiding in plain sight, and the extraordinary woman who
Speaker 2: would finally give these unknown victims back their names and
Speaker 2: their dignity. With newly uncovered information about the case, the
Speaker 2: scientist and the serial killer immerses readers in an astonishing
Speaker 2: story and reveals why these horrific events remain relevant decades later.
Speaker 2: The book that we're featuring this evening is The Scientist
Speaker 2: and the serial Killer, The Search for Houston's Lost Boys,
Speaker 2: with my special guest, investigative reporter, editor, and author Lisa Olson.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for
Speaker 2: this interview. Lisa Olson.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks Stan for having me. I look forward to
Speaker 3: speaking to you about my new book.
Speaker 2: And congratulations on that book, The Scientist and the serial Killer.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the origins of this book project, how
Speaker 2: you became involved in your connection to this area.
Speaker 3: I learned about this story when I first moved to Houston.
Speaker 3: I had already written about unidentified people who had been
Speaker 3: victims of a serial killer in Seattle called the Green
Speaker 3: River Killer, and I was aware of the fact that
Speaker 3: Houston had something like four hundred unidentified people. So one
Speaker 3: of the first people I looked for was the anthropologist,
Speaker 3: the forensic anthropologist in Harris County, because I was interested
Speaker 3: in writing more about these cases. In Seattle, I'd done
Speaker 3: some work on cases like this that had resulted in
Speaker 3: the identifications of several people, including a mother and child
Speaker 3: murder victim, so I knew it was an area where
Speaker 3: investigative reporting could make a difference and where there was
Speaker 3: a huge human rights issue in terms of unidentified people
Speaker 3: all across the United States, there's something like forty thousand.
Speaker 3: But I learned about this particular case after meeting forensic
Speaker 3: anthropologist Sharon Derrek, who had already when I first moved
Speaker 3: to Houston, sort of started to dig into the fact
Speaker 3: that around a third of one of the most famous
Speaker 3: or infamous Houston serial killing cases, about a third of
Speaker 3: those victims remained unidentified twenty or thirty years after the
Speaker 3: discovery of those crimes in nineteen seventy three. This was
Speaker 3: the serial killings linked to Dingy Coral, who is known
Speaker 3: in Houston as the candy Man, who with two teenage accomplices,
Speaker 3: murdered at least twenty seven people known to authorities in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three. It turned out there were even more
Speaker 3: than that.
Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit about Sharon Derek's background
Speaker 2: and how she came to be involved in this case.
Speaker 3: Sharon Derek had raised three children when she went back
Speaker 3: to school to become initially a cultural anthropologist studying ancient peoples,
Speaker 3: and then she really decided that she'd rather use their
Speaker 3: skills in a very modern way and look into forensic cases.
Speaker 3: She learned about the field of forensic anthropology and she
Speaker 3: trained in that specialty area, first working on child death
Speaker 3: cases in Harris County and then transitioning to identifications, and
Speaker 3: over the years she worked with another forensic anthropologist and
Speaker 3: Harris County doctor, Jennifer Love to really develop a specialty
Speaker 3: in this area and became quite an authority in Texas
Speaker 3: in identifications, and these cases in particular were of both
Speaker 3: personal and professional interest to her. Sharon remembered after finding
Speaker 3: these bones in storage in the Harris County Medical Examiner's
Speaker 3: office that she had heard about these crimes when she
Speaker 3: was a teenager in Austin, Texas. They had made national
Speaker 3: and international news. There had been searches that were televised
Speaker 3: internationally of these digs, the kind of hasty digs for
Speaker 3: these remains in three different places in Texas, in Houston,
Speaker 3: in East Texas, on in a woodland area, and also
Speaker 3: on a beach called High Island. And Sharon remembered those
Speaker 3: stories and she took this really personally, partly because she
Speaker 3: had cousins who were around the same age of these
Speaker 3: boys who had been hunted and killed by Dean Coral,
Speaker 3: and many of them came from the same neighborhoods in Houston,
Speaker 3: a really historic neighborhood called the Houston Heights, and other
Speaker 3: neighborhoods around that. Sharon was very familiar with those neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: Her grandparents had lived there, her parents had met at
Speaker 3: a church there. And she thought, how is it possible
Speaker 3: that seven or eight boys from these neighborhoods, these long
Speaker 3: historic neighborhoods in Houston, could still be missing all this
Speaker 3: time later and never be identified. How is that possible?
Speaker 3: She felt a personal and professional connection to the case.
Speaker 2: You righte that in preparation, she took homicide reports and
Speaker 2: took them home, and she looked at typewritten passages, and
Speaker 2: she made notes and began identifying clues right away.
Speaker 3: She absolutely did. She obtained records through the DA's office
Speaker 3: of the original homicide reports, and they're kind of hard
Speaker 3: to read. They're like mimeographed on old typewriters, fuzzy, And
Speaker 3: she began looking for names of boys that had not
Speaker 3: been identified in the seventies but who were listed as missing.
Speaker 3: And she came up with a list of names and
Speaker 3: possible dresses, but they were from, you know, nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3: One of the names that popped out at her right
Speaker 3: away was Randy Harvey, who was a boy who had
Speaker 3: gotten on his bike to ride to a gas station.
Speaker 3: In those days, it was really common for kids in Houston,
Speaker 3: and I think all over the country to ride their
Speaker 3: bikes or walks in their neighborhoods. People didn't think much
Speaker 3: of it. It was just a couple of miles to
Speaker 3: his workplace, but it turned out he had never gotten
Speaker 3: there at all. His mother didn't know that. She just
Speaker 3: knew that he didn't come home. She worried, but in
Speaker 3: those days, you know, there was no cell phone, there
Speaker 3: was no pager. They didn't actually have a phone at
Speaker 3: the house, and so she really had no way to
Speaker 3: figure out where Randy was, and she reported a missing
Speaker 3: to the police. Sharon found that report described Randy, it
Speaker 3: described his bicycle, and that was the end. She also discovered,
Speaker 3: hidden in some older file two notes that really made
Speaker 3: her think there must be someone still looking for Randy.
