Paperback: The imagination will not down. If it is not a dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance, it becomes deformity; if it is not art, it becomes crime. - William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel, 1923.
The mass murder of almost thirty young boys - in which nearly thirty young boys were sexually tortured to death - in Houston may well have been the most heinous crime of the century.
How could such a series of murders go undetected for almost three years before being exposed?
"Try to remember, Bill," a visitor wrote in 1885, "hell and houston both begin with a h." Mythology and Shakespeare hold that murder will out, but the statement has never been absolutely true, and certainly not in Houston. Violence is as much a part of the city's heritage as the post oaks and the bayous. When it was a tiny frontier town, Houston was described by a diarist as "the greatest sink of disipation [sic] and vice that modern times have known." An early diplomat wrote: "I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town during my stay on the coast committed there, than throughout the whole of Texas." A bishop proclaimed in 1843 that "there is a great need for a deep, a thorough, a sweeping revival of religion in Houston," and more than a century later, Billy Graham, wielding his customary theological meat ax, warned Houstonians that most of them "will spend an eternity in hell."
Houston's speciality is homicide.
The night David Hilligiest did not come home was both like and unlike other nights when other Houston boys disappeared between the years 1971 and 1973. At three in the morning, the police were called, but they just said that boys were running away from the best of homes nowadays and that they would list David as a runaway. No, there would be no official search for the youngster.
Aghast, the Hilligiests, in the months that followed, hired their own detective, put up posters, even sought the aid of clairvoyants. But David never did come home again because, along with at least twenty-six other Houston boys, he had been murdered and buried by the homosexual owner of a candy factory, the mass murderer of the century, Dean Corll, according to his two teenage confessed accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr and David Brooks. Many of the young boys had not even been reported as missing, and the fact that they were dead would probably never have come to light had not one of the murderers confessed. For in Houston, where in a typical year the total number of murders is twice that of London despite the fact that London is six times as large and far more densely populated, missing persons and violence are likely to be considered commonplace.
In the months before the trial of Henley and Brooks, Jack Olsen interviewed and probed for answers about the criminals, the victims and the city itself, which remained for the most part silent, angry and defensive. The result is a classic of true crime reportage.
The Man with the Candy (1974) is a brilliant investigative journalist's story of the crime and the answer to that question by Jack Olsen, Dean of True Crime.
About the author: The award-winning and respected author of thirty-three books, Jack Olsen's books have published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen's journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild's Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. He was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1987. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure."
Olsen was described as "the dean of true crime authors" by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and "the master of true crime" by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him "the best true crime writer around." His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike."
Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writer’s of America, Edgar award. Jack Olsen died of a heart attack, in bed at home with a magazine resting on his chest at the age of 77.
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