Customer Reviews

The Man with Candy

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

At a time when serial murder has become a pop culture phenomenon, when you can walk into your local Blockbuster and rent any number of cheesy movies on notorious serial killers (Ed Gein, Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Gacy, Speck, Nightstalker, etc.), many Americans have never heard of Dean Arnold Corll (aka: the Candy Man), a homosexual rapist and serial killer capable of monstrous savagery. This is surprising considering it became a media circus when news of the torture-slayings first broke in August of 1973. Even the Vatican and Izvestia, voice of the Soviet government, spoke out about the unbelievable case.

Dean Corll raped, tortured, mutilated and murdered 27 young men and boys from 1970-73 around the Houston, Texas area. Some victims were kept alive for days of torture and abuse. The method of killing was usually strangulation or shooting, although a few corpses were found with their chests caved in, indicating they were probably kicked to death. Most of the butchered boys were buried in a boat shed Corll had rented (sometimes he buried their severed genitals, which were preserved in a ziplock bag, next to them). Corll held the serial killing record at the time, only to be broken by the far more infamous John Wayne Gacy in the late 1970's, who slaughtered 33 young males. Olsen speculates that other unknown victims might be buried around Corll's candy shop, but authorities showed no interest in pursuing the case any further.

The book is well written, but the thick Southern dialect tends to get a bit annoying. And the other reviewers were right about the book needing pictures. Olsen also fails to go into much detail about the atrocities committed by Corll. Not that I revel in such things, but people should know just how vicious and depraved this psycho really was. There are two other books about this case, but both are hard to find as they've been out of print for some time (Mass Murder in Houston by John K. Gurwell and Harvest of Horror by David Hanna).

Dean Corll, a gay rapist and predator was responsible for the deaths of between 20-30 boys in the Houston area (a Houston neighborhood called "The Heights" was his major hunting grounds) during the early 1970s.

Corll, a worker in a candy factory used candy and promises of fishing trips to lure adolescent boys into his shop. Once he gained access to the boys, he chained them to a piece of plywood and subjected them to sundry atrocities before killing them. He prided himself on being a traveling mortician; he buried most of the boys in a shed nowhere near his property. Others were buried in secluded spots.

Corll's sick, twisted career is believed to have started in 1970 with the disappearance and subsequent deaths of Jerry and Donald Waldrup. Between 1970-1973 some 25 boys were discovered to have been killed by Corll. Two young men, Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. and David Brooks were used to procure the boys for Corll. The depraved candy man even bought David a car for his efforts.

Matters came to a head when Henley allegedly shot Corll to death during the summer of 1973. He claimed he shot the man in self defense. He and Brooks are currently serving time for their involvement with the candy man.

Jack Olsen has crafted a well-written non-fiction book about the heart rending loss of almost 30 pre-teen and teen-aged boys from one of Houston's suburbs and their subsequent torture and murder at the hands of one of America's most evil human monsters.

The book was written about the time of the murders: in the 1970's. This fact makes it all the more engaging since the reader is given a unique view of what Houston was like at the time of the murders: 1971 through 1974.

So many true crime books of this nature seem to be thrown together in a very hasty manner in an effort to cash in on the interest that occurs at the time of and just after such serial killers operate. They tell us just the facts that can be gleaned from news sources and court documents. The books are cold and the reader never really relates to the very real human loss that occured. Mr. Olsen's book is not that type of book.

We get a bit of history on not only Houston but the suburb where the murderers - Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley - procured just about all of their victims. Most true crime writers don't really interview families of victims and create a "real" book. Olsen has done this.

Reading about a murderer's motis operandi and reading about the horrors of murders themselves is something that just about all the hack true crime writers give us. Olsen's presentation is different - more like Capote's with In Cold Blood. He makes the crimes real and personal because he introduces us to each of the boys' families and loved ones. We learn about the boys as real people, not just names and victim numbers.

This isn't a book about a murderer and his protege as it could have been. This is a book about the loss of life delivered unto a decent hard-working community just outside of Houston. As many of the families of the victims of Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley have said over the years - Corll and Henley are remembered but their victims have been forgotten. Olsen makes up for this disparity.

Certainly you get the gory details, but since you've first learned about the victims and their unique lives, you feel more connected to them.

If I had one complaint, it would be that there is not one picture of the boys who were murdered (the cover has three, but they are unidentified). There isn't a need for post mortem photos or even pictures of the murderers, but it would be more emotionally engaging had there been pictures of the boys themselves. However, due to the finances of the families of some of the boys, it is entirely possible that there simply were no photos of the boys as they looked at the time of their death.

Although one of the most heinous of serial killings to ever take place in the U.S., as with most things, time allows people to forget...These boys should not be forgotten...Read this book and remember them.

