CLOWN AND THE CANDY MAN:
Episode 1:
"every now and then I get letters from people that like crime books. There's such a distortion between facts and truth, it's nothing like the real story anymore"
John Wayne Gacy (summarized quote)
Gacy raped and killed tortured 33 young men and buried it in his chicago home. How did he get away with it for so long?
To understand what he did, you have to understand what happened in the 1970s
Many boys went missing, abused, and murdered. And John Wayne Gacy was just one of them.
I became convinced that they were all connected
It was like a rabbit hole, when you find one victim, there was one more. And when you find one pedophile, you see more of them, and more. Why didn't we see it? We didn't want to.
Happening in the 1970s:
- Watergate and Nixon
- Vietnam
- Hippie counterculture and sexual revolution
- In other places in America, that was only stuff on the news. Kids played outside unsupervised. People rarely locked their doors. That would all soon change
It started with "The Candyman"
- Dean Corll, "The Candyman", molested and killed 27 boys from 1970 to 1973.
- Most people haven't heard of Dean Corll. Once you do, it's unforgettable
- Houstan Texas, August 1973: Neighborhood called "The Heights" is the backdrop of this story, as it would soon see a rash of disappearancs of boys from there.
It started with a phone call on morning on August 8th 1973. A Patrol officer responded to a shooting call at 22 Lamar in Pasadena Texas
- Outside the house were 3 shaken teenagers. 17 year old Elmer Wayne Henley, 19 year old Tim Curly, and 15 year old Rhonda Williams
- a ..22 caliber gun was on the ground next to them.
- Elmer Wayne Henley tells the police he shot Dean Corll
- The story about how they got to the house is recalled:
"Th enight before, the two boys, Elmer and Tim Curly had performed a "rescue mission" of sorts. Rhonda had a fight with her dad, which wasn't unusual. Her home life was't great. Her mother died when she was a baby, her father an alcoholic.
Rhonda packed her bags and left, but didn't know where to go. She called Edward Wayne Henley, and knew Wayne had a crush on her. So Wayne and Tim picked her up at her place, and told her they were going to a party at Dean Corll's place.
Rhonda knew dean didn't like her. But what she didn't know is that Dean didn't like any girls, at all. Why Wayne brought a girl to Dean's place that night is a mystery, but something in Henley snapped that night. And now here they were, sitting on the curb outside the house being questioned by the police about how Elmer shot and killed Dean Corll.
He was fou nd naked, crumpled down next to the wall. He was shot 6 times.
It wasn't the goriest crime scene in history, but when detectives searched the rest of the house, it was a scene none of them would ever forget. They were about to uncover the most horrifying killing spree the nation has ever seen back then.
- One bedroom had a baord with hole sin it, handcuffs with ropes attached to it, various sex toys, acryllic spray cans, weed
The three teenages told a story: "they were having a party, sniffing acryllic spray out of a bag to get high, and got so high and passed out. When they woke up, they were all in tied up or handcuffed, all three, including Wayne Henley. The other two had hteir mouths taped shut. Corll was trying to have sex with one of them, and he told Henley that he was going to kill him. Henley talked him into letting him out of the handcuffs, and when he did that, he immediately grabbed a pistol and shot Dean Corll.
Both Tim and Rhonda backed Henley's story up. However, Henley still doubted that the police would believe him and that it was self defense, so he added a detail that would help and one which changed everything.
That's when henley told the story about Corll murdering, torturing, and sexually assaulting young boys and burying them in his boat shed. Henley said he even had some of the names of the boys he killed. The detective doubted it at first, but when the detectives started checking the names out, and began to learn that some of those names were indeed listed as missing.
Henley kept talking, too. Henley said he could even show them where the bodies were buried.
Henley brought police to the boat shed. It was locked, and one of the officers broke the hinges off the door. Immediately upon it opening, it smelt realy bad - something was dead inside that boat shed. The officer knew, as he has smelt it before. At that time, the officer thought: "Henley was right! I believe him"
[11:23]
On that afternoon in 1973, Henley sat in the patrol car outside the storage facility.
Officers looked around the ground of the facility and saw there was a part that was cracked and raised up. They started digging, and soon enough they found the first body. The body was nude, and wrapped up in plastic. The bodies were layered on top of one another, and the officers continued to unearth more.
Some bodies were already skeletons, indicating they had been there for a long time.
[13:00]
Danny James hadn't been a detective for more than a month when he was called in to help dig. He said you could smell the boat shed when you got out of the car. When you were digging, you'd hit a section of lime first. The lime was to prevent decomposition.
By now, reporters had caught wind of the discovery. Henley was wandering around outside the boat shed talking to reporters, who were swarming the crime scene. As opposed to today, where something like that could never happen.
Henley only showed emotion when he called his mom at the boat shed that night. According to police, he never showed emotions at any other time.