Speaker 3: There were notes from his little sister, Leonore, showing that
Speaker 3: Leonore had called the work herself twice and asked to
Speaker 3: come visit to look for her brother, but had been
Speaker 3: told she was too young to come, So that was
Speaker 3: one of the first names Sharon tried to research, thinking,
Speaker 3: what if one of these boxes of bones is really
Speaker 3: Randy Harvey. I need to know and to answer that question,
Speaker 3: she needed to both analyze the bones herself and then
Speaker 3: also try to see if she could find any of
Speaker 3: his family. Both of those things were tasks she took
Speaker 3: on almost simultaneously. She did a full new analysis using
Speaker 3: updated forensic anthropology techniques to measure the bones that were
Speaker 3: in those box and to make new calculations using new
Speaker 3: databases that are based on research in places like the
Speaker 3: Body Farm in Nashville, Tennessee, which you might have heard about,
Speaker 3: that allow modern day anthropologists to anthropologists to make better
Speaker 3: estimates of possible ages and weights and not weight sorry,
Speaker 3: ages and heights of victims. Weight is really impossible to
Speaker 3: tell from bones. She was able to then determine that
Speaker 3: Randy Harvey was likely taller and younger I mean, not
Speaker 3: Randy Harvey. These bones that she first picked out were
Speaker 3: likely from a taller and younger boy than had originally
Speaker 3: been identified in nineteen seventy three in old autopsy reports,
Speaker 3: so this unknown one of the first boxes she identifies,
Speaker 3: she realizes that these bones are of a boy of
Speaker 3: fifteen who are who is around six feet tall. Originally,
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy three, the pathologist had guessed that this
Speaker 3: boy was older and was shorter, and so with her
Speaker 3: new calculations, it turned out that this boy was actually
Speaker 3: a better match for missing person Randy Harvey than anyone
Speaker 3: had thought in seven He might have been ruled out
Speaker 3: because of the age determination as a older boy, and
Speaker 3: because there was sort of an assumption that Randy was
Speaker 3: shorter than six feet tall, but he was. He was
Speaker 3: six feet and the bones were six feet and she
Speaker 3: ends up eventually finding his sisters and verifying that that
Speaker 3: DNA in a relatively short period of time. It took
Speaker 3: her about a year and a half, and given all
Speaker 3: the obstacles she had, you know, years decades of no progress,
Speaker 3: no DNA tests, no names for the next of well,
Speaker 3: names for the next of ken, but no addresses, no
Speaker 3: phone numbers, no idea if the little girl listed as
Speaker 3: Leonora Harvey was still named Harvey or something else. She
Speaker 3: was able to find you know, the siblings and get
Speaker 3: a match within a fairly short amount of time, which
Speaker 3: really excited her. Made her think, well, the rest of
Speaker 3: this case should be easy to solve. Author didn't turn
Speaker 3: out to be.
Speaker 2: So you chronicle the efforts and all of the technological
Speaker 2: advances that occur in the ensuing years. But she also
Speaker 2: some of the people that she teams up with, and
Speaker 2: you had mentioned doctor Jennifer Love, So tell us about
Speaker 2: doctor Jennifer Love and an unexpected breakthrough.
Speaker 3: So doctor Love was brought into the Medical Examiner's office.
Speaker 3: She had studied at the University of Tennessee at the
Speaker 3: famous Body Farm facility. She was kind of a hot
Speaker 3: shot and at first Sharon thought, uh, oh, you know,
Speaker 3: she's going to want to take over these cases from me,
Speaker 3: But it didn't turn out that way. They kind of
Speaker 3: teamed up and doctor Love said, hey, you know you
Speaker 3: have those cases. They had gotten a grant together, working
Speaker 3: together from the Departments of Justice to look at more
Speaker 3: of these unidentified and they had picked a certain number
Speaker 3: of cases to do DNA testing because DNA testing is expensive,
Speaker 3: and they had chosen you know, the Loss Boys cases
Speaker 3: and also some other murder victims from that backlog of
Speaker 3: four hundred bodies unidentified bodies. They had, and so doctor
Speaker 3: Love decided, well, I'll take some of these more mysterious
Speaker 3: cases that don't seem to have anything to do with
Speaker 3: the seventies murders and let Sharon take those on, because
Speaker 3: she already had this knowledge from you know, really basically
Speaker 3: memorizing the HBD police reports and essentially you know, having
Speaker 3: gone through a lot of hoops to find Randy Harvey,
Speaker 3: figuring out things about how to find people from seventies records,
Speaker 3: using ancestry dot com, using old public records, and so
Speaker 3: they split it up that way. Well, so then one
Speaker 3: day doctor Love gets her own box of bones out,
Speaker 3: and this is a really cryptic one. All it says,
Speaker 3: the sort of antiquities. She starts doing the analysis and
Speaker 3: she sort of shocked because when she looks at these bones,
Speaker 3: she says, you know, there's really nothing in this box
Speaker 3: that makes me think that this is a historic body.
Speaker 3: There's no you know, relics of you know, caskets that
Speaker 3: were used in pioneer days. These bones don't seem to
Speaker 3: be from a Native American person. It seems like this
Speaker 3: might be a modern murder case. So she's kind of
Speaker 3: mystified by that. Turns out the box was miss labeled.
Speaker 3: She goes ahead and gets the DNA testing done, thinking, well,
Speaker 3: you know it's worth it because it doesn't look like
Speaker 3: it's really an ancient being who wouldn't have any modern
Speaker 3: family necessarily living, and so she's astonished when she gets
Speaker 3: the DNA it results back. Turns out this is yet
Speaker 3: another victim of Dean Coral. It is a After the
Speaker 3: first identifications, Sharon gets a lot of calls from other
Speaker 3: families who have missing persons from the seventies. One of
Speaker 3: them is a woman named Donna Taylor, whose brother Alan
Speaker 3: was missing for many, many years, and it turns out
Speaker 3: that the DNA from this mysterious box of n antiquities
Speaker 3: matches Allen's sister and other family. So the second identification
Speaker 3: comes from this partnership in that office. And I want
Speaker 3: to say that, you know, Harris County is one of
Speaker 3: the few counties in the United States that has forensic
Speaker 3: anthropologists on staff, and they were certainly very unusual in
Speaker 3: the two thousands and having a team of forensic anthropologists.
Speaker 3: They actually had at different times three or four forensic anthropologists,
Speaker 3: all kind of committed to trying to both handle modern
Speaker 3: cases where there's really only bone evidence, and so their
Speaker 3: expertise is needed as well as these older backlog cases.
Speaker 3: So they were really forging some new territory in terms
Speaker 3: of making identifications and kind of leading the way along
Speaker 3: with them people in Seattle who had worked on the
Speaker 3: Green River cases, and of course New York City where
Speaker 3: forensic anthropologists were very involved in trying to help identify
Speaker 3: the victims of the eleven terrorist attacks.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now, you also chronicle all of the people
Speaker 2: that Sharon Derek. She reads reports back from nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: three we already mentioned that, and familiarizes herself with this
Speaker 2: case completely, but there are people that she gets to
Speaker 2: speak to that she tracks down that offer some very
Speaker 2: illuminating information and add to the identification of some of
Speaker 2: these people. You also mentioned you spoke to Nita Bottaford
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: It really was, especially after both Randy and Allen were identified.
