You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening, the true story of how one dedicated forensic scientist restored the long lost identities of the teenage victims of the Candyman, one of America's most prolific serial killers. Houston, Texas in the early nineteen seventies was an exciting place, the home of NASA, the City of the Future, but a string of more than two dozen missing boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for far
too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston Police Department dismissed them as runaways fleeing the Vietnam Draft or conservative parents likely looking to get high and join the counter culture. Was only after their killer, Dean Coral, was murdered by an accomplice that many of those boys bodies were discovered in mass graves. Coral known as the Candyman, was a local sweet shop owner who had enlisted two teens to lure their friends
to parties where they would be tortured and killed. All of Coral's victims' bodies were badly decomposed, some were only skeletal, known collectively as the Lost Boys, Many were never identified, and some remained undiscovered decades later. When forensic anthropologist Sharon Derek discovered a box of remains marked with the year nineteen seventy three in the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, she recalled the horrifying crimes from her own childhood and
knew she had to act. It would take prison interviews with Choral's accomplices, advanced scientific techniques, and years of tireless effort to identify these young men. Investigative journalist Lisa Olsen brings to life the teens who were hunted by a killer hiding in plain sight, and the extraordinary woman who would finally give these unknown victims back their names and
their dignity. With newly uncovered information about the case, the scientist and the serial killer immerses readers in an astonishing story and reveals why these horrific events remain relevant decades later. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Scientist and the serial Killer, The Search for Houston's Lost Boys, with my special guest, investigative reporter, editor, and author Lisa Olson. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Lisa Olson.
Well, thanks Stan for having me. I look forward to speaking to you about my new book.
And congratulations on that book, The Scientist and the serial Killer.
Thank you.
Let's start with the origins of this book project, how you became involved in your connection to this area.
I learned about this story when I first moved to Houston. I had already written about unidentified people who had been victims of a serial killer in Seattle called the Green River Killer, and I was aware of the fact that Houston had something like four hundred unidentified people. So one of the first people I looked for was the anthropologist, the forensic anthropologist in Harris County, because I was interested
in writing more about these cases. In Seattle, I'd done some work on cases like this that had resulted in the identifications of several people, including a mother and child murder victim, so I knew it was an area where investigative reporting could make a difference and where there was a huge human rights issue in terms of unidentified people all across the United States, there's something like forty thousand.
But I learned about this particular case after meeting forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrek, who had already when I first moved to Houston, sort of started to dig into the fact that around a third of one of the most famous or infamous Houston serial killing cases, about a third of those victims remained unidentified twenty or thirty years after the
discovery of those crimes in nineteen seventy three. This was the serial killings linked to Dingy Coral, who is known in Houston as the candy Man, who with two teenage accomplices, murdered at least twenty seven people known to authorities in nineteen seventy three. It turned out there were even more than that.
So tell us a little bit about Sharon Derek's background and how she came to be involved in this case.
Sharon Derek had raised three children when she went back to school to become initially a cultural anthropologist studying ancient peoples, and then she really decided that she'd rather use their skills in a very modern way and look into forensic cases.
She learned about the field of forensic anthropology and she trained in that specialty area, first working on child death cases in Harris County and then transitioning to identifications, and over the years she worked with another forensic anthropologist and Harris County doctor, Jennifer Love to really develop a specialty in this area and became quite an authority in Texas in identifications, and these cases in particular were of both
personal and professional interest to her. Sharon remembered after finding these bones in storage in the Harris County Medical Examiner's office that she had heard about these crimes when she was a teenager in Austin, Texas. They had made national and international news. There had been searches that were televised internationally of these digs, the kind of hasty digs for these remains in three different places in Texas, in Houston, in East Texas, on in a woodland area, and also
on a beach called High Island. And Sharon remembered those stories and she took this really personally, partly because she had cousins who were around the same age of these boys who had been hunted and killed by Dean Coral, and many of them came from the same neighborhoods in Houston, a really historic neighborhood called the Houston Heights, and other neighborhoods around that. Sharon was very familiar with those neighborhoods. Her grandparents had lived there, her parents had met at
a church there. And she thought, how is it possible that seven or eight boys from these neighborhoods, these long historic neighborhoods in Houston, could still be missing all this time later and never be identified. How is that possible? She felt a personal and professional connection to the case.
You righte that in preparation, she took homicide reports and took them home, and she looked at typewritten passages, and she made notes and began identifying clues right away.
She absolutely did. She obtained records through the DA's office of the original homicide reports, and they're kind of hard to read. They're like mimeographed on old typewriters, fuzzy, And she began looking for names of boys that had not been identified in the seventies but who were listed as missing. And she came up with a list of names and possible dresses, but they were from, you know, nineteen seventy three.
