Free The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen Page A

and were seldom invited. One boy reflected later, “They seemed to invite kids they hardly knew, kids we didn’t even hang around with. Looking back, it seems odd—if you’re gonna have parties, why not invite your closest friends? But it’s just like so many other things that went down around here. They seem odd now, but at the time we didn’t give a particular shit. So Dean didn’t invite us to his dope parties? So what? We had parties of our own, every Saturday night in our cars.”
    Parents of Heights boys were equally uninvolved in Dean Corll’s affairs. Said a father, “We did think he was a little old to be hangin’ with kids. He looked maybe twenty-five or twenty-six; we didn’t know he was really older’n that. But he was clean-cut, a nice polite young man, no hairs on his face or nothing radical. Didn’t cuss or act bad, and he’d help you out if you needed him, push your car or help you charge your battery, things like that. He was vanilla is what he was. What’s wrong with vanilla?” The appearance was acceptable. He had no beard.
    Dozens of local boys found themselves bedazzled by such blandishments as “a ride in my van,” “a real groovy party,” “a fishing trip to the piney woods,” “wine and whiskey and beer,” especiallysince many of them cherished memories of the same kindly man stuffing candy into their pockets at the Helms Elementary School. Certain people were just put on earth to help others. “We thought that’s the way he got his kicks,” a boy said.
    For a time, the parties were held in Dean’s apartment in Westcott Towers, a few blocks from The Heights. David and Wayne seemed to have the run of the small Corll apartment. A Westcott resident named Johnny Jones gained the impression that his next-door neighbors were two teen-age boys and an adult man, since Brooks and Henley were there so often. “One time the guy with the long hair, Brooks, he brought over two girls,” Jones said, “and I told my wife, ‘Look, they’re making the old guy leave,’ ’cause the old guy left, and he looked kinda bad about it. He came back when the girls left.”
    One afternoon Johnny Jones arrived home just as a screaming fire engine raced by the building. “Everybody next door ran out. There was two girls and two or three boys in there. They was scared it was the cops, but they laughed when it was the fire department.”
    Soon Jones became aware that the oldest member of the group spent hours on the balcony, scanning the streets with binoculars. “I’d come home in the evening and he’d be standing there looking down the street, the same guy all the time, tall, medium build, dark hair.” On a Saturday afternoon Jones peered at the parking lot and saw three people fondling a medium-sized boa constrictor. Fascinated, he watched David Brooks stroke the snake, raise it to his lips and kiss it. “I don’t know,” the astonished man told his wife. “They don’t seem like homosexuals to me, but they’re sure weird. Anybody that’d kiss a snake …”
    Early one morning, between two and four, Jones and his wife were awakened by loud noises from the next balcony. “We heard a lot of screaming, and somebody was beating their head against the wall and a guy hollering, ‘Stop him! Stop him!’ But you know,I never got out of my bed. I just thought somebody was tripping out on drugs and his friend was trying to help him or something.”
    Not long after, a maid at Westcott Towers complained to the manager, “I can’t clean that apartment yet. I have to air it out first.” A few days later, the place was vacant.
    THE THREADBARE HOUSE at the corner of Fifteenth and Tulane, a mile south of the Hilligiests and the Winkles, had a permanent look of fatigue. The two-story frame building had been propped ad libitum on corner pilings that kept it from subsiding into the sand and muck of the yard. The paint was flaking; a Matterhorn of bald tires and metal junk lay at streetside; the broken