Speaker 3: You know, there were really a lot of people whose
Speaker 3: lives had been really forever altered by these murders. And
Speaker 3: Sharon started getting a lot of phone calls and a
Speaker 3: lot of emails, and a lot of them were from
Speaker 3: people who had known different missing persons, and there were
Speaker 3: also people who had been friends of the murder victims
Speaker 3: who were identified in nineteen seventy three who wanted to
Speaker 3: offer additional information. Some of them just had cryptic stories
Speaker 3: about remembering some school chom who suddenly disappeared, And sometimes
Speaker 3: what she'd find out is, well, that person just moved
Speaker 3: away and they're alive and well and living in another state.
Speaker 3: But other times she would find out that a story
Speaker 3: about a missing person that then would prove to be
Speaker 3: young man or young woman, young man mainly who then
Speaker 3: disappeared entirely from the records. And there were lots and
Speaker 3: lots of stories too that came from people who started
Speaker 3: talking about Dean Coral being more than a sexual, sexually
Speaker 3: motivated serial killer. Dean Coral systematically captured, tortured, raped, and
Speaker 3: murdered these thirty some victims. It turned out there were
Speaker 3: more than twenty seven. Sharon found out along the way
Speaker 3: he had alliances with different people, both teenagers, who he
Speaker 3: used as accomplices, but also he had other criminal activities.
Speaker 3: So some of the people Sharon was hearing from was
Speaker 3: telling her about Dean Coral being involved in other kinds
Speaker 3: of crime, Dean Coral being involved in a porn ring,
Speaker 3: Dean Coral being involved in selling stolen goods. And these
Speaker 3: were stories too that people started to tell me. When
Speaker 3: I began to write this book, I really started looking
Speaker 3: because Sharon's mission was to identify these boys. Her a
Speaker 3: mission wasn't to figure out what happened to all of
Speaker 3: them and how Dean Coral learned lured all of them in.
Speaker 3: When I started writing my book, I decided I wanted
Speaker 3: to not only tell the story of her identifications of
Speaker 3: in these eight cases, but also show the reader what
Speaker 3: those cases revealed to us about this crazy murder case
Speaker 3: in the seventies, about how Korl managed to get away
Speaker 3: with kidnapping, killing, and murdering so many young boys and
Speaker 3: the police never really raising any alarm. How did he
Speaker 3: do that, what tools did he use? What who else
Speaker 3: was involved? Were there other adults involved? And the answers
Speaker 3: I started learning to those questions really came from a
Speaker 3: lot of the friends and family of these eight boys
Speaker 3: who were never identified in the seventies because no one
Speaker 3: had ever talked to them, and in fact, in many cases,
Speaker 3: no one had talked to the siblings of the boys
Speaker 3: who had been identified the authorities large. He had interviewed
Speaker 3: the two accomplices of Dean Coral who were sent to
Speaker 3: prison for these crimes with him, Elmer, Wayne Henley and
Speaker 3: David Brooks, but they didn't necessarily try to interview a
Speaker 3: lot of other young people about who else Coral had
Speaker 3: associated with or what else who else might have been involved.
Speaker 3: And so when I started talking to other people, I
Speaker 3: hear stories. For example, you mentioned Nita Bodaford, who dated
Speaker 3: one of the boys that Sharon Derek identified, whose name
Speaker 3: was Michael Balch, and she's told me that Michael Balch
Speaker 3: was one of the last murder victims. He was killed
Speaker 3: in the summer of nineteen seventy three, about a month
Speaker 3: before Coral died at the hands of one of his accomplices.
Speaker 3: So Nita Bodaford tells me a story that Michael was
Speaker 3: one of the last time the last time she ever
Speaker 3: saw him was eating in a local hangout in the
Speaker 3: Heights and made a remark that he knew who had
Speaker 3: done this to his brother, because Michael Balch's brother, Billy,
Speaker 3: was a murder victim and he had already been missing
Speaker 3: for a couple of years. When Michael went missing. So
Speaker 3: she hears him talk about she knows what's he knows
Speaker 3: what's happening, he knows who took his brother, and he's
Speaker 3: going to do something about it. And so that kind
Speaker 3: of those kind of stories that I accumulate helped paint
Speaker 3: the picture of how within the teenage world in Houston,
Speaker 3: some people knew that there was there was a group
Speaker 3: out there, there was a killer out there who were
Speaker 3: doing things to young boys who were that too many
Speaker 3: people were going missing, there were too many kids that
Speaker 3: just disappeared from school, and some kids suspected that Dean
Speaker 3: Coral was involved. It's just the authorities didn't seem to
Speaker 3: have talk to most of these kids. And so that
Speaker 3: that opened up in this book a chance to tell
Speaker 3: the rest of the story of these crimes and how
Speaker 3: many different ways Coral tricked and lurd and young teens
Speaker 3: and then was able to kill them in ways that
Speaker 3: I think are relevant today because we still have human
Speaker 3: trafficking ringks Kral was involved with the group of people
Speaker 3: who took erotic photos of young men and sold them internationally.
Speaker 3: So to me was that was part of the story
Speaker 3: that was completely unknown in the seventies. That made this
Speaker 3: murder really really relevant today because there were the same
Speaker 3: kinds of conditions that we see now in the seventies,
Speaker 3: and no one was doing anything about it. There were
Speaker 3: no laws really protecting teenage boys. A lot of times,
Speaker 3: if teenage boys were sexually assaulted, it was viewed as
Speaker 3: not a crime. It was viewed as something that just happened,
Speaker 3: and maybe even the boy's fault. And there was a
Speaker 3: lot of homophobia, and so the odds of these boys
Speaker 3: coming forward or seeking help or telling anyone what was
Speaker 3: going on were really low. And of course that wasn't
Speaker 3: the only way Dean Coral was luring people to his home.
Speaker 3: He was also using teenagers just to throw parties and
Speaker 3: invite people, and he was getting them to grab people
Speaker 3: essentially off the street. But he was also paying kids
Speaker 3: to take their photos, and that was a part of
Speaker 3: the story that was really hidden in the seventies.
Speaker 2: You talk about people that you got to speak to,
Speaker 2: and Bernie Milligan's story.
Speaker 3: Well, that was the other part that was really eye opening.