Jack Olsen is an experienced writer, and this book reflects it, however it is not nearly as well done as many I have read, including a few of his. He offers exhaustive research into the Houston area and Police Force, far more than necessary to set the stage. Extremely distracting was his need to convey dialect by spelling words phonectically as pronounced by the average Houstoner instead of simply using a few idioms and phrasing to make the dialogue realistic. After awhile, it became painful to wade through any lenthy conversation. I also found the book difficult to follow, lacking continuity and direction.
On the other hand, the subject matter is quite astounding and he has researched it well. For that reason, I would recommend it to those who would not be terribly put off by the problems I've described. He is a good writer, I just think he could have done better.

This is probably the most accurate version of the Dean Corll story I've ever read, only I think the author made a mistake by not including pictures. If there were some crime-scene photos and pictures of the killers and victims, the book would have been 100% better. The Dean Corll case is one of the scariest, most horrible cases of serial murder ever purpetrated and I find it amazing that, with all the forensic/murder shows on TV these days, NOBODY has ever devoted one program covering the Dean Corll/Wayne Henly case.

The Dean Corll case was so horrific that entities as diverse as the Vatican and the Soviet Union felt compelled to comment on it. Corll was a Houston based candy maker who, along with a pair of teenage accomplises murdered nearly 30 boys (and probably many more) in a depressed Houston neighborhood known, ironically, as the Heights. Olsen makes it clear that Corll operated as long as he did due to a mixture of cultural breakdown, official indifference/incompotence, and the foolish behavior of the teens and boys themselves. Not as epic in length as Olsen's best books, but many of his later themes are prevalent here: the relentless search for missing children by pained parents who, sometimes, drift off into a fantasy world in which they avoid the awful truth; the economic misery and hardship that breeds criminals and victims, and the toll that a psychopath takes from those around him, his victims and their families, and those close to him. Yes, like other reviewers have pointed out, the Texas drawl gets tiring ("hail fire" for "hell fire" and so one), but it is hardly a fatal flaw. If nothing else it is a book that harkens back to when a "true crime" book wasn't a poorly writen and researched hack job by a journalism school drop out.

I remember this story breaking when I was ten. Vividly. Those were glum times (Watergate, gas crisis, America turning tail in Nam) and this was the kind of story that scared little boys senseless.

Lots of stuff fascinates me to this day and Jack Olsen, writing only a few months after the whole murder ring came to a violent end, fills in the blanks.

He cracks the psychological bonds between this graying closet case and two HS dopers. He brings you inside the Houston PD and shows how the police missed out on 27 missing kids. The time and the place are vividly captured.

He also hints at why so few true crime writers have tackled the Corll murders - the police quickly closed ranks and the neighborhood ran off anybody they thought would exploit the case. A another big reason: the story is too disturbing for even many true crime fans.

Corll remains a nightmare for kids of who came of age in the '70s. A sweet-tempered man who acted out unspeakably sadist fantasties, a monster who muffled the screams of little boys and killed them in dark apartments across hot, sticky Houston.

Yes, Olsen should have left the whole East Texas dialect to our imagination instead of spelling it out on the page. And we could use photos (Corll was notoriously camera-shy). But this is highly recommended.

I checked this book out after I read a bunch of reviews here about how good the book was. I don't think it lived up to the hype but it was a decent read regardless. Nice quick read. I learned about Dean Corll and his cronies who I might not have if it wasn't for this book. The only downfall that stuck out quite a bit was the language. Jack Olsen uses a bunch of Texas (circa 1970) style language and it bothered me. There were a few words I couldn't figure out and me being from the north didn't help. I think he could have done without it.

The whole time I was reading this book I was wondering what the people looked like, I would have loved to see them (sorry if that sounds sick, but most crime books do come with pics) The writing was pretty good, and the fact that this crime really happened is shocking. I would still recommend this book to any true crime fan.

Its always amazed me that this murder case has only inspired 2 books (Olsen's and a quickie paperback that came out in 1974 called "mass murder in Houston" Its every bit as good as this one.)Dean Corll has got to rank as one of the most horrific serial killers of the 20th century in body count and the sheer horror and suffering he submited his victims to.
My Only real objection to this book is that Olsen though a talented writer doesnt do a very good job of making the sheer evil and horror of Corll's crimes felt by the reader on any visceral level.Indeed he tends to make them seem almost mundane by his detached and at times glib tone.
At times he does seem to find the social and political history of Houston far more facinating then the crime and its aftermath itself.(far more facinating then the reader is likely to)such an exaustive treatice is a bit much just to put forth the simple proposition that there may have been something about Houston in 1973 that was conducive to social,economic and moral deadzones in which a Dean Corll could flourish.
To be fair Houston at that time was not exactly courting journalists that wanted to cover the murders.
I have seen Jack Olsen give far more penetrating and insightful effort to far less interesting true crime stories then this one.
This book raises far more questions than it answers about Dean Corll,Wayne Henley and David Brooks,Corll's victims and the time and place that created them.
I still feel that a wonderful and long piece of writing could be done about this case and I hope it will someday,but for now its either this book or nothing.