Remember: the term "Serial Killer" didn't exist at this point in time. This event was so intense and so surprising to the people in the area, they had no way to wrap their head around it
Who's Dean Corll Though?
- Grew up in INdiana and Tennessee, his dad was an electrician
- came to texas in 1962 and opened a candy shop
- Was friendly; gave candy to the kids and was generally a pleasure to be around. He set up a pool table in the back for the kids and would give some of them rides on his motorcycle. He wasn't someone to be scared of.
- The most remarkable thing about Corll is that he managed to remain so unremarkabkle
- Dean's mom gets divorced and soon gets married to a merchent marine.. The marine told her one day that Dean might have a problem, he seems to like the young boys
- She got so mad at him, she closed the candy shop and divorced him. She even moved away
- Dean Corll decided to stay, though. This is when something became unleashed in him
[18:00]
The night that Dean Corll was shot dead and the bodies were being dug up, 18 year old david brooks showed up to the ho uston police department with his father and droopped a bombshell.
He informed the police that it wasn't only Dean Corll involved in the murders, but that Elmer Wayne Henley was involved too.
Elmer Wayne Henley stuck to his original story until the police told him that Brooks was implicating him in the murers and told the truth. He admitted to participating in the murdering and burying of many of the young boys. He helped strangle them, and sometimes shot them. He even said one of the victims was a friend of his.
Brooks and Henley came clean pretty quickly after that. But how do two teens get involved with a pedophile that is willing to kill their friends?
- Brooks had known the Corlls for a long time and visited the candy shop
- Dean Corlls had an apartment, and one day he brought David Brooks over. he had taken care of him in a way his own father had not. Eventually, Dean Corlls began abusing David Brooks. David felt like that's what he had to continue to do to keep his father figure's affection.
- A few weeks later, he walks into Dean's apartment and sees Dean having sex with two terrified teenagers, and Dean tells him to leave.
After that incident, Dean Corll went to David and came clean. He told him what he was up to, killing raping kids, but he told David he'd pay up to $200 for every boy David brings him.
- Henley got so involved in his activities with Corll that he'd bring his own friends to him to be murdered
- Henley told detectives that he feared for his life even before Dean strapped him to the torture board that night because Dean said he belonged to an organization in Dallas that traffics and rapes boys and that they'd get him if he said anything.
Could Dean have really been involved in an organization like that?
[23:56]
Henley tell police about a second and third body site, digging up multiple bodies.
One of those sites was a beach, and as Brooks and Henleey sat on a sand dune pointing out the bodies, the police would go over dig the bodies up. Meanwhile, media and reporters were everywhere on the beach looking on.
Danny James, the new detective, was sitting with Brooks and Henley while the detectives and agents were searching for bodies. David Brooks was described as being very quiet, sometimes wouldn't respond.
Henley was very talkative. He was admitting to everything; more body sites, and how they'd abduct kids off the street by inviting them to a party, and how they'd hang them up on torture boards and kill them when they got tired of the victim. Henley told the officer that he didn't know it was so difficult to strangle someone.
[26:45]
In one gruesome episode, two victims handcuffed by one hand to Deans torture board were forced to fight each other until only one was still standing. Dean said whoever won got to be released. That was a lie.
It all started with Dean's handcuff trick. Dean handcuffed himself and escaped from them, and then challeneged the boys to doing the same thing. The boys would handcuff themselves for Dean, but dean wouldn't unlock them. Then he'd take them to the torture board and strap them up.
After they were done, David Brooks and Henley would move the bodies into a van and bury them or put them at the boatshed, whatever body drop site it was.
How could all of these boys disappear and no one notice? The answer was: a lot of people DID notice.
Over the next weeks and months when identification of the bodies began, a pattern emerged: most of the kids were from The Heights, and the police had the reports....but that's where it stopped. Nothing was done.
11 of them went to the very same school. When one of the mothers went to the principal, he commented on the strangeness of it, but not one raised an alarm.
The families however never stopped looking. They hired private investigators, they camped out at the police station. A common refrain heard over and over throughout the investigation from police however: "Kids went missing all the time. They may stay away from home for a week or two to goof off and do drugs, but it was a different era. You'd look for them still, talk to their friends, but thats all you can do. Should they hav e.oticed that many kids missing? Well, there were thousands of runaway juveniles. File cabinets filled with run away juvenile reports"
- Dean Corll didn't make it easy on the parents either. In many cases, he forced his victims to write postcards to his family from different locations to throw them off the track.
Eventually, the story faded from the headlines. Houston police did look into that mysterious organization in Dallas that Corll said he was apart of, but nothing came of it. The world went back to the way we wanted it to be.
But three years later, it happened again.