Speaker 3: When I started to speak to people who had known
Speaker 3: murder victims, who could create the world of nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 3: seventy two and seventy three when in Houston, Dean Coral
Speaker 3: was driving different kinds of kind of muscle cars around
Speaker 3: and approaching kids, initially alone and then later with two
Speaker 3: other teens that he recruited. I ended up finding a
Speaker 3: number of people who told me stories about being either
Speaker 3: invited to go to party with Dean Coral or the
Speaker 3: other kids who were associated with Coral, or who were
Speaker 3: chased by Dean Coral. And one of the most scary
Speaker 3: stories I heard was from Bernie Milligan. And Bernie Milligan
Speaker 3: was very good friends with the known murder victim, a
Speaker 3: kid who was killed by Dean Coral whose name was
Speaker 3: Franka Gary. And Franka Gary was a really well known
Speaker 3: teen in the Houston Heights. You know, he was somebody
Speaker 3: everyone liked. He was a good kid. He went to
Speaker 3: Waltrip High School, he was close to graduating, and then
Speaker 3: he just suddenly disappeared. And Bernie Milligan was one of
Speaker 3: his friends, one of his close friends. So Bernie lived
Speaker 3: in the same area there were other murder victims had disappeared,
Speaker 3: and he happened to be in the wrong place at
Speaker 3: the wrong time and encountered Dean Coral. He was working
Speaker 3: late at night at a ice cream store, kind of
Speaker 3: place a lot of us get our first teenage jobs, right.
Speaker 3: He cleaning it because they had a health inspection coming
Speaker 3: the next day, so he was working lad. He's just
Speaker 3: really tired and hot, sweating, covered with all kind of
Speaker 3: sticky ice cream that he washes off before he goes
Speaker 3: out of the store, but he just can't wait to
Speaker 3: get home. And a block or so from the ice
Speaker 3: cream store, which still exists, just a different business today,
Speaker 3: he stops at a gas station which also still exists
Speaker 3: and is quite a nice little cafe in the heights
Speaker 3: to get a soda, and he's plunking his change into
Speaker 3: one of those old fashioned machines where the bottles clunk down,
Speaker 3: and when he suddenly hears a car behind. Timmy turns
Speaker 3: to see a man approaching him whose hands are sort
Speaker 3: of up ready to attack him, and Bernie shares this
Speaker 3: incredibly harrowing story of someone trying to grab him and
Speaker 3: then really literally running away from this man who begins
Speaker 3: to chase him in a car, hurling that bottle at
Speaker 3: the man, breaking the bottle on the car, and then
Speaker 3: being able to evade him only because he knows his
Speaker 3: neighborhood so well that he can kind of jog around
Speaker 3: through houses, through yards, through alleys, and he also happens
Speaker 3: to be on the track team, so he can run
Speaker 3: pretty fast without stopping. And so that that kind of
Speaker 3: thing is that kind of story is in the book,
Speaker 3: and it gives you, I think, a flavor of the
Speaker 3: fear that the boys who didn't live to tell their
Speaker 3: stories must have experienced. And it also lets you know
Speaker 3: to what extent the kids in the seventies and neighborhoods
Speaker 3: like the Heights felt estranged from the authorities. They really
Speaker 3: didn't feel like they could talk to the police, or
Speaker 3: if they did, no one would believe them, even someone
Speaker 3: like Bernie, who was not a hippie. Some other kids
Speaker 3: who I talked to were kind of hippies. They were
Speaker 3: long hair, and they said, we would never have talked
Speaker 3: to police about anything we were worried about because police
Speaker 3: were just around there hassling us. You know, some of
Speaker 3: the kids who disappeared were you know, smoked pod or whatever,
Speaker 3: and they would never have talked to police. But Bernie,
Speaker 3: you know, Bernie was a good kid, didn't drink and smoke,
Speaker 3: was on the track team, but he felt like police
Speaker 3: would never have believed him if he had told the
Speaker 3: story of being chased by a man like this. He figured,
Speaker 3: at best, you know, they would have hassled him about
Speaker 3: why he was out late at night, and he didn't
Speaker 3: have the plate number, so he didn't say anything right away.
Speaker 3: But Bernie realized too. This was a couple of years
Speaker 3: later when he sees Coral again at another friend's house
Speaker 3: and this time he gets a really weird feeling from him.
Speaker 3: He realizes who he is. Someone tells him Coral's name,
Speaker 3: but he again he still doesn't feel like anyone's going
Speaker 3: to believe this kind of a story, and of course
Speaker 3: later on he regrets it when he learns about the murders.
Speaker 3: But these kind of stories are infused in the book.
Speaker 3: There's so many accounts. I used only the most grudible accounts,
Speaker 3: kids who claimed to have been approached or lured by
Speaker 3: Dean Coral or in Bernie's case, Chase, And there were
Speaker 3: a lot of accounts like that, and that was also
Speaker 3: I think a frightening part of the reporting is that,
Speaker 3: you know, kids just felt like they were not going
Speaker 3: to be listened to, and that even when their friends
Speaker 3: disappeared no one was going to do anything about it.
Speaker 3: Even when somebody like Frank A. Gary, Bernie's friend disappeared,
Speaker 3: no one did much about it. Frank was, like I said,
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks from graduation. He had a car
Speaker 3: that was left behind. He had already bought his class ring.
Speaker 3: He had proposed to his high school girlfriend. And police
Speaker 3: made a few inquiries at his high school. They spoke
Speaker 3: to his mother because they begged she begged them to
Speaker 3: But really there was that murder case was shut very quickly,
Speaker 3: and I think if people had looked deeper into Frank A.
Speaker 3: Gary's disappearance, they might have started to notice that there
Speaker 3: were a lot of other of his junior high school
Speaker 3: classmates who were also missing. The thing was, at the time,
Speaker 3: there were lots of kids reported runaway and there still are,
Speaker 3: but missed runaways were returned fairly quickly, as we now know.
Speaker 3: You know, few of those runaways get anything like an
Speaker 3: Amber alert. There was nothing like an Amber alert in
Speaker 3: the seventies, so there was no red flags raised. A
Speaker 3: kid like Frank, who was eighteen, was classified as an adult,
Speaker 3: and adults, you know, are allowed to go missing. You know,
Speaker 3: that's not a crime. It's not even a runaway, so
Speaker 3: there was no analysis being done of this. What I
Speaker 3: think might be more obvious today, although it would only
Speaker 3: be obvious if police were analyzing reports of missing persons
Speaker 3: that there was indeed a large cluster of unexplained missing
Speaker 3: persons in the same sort of central Houston area neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: How you talk about the confession that was elicited by
Speaker 2: Detective Mullokan originally in nineteen seventy three from Wayne Henley,
Speaker 2: but doctor Derek Sharon Derek was very interested. Despite being
Speaker 2: repulsed by Henley's behavior and obviously his account of the crimes,
Speaker 2: she felt it necessary or felt it necessary, to interview
Speaker 2: both David Brooks and Wayne Henley.
Speaker 3: Yes, she did. As I said. The crimes that were
Speaker 3: discovered only in August nineteen seventy three, really, despite the
Speaker 3: fact that there were you know, over two dozen missing
Speaker 3: boys who were endangered missing persons is what we would
Speaker 3: call them today, with all kinds of red flags about
Speaker 3: their disappearances. Police had only opened two murder cases out
Speaker 3: of those twenty four plus disappearances. Sharon. When she looked
Speaker 3: back at the old records, and you know, of course
Speaker 3: Henley's initial statements in David Brooks's initial state were led
Speaker 3: to the first IDs. She noticed all kinds of inconsistencies
Speaker 3: between how David Brooks described victims and how Wayne Henley
Speaker 3: described victims, and she started trying to sort of analyze
Speaker 3: those and compare in contrast, to try to figure out
Speaker 3: if some of the victims they described had in fact
Speaker 3: never been identified. They knew some of the victims. So
Speaker 3: it was easy for Frank Gary to be identified because
Speaker 3: Wayne Henley said Frank A. Gary was murdered and Franka
Speaker 3: Gary's body was found, and Franka Gary's family had dental records,
Speaker 3: so Frank was one of the early IDs. And there
Speaker 3: were other ideas that were made like that, like Michael
Speaker 3: Balch's brother Billy, he disappeared with a friend Johnny, who
Speaker 3: had broken his collarbone. And so those are names that
Speaker 3: Wayne Henley and David Brooks knew because these kids were
Speaker 3: classmates of theirs. They were kids in fact, who they'd
Speaker 3: known since elementary school in some case. And so those
Speaker 3: some of those id's were really solid, right, So she
Speaker 3: knew that some of those kids had been personally known
Speaker 3: by Brooks and Henley. And then the really good forensic
Speaker 3: work in the seventies, which they did the best work
Speaker 3: they could in the seventies. They used dental records, they
Speaker 3: used X rays, they did everything they could to try
Speaker 3: to confirm IDs. That some of those identifications were really,
Speaker 3: really good. But then she realized, you know, there were
Speaker 3: identification there were statements from Brooks and Henley about kids
Speaker 3: that she couldn't figure out which kid they were talking about,
Speaker 3: like she would they would say, okay, we picked up
Speaker 3: a kid on a certain block, or there was a
Speaker 3: kid who was a Mexican kid who fought with Dean
Speaker 3: Coral when he lived at a certain address, And those
Speaker 3: specific statements made in police reports didn't really match necessarily
Speaker 3: any person who had been identified. So she started thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, she she was trying to piece together those
Speaker 3: clues of the non matching descriptions, the ones without names,
Speaker 3: really to see if she could use those to lead
Speaker 3: to other missing persons who might be her her lost boys,
Speaker 3: that might be the ones she was still trying to identify.
Speaker 3: So in addition to really going through all those statements
Speaker 3: and organizing them and trying to assemble lists. She decided
Speaker 3: she would go and try to reinterview. She started with
Speaker 3: David Brooks because David Brooks, after making three statements to
Speaker 3: Houston Police in August nineteen seventy three, never talked about
Speaker 3: the crimes again. He never did any interviews with anybody.
Speaker 3: Elmrwayne Henley had done a lot of interviews, so she
Speaker 3: didn't feel the need to interview him right away because
Speaker 3: she felt like he had said everything he could already.
Speaker 3: She went through all the published interviews and kind of
Speaker 3: looked at that looking for those inconsistencies, looking for names
Speaker 3: that didn't match. But she did think early on that
Speaker 3: David Brooks might be able to help her. Even with
Speaker 3: that first case. She was trying to identify the missing
Speaker 3: person that we talked about, Randy Harvey. She found that
Speaker 3: old police report that suggested David Brooks had known Randy Harvey,
Speaker 3: that in fact, he'd accused Randy of stealing his stereo
Speaker 3: of all things, and so she thought, well, I need
Speaker 3: to go talk to him, because then maybe that will
Speaker 3: help me right away. She wanted to talk to him
Speaker 3: with her first about her first idea, but she was
Speaker 3: also looking for like I said, the non matching descriptions,
Speaker 3: the anomalous statements that might lead her to more matches.
Speaker 2: How does she overcome the challenges with her team at
Speaker 2: the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, she.
Speaker 3: The Emmy's office. Of course, you know, this is not
Speaker 3: something that forensic anthropologists normally do. They don't normally go
Speaker 3: to prisons to interview people. They work in crime labs.
Speaker 3: You know, they do their analysis in the lab. The
Speaker 3: ones who work on identifications, of course, do interview families.
Speaker 3: Do you facilitate the DNA collection for families? But going
Speaker 3: to a prison was not normally on her list of duties, right,
Speaker 3: so she had to get special permission from her boss,
Speaker 3: the Harris County Chief Medical Examiner, Lewis Sanchez, Les Sanchez,
Speaker 3: and she did get permission from him after making a
Speaker 3: case that you know, if David Brooks talks, he knew
Speaker 3: things about victims that predated the victims that Wayne Henley
Speaker 3: had helped identify. Wayne Henley had been kind of the
Speaker 3: main henchman really in the Coral murders, but he had
Speaker 3: met Coral through David Brooks, and David Brooks had known
Speaker 3: Coral longer Korl had met David Brooks when he was
Speaker 3: a really young kid, because David Brooks's grandmother lived near
Speaker 3: a candy shop that Coral ran in the Heights. Cor
Speaker 3: ran three different candy shops in the Heights, three different locations,
Speaker 3: all of them near elementary schools, and David met Jean
Speaker 3: Coral when he was about ten years or eleven years
Speaker 3: old at one of those candy shops. So she thought,
Speaker 3: you know, David Brooks has known him the longest, maybe
Speaker 3: there's other things that could help me to lead me
Speaker 3: to other people. But she had some obstacles. Like I said,
Speaker 3: David Brooks had never spoken to anyone, so even after
Speaker 3: she got permission, she wasn't sure he would agree to
Speaker 3: talk to her, and surprisingly he did. He did agree
Speaker 3: to talk to her two times, and when she did
Speaker 3: talk to him, though, it was clear that David Brooks
Speaker 3: was still hoping to be paroled. Both David Brooks and
Speaker 3: Wayne Henley had been sentenced to life for murder that
Speaker 3: David Brooks had not been convicted and as many of
Speaker 3: the murders as Wayne Henley had been, so David Brooks
Speaker 3: still had some hope he would be paroled somedays. So
Speaker 3: he was cautious in talking to Sharon because he didn't
Speaker 3: want to admit to anything that might implicate him in
Speaker 3: more murders, because of course there's no statute of limitations
Speaker 3: on murders. So she was trying to persuade him, but
Speaker 3: she was not a prosecutor. She couldn't offer him any
Speaker 3: kind of immunity. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: what was interesting with that first interview with or the
Speaker 3: second interview actually she had with David was he ends
Speaker 3: up drawing a map for her of the house where
Speaker 3: he thought that Randy Harvey had lived in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: one at the time he disappeared, and when she looked
Speaker 3: for that address, it matched exactly with the missing persons report.
Speaker 3: It was all but certain, even though David Brooks didn't
Speaker 3: want to say that Randy Harvey had been one of
Speaker 3: the early victims of Dean Coral. So that really gave
Speaker 3: her a lot of motivation to make that first idea
Speaker 3: to do everything she could to find Randy's sisters. So
Speaker 3: David was helpful in that way, and again there were
Speaker 3: these statements that she went over with him that ended
Speaker 3: up later matching to some of the other victims that
Speaker 3: she identified, but other Thanry, that was the main clue
Speaker 3: that Randy was the main clue really she got from
Speaker 3: David Brooks. But it did make her think, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe I should go talk to Elma Wayne Henley, because
Speaker 3: she did have a different perspective than journalists and other
Speaker 3: people who had interviewed him. She was looking really for
Speaker 3: those descriptions of victims he might have known or heard
Speaker 3: about from Brooks or Coral. You know, Coral occasionally had
Speaker 3: talked to Brooks about other victims he had killed alone.
Speaker 3: Coral and Brooks had talked a little bit to Henley
Speaker 3: about places or people that had been killed previously. So
Speaker 3: she was looking to expand that list because as she worked,
Speaker 3: she started out thinking there were only three unidentified Coral victims,
Speaker 3: but as she worked, she started to realize there were
Speaker 3: more like eight, which ended up, you know, the discoveries
Speaker 3: that she makes end up also expanding the number of
Speaker 3: victims that Dean Coral's known to have had. So she's
Speaker 3: finding more victims and she's finding more mysteries as she goes.
Speaker 2: What did she make of the original story that when
Speaker 2: they went to the beach to search with Henley, he
Speaker 2: said there were nine bodies there and the search ended
Speaker 2: quickly with six bodies.
Speaker 3: Well, she found that really significant, you know, and she
Speaker 3: talks to at the point she talks to Elmer Wayne Henley,
Speaker 3: which is later in her searches, she's trying to find
Speaker 3: what happened. One of the kind of heartbreaking discoveries Sharon
Speaker 3: makes is that some of the boys were misidentified. The
Speaker 3: boy we talked to is Nita's boyfriend, Michael Balch. We
Speaker 3: talked about Michael, the one who went looking for his
Speaker 3: brother's killer and was killed himself in July nineteen seventy three. Yes, Saron.
Speaker 3: Sharon finds out fairly early on that Michael Balch was misidentified.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of pressure in seventy three to
Speaker 3: identify the Bulch brothers, and later on she starts to
Speaker 3: suspect that another another murder victim who was identified in
Speaker 3: the nineties had been misidentified. His name was Mark Scott.
Speaker 3: So when she goes to see Elma Wayne Henley, she's
Speaker 3: trying to figure out if some of these boys that
Speaker 3: she's still searching for were buried on the beach or
Speaker 3: in the woods, as were two locations in East Texas,
Speaker 3: or if some of the bodies might have been mixed
Speaker 3: up from those two burial sites, and Henley sticks to
Speaker 3: his story. He sticks to his story that there were
Speaker 3: more bodies on the beach and that she doesn't have
Speaker 3: Mark Scott's body, which is kind of a devastating statement
Speaker 3: that he makes. But Sharon already knows that there had
Speaker 3: been bodies missed on the beach from the identification that
Speaker 3: she had made previously with doctor Love. The mysterious box
Speaker 3: of bones labeled antiquities had been found on the same
Speaker 3: beach where the other bodies had been found, but ten
Speaker 3: years later, so she already knows that in this one
Speaker 3: way for sure, ELM. Marwayne Henley isn't lying. There definitely
Speaker 3: were more bodies on the beach than we're found, and
Speaker 3: in her interview with him, she determines that there were
Speaker 3: definitely at least two more and possibly three more because
Speaker 3: he sticks to his story that there were nine. She
Speaker 3: knows that Alan's body was missed in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3: He tells her that Mark Scott's body was missed in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, so the question is who's the other
Speaker 3: body that was buried on the beach. Sharon also in
Speaker 3: the course of the book, starts to believe that other
Speaker 3: bodies were missed at the boat shed, which is the
Speaker 3: first place that was searched for bodies. There was a
Speaker 3: storage unit in Houston that Coral had rented, a boat
Speaker 3: shed that he filled with bodies. He made it into
Speaker 3: a mass grave, and she starts to suspect that not
Speaker 3: only were there additional bodies likely buried, say in layers,
Speaker 3: under the other bodies that were excavated, but that also
Speaker 3: there seemed to have been extra that were mixed in
Speaker 3: with the bodies who were identified. When she looks at
Speaker 3: the old records, some of the boys are missing bones
Speaker 3: and other boys have too many bones. And when she
Speaker 3: identifies Randy very early on, there are a couple of
Speaker 3: extra bones that she finds in another box that she
Speaker 3: wonders if they might be Randy, because Randy's missing a
Speaker 3: couple of armbones. When she gets the DNA back from
Speaker 3: those armbones, there don't match. So Sharon starts to become
Speaker 3: convinced that not only did Elmerwayne Henley and David Brooks
Speaker 3: claim there were more bodies left behind at the beach
Speaker 3: and at the boat shed, but she can actually prove
Speaker 3: it that there really were extra bodies. The question is
Speaker 3: can she prove who they were? So that's part of
Speaker 3: what she's trying to do.
Speaker 2: Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: You offer the Mark Scott's harrowing story of near escape
Speaker 2: in this book. I know this is not the focus
Speaker 2: of the book as these graphic accounts, but this story
Speaker 2: is worth mentioning. Could you tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about this story.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things I really wanted to do
Speaker 3: in the book was, like I said, give you the
Speaker 3: real stories as much as I could. Of these eight
Speaker 3: boys who Sharon identifies, we've mentioned some of their names.
Speaker 3: Mark Scott is one of them. Randy Harvey is one
Speaker 3: of them. In the case of Mark Scott, Mark was
Speaker 3: someone who was very well known to Elmer Wayne Henley.
Speaker 3: He was Elma Wayne Henley's neighbor. He had gone to
Speaker 3: the same junior high school as Brooks and Henley. He
Speaker 3: was a kid that actually went to parties at Coral's
Speaker 3: house because there were, unbelievably, there were some kids in
Speaker 3: this group that Coral murdered who were kids that he
Speaker 3: had met at his candy shops. As boys as elementary
Speaker 3: school kids like David Brooks, some of the murder victims
Speaker 3: had also hung out at the candy shops, and as
Speaker 3: they got older, they started coming by Coral's place to
Speaker 3: hang out. David Brooks lived with Dean Coral and they
Speaker 3: had parties at Coral's places all over Houston. Coral moved
Speaker 3: every three months or so to different places and he
Speaker 3: had parties. He had large parties that you know, he'd
Speaker 3: give people free drugs and alcohol. And Mark went to
Speaker 3: these parties. So Mark was someone really well known. So
Speaker 3: when Sharon goes to visit Wayne Henley to try to
Speaker 3: figure out if she has Mark's bones in storage or not,
Speaker 3: and she learns that she doesn't, she also asks Wayne
Speaker 3: about the place where Mark was murdered because she does
Speaker 3: want to know if he's credible, if he really would
Speaker 3: know for sure what happened to Mark. And when she
Speaker 3: asks those questions, when aren't questions she necessarily usually would ask,
Speaker 3: Wayne unleashes the story of what he did to Mark
Speaker 3: that is more detailed than any other story I've ever
Speaker 3: heard about Mark Scott's murder. And I also separately interviewed
Speaker 3: one of Mark Scott's best friends, who Mark called on
Speaker 3: the night of his murder, tried to call Mark. Like
Speaker 3: some of the living victims, you know, like Bernie Milligan,
Speaker 3: attempted to escape from Dean Coral. He was able to quarrel.
Speaker 3: Sometimes left victims tied up for days and kept torturing them.
Speaker 3: Sometimes he would tie up two people at the same
Speaker 3: time to what he called a torture board, and he
Speaker 3: did that to Mark. Mark managed to loosen the ties
Speaker 3: around his hands. Somehow. Mark was a big kid, muscular,
Speaker 3: and he also had a pocket knife he might have
Speaker 3: been able to grab, but in whatever way he did this,
Speaker 3: he was able to loosen his hands. During the night,
Speaker 3: he tried to make a phone call. I talked to
Speaker 3: his friend who said, you know, Mark couldn't talk when
Speaker 3: he tried to call me. I couldn't tell where he was.
Speaker 3: I couldn't tell anything. Mark probably still had a gag
Speaker 3: in his mouth. And Wayne Henley tells Sharon about what
Speaker 3: then happened to Mark. When they wake up in the
Speaker 3: morning and see that Mark's freed himself, Wayne ends up
Speaker 3: torturing They all torture him, and Wayne ends up being
Speaker 3: the one to make the kill and Dean Coral's orders
Speaker 3: and this is a horrifying, horrifying account of how a
Speaker 3: teenager who's controlled by someone else is groomed to not
Speaker 3: only be a fellow rapist and torturer, but a fellow
Speaker 3: collaborative killer. So it's probably one of the most disturbing
Speaker 3: stories in the book. But I think it's fundamental to
Speaker 3: understanding the dynamic of what was going on and how
Speaker 3: much Dean Coral was controlling the kids who were in
Speaker 3: this group, both kids who were helping him kill kids
Speaker 3: and who may just have seen something that they didn't
Speaker 3: understand until later that may have seemed like a horror
Speaker 3: story to them but that they couldn't explain tell of course,
Speaker 3: the bodies were found. So those are the kinds of
Speaker 3: stories I share because there's really no way to dress
Speaker 3: it up. Dream Coral was an incredibly violent, horrifying killer
Speaker 3: on the same order of you know, John Wayne Gacy,
Speaker 3: and I think the only reason he's not as famous
Speaker 3: or infamous is he didn't live decades on death row
Speaker 3: to glorify his life and his exploits the way Gaysey did.
Speaker 3: Very much like Gaysey, he was sexually assaulting, exploiting, fooling,
Speaker 3: tricking young men, luring them into his homes with different ruses,
Speaker 3: using handcapped tricks to trap them. Also, you know, photographing
Speaker 3: and being involved in a porn ring. Gacy was also
Speaker 3: involved in a porn ring. Dean Coral isn't as famous
Speaker 3: because he died, but what he did was truly heinous.
Speaker 2: In that vein, you interviewed a woman named Susan mick Lamar,
Speaker 2: and she was eleven years old and witnessed some harrowing
Speaker 2: things at Coral's house, including adult men in bedrooms, and
Speaker 2: so in that theme you talk about that. In the
Speaker 2: research for this book, there was the boy pornring that
Speaker 2: you discover and several notorious characters behind it all.
Speaker 3: Well, so I didn't interview Susan because Susan had already
Speaker 3: died by the time I began writing this book. But
Speaker 3: I did interview Susan's sister and her stepbrother, and I
Speaker 3: interviewed reporter who interviewed her, and I read the accounts
Speaker 3: that she had given. She gave a lot of interviews
Speaker 3: in the eighties and nineties about this, but no one
Speaker 3: I think had at the time. Even though really good
Speaker 3: reporters wrote about her account, no one went back and
Speaker 3: reviewed other evidence that is in the police files and
Speaker 3: is in other court cases that corroborate her allegations. There
Speaker 3: are What I did was I did research to show
Speaker 3: that there was credible evidence to show what Susan maclamore
Speaker 3: had said in her store in her interviews in the
Speaker 3: eighties and nineties was true. She was the younger sister
Speaker 3: of a murder victim named Rusty Branch, who was the
Speaker 3: son of a police officer, and Susan had stories about
Speaker 3: tagging along with her older brother two parties at Dean
Speaker 3: Coral's house where kids were being photographed and things were
Speaker 3: being done in back rooms that she did not understand
Speaker 3: as a little kid, but she certainly saw kids sniffing paint,
Speaker 3: smoking pot, all consistent with the allegations or the counts
Speaker 3: of corals parties and the men in the back room
Speaker 3: taking photos. When you look back in the old police files,
Speaker 3: there were murder victim's parents who told police in the
Speaker 3: seventies that their sons had been photographed by gay men
Speaker 3: at parties, and one of the fathers actually had given
Speaker 3: police names of people who were friends of Dean Coral's
Speaker 3: And when I looked for information about those people, I
Speaker 3: found evidence that they were pornographers, that they were internationally
Speaker 3: known pornographers, that a few years after there after these murders,
Speaker 3: they were busted and a warehouse full of tons of
Speaker 3: porn contained pictures of eleven of Coral's known murder victims,
Speaker 3: eleven out of the thirty we know of today. So
Speaker 3: that to me was a really shocking revelation. It was
Speaker 3: pretty much there in the records, there in old interviews,
Speaker 3: but I put it together that was as part of
Speaker 3: what you do in your investigative reporter. But to me,
Speaker 3: it was shocking. To me, it was shocking that that
Speaker 3: part of the story about Dean Coral is not really
Speaker 3: known in Houston. When I talked to journalists who are
Speaker 3: still around who covered the Choral case, they really had
Speaker 3: no notion that Coral was definitely connected to an international
Speaker 3: partnering that there was evidence in the old files that
Speaker 3: showed that that was the case.
