Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 2: We're just so thrilled that the two of you seem
to be getting along pretty well for you murder here
strong opinions.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: That is high praise.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: I knew that she was a.
Speaker 6: Stute professional and looked forward to approaching her and seeing
if she would want to work together, and sure enough,
she did.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: Tracy, I think that all jibes with my experience. So yeah,
I think that you've got a good explanation of what happened.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: But then when you start.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: One thing you referenced a moment ago was the delay
in searching the property that Gaysey was associated with. What
led to the delay.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: They actually did.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 3: In Chicago, you had mentioned that there was a list
with literally thousands of names on it. What happened to
the list?
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 5: I was permitted by him. I did not ask any
prison person.
Speaker 2: Right, but he knew you were recording. And obviously there's
a tremendous exchange of information back and forth, and.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: So, Catherine, how similar was this process to the work
that you did with Dennis Raider. Not at all time,
Not at all, Okay.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: Would you classify as ininctive for him.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
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Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: What kept me.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: So it is.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: Also, the amount of information that parents put out there
about their.
Speaker 7: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: Tracy, any thoughts about now that you've spent time with Henley,
any thoughts about that final quote from him.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: Of the equation.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: Was Wayne able to steer his siblings away from this
horrible lifestyle that he'd been drawn.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: That was so helpful.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 2: Clearly, this chilling idea of the syndicate.
Speaker 5: Here we are.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 5: I'll let Tracy take this way far worse.
Speaker 6: 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?
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Thank you. I'm happy to be here again.
Speaker 3: That's going to do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another
Dog Productions.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.