Episode 2:
The Oakland County Child Killing
- 4 kids from 4 different suburbs of Detroit were snatched off the street, held for days, sexually abused, then killed and dumped in the snow
- For 43 years, someone has gotten away with the murder of the kids. The case remains unsolved....sort of.
In 1977, Tim King was the last victim of the okland cou nty child killing. Since then, his family never give up searching for justice.
Tim disappeared after he was given 30 cents from his siter and went down the block to the pharmacy to buy candy.
Oakload county ended up mobilizing a humongous task force to solve the crime, one of the bigegest. The police stopped cars, canvassed neighborhoods, and set up tip lines.
Tim was found in a ditch with his skateboard.
Mark was the second body that was found in a ditch near the street.
Mark Stevins murder was put down as an isolated incident, and media coverage dissipated.
The next victim lived 2 miles away from the Stevin's home. She got into a fight with her mom, got on her bike and left. She was never seen again, except for when she was found after being dumped in the snow next to the highway. She was shot with a shotgun, though there was no sexual assault.
For some reason, no one made any cohnnection between Mark and Jill. Children continued to play outside.
Not long after this, the next victim, Christine Mahaylick went missing. Christine convinced her mom to let her go down the street, but would not return.
The episode then goes into a segment from the perspective of Corey Williams and how he got involved in this case. What Corey learned would change our perspective on what happened to what happened to those kids in oakland county
- he was investigating a cold homicide case, and found a suspect by the name of Richard Lawson. Lawson had been arrested for armed robbery, but interestingly, he made a statement to the arresting officers that he knew who killed all those kids in Oakland.
- Corey Williams knew he was referring to the Okland County CHild Murders, and decided to look into it more.
Coincidentally, Corey Williams grew up in Buerekley michigan. He was 15 when Christine Mayalek went missing. His dad was a cop, and friends with Christine's Grandfather. The night she went missing, the grandfather killed Corey's dad.
So, here we are in 2004. Corey's murder suspect Richard Lawson says he knows who killed those kids. Corey doesn't know it yet, but he's ab out to crack open a case that's been cold for 30 years.
Who was Richard Lawson?
- He was a known pedophile, and was an informatn for the Detroit police at the time of the child killings ("snow killings")
- He told Corey Williams that he believes a group of guys (one he called Ted Ore, another was called Bob Moore, and one other guy) was responsible for the murders
- Bob Moore was a bad guy, and weas called "Bad Eyed Bob". Bob died by having a heart attack, and wasn't found for days. His pitbulls ate him.
- Corey Williams was then looking for Bob moore, and Ted Ore - and back in the 1970s, they were living right in the center of the Cass Corridor. During that time, the Cass Corridor was known for a lot of shady business including pornography. It was a buffet for pedophiles.
[19:53]
The officer goes on to explain how child pornography was filmed and distributed back in the 1970s. He spoke of video shops that sold child porn under the table, and he spoke of pedophiles renting an apartment above a movie theater and filming pornography there, then bringing it to these places like the video shops to sell the products.
Because there was no internet, and because this area was a bustling buffet of boys for pedophiles, the officer noted just how tight knit of a group these groups of men were.
[20:36]
They were so well organized, they had rank structures, and they had physical meetings - there was no Interenet to talk on. THey would meet up, swap boys, and they'd call them parties.
The officer states how surprised he was to find out how organized the child porn rings were. He then states how astounding it is that they were operating right under the noses of everyone, and he said he realized "it wasn't so much that people didn't think it was happening, it was more that people didn't want to believe it was happening."
So, back to Lawson, the guy Corey arrested. Lawson states its those 3 guys from the Cass Corridor responsible for the Oakland Child Killings. The first person Corey tracked down first was Ted Ore, real name Ted Lamborgeen, an auto worker.
He was a career pedophile, sexual predator - and Corey put him in prison for life for molesting kids in the 1970s. He had no previous arrest record.
The narrator then goes on to say: "if you're sensing a theme developing,m you're onto something. In the 1970s, there were pedophiles just like they're are today, but there was no internet, so they ran in groups, and they were all interconnected. The Candy Man's killer told that to police in Houston. Now, Corey Williams is hearing about the same thing in Detroit."
Back to the present: it is is 2004, long after the murders. If Corey can get Ted Lamborgeen, known pedophile, to talk, maybe they can solve the case.
Ted admits he was a pedophile, but denies killing the kids. He even took a polygraph examination....but he bombed it. Clearly, he knew something about the murders.
The police wanted very badly to find out what he knew, so they were willing to strike a deal of reducing charges for him (being as he was an old man at that time) in exchange for information.
It was then that a very weird thing happened: he not only would not talk to police, he decided to plead guilty straight up on the nose on all 17 counts, going away quietely to prison. Whatever he was hiding, we may never know.
Ted failing the polygraph examination was the only negative test in polygraph examinations when it came to the Oakland County Child Murders.....until 2006 that is.
The episode then talks to Chris King, the brother of Oakland Child Killer victim Tim King.
In 2006, Chris revealed a phone call from his friend that had become a polygraph examiner and was at a polygraph convention in Las Vegas. While there, Chris' friend was having a conversation with a polygraph examiner from Southfield Michigan. The friend brings up the case of Timmy King, being as it was that case that led him to become a polygraph examiner being as it was his friends brother that was a victim.
The Polygraph examiner was aware of the case in fact. He polygraphed the person that killed Timmy King. Chris King immediately phone his family, and relayed the piece of information to officer Corey Williams of our story.
For the next two years, Williams and the King family tracked down the identity of the man that confessed to polygraphers that he killed Timmy King. Along the way, Williams and King ran into a ton of trouble from various legal institutions when trying to obtain records.
The man that confessed was named Christopher Bush, and it turned out a lot of people in Okland COunty knew tha tname.
Christopher Bush's father was Head of American Operations for General Motors, and knew a big home about a mile or two from where Tim King lived. Apparently Christopher was a creep and a pedophile, and was previously charged with 4 counts of child molestation crimes. During the course of the investigation, the King family was hearing rumors for years that the killer was the son of a General Motive executive that was now dead. Apparently, they were hearing these rumors between police officers.
Intriguingly, that story added up with Christohphher Bush's story quite nicely.
Anyway, christopher bush's family secured an expensive lawyer to help combat the charges. In Bush's previous case about molesting kids and trying to pick them up, the exact same area he was picking up kids at added up with the area of interest when it came to the okland child murders.
When Bush was about to take a polygraph examination about his molestation charges, he was asked if there was anything he was hiding that may cause it to come out as a negative test. That is when he confessed to killing Timmy King.
This was all protected by attorney client privelage at the time, so nobody would have ever known about this confession....except for the polygrapher that did the test, which was the same one in Las Vegas that gave the info to King's brother's friend.
Now, back to Bush's original 4 molestation charges. Apparently he was cruising around looking for kids with a pedophile buddy, and one of incidents of molestation occurred right after the discovery of the 3rd child killing victim. Bush's parter in crime, however, turned on him; he informed authorities that Christopher Bush killed Mark Stevins, the very first victim of the Oakland County Child Murders.
A cop on the Mark Stevins case, lorne done, thought "they had the oakland county child killer" after they got this tip about Christopher Bush. They scheduled a polygvraph for christopher bush about the murder of mark stevins. imagine their suprise when a well rehearsed chris bush passed the polygraph?
Back then, polygraphs were considered the gold standard. So, Bush's wealthy family paid his bond, and Bush was released. 6 weeks later, Tim King was abducted.
So, how did Bush pass that polygraph? Well, years later, Detective Williams had experts reexamine that test, and they say the polygrapher misread the results. Christopher Bush actually failed that polygraph.
However, there was nothing to be done about it, because a year and a half later, Christopher Bush was found dead in his parents home. Police ruled it a suicide.
There's a few odd things though:
- shooting yourself with a long gun is doable, but hard
- in the room where he was shot, there was ropes in the closet, a shotgun shell in the dresser...is that normal? Or was the scene set up?
- regardless, we do know that on the wall of Bush's bedroom was a pencil sketch of a kid, a boy's face controted in a primal scream. The boy looks so much like Mark Tevins, the first victim, that it's uncanny.
Some people, including Corey, believes Busch was murdered. If he was murdered, there were lots of people that would have wanted him dead. It could have been the guys invovled in these murders did it.
Theory 1: Busch killed himself because he was a troubled drunk pedophile and cou ldn't take it anymore
Theory 2: Someone in the pedophile group decided Busch was a liability and murdered him, hanging up the drawing of that kid to make it look incriminating and make it look like a suicide
If it hadn't been for the King family and Corey Williams, none of this would have ever been exposed.
What does General Motors have to do with this story and the ring?
- we know that Chris Bush's father was a prominent GM execuive
- the Cass Corridor police investigation focused on kids in that area being serviced to a pedophile ring that involved politicians and some high level GM executives and other upstanding members of the community
- After the journalist appearing in this episode published her story, she was contacted by women that claimed to be ritually abused by people that were "higher up" in GM executive management in the mid 1970s and were still scared of reprecussions.
The question mark around Chris Bush's death, and whether it was suicide or not, gets even bigger when your ealize that the officer that was first on scene to Buschs death was a pedophile himself. While one of the stories was being written, the journalist received a tip from a listener that she was abused by the very same officer that was first on the scene. After they filed for his records and other information, they received a ton that proved that she wasn't the only one abused by this officer.
What are the statistical chances that a pedophile officer is the first to respond to the pedophile and likely murderers so called suicide? This officer had a full 30 minutes with the body before anyone else arrived.