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Else You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about him Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, DTK. 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, Elmer. Wayne Henley Junior was only fourteen when he first became entangled with serial rapist and murderer Dean Coral in nineteen seventy one. Fellow Houston, Texas teenager David Brooks had already been ensnared by the charming older man bribe with cash to help lure boys to Coral's home. When Henley unwittingly entered the trap, chorrel evidently sensed he be more use as a second accomplice than another victim.
He baited Henley with the same deal he'd given Brooks, two hundred dollars for each boy they could bring him. Henley didn't understand the full extent of what he had signed up for at first, but once he started, Coral convinced him that he had crossed the line of no return and had to not only procure boys, but help kill them and dispose of the bodies as well. When Henley first took a life, he lost his moral base.
He felt doomed. By the time he was seventeen, he'd helped with multiple murders and believed he be killed too. But on August eighth, nineteen seventy three, he picked up a gun and shot Coral. He turned himself in. Henley showed police where he and Brooks had buried Coral's victims in mass graves. Twenty eight bodies were recovered, most of them boys from Henley's neighborhood, making this the worst case
of serial murder in America at the time. The case reveals gross failures in the way Copps handled parents please to look for their missing sons, and how law enforcement possibly protected a larger conspiracy. The Serial Killer's Apprentice tells the story of Coral and his accomplices in its fullest
form to date. It also explores the concept of murder, the predator's instinct for exploitable kids, current neuroscience about adolescent brain vulnerabilities, the role of compartmentalization, the dynamic of a murder apprenticeship, and how tales like Henley's can aid with early intervention. Despite his youth and cooperation, Henley went to trial and received six life sentences. He's now sixty five and has a sense of perspective about how adult predators
can turn formally good kids into criminals. Unexpectedly, He's willing to talk. This book is his warning and the story of the unspeakable evil and sorrow that befell Houston in the early nineteen seventies. The book that we're featuring this evening is The serial Killer's Apprentice, the true story of how Houston's deadliest murderer turned a kid into a killing machine. With my special guest, professor of forensic psychology, researcher and
best selling author Katherine Ramslin. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Katherine Ramsland, thanks.
For having me. I'm happy to be here again with you.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary book, The Serial Killers Apprentice.
I appreciate that it was quite a book to write.
Absolutely, tell us how you came to be involved in this book project and tell us about Tracy Ullman and her contribution to this book.
Okay, it started with my work with Dennis Rader, when I had written a book based on five years of interviewing him and putting together his autobiography. We did a four part documentary on it for A and E. And at that point the production team asked me if I wanted to do another one, and they had picked some ideas, none of which I thought were feasible, and I said,
I want to speak with Wayne Henley. And I had had this in mind for years, based on watching him in an interview on a really small documentary called The Collectors, which is about these art collectors of serial killer art, and so I had always wanted to speak with him.
It turned out Tracy Omen, who was on our production team, had already been speaking to him because she had done a lot of work on the John Wayne Gacy case and she had connected into these sex trafficking networks and found out that some of the things that Wayne and David Brooks, the other accomplice, said back in nineteen seventy three about there being a large networked sex trafficking operation out of Dallas was in fact true, and she had done a lot of that work and so she had
been talking with him. So she introduced me to him and since he already trusted her, he was willing to talk with me, and that got the process rolling.
And what did you want most to explore in terms of this new book project, Well, one of the.
Things we wanted to do was set it in the right context. The things the police missed or refused to even follow leads on. That was Tracy's part, and at that point she had been she had ten years worth of research on all of that, so she framed it that way, and I also wanted to look at some of the earlier books. The one thing I want to say is many people think the Jack Olsen book The Man with the Candy is the definitive work on that, but in fact, there's so many holes and errors in
that book. He didn't even take it to the trial. It was a quick hit, journalistic piece of work based only on flawed and biased police reports, with multiple issues about memory and and corruption of people talking to each
other and before putting together their reports. So there were a lot of issues with the police supports, and that book is based largely in those and some interviews with family, but no interviews with Henley or Brooks or anyone who knew either one of those two so it was very clear to me there needs to be a narrative that includes far more than the early narratives ever did. And as a result, the narrative changed considerably in terms of
the way Wayne Henley was presented. I mean, he originally was brought in almost as a victim potential target for Dean Coral, the candyman from the early nineteen seventies, and he became an accomplice. But the narrative about him was that he tricked all of his friends into coming to parties where they were abused and assaulted and murdered, and then he helped bury them. And that's not the narrative
at all. So having the long, intense interviews with him that I had over the course of a year changed a lot of my perception of him, and I'm hoping to change the perception of other people.