One of the names that popped out at her right away was Randy Harvey, who was a boy who had gotten on his bike to ride to a gas station. In those days, it was really common for kids in Houston, and I think all over the country to ride their bikes or walks in their neighborhoods. People didn't think much of it. It was just a couple of miles to his workplace, but it turned out he had never gotten there at all. His mother didn't know that. She just
knew that he didn't come home. She worried, but in those days, you know, there was no cell phone, there was no pager. They didn't actually have a phone at the house, and so she really had no way to figure out where Randy was, and she reported a missing to the police. Sharon found that report described Randy, it described his bicycle, and that was the end. She also discovered, hidden in some older file two notes that really made her think there must be someone still looking for Randy.
There were notes from his little sister, Leonore, showing that Leonore had called the work herself twice and asked to come visit to look for her brother, but had been told she was too young to come, So that was one of the first names Sharon tried to research, thinking, what if one of these boxes of bones is really Randy Harvey. I need to know and to answer that question, she needed to both analyze the bones herself and then also try to see if she could find any of
his family. Both of those things were tasks she took on almost simultaneously. She did a full new analysis using updated forensic anthropology techniques to measure the bones that were in those box and to make new calculations using new databases that are based on research in places like the Body Farm in Nashville, Tennessee, which you might have heard about, that allow modern day anthropologists to anthropologists to make better estimates of possible ages and weights and not weight sorry,
ages and heights of victims. Weight is really impossible to tell from bones. She was able to then determine that Randy Harvey was likely taller and younger I mean, not Randy Harvey. These bones that she first picked out were likely from a taller and younger boy than had originally been identified in nineteen seventy three in old autopsy reports, so this unknown one of the first boxes she identifies, she realizes that these bones are of a boy of
fifteen who are who is around six feet tall. Originally, in nineteen seventy three, the pathologist had guessed that this boy was older and was shorter, and so with her new calculations, it turned out that this boy was actually a better match for missing person Randy Harvey than anyone had thought in seven He might have been ruled out because of the age determination as a older boy, and because there was sort of an assumption that Randy was
shorter than six feet tall, but he was. He was six feet and the bones were six feet and she ends up eventually finding his sisters and verifying that that DNA in a relatively short period of time. It took her about a year and a half, and given all the obstacles she had, you know, years decades of no progress, no DNA tests, no names for the next of well, names for the next of ken, but no addresses, no phone numbers, no idea if the little girl listed as
Leonora Harvey was still named Harvey or something else. She was able to find you know, the siblings and get a match within a fairly short amount of time, which really excited her. Made her think, well, the rest of this case should be easy to solve. Author didn't turn out to be.
So you chronicle the efforts and all of the technological advances that occur in the ensuing years. But she also some of the people that she teams up with, and you had mentioned doctor Jennifer Love, So tell us about doctor Jennifer Love and an unexpected breakthrough.
So doctor Love was brought into the Medical Examiner's office. She had studied at the University of Tennessee at the famous Body Farm facility. She was kind of a hot shot and at first Sharon thought, uh, oh, you know, she's going to want to take over these cases from me, But it didn't turn out that way. They kind of teamed up and doctor Love said, hey, you know you
have those cases. They had gotten a grant together, working together from the Departments of Justice to look at more of these unidentified and they had picked a certain number of cases to do DNA testing because DNA testing is expensive, and they had chosen you know, the Loss Boys cases and also some other murder victims from that backlog of
four hundred bodies unidentified bodies. They had, and so doctor Love decided, well, I'll take some of these more mysterious cases that don't seem to have anything to do with the seventies murders and let Sharon take those on, because she already had this knowledge from you know, really basically memorizing the HBD police reports and essentially you know, having gone through a lot of hoops to find Randy Harvey, figuring out things about how to find people from seventies records,
using ancestry dot com, using old public records, and so they split it up that way. Well, so then one day doctor Love gets her own box of bones out, and this is a really cryptic one. All it says, the sort of antiquities. She starts doing the analysis and she sort of shocked because when she looks at these bones, she says, you know, there's really nothing in this box that makes me think that this is a historic body. There's no you know, relics of you know, caskets that
were used in pioneer days. These bones don't seem to be from a Native American person. It seems like this might be a modern murder case. So she's kind of mystified by that. Turns out the box was miss labeled. She goes ahead and gets the DNA testing done, thinking, well, you know it's worth it because it doesn't look like it's really an ancient being who wouldn't have any modern family necessarily living, and so she's astonished when she gets the DNA it results back. Turns out this is yet
another victim of Dean Coral. It is a After the first identifications, Sharon gets a lot of calls from other families who have missing persons from the seventies. One of them is a woman named Donna Taylor, whose brother Alan was missing for many, many years, and it turns out that the DNA from this mysterious box of n antiquities matches Allen's sister and other family. So the second identification
comes from this partnership in that office. And I want to say that, you know, Harris County is one of the few counties in the United States that has forensic anthropologists on staff, and they were certainly very unusual in the two thousands and having a team of forensic anthropologists.