Speaker 2: You right about this very interesting response from Officer Branch,
Speaker 2: Rusty's father defending the department that was criticizing people criticizing
Speaker 2: the department. Very interesting what his own daughter had to
Speaker 2: say about Officer Branch.
Speaker 3: Well. Officer Branch is Rusty's father was interviewed in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy three because his son was known to be missing,
Speaker 3: but he did not want to admit that his son
Speaker 3: was a murder victim. In fact, he and he also
Speaker 3: wasn't joining the other parents. There are a lot of
Speaker 3: other parents who were saying, the police didn't do anything
Speaker 3: when we reported our kids missing. They should have done more.
Speaker 3: They should have been sounding an alarm about so many
Speaker 3: kids missing and such small area. Like I said, some
Speaker 3: of these murder victims lived just blocks front apart from
Speaker 3: each other. People like Frank Gary and Mark Scott. You know,
Speaker 3: they lived very near each other. So a lot of
Speaker 3: the families of the murder victims were making a big stink.
Speaker 3: In August nineteen seventy three, Rusty Branch's dad, even though Rusty,
Speaker 3: his son had been missing for two years, didn't join
Speaker 3: in that chorus. He gave an interview where he depended
Speaker 3: his department. He was in the radio division, which is
Speaker 3: a different division than obviously missing persons. But he just said,
Speaker 3: you know, they did everything they could. They did everything
Speaker 3: they could, and kind of more astonishingly, I mean, that's
Speaker 3: not so surprising to me for an officer to defend
Speaker 3: his department. But what was more surprising to me was
Speaker 3: he did not go to the emmy's office and take
Speaker 3: his son's medical records or his son's dental records in
Speaker 3: to be compared to the bones that they had in
Speaker 3: the mor the unidentified bodies. He didn't take that step.
Speaker 3: I a surmise really from other relatives I interviewed who
Speaker 3: were still living. It was because he didn't want to know.
Speaker 3: He didn't want his son to be one of the
Speaker 3: victims of Dean Cora. He didn't want his son to
Speaker 3: be infamous as a rape and murder victim. And that's
Speaker 3: part of what Susan says in her interviews. In the
Speaker 3: eighties and nineties, his little sister, She says, you know,
Speaker 3: there was a tremendous stigma around us, and my father,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of didn't want to face it. And
Speaker 3: other people in the family also said, you know, there
Speaker 3: was We always knew that Rusty was probably a murder victim,
Speaker 3: and we always knew that that Officer Branch the father
Speaker 3: seemed to know more about Dean Coral than he would
Speaker 3: ever taught us about. And so Susan goes into detail
Speaker 3: about the fact that she believes in these older interviews
Speaker 3: that her father knew about Coral's porn parties, that of
Speaker 3: course he didn't know boys were being murdered. You know,
Speaker 3: there's no implication that he knew about that, but there
Speaker 3: was kind of a an acceptance that in the vice
Speaker 3: world that this was just happening, and maybe I don't
Speaker 3: know what, I don't know why he would have tolerated it,
Speaker 3: or maybe he tried to do something about it he couldn't.
Speaker 3: But you know, there were no arrests, there were no
Speaker 3: the after the murders. The people who were named as
Speaker 3: being supposedly involved with Coral in this photography of boys' activities,
Speaker 3: there there's no evidence that they were ever questioned by
Speaker 3: police about Dean Coral, their involvement with Dean Coral. The
Speaker 3: principal person, Roy Ames, who was arrested and went to
Speaker 3: federal prison as a pornographer. His lawyer, he had a
Speaker 3: very good lawyer who said, you know, filed emotion saying
Speaker 3: I want it to be clear that there should be
Speaker 3: no mention of Dean Coral in this case. When when
Speaker 3: Roy Ames is eventually charged with pornography, taking porn across
Speaker 3: steam lines and selling it as a as a violation
Speaker 3: of postal law. Essentially that there's a there's a kind
Speaker 3: of an agreement that they're not going to mention the murders,
Speaker 3: which is sort of astonishing. It's in the court files.
Speaker 2: In the end, doctor Derek, Sharon Derek really wanted to
Speaker 2: before she retired solve all these unidentified cases and give
Speaker 2: the names back to these unidentified victims. How many unidentified
Speaker 2: bodies in the end, with everyone's help, were identified.
Speaker 3: So she makes she makes seven identifications. There's an eighth
Speaker 3: that is I'd say half made that of those seven,
Speaker 3: only six were ever announced. Of the book reveals an
Speaker 3: unannounced identification. And the story of Rusty Branch is more
Speaker 3: complicated than I've I've told you about, you know, and
Speaker 3: you have to read the book to get the rest
Speaker 3: of the story I'm going to say, But there is
Speaker 3: still a mystery surrounding the identification of Rusty Branch that
Speaker 3: was made in the nineteen eighties. It almost certainly was wrong.
Speaker 3: So we don't know really who's buried in Rusty Branch's
Speaker 3: grave today, And at this moment, the authorities in Texas
Speaker 3: don't seem inclined to exhume that body and correct that mistake.
Speaker 3: So I'd say there's that one body that really needs
Speaker 3: to be identified, the one that's in Rusty Branch's grave.
Speaker 3: We need to know more about whether Rusty is actually
Speaker 3: related to a different body. There are partial remains from
Speaker 3: the beach and from the boat shed that remain unexplained.
Speaker 3: So we know now that Dean Coral killed at least
Speaker 3: thirty people in Texas. Still makes him one of the
Speaker 3: most prolific serial killers in Texas history. He was labeled
Speaker 3: as one of the most prolific in US history, in
Speaker 3: modern US history in nineteen seventy three, but he still
Speaker 3: is up there in Texas history, and there's at least
Speaker 3: partial remains for say five more people. Three missing persons
Speaker 3: that Sharon is fairly convinced could have been Dean Coral's victims,
Speaker 3: people who were known by Coral or by his teenaged accomplices,
Speaker 3: and who lived in some of the same neighborhoods where
Speaker 3: other victims were killed during those same years.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking about the scientist and the serial killer, the
Speaker 2: search for Houston's Lost boys. This is an extraordinary story
Speaker 2: for people that want to find out more about this book.
Speaker 2: Do you have a website? You do any social media?
Speaker 3: I do? I have. My website is www dot Lisa
Speaker 3: Olsen l A s e O L S e n
Speaker 3: dot com at Lisa Olsen. Author is the Instagram handle,
Speaker 3: and I've got a book tour coming up, so I
Speaker 3: hope some of you join me. If you're around in April.
Speaker 3: There's events in New York, Washington, DC, Virginia, and of
Speaker 3: course all over Texas.
Speaker 2: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Lisa Wilson for the Scientist
Speaker 2: and the serial killer, the search for Houston's Lost Boys.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for this interview, and you have a
Speaker 2: great evening and good night.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Dan, thank you, good night.