You're right that Wayne Henley hoped to and hopes to contribute something redemptive from his acts.
One of the things that he had said to someone like a journalist or some was that he didn't want to be remembered only for the things he had done when he was a teenager that he deeply regretted was horrified he'd ever even been involved in had lots of remorse, and he hoped that someday he'd be able to use his experience to help others. And so that's exactly what our approach became was, how does this become a cautionary
tale for today? How is what happened fifty years go in Houston, Texas, where at least twenty seven young men were killed? How does that help us today? Well, there's a lot of ways it helps us today. And I devoted an entire chapter just to guidance for parents, teachers, youth counselors to start looking for how predators are not just looking for victims, They're looking for partners, and they look among teens. And Wayne Henley was fifteen when he
was first engaged in this murder team. David Brooks was He was twelve years old when he first met Dean. He was brought in because he had really nowhere else to go. Both of his parents had split up. Both of them thought he was kind of no good, really paid no attention to him. Dean Coral filled that hole and became like a big brother. And he moved in with Dean, and he got money and he got a car, and he got a number of things to keep his mouth shut and to have a weight, a place to
stay in a way to make some income. So he was swept into it very early, and then he brought Wayne into it. Wayne also bought into Coral's initial narrative that he was looking for boys to put into this network to sell and those boys would end up in California being pool boys for some rich people. So everybody
wins essentially, is the way he framed it. And then and I think when Wayne fell for that and actually did help him to secure a hitchhiker, at that point, Coral murdered that boy and then told Wayne, you're in this now, like it or not. And so he's trapped, he's leveraged. They're both leveraged. And that's what we wanted to show is how vulnerable teenagers can be to an adult predator with a plan and a way to choreograph their involvement and then keep them quiet and keep them
working for him. And there's more of that than you might imagine. So that's one of the things I think that Wayne wanted to had hoped to present, was here's my experience, use it to help others not fall into this like I did.
You chronicle this extraordinary process, and first with information from provided by David Brooks and then by Wayne Henley. But David Brooks was, as you write, the first known apprentice or handyman or Dean Coral. So tell us as you had discovered on how exactly this process works to slowly eat away at the moral code that these children were raised with, to get to the point where Dean Coral has them assisting in murderous acts.
So calling David Brooks the first known apprentice is important because we think there were others before David Brooks. It was just hard to you know, with Dean Coral dead, it was hard to really follow any leads on that. But it seemed from some of the things he said to Brooks that he had certainly done this before, and from some of the victims he picked who had been doing things for him, like stealing things that he could then you know, sell elsewhere, it looked as if that
he was involved with some others before Brooks. But we really only know and Brooks did not give media interviews, but he did have three different police confessions. One was just I'm kind of a bystander. I wasn't really involved in this, Yes, I lived with them, But eventually he copped to his involvement in it, though not all the way. Mostly he kind of threw Wayne Henley under the bus, and even though he was with Chral for a lot longer than Wayne and was involved in some of the
murders before Wayne. But essentially the way this works is an adult predator like Dean Coral and he was known as a candyman because he did make candy with his mother and he would dispense it to kids to bring them around they lived. They had a candy shop near an elementary school, and he would would not just give out candy, but then he'd tell these these boys that they could come over to his place and play pool and ride on his motorcycle and he'd take him to
the beach and whatnot. And he was basically scoping out who then might become eligible for sexual favors for him, and some of them agreed to it for five or ten dollars, you know, minor things, but still they were sexually assaulted, and so little by little he's looking for people who've crossed a line and you know, committed some minor acts, so it looks like their moral code already is eroded to some extent. And David Brooks was smoking dope.
He had I think of a burglary on his record in another town, but he was a juvenile, so obviously didn't really count for much. But it was clear to Dean Coral that this is a kid who can be manipulated, who he's got soft limits, which is what I talk about, the difer between hard and soft limits. Hard limits being something you absolutely will not do under any circumstances, and
soft limits being things that are appliable. And so a predator looks for those and looks for how to manipulate them and bring the kid further and further into criminal activity that's increasingly more serious. And so David Brooks came upon Dean one day with two kids tied to his bed and they were naked. He was naked, and he kind of told Brooks, you know, forget about this, we're just having fun, and little by little it was clear that he was actually bringing kids in to assault them
and then kill them. And then he brought Brooks into help with the burials in a boat shed that he had rented and Brooks was doing this and then he was being paid to bring boys to Dean Coral. We clearly see that his moral compass had been breached pretty effectively with money and then a car or a bottom a car. And he was also dispensing drugs in some of the parks in the Houston Heights, so he was primed.