They actually had at different times three or four forensic anthropologists, all kind of committed to trying to both handle modern cases where there's really only bone evidence, and so their expertise is needed as well as these older backlog cases.
So they were really forging some new territory in terms of making identifications and kind of leading the way along with them people in Seattle who had worked on the Green River cases, and of course New York City where forensic anthropologists were very involved in trying to help identify the victims of the eleven terrorist attacks.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, you also chronicle all of the people that Sharon Derek. She reads reports back from nineteen seventy three we already mentioned that, and familiarizes herself with this case completely, but there are people that she gets to speak to that she tracks down that offer some very illuminating information and add to the identification of some of these people. You also mentioned you spoke to Nita Bottaford as well.
It really was, especially after both Randy and Allen were identified. You know, there were really a lot of people whose lives had been really forever altered by these murders. And Sharon started getting a lot of phone calls and a lot of emails, and a lot of them were from people who had known different missing persons, and there were also people who had been friends of the murder victims who were identified in nineteen seventy three who wanted to
offer additional information. Some of them just had cryptic stories about remembering some school chom who suddenly disappeared, And sometimes what she'd find out is, well, that person just moved away and they're alive and well and living in another state. But other times she would find out that a story about a missing person that then would prove to be young man or young woman, young man mainly who then
disappeared entirely from the records. And there were lots and lots of stories too that came from people who started talking about Dean Coral being more than a sexual, sexually motivated serial killer. Dean Coral systematically captured, tortured, raped, and murdered these thirty some victims. It turned out there were
more than twenty seven. Sharon found out along the way he had alliances with different people, both teenagers, who he used as accomplices, but also he had other criminal activities. So some of the people Sharon was hearing from was telling her about Dean Coral being involved in other kinds of crime, Dean Coral being involved in a porn ring, Dean Coral being involved in selling stolen goods. And these
were stories too that people started to tell me. When I began to write this book, I really started looking because Sharon's mission was to identify these boys. Her a mission wasn't to figure out what happened to all of them and how Dean Coral learned lured all of them in.
When I started writing my book, I decided I wanted to not only tell the story of her identifications of in these eight cases, but also show the reader what those cases revealed to us about this crazy murder case in the seventies, about how Korl managed to get away with kidnapping, killing, and murdering so many young boys and the police never really raising any alarm. How did he do that, what tools did he use? What who else
was involved? Were there other adults involved? And the answers I started learning to those questions really came from a lot of the friends and family of these eight boys who were never identified in the seventies because no one had ever talked to them, and in fact, in many cases, no one had talked to the siblings of the boys
who had been identified the authorities large. He had interviewed the two accomplices of Dean Coral who were sent to prison for these crimes with him, Elmer, Wayne Henley and David Brooks, but they didn't necessarily try to interview a lot of other young people about who else Coral had associated with or what else who else might have been involved. And so when I started talking to other people, I
hear stories. For example, you mentioned Nita Bodaford, who dated one of the boys that Sharon Derek identified, whose name was Michael Balch, and she's told me that Michael Balch was one of the last murder victims. He was killed in the summer of nineteen seventy three, about a month before Coral died at the hands of one of his accomplices.
So Nita Bodaford tells me a story that Michael was one of the last time the last time she ever saw him was eating in a local hangout in the Heights and made a remark that he knew who had done this to his brother, because Michael Balch's brother, Billy, was a murder victim and he had already been missing for a couple of years. When Michael went missing. So she hears him talk about she knows what's he knows what's happening, he knows who took his brother, and he's
going to do something about it. And so that kind of those kind of stories that I accumulate helped paint the picture of how within the teenage world in Houston, some people knew that there was there was a group out there, there was a killer out there who were doing things to young boys who were that too many people were going missing, there were too many kids that just disappeared from school, and some kids suspected that Dean Coral was involved. It's just the authorities didn't seem to
have talk to most of these kids. And so that that opened up in this book a chance to tell the rest of the story of these crimes and how many different ways Coral tricked and lurd and young teens and then was able to kill them in ways that I think are relevant today because we still have human trafficking ringks Kral was involved with the group of people who took erotic photos of young men and sold them internationally. So to me was that was part of the story
that was completely unknown in the seventies. That made this murder really really relevant today because there were the same kinds of conditions that we see now in the seventies, and no one was doing anything about it. There were no laws really protecting teenage boys. A lot of times, if teenage boys were sexually assaulted, it was viewed as not a crime. It was viewed as something that just happened,
and maybe even the boy's fault. And there was a lot of homophobia, and so the odds of these boys coming forward or seeking help or telling anyone what was going on were really low. And of course that wasn't the only way Dean Coral was luring people to his home. He was also using teenagers just to throw parties and invite people, and he was getting them to grab people
essentially off the street. But he was also paying kids to take their photos, and that was a part of the story that was really hidden in the seventies.
You talk about people that you got to speak to, and Bernie Milligan's story.
Well, that was the other part that was really eye opening. When I started to speak to people who had known murder victims, who could create the world of nineteen seventy one, seventy two and seventy three when in Houston, Dean Coral was driving different kinds of kind of muscle cars around and approaching kids, initially alone and then later with two
other teens that he recruited. I ended up finding a number of people who told me stories about being either invited to go to party with Dean Coral or the other kids who were associated with Coral, or who were chased by Dean Coral. And one of the most scary stories I heard was from Bernie Milligan. And Bernie Milligan was very good friends with the known murder victim, a kid who was killed by Dean Coral whose name was Franka Gary. And Franka Gary was a really well known
teen in the Houston Heights. You know, he was somebody everyone liked. He was a good kid. He went to Waltrip High School, he was close to graduating, and then he just suddenly disappeared. And Bernie Milligan was one of his friends, one of his close friends. So Bernie lived in the same area there were other murder victims had disappeared, and he happened to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time and encountered Dean Coral. He was working late at night at a ice cream store, kind of place a lot of us get our first teenage jobs, right. He cleaning it because they had a health inspection coming the next day, so he was working lad. He's just really tired and hot, sweating, covered with all kind of sticky ice cream that he washes off before he goes out of the store, but he just can't wait to
get home. And a block or so from the ice cream store, which still exists, just a different business today, he stops at a gas station which also still exists and is quite a nice little cafe in the heights to get a soda, and he's plunking his change into one of those old fashioned machines where the bottles clunk down,
and when he suddenly hears a car behind. Timmy turns to see a man approaching him whose hands are sort of up ready to attack him, and Bernie shares this incredibly harrowing story of someone trying to grab him and then really literally running away from this man who begins to chase him in a car, hurling that bottle at the man, breaking the bottle on the car, and then being able to evade him only because he knows his neighborhood so well that he can kind of jog around
through houses, through yards, through alleys, and he also happens to be on the track team, so he can run pretty fast without stopping. And so that that kind of thing is that kind of story is in the book, and it gives you, I think, a flavor of the fear that the boys who didn't live to tell their stories must have experienced. And it also lets you know to what extent the kids in the seventies and neighborhoods
like the Heights felt estranged from the authorities. They really didn't feel like they could talk to the police, or if they did, no one would believe them, even someone like Bernie, who was not a hippie. Some other kids who I talked to were kind of hippies. They were long hair, and they said, we would never have talked to police about anything we were worried about because police
were just around there hassling us. You know, some of the kids who disappeared were you know, smoked pod or whatever, and they would never have talked to police. But Bernie, you know, Bernie was a good kid, didn't drink and smoke, was on the track team, but he felt like police would never have believed him if he had told the
story of being chased by a man like this. He figured, at best, you know, they would have hassled him about why he was out late at night, and he didn't have the plate number, so he didn't say anything right away. But Bernie realized too. This was a couple of years later when he sees Coral again at another friend's house and this time he gets a really weird feeling from him.
He realizes who he is. Someone tells him Coral's name, but he again he still doesn't feel like anyone's going to believe this kind of a story, and of course later on he regrets it when he learns about the murders. But these kind of stories are infused in the book.
There's so many accounts. I used only the most grudible accounts, kids who claimed to have been approached or lured by Dean Coral or in Bernie's case, Chase, And there were a lot of accounts like that, and that was also I think a frightening part of the reporting is that, you know, kids just felt like they were not going to be listened to, and that even when their friends disappeared no one was going to do anything about it. Even when somebody like Frank A. Gary, Bernie's friend disappeared,
no one did much about it. Frank was, like I said, a couple of weeks from graduation. He had a car that was left behind. He had already bought his class ring. He had proposed to his high school girlfriend. And police
made a few inquiries at his high school. They spoke to his mother because they begged she begged them to But really there was that murder case was shut very quickly, and I think if people had looked deeper into Frank A. Gary's disappearance, they might have started to notice that there were a lot of other of his junior high school
classmates who were also missing. The thing was, at the time, there were lots of kids reported runaway and there still are, but missed runaways were returned fairly quickly, as we now know. You know, few of those runaways get anything like an Amber alert. There was nothing like an Amber alert in the seventies, so there was no red flags raised. A kid like Frank, who was eighteen, was classified as an adult, and adults, you know, are allowed to go missing. You know,
that's not a crime. It's not even a runaway, so there was no analysis being done of this. What I think might be more obvious today, although it would only be obvious if police were analyzing reports of missing persons that there was indeed a large cluster of unexplained missing persons in the same sort of central Houston area neighborhoods.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. How you talk about the confession that was elicited by Detective Mullokan originally in nineteen seventy three from Wayne Henley, but doctor Derek Sharon Derek was very interested. Despite being repulsed by Henley's behavior and obviously his account of the crimes, she felt it necessary or felt it necessary, to interview both David Brooks and Wayne Henley.
Yes, she did. As I said. The crimes that were discovered only in August nineteen seventy three, really, despite the fact that there were you know, over two dozen missing boys who were endangered missing persons is what we would call them today, with all kinds of red flags about their disappearances. Police had only opened two murder cases out
of those twenty four plus disappearances. Sharon. When she looked back at the old records, and you know, of course Henley's initial statements in David Brooks's initial state were led to the first IDs. She noticed all kinds of inconsistencies between how David Brooks described victims and how Wayne Henley described victims, and she started trying to sort of analyze those and compare in contrast, to try to figure out if some of the victims they described had in fact
never been identified. They knew some of the victims. So it was easy for Frank Gary to be identified because Wayne Henley said Frank A. Gary was murdered and Franka Gary's body was found, and Franka Gary's family had dental records, so Frank was one of the early IDs. And there were other ideas that were made like that, like Michael Balch's brother Billy, he disappeared with a friend Johnny, who
had broken his collarbone. And so those are names that Wayne Henley and David Brooks knew because these kids were classmates of theirs. They were kids in fact, who they'd known since elementary school in some case. And so those some of those id's were really solid, right, So she knew that some of those kids had been personally known by Brooks and Henley. And then the really good forensic work in the seventies, which they did the best work
they could in the seventies. They used dental records, they used X rays, they did everything they could to try to confirm IDs. That some of those identifications were really,
really good. But then she realized, you know, there were identification there were statements from Brooks and Henley about kids that she couldn't figure out which kid they were talking about, like she would they would say, okay, we picked up a kid on a certain block, or there was a kid who was a Mexican kid who fought with Dean Coral when he lived at a certain address, And those specific statements made in police reports didn't really match necessarily
any person who had been identified. So she started thinking, you know, she she was trying to piece together those clues of the non matching descriptions, the ones without names, really to see if she could use those to lead to other missing persons who might be her her lost boys, that might be the ones she was still trying to identify. So in addition to really going through all those statements and organizing them and trying to assemble lists. She decided
she would go and try to reinterview. She started with David Brooks because David Brooks, after making three statements to Houston Police in August nineteen seventy three, never talked about the crimes again. He never did any interviews with anybody. Elmrwayne Henley had done a lot of interviews, so she didn't feel the need to interview him right away because she felt like he had said everything he could already.
She went through all the published interviews and kind of looked at that looking for those inconsistencies, looking for names that didn't match. But she did think early on that David Brooks might be able to help her. Even with that first case. She was trying to identify the missing
person that we talked about, Randy Harvey. She found that old police report that suggested David Brooks had known Randy Harvey, that in fact, he'd accused Randy of stealing his stereo of all things, and so she thought, well, I need to go talk to him, because then maybe that will help me right away. She wanted to talk to him with her first about her first idea, but she was also looking for like I said, the non matching descriptions, the anomalous statements that might lead her to more matches.
How does she overcome the challenges with her team at the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, she.
The Emmy's office. Of course, you know, this is not something that forensic anthropologists normally do. They don't normally go to prisons to interview people. They work in crime labs. You know, they do their analysis in the lab. The ones who work on identifications, of course, do interview families.
Do you facilitate the DNA collection for families? But going to a prison was not normally on her list of duties, right, so she had to get special permission from her boss, the Harris County Chief Medical Examiner, Lewis Sanchez, Les Sanchez, and she did get permission from him after making a case that you know, if David Brooks talks, he knew things about victims that predated the victims that Wayne Henley
had helped identify. Wayne Henley had been kind of the main henchman really in the Coral murders, but he had met Coral through David Brooks, and David Brooks had known Coral longer Korl had met David Brooks when he was a really young kid, because David Brooks's grandmother lived near
a candy shop that Coral ran in the Heights. Cor ran three different candy shops in the Heights, three different locations, all of them near elementary schools, and David met Jean Coral when he was about ten years or eleven years old at one of those candy shops. So she thought, you know, David Brooks has known him the longest, maybe there's other things that could help me to lead me
to other people. But she had some obstacles. Like I said, David Brooks had never spoken to anyone, so even after she got permission, she wasn't sure he would agree to talk to her, and surprisingly he did. He did agree to talk to her two times, and when she did talk to him, though, it was clear that David Brooks
was still hoping to be paroled. Both David Brooks and Wayne Henley had been sentenced to life for murder that David Brooks had not been convicted and as many of the murders as Wayne Henley had been, so David Brooks still had some hope he would be paroled somedays. So he was cautious in talking to Sharon because he didn't want to admit to anything that might implicate him in more murders, because of course there's no statute of limitations on murders. So she was trying to persuade him, but
she was not a prosecutor. She couldn't offer him any kind of immunity. And at the end of the day, what was interesting with that first interview with or the second interview actually she had with David was he ends up drawing a map for her of the house where he thought that Randy Harvey had lived in nineteen seventy one at the time he disappeared, and when she looked for that address, it matched exactly with the missing persons report.
It was all but certain, even though David Brooks didn't want to say that Randy Harvey had been one of the early victims of Dean Coral. So that really gave her a lot of motivation to make that first idea
to do everything she could to find Randy's sisters. So David was helpful in that way, and again there were these statements that she went over with him that ended up later matching to some of the other victims that she identified, but other Thanry, that was the main clue that Randy was the main clue really she got from David Brooks. But it did make her think, you know, maybe I should go talk to Elma Wayne Henley, because she did have a different perspective than journalists and other
people who had interviewed him. She was looking really for those descriptions of victims he might have known or heard about from Brooks or Coral. You know, Coral occasionally had talked to Brooks about other victims he had killed alone. Coral and Brooks had talked a little bit to Henley
about places or people that had been killed previously. So she was looking to expand that list because as she worked, she started out thinking there were only three unidentified Coral victims, but as she worked, she started to realize there were more like eight, which ended up, you know, the discoveries that she makes end up also expanding the number of victims that Dean Coral's known to have had. So she's finding more victims and she's finding more mysteries as she goes.
What did she make of the original story that when they went to the beach to search with Henley, he said there were nine bodies there and the search ended quickly with six bodies.
Well, she found that really significant, you know, and she talks to at the point she talks to Elmer Wayne Henley, which is later in her searches, she's trying to find what happened. One of the kind of heartbreaking discoveries Sharon makes is that some of the boys were misidentified. The boy we talked to is Nita's boyfriend, Michael Balch. We talked about Michael, the one who went looking for his brother's killer and was killed himself in July nineteen seventy three. Yes, Saron.
Sharon finds out fairly early on that Michael Balch was misidentified. There was a lot of pressure in seventy three to identify the Bulch brothers, and later on she starts to suspect that another another murder victim who was identified in the nineties had been misidentified. His name was Mark Scott.
So when she goes to see Elma Wayne Henley, she's trying to figure out if some of these boys that she's still searching for were buried on the beach or in the woods, as were two locations in East Texas, or if some of the bodies might have been mixed up from those two burial sites, and Henley sticks to his story. He sticks to his story that there were more bodies on the beach and that she doesn't have Mark Scott's body, which is kind of a devastating statement
that he makes. But Sharon already knows that there had been bodies missed on the beach from the identification that she had made previously with doctor Love. The mysterious box of bones labeled antiquities had been found on the same beach where the other bodies had been found, but ten years later, so she already knows that in this one
way for sure, ELM. Marwayne Henley isn't lying. There definitely were more bodies on the beach than we're found, and in her interview with him, she determines that there were definitely at least two more and possibly three more because he sticks to his story that there were nine. She knows that Alan's body was missed in nineteen seventy three. He tells her that Mark Scott's body was missed in nineteen seventy three, so the question is who's the other
body that was buried on the beach. Sharon also in the course of the book, starts to believe that other bodies were missed at the boat shed, which is the first place that was searched for bodies. There was a storage unit in Houston that Coral had rented, a boat
shed that he filled with bodies. He made it into a mass grave, and she starts to suspect that not only were there additional bodies likely buried, say in layers, under the other bodies that were excavated, but that also there seemed to have been extra that were mixed in with the bodies who were identified. When she looks at the old records, some of the boys are missing bones
and other boys have too many bones. And when she identifies Randy very early on, there are a couple of extra bones that she finds in another box that she wonders if they might be Randy, because Randy's missing a couple of armbones. When she gets the DNA back from those armbones, there don't match. So Sharon starts to become convinced that not only did Elmerwayne Henley and David Brooks claim there were more bodies left behind at the beach and at the boat shed, but she can actually prove
it that there really were extra bodies. The question is can she prove who they were? So that's part of what she's trying to do.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. You offer the Mark Scott's harrowing story of near escape in this book. I know this is not the focus of the book as these graphic accounts, but this story is worth mentioning. Could you tell us a little bit about this story.
Well, one of the things I really wanted to do in the book was, like I said, give you the real stories as much as I could. Of these eight boys who Sharon identifies, we've mentioned some of their names. Mark Scott is one of them. Randy Harvey is one of them. In the case of Mark Scott, Mark was someone who was very well known to Elmer Wayne Henley. He was Elma Wayne Henley's neighbor. He had gone to
the same junior high school as Brooks and Henley. He was a kid that actually went to parties at Coral's house because there were, unbelievably, there were some kids in this group that Coral murdered who were kids that he had met at his candy shops. As boys as elementary school kids like David Brooks, some of the murder victims had also hung out at the candy shops, and as they got older, they started coming by Coral's place to hang out. David Brooks lived with Dean Coral and they
had parties at Coral's places all over Houston. Coral moved every three months or so to different places and he had parties. He had large parties that you know, he'd give people free drugs and alcohol. And Mark went to
these parties. So Mark was someone really well known. So when Sharon goes to visit Wayne Henley to try to figure out if she has Mark's bones in storage or not, and she learns that she doesn't, she also asks Wayne about the place where Mark was murdered because she does want to know if he's credible, if he really would
know for sure what happened to Mark. And when she asks those questions, when aren't questions she necessarily usually would ask, Wayne unleashes the story of what he did to Mark that is more detailed than any other story I've ever heard about Mark Scott's murder. And I also separately interviewed one of Mark Scott's best friends, who Mark called on the night of his murder, tried to call Mark. Like some of the living victims, you know, like Bernie Milligan,
attempted to escape from Dean Coral. He was able to quarrel. Sometimes left victims tied up for days and kept torturing them. Sometimes he would tie up two people at the same time to what he called a torture board, and he did that to Mark. Mark managed to loosen the ties around his hands. Somehow. Mark was a big kid, muscular, and he also had a pocket knife he might have been able to grab, but in whatever way he did this, he was able to loosen his hands. During the night,
he tried to make a phone call. I talked to his friend who said, you know, Mark couldn't talk when he tried to call me. I couldn't tell where he was. I couldn't tell anything. Mark probably still had a gag in his mouth. And Wayne Henley tells Sharon about what
then happened to Mark. When they wake up in the morning and see that Mark's freed himself, Wayne ends up torturing They all torture him, and Wayne ends up being the one to make the kill and Dean Coral's orders and this is a horrifying, horrifying account of how a teenager who's controlled by someone else is groomed to not only be a fellow rapist and torturer, but a fellow collaborative killer. So it's probably one of the most disturbing
stories in the book. But I think it's fundamental to understanding the dynamic of what was going on and how much Dean Coral was controlling the kids who were in this group, both kids who were helping him kill kids and who may just have seen something that they didn't understand until later that may have seemed like a horror story to them but that they couldn't explain tell of course, the bodies were found. So those are the kinds of stories I share because there's really no way to dress
it up. Dream Coral was an incredibly violent, horrifying killer on the same order of you know, John Wayne Gacy, and I think the only reason he's not as famous or infamous is he didn't live decades on death row to glorify his life and his exploits the way Gaysey did. Very much like Gaysey, he was sexually assaulting, exploiting, fooling, tricking young men, luring them into his homes with different ruses, using handcapped tricks to trap them. Also, you know, photographing
and being involved in a porn ring. Gacy was also involved in a porn ring. Dean Coral isn't as famous because he died, but what he did was truly heinous.
In that vein, you interviewed a woman named Susan mick Lamar, and she was eleven years old and witnessed some harrowing things at Coral's house, including adult men in bedrooms, and so in that theme you talk about that. In the research for this book, there was the boy pornring that you discover and several notorious characters behind it all.
Well, so I didn't interview Susan because Susan had already died by the time I began writing this book. But I did interview Susan's sister and her stepbrother, and I interviewed reporter who interviewed her, and I read the accounts that she had given. She gave a lot of interviews in the eighties and nineties about this, but no one I think had at the time. Even though really good reporters wrote about her account, no one went back and reviewed other evidence that is in the police files and
is in other court cases that corroborate her allegations. There are What I did was I did research to show that there was credible evidence to show what Susan maclamore had said in her store in her interviews in the
eighties and nineties was true. She was the younger sister of a murder victim named Rusty Branch, who was the son of a police officer, and Susan had stories about tagging along with her older brother two parties at Dean Coral's house where kids were being photographed and things were being done in back rooms that she did not understand as a little kid, but she certainly saw kids sniffing paint, smoking pot, all consistent with the allegations or the counts
of corals parties and the men in the back room
taking photos. When you look back in the old police files, there were murder victim's parents who told police in the seventies that their sons had been photographed by gay men at parties, and one of the fathers actually had given police names of people who were friends of Dean Coral's And when I looked for information about those people, I found evidence that they were pornographers, that they were internationally known pornographers, that a few years after there after these murders,
they were busted and a warehouse full of tons of porn contained pictures of eleven of Coral's known murder victims, eleven out of the thirty we know of today. So that to me was a really shocking revelation. It was pretty much there in the records, there in old interviews, but I put it together that was as part of what you do in your investigative reporter. But to me, it was shocking. To me, it was shocking that that part of the story about Dean Coral is not really
known in Houston. When I talked to journalists who are still around who covered the Choral case, they really had no notion that Coral was definitely connected to an international partnering that there was evidence in the old files that showed that that was the case.
You right about this very interesting response from Officer Branch, Rusty's father defending the department that was criticizing people criticizing the department. Very interesting what his own daughter had to say about Officer Branch.
Well. Officer Branch is Rusty's father was interviewed in nineteen seventy three because his son was known to be missing, but he did not want to admit that his son was a murder victim. In fact, he and he also wasn't joining the other parents. There are a lot of other parents who were saying, the police didn't do anything when we reported our kids missing. They should have done more. They should have been sounding an alarm about so many
kids missing and such small area. Like I said, some of these murder victims lived just blocks front apart from each other. People like Frank Gary and Mark Scott. You know, they lived very near each other. So a lot of the families of the murder victims were making a big stink. In August nineteen seventy three, Rusty Branch's dad, even though Rusty, his son had been missing for two years, didn't join in that chorus. He gave an interview where he depended
his department. He was in the radio division, which is a different division than obviously missing persons. But he just said, you know, they did everything they could. They did everything they could, and kind of more astonishingly, I mean, that's not so surprising to me for an officer to defend his department. But what was more surprising to me was he did not go to the emmy's office and take his son's medical records or his son's dental records in to be compared to the bones that they had in
the mor the unidentified bodies. He didn't take that step. I a surmise really from other relatives I interviewed who were still living. It was because he didn't want to know. He didn't want his son to be one of the victims of Dean Cora. He didn't want his son to be infamous as a rape and murder victim. And that's part of what Susan says in her interviews. In the eighties and nineties, his little sister, She says, you know, there was a tremendous stigma around us, and my father,
you know, kind of didn't want to face it. And other people in the family also said, you know, there was We always knew that Rusty was probably a murder victim, and we always knew that that Officer Branch the father seemed to know more about Dean Coral than he would ever taught us about. And so Susan goes into detail about the fact that she believes in these older interviews that her father knew about Coral's porn parties, that of
course he didn't know boys were being murdered. You know, there's no implication that he knew about that, but there was kind of a an acceptance that in the vice world that this was just happening, and maybe I don't know what, I don't know why he would have tolerated it, or maybe he tried to do something about it he couldn't. But you know, there were no arrests, there were no
the after the murders. The people who were named as being supposedly involved with Coral in this photography of boys' activities, there there's no evidence that they were ever questioned by police about Dean Coral, their involvement with Dean Coral. The principal person, Roy Ames, who was arrested and went to federal prison as a pornographer. His lawyer, he had a very good lawyer who said, you know, filed emotion saying I want it to be clear that there should be
no mention of Dean Coral in this case. When when Roy Ames is eventually charged with pornography, taking porn across steam lines and selling it as a as a violation of postal law. Essentially that there's a there's a kind of an agreement that they're not going to mention the murders, which is sort of astonishing. It's in the court files.
In the end, doctor Derek, Sharon Derek really wanted to before she retired solve all these unidentified cases and give the names back to these unidentified victims. How many unidentified bodies in the end, with everyone's help, were identified.
So she makes she makes seven identifications. There's an eighth that is I'd say half made that of those seven, only six were ever announced. Of the book reveals an unannounced identification. And the story of Rusty Branch is more complicated than I've I've told you about, you know, and you have to read the book to get the rest of the story I'm going to say, But there is still a mystery surrounding the identification of Rusty Branch that
was made in the nineteen eighties. It almost certainly was wrong. So we don't know really who's buried in Rusty Branch's grave today, And at this moment, the authorities in Texas don't seem inclined to exhume that body and correct that mistake. So I'd say there's that one body that really needs to be identified, the one that's in Rusty Branch's grave. We need to know more about whether Rusty is actually
related to a different body. There are partial remains from the beach and from the boat shed that remain unexplained. So we know now that Dean Coral killed at least thirty people in Texas. Still makes him one of the most prolific serial killers in Texas history. He was labeled as one of the most prolific in US history, in modern US history in nineteen seventy three, but he still is up there in Texas history, and there's at least
partial remains for say five more people. Three missing persons that Sharon is fairly convinced could have been Dean Coral's victims, people who were known by Coral or by his teenaged accomplices, and who lived in some of the same neighborhoods where other victims were killed during those same years.
I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about the scientist and the serial killer, the search for Houston's Lost boys. This is an extraordinary story for people that want to find out more about this book. Do you have a website? You do any social media?
I do? I have. My website is www dot Lisa Olsen l A s e O L S e n dot com at Lisa Olsen. Author is the Instagram handle, and I've got a book tour coming up, so I hope some of you join me. If you're around in April. There's events in New York, Washington, DC, Virginia, and of course all over Texas.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Lisa Wilson for the Scientist and the serial killer, the search for Houston's Lost Boys. Thanks so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
Thank you so much, Dan, thank you, good night.