And then he saw Wayne Henley and he was told to bring kids who were runaways, who had a record, who dropouts, you know, sort of society's marginalized throwaways. And so he saw Wayne Henley one day outside school walk away clearly, and he was going down to the pool hall, and clearly he was a dropout. He wasn't going to school or he was truant that day. So Brooks kind of held the money in front of him, and Henley needed it because he had a father. He was from
an abusive home. He had a father who had abandoned the family, had also tried shooting him a couple of times, had beat up his mother and grandmother, and he, at the age of you know, thirteen and fourteen, was working part time at a gas station to try to bring in some money to help. He was the oldest of four boys trying to help his mother. So he sees David Brooks with all this money and a car, and he's wondering, wow, you know, how can I be cut
in on some of that? Friends him and this is the predator reaching through and accomplished to yet another kid
to bring aboard. So it's highly manipulative and layered. So Henley trusts Brooks, and Brooks basically tells him, you know, oh, we're going to cut you in on this, and he brings Dean down to the gas station to meet Henley, and then they bring him over to Dean's place, at which point I have a scene in the book where it's pretty clear Dean is just about to grab Henley and probably bind him as a knife right there, and Henley immediately says, I told my mother where I am
which and everything shifted right in that moment. Okay, you know,
take him home. But I think what happened is that Quarrel realized that Brooks, who was a kind of geeky outsider type who really didn't didn't want to be a part, was very reluctant, didn't have really many connections with the other kids, compared to Wayne Henley, who was really a friendly, open, approachable kid with a lot of connections in the neighborhood among the different groups of boys, and so he figured this would be a far better accomplice to me than
Brooks would be. And so he started a plan to figure out his weakness. Is he needs money, and I'll approach him that way. And that's essentially what happens with these adult predators. They're looking to see what's the kid looking for? Is it money? Is it drugs? Is it alcohol?
Is it stimulation and fun? Are they lonely? Etc. They're looking for their vulnerability and then they exploit it and they keep the pressure on until they have leveraged that person and compromised them to the point where they're too scared to act and to tell anybody.
You also say that it's quite powerful to have these Wayne Henley regarded as being recruited into a criminal enterprise for his intellect and his abilities.
I say that in the book it's hard to know what was on. I mean, the important thing is quorl is dead, so it's hard to know what he was thinking. We can only extrapolate from the behaviors that we do know. And I want to point out that Wayne Henley is the only accomplice to a serial killer who killed the serial killer. To end things right, he two friends, Coral was about to kill both of them, and also Wayne. Wayne talked his way out of being he had been
bound after he passed out getting high and whatnot. He had been bound, and he talked Dean into letting him free and said he would help kill the other two. But instead he picked up a gun and killed Coral. So we have very little Coral was a highly secretive man, and even to his accomplices, he would tell them very little. He had a private mailbox that as soon as he got anything there, he'd tear it up to make sure nobody saw it. So it's hard to know what his
intent and what his thinking process was. But I make inferences based on what is known from Brookes and Henley and what we do know about adult predators. It's easy to put all that together. For example, Wayne said to me, the first thing Dean ever said to him was he told him a dirty joke. And I said, wow, classic predator move. Because if you respond, well, now they know you will cross a line. If you don't, they can always oh blow it off. Oh just kidding, just kidding
and golf and that's a classic predator move. So there we go. We have Dean Coral doing exactly what we know adult predators will often do.
You talk about, though, the the threat that he had. He said that there was a criminal organization in Dallas selling boys, buying and selling boys. So what was the what was the premise that Henley thought that he was joining this organization for and the rule that potentially he could have in that organization.
Okay, so there was that was that evolved that the idea that evolved. Initially it was that Coral was selling these you know, grabbing these boys and selling them to California wealthy people who wanted yard workers and pool boys, et cetera. That and that sounded okay, But as Wayne was was leveraged into this, it really became much more ominous.
Now this minded this is the era when The Godfather was a big you know, book and movie whatnot, the idea of organized crime and and all these assistants and whatnot being committed to the to the ideas. So there was that sense right off the bat that there was this larger organization and it became increasingly more sinister because when Wayne did help to bring in a kid that they met hitchhiking and then was told afterward, we killed him.
And now you're implicated, and this organization knows about you, so if you try to talk, they're going to find out. And so to a fifteen year old kid, what you know with limited resources, who's a ninth grade dropout, that sounds pretty ominous and scary, and he even thinks about it. And then when he brought a friend over one day who Coral tackled hog Tide right in front of him and then told him he killed him, and you are involved. So now so that first guy, the hitchhiker, now your friend.
You're involved. If you go to the police, you take a big risk because this organization is aware of you. Initially, Hanley had wanted to wanted the organization aware of him because he thought one of his childhood friends had been abducted from the neighborhood by Coral, but he didn't know that at the time had been abducted a year or
two before. He thought, if he did well in this organization, he could find out where that boy was and bring him home, because he had made a promise to that boy's mother that he would do everything he could to try to do that. So he thought, if he did a good job in this organization, he'd find out their secrets and he'd be able to go find that boy. Did he know that boy was dead and buried in Dean's boatshed. So but as Wayne began to think he really should go to the police, he thought, what, it's
just me against this adult predator. Who who are they going to believe? It's just me and this man who's got it all together, he's got a job, he's got you know, why would they believe me? And even if they did and they arrested him and he got out, then he's going to come after me. Or if he didn't get out, then the organization is going to come after me for, you know, snitching on one of their people. So he was in this kind of no win situation in his own imagination. He couldn't and he might have
been right. Frankly, when we looked at how the police actually did handle that lead, they did very little follow through on it. Even though there was an organization out of Dallas exactly as Dean had described. There really was such an organization, but the at least never picked up on it. And those who did a little later still did not do much with it in terms of connecting
it to Dean Coral. So Henley might not have been wrong about it about his sense of no one's going to listen to me, because it's possible they might not have because they didn't listen to him. Even when he was leading them to where the bodies were buried, they still didn't really listen to him.
Now, you write that Brooks had a room in Coral's apartment and he was given this corvette. But Wayne just worked at this same job and lived at home, and so there was this difference in dynamic. But you chronicle that there was Henley having pangs of conscience and trying to get away from Dean Coral at some point, and you also chronicle discussions that Brooks had with Wayne Henley as well.
Yeah, I mean I my own sense is that Brooks was paid each time he brought someone or helped with something. He was paid for sexual favors. He was given a room where ever Dean lived. He followed Dean from one place to another because Dean moved frequently, and he got a car for keeping his mouth shut about two kids that he knew had been murdered. So there were several
things that went on once Henley joined. That suggested to me because because Wayne said he was paid once for the hitchhiker and that after that he didn't get paid. He was supplied with liquor and you know, drugs and acrylic gas cans that they liked to use to get high. He was given that kind of stuff, but he did not get a room, and when he was there he
slept on the floor, so he was treated differently. And I even have suggested to him that I think I think David continued to be paid, because there was one point at which David got married and moved out, and he called in when they had a kid there and he wanted to know what he was missing. Now this is this is a guy who claims he was very reluctant to be involved and really never did any of the killing. Now he's he didn't need to come over that day, but he was afraid and he still had
a room in Dean's house. He was afraid of missing out on something. What could it be? I think it was pay I think he thought that he if he was part of this, he would be cut in on some money. And we do know that when Coral was killed, he had two one hundred dollar bills. That was the amount he would be paying for boys. So he was
certainly paying somebody for something. And I think I think Brooks always had an edge on Henley in that he is getting more favors, he was getting more privileges, and he was getting money, and Henley was not.
You write about some of the people that Wayne Henley tries to reach out and talk about his situation too.
Yeah, there's there's a myth that that Wayne was in this wholeheartedly and enjoyed the killing and whatnot. But it's there's there's clearly we talked to his mother. Also, he did several things. He talked to two of his uncles to try to tell them what was going on. He was scared. He wanted to get out of this, but he didn't know how and so, and both of them dismissed him as being high and being crazy, and one of them sent him home on a bus, get away
from me. So then he wrote it all out in a letter to his mother and he gave it to her and she was so disturbed by it. Now, to her credit, she did make an appointment with a psychiatrist, but that was too late in coming, and then she destroyed the letter, but she remembered it, and she just didn't understand what he could possibly be talking about because there's no chance her some would be involved in something like that, and he was drinking a lot, and so
she just thought maybe it's that. He also tried to join the navy as a way to get to get away from this, and he was not accepted. He also tried to move to another town, and David Brooks told him that Dean was looking at his younger brother, so he felt like he needed to come back and be protective over his brothers to make sure Kral never made them into victims. So he did try to get out on several occasions. He also did not realize that Coral was sometimes acting on his own and grabbing boys and
killing them. And we have evidence of one kid buried in an area not where all the others are buried that was clearly a victim of being Coral. So when Brooks and Henley thought maybe Coral was backing off, in fact, he was just operating as a lone wolf.
You write about the process that Chral uses to convince Wayne Henley to participate in murder and you call it the turning point, and also wanting him to engage in sadistic behavior and torture along with being coral.
Yeah, Coral always wanted to partner all the way, and I think in his mind he thought if he choreographed it well enough psychologically, he'd eventually get that person. I mean, that's a complete niavete on his part, that you can create a sadist where none exists. But that's apparently what he thought. He had wanted David Brooks to do this,
and Brooks didn't want to. He wanted somebody to sexually assault another victim while so they would have two boys there and both of them would would torture and assault them and murder them together. That was he on several occasions had more than one victim in the house, and that was just some There was a hard limit there for Wayne that I don't want to do this. I don't. It's astonishing to me that you even think I would.
So there were some things that Kral asked of him that he just held the line, there's no way, there is no way I'm doing this, at least according to him. So Coral I think believed, and he had all this big stack of books on hypnosis in his closet, so I think he thought that he somehow could would get Wayne or David into a mindset where they would be able to be pushed into doing these kind of double criminal acts together. And that, as I understand, it never happened,
But that was Coral's goal. That was his fantasy.
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Now, let's continue with the process of grooming this Wayne Henley as his ultimate apprentice. But Wayne Hendley has other ideas and take us up to the point where it all turns to murder. You you write that Dean Coral had instructed Wayne that if he were to shoot, and he was trying to do you use a pistol. If he were to shoot, he would have to continue to shoot till that person was on the ground. Yeah.
I think it's really interesting that Korrel more or less set up his own demise in his training program. Essentially, he trained Wayne on. He gave maccess to a gun. Wayne already knew how to shoot because he had guns in his own house, but he gave maccess to this gun. He trained him and almost like a little soldier again, this is that Godfather era. You're my capo or whatever
you want to call it. And he trained him and then also worked on him mentally because he wanted One of the things that Wayne had wanted to be was a minister, and he carried a Bible in his pocket. And so Coral had his training program had to kind of accomplish two things. Was to get Wayne to forget about God and morality and whatnot, and to get him angry enough where he'd want to really go after these kids.
So he used Wayne's anger at his father at the time his father had abandoned the family, had also abused them, had also shot at Wayne a couple of times. So Coral used that kind of manipulation and then also had the physical training of here's how you do these things, and if you're going to shoot someone, you shoot and
shoot and keep shooting till they hit the ground. And that's exactly what Wayne did to Chral eventually, so Coral brought about his own demise because I kind of think on the morning when Wayne shot him, he was high on drugs. He was astonished that Kral was talking about
killing him, although he'd always thought that's how he'd end up. Eventually, Coral would kill him, And I think he had he not been trained to keep shooting, he might have shot him once and it did hit him, but he kept coming and then not knowing what to do, but the fact that he had this training, it just automatically kicked in and he gets kept shooting till Choral did eventually hit the ground.
You explore all kinds of psychological phenomenonists, but especially the temporary psychopath. Tell us about that.
The temporary psychopath is my own kind of contribution. I think I've studied a lot of these team cases where somebody is called a compliant, accomplished, somebody who doesn't really want to do these things, but they think if they don't, they're going to have something to lose, or they've been
psychologically manipulated to the point where they just submit. So we've seen cases in which once the team is stopped, usually by some arrest, the compliant person or reluctant person looks at what they did and things, how did I ever do that? That isn't me, It's not who I ever was? How did I manage to be in that
position and stay in that position? So that's the idea that the idea that they're temporary is that once out from under the influence of the predator, they can revert back to their original moral code and be astonished at what they did. And Wayne is not the only one. I have a number of cases in the book of others who have expressed very similar thoughts, and so I think some people are Often they've been in abusive situations prior to becoming part of the team, so they're kind
of used to it. They've calloused themselves, and so the predator has a way to keep them calloused, like like a psychopath, in getting them to do these horrible things and to feel nothing about it under the predator's influence. What was interesting about Henley is that he's a reader. He's quite the reader, and so he had already read quite a bit about through urban fantasy and books like that, about people who subvert their own sense of will power
to a higher authority. But he viewed that that's how what he had done with Kral is Charrel's the one choreography is Karrel's the one who's making these decisions. This is not what I want to do, but I don't really have much choice. So all I can do is please Dean. That's that's what I want to do. And now you know, out from under Dean Coral, he immediately began to think, my god, how did I do this?
Uh?
And to this day now he has never said to me, and to his credit, and I want I want to
find something that mitigates what I did. In fact, some of his first words to me were, don't try to lessen my responsibility, right, And of course I did eventually, because he didn't know anything about the juvenile brain and the immaturity that we have found, you know, in recent years, and the idea of the temporary psychopath that this is not who you essentially are, but who you've been made into by a more powerful person, and it is not who you are, and you can recover your base by
getting out from under that influence. So it's my concept, but it's based on looking at a number of these teams.
You talk about explaining the descent into this moral abyss and why, and you talk about again the juvenile brain and this temporary psychopathy. But people will still have a problem with Wayne Henley's participation, despite again the very clear evidence that he was remorseful many times along the way. Please tell us how, in the exploration and through his insights, how he came to be able to accept the more sadistic aspects of this murder, and also bringing people he knew to Dean Coral's home.
He did not bring. A number of people were already there when he came in. They knew Dean from before. The ones he brought were besides the friend, the initial friend, Franka Gary, who he did not know. He says, what was going to happen to him, You can believe him or not believe him. But the ones after that, they were already in the house. He didn't bring them himself. So again, that's the myth, is that he brought all his friends to be killed by Dean Coral, and that
really isn't sure. In fact, he tried to keep his friends away from Dean as much as he could. But your question is not really that. It's one of the things I struggled with was what to call this kind of in between status. He's not a victim, he's a perpetrator, but he's not fully responsible like Dean Coral, who is the predator who set it all up. Yet he's certainly not completely innocent. We have no terminology for someone like that. We lump all accomplices together essentially and and viue them
with responsibility for everything that happened. But I think that's really not a fair position, and that's kind of our fall for not looking at the nuances of these kinds of associations. I think it is difficult because he definitely did participate in strangling and shooting other boys. He was convicted of six. There certainly were a few more than that. He is certainly not responsible for twenty seven murders, which Dean Coral was responsible for. David Brooks was in on
a number of those, but Henley was not. And what he says at the end of the book is be mad at me for what I did, but don't be mad at me for what Chorl did. He Henley did not murder twenty seven boys, but still he did murder some under Korrel's command. He did bury some, he did not go to the police. These are all things that
he admits he's responsible for. Nevertheless, he was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen when all of this was going on, and we have to keep that in mind because he was easily manipulated by Korl based on his need and his background and his lack of understanding. Same with David Brooks. But I will say when I look at the two of them together and their reactions, and in what we see in the statements they gave to the police, I don't
think Brooks would have ever stopped being Kral. I don't think there would have been a time when he even though he and Wayne both talked about maybe having to kill Kral to save their own lives and to stop this, I don't think Brooks on his own would have ever done that because I think he had gotten very used to this, and there was never a time when he
came out with a statement about regretting everything. But Wayne did right from the get go, and in fact, as soon as he killed Coral and the police and turned himself in and the police came, he was in the back of the police car going to the police station when he started to tell them about the fact that there were victims buried in a boatshit, and he could
have said nothing. Had he said nothing, he would have been a hero because he saved his two friends, and he's shot Dean and self defense and that was all, you know, agreed upon that there would be no charges for that. If he had said nothing about the burial sites, they may never have been found. And even if found not connected to him. So I think that's important that he immediately initiated I want to tell you where that there are victims and where they're buried. I'll show you.
David Brooks didn't do that. He did. He did accept once they they basically told him, we know you're part of this, and we have this and this, and we're taking Wayne down to the High Island beach. Brooks said, okay, I'll go help with that. But initially he basically said no. I was just you know, I didn't know about any of this. It wasn't me.
You write about a dramatic scene where they bring Henley into a room with David Brooks hoping to hear one or the other confess, and Henley's he says, listen, he thought the Brooks would use this opportunity to fess up, and he said, if you don't, I will put it all on you. So he very much right from the moment he killed, being coral. He was acting in a responsible way and taking responsibility for the murders and his involvement.
Yeah, he was. And in fact, I think his mother might have said that she was trying to get an attorney. Berm And said you have to stop talking, and he said, I have to get this off my chest. I don't care what happens. He was bothered by his conscience, definitely, and he wanted to do the right thing. He wanted the families to find, you know, where these boys are buried. And it's so hard to know how to take this all in because clearly he was part of this for
a year and a half. And yes, and he'll admit, I am culpable. It was horrible what I did. But on the other hand, he also has had fifty years in prison where he's been reflective, remorseful and has tried to, you know, do what he could. But I don't know. I think people are just gonna have to make up
their own minds. I know, when I first started writing about him, I based a lot of my ideas on Jack Olsen's book and on some news reports, and I thought of him as this you know, horrid loser teen who you know, had been a reprehensible, nasty kid who had gleefully been part of grabbing his friends and bringing them to quarrel. And that was based on you know,
those early accounts. The more I looked and realized there was in fact, this network that was held over his head, and that he had tried to get out of it on several occasions in several different ways, and that he had tried to protect his brothers and his friends. So that gave you a lot more layered sense of him
that I had had from the early accounts. And the more we talked, and I talked him for many, many hours over the course of a year, it was clear that had he never met Kral, he would have never done any of these things. And that is one of the true mysteries of the Team Killer association. What is the chemistry that turns somebody into a person who's willing to kill, who would never have done that had he not met he or she not met the predator, who was in fact the leader of all of it.
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You talk about? That what you just mentioned that he otherwise without meeting Dean Coral, he would not have had any life of crime. You posit. Let's talk about the the threat that was over his head and the criminal enterprise that Dean Coral talked about selling and buying boys, and you talk about the the not the neglect, but the dismissal by police. Eventually about this syndicate, the.
Whole syndicate idea that a lot of that was my co author's work, Tracy Omen. She had been working on that as a result of being very involved in the John Wayne Gacy case, and she had identified a several
people in common between Gaycy and Kral. Gaysey took place a few years later, but he was certainly aware of all the publicity surrounding the Coral case, because when all was said and done, the Dean Coral case was the largest mass murder on American soil to date, and they didn't at that point even have the term serial killer. They just called it the Houston mass murders. But twenty seven young boys and young men called out of three different burial sites was an astonishing piece of news, very
sensation all the time. So Tracy Omen had done a lot of research on John Wayne Gacy, who claimed that there also was this network, and she found evidence of it. She and her team of journalists found evidence of it, and it was tricked to Dallas, as Dean Coral said in the early nineteen seventies, and they had also operated out of California, and Coral said he had also killed in California. He had told this to David Brooks, although they weren't able to identify any of his victims there.
But there was this big operation. It was all over the country, it was international. A lot of people were in it. Some of the journalists found a list and saw the names on it, but police destroyed the list. Why would they do such a thing. There was this card file of hundreds of cards with names and addresses of these men who were interested in getting boys for sexual activities, and those card files were destroyed. Why so Tracy is the one who writes all of that up.
She writes about John David Norman, who's kind of referred to as the apex Predator, the guy who organizing all of this. Now, did Dean Coral know him, We don't know, but we do know that two of his victims were associated with a guy who was taking pictures of these boys for these sexual predator publications. And we know that Dean Coral had a picture of a boy in his
house that ended up being published elsewhere. So these are some of the things that we can't definitely prove that Coral was part of this network, but the fact that he knew it was out of Dallas, which it was, and he would use that to leverage both Brooks and Hinley, and both of them talked about it to the police. That's astonishing to me that they really did not follow up on that.
You're right too, that's interesting that half a dozen boys from the same junior high school were missing at the same time without police making any kind of connection.
Well, and actually I just saw Terry Sullivan doing an interview who he's the Maternean on John mcgacy case. Was a DA he said at that time, and he's talking about nineteen seventy eight, So a few years later, we just dismissed missing boys as runaways. That was just the first thing you did. And every single one of those kids that the parents would would try to register as missing persons with the police and ask for an investigation,
every one of them were dismissed as runaways. Even a kid in a swimsuit who was just going down to the local pool to practice his strokes before his family went out of vacation. How could you think this kid who's, like I think fourteenth is a runaway. Astonishes me when you look at the stories of these victims and the way police dismissed them, and then how they tried to cover it up later when the citizens got hugely angry, as they should have, over this mismanagement of these cases.
You also chronicle. We don't have time to go into it, but the way that Wayne Henley as a juvenile was treated, not being able to talk to his mother, repeatedly asked for his mother, just the way the police conducted and were able to get this confession from him, it was its alarming to see that evidence of how they proceeded at that time.
Yeah, that was nineteen seventy three. It would never happen like that today. Tried. They did not want him talking to attorney, They did not want him talking to his mother, They did not want anyone persuading him that maybe he shouldn't say so much, and they tapped into his being high that morning. He was still coming off. He had taken drugs and had plenty to drink the night before,
partying with his friends at Coral's house. They were taking advantage of the fact that he felt that he needed help, he needed to talk to someone, and so they just tapped into that. Now, I will say, of course the police were quite inexperienced with this kind of investigation. Who who in the world would ever consider that boys are helping to kill other boys on behalf of an adult predator. That it was just an unheard of kind of thing.
So yes, police were inexperienced, but they certainly were also very manipulative, exploiting Henley and keeping him isolated from people by rights he should have had access to.
You also write about his situation that he could not afford or his family could not afford an attorney, So the attorney had an idea for Henley to be able to earn that attorney's fees. Can you tell us about that?
Oh?
I was so astonished. But this was this was apparently not unheard of in these days, was for attorneys to make deals with media. They would make deals with their clients to have the rights. If the client couldn't pay, and it was a big sensational case, the attorney could then sell the life story rights to media. So what Wayne didn't understand, which in still to this even until I explained to him, here's an attorney who's not going to sell anything if if you're found innocent, that's the
whole case is going to go away. He's only going to get money from media if you are found guilty. What attorney He's compromised from the get go. And also this particular attorney was an expert on appeals, so he wouldn't even put on a case. He spent no money on witnesses on Wayne's behalf. Wayne was not allowed to speak at all, though he wanted to. But he was a kid. He didn't know what rights he had and
what he should or shouldn't do. Uh, And then he had there were three attorneys who are all fighting amongst themselves as to how best to present this and U but the attorney who who dealt with him by saying, I'm going to I'm gonna pay, I'm going to sell your life rights. And there was one person, one interviewer that right after Wayne was convicted, the attorney took him to this this particular journalist and said, tell him everything.
Make it like, oh my god, what kind of attorney is that yah and wanted Wayne to really seem like like this, you know, awful person. And that journalist obliged because he he really put all the words on him that I think he could find. And that was a you know, a big publication that is all and how we view Wayne Henley. But that had to do a lot with the attorney and his manipulation, and that is now dead. I mean, there's no recourse. But I think his strategy was appalling.
Oh absolutely, you got a good opportunity to speak to the current Wayne Henley and you as evidence that he would have never maybe had a life of crime. Whatsoever is his record behind bars? Tell us about parole and Wayne Henley behind bars today?
So in Texas with this case, he and Brooks both came up for parole on a number of occasions, but Wayne was told this is just a formality because we have to do it. You're never getting out. And it looks to be true because he's been in there for fifty years. David Brooks died from COVID a couple of years ago, but I know Wayne is coming up for another pearle hearing, maybe twenty twenty five. I'm not sure
of that. You know, he actually was told by one of the people on a pro board, you need to get people to know who you are, because otherwise all they're going to think is you know what they read in the news and whatnot. You need to show yourself. And when he tried to do that with some media outlets, they would interview him and then twist it. Like Montel Williams.
I remember this so well. He was going to have this exclusive interview with Wayne Henley and he I think clipped a few quotes from him and then said that interview is just so horrific, I can't even I can't even put it on. So, you know, I was actually surprised that he trusted me after some of the things that had happened to him from me. Yeah, I was very surprised that he did well.
You have credibility compared to who you just mentioned. And you as you say that with this this the true Story chronicle, do you think that they're despite all of the previous information supposedly that people had about Wayne Henley and these crimes. Do you think there will be any sympathy with this true story now chronicled in this book The Serial Killers Apprentice.
I think there's going to be both animosity from people who want to retain the old narrative and hold him one hundred percent responsible, and I think there's going to be sympathy from people who thought they knew and now are willing to reconsider their position like I did. And I think there are already people who've long been sympathetic to Wayne, have written to him, have talked to him, who will welcome this account. So I think I'm going to get a range from you know, probably hate mail,
what not to wo, to people thanking me. I'll get that full range of responses.
And you you had a goal when you started this project. You probably had an idea where you might end up. Where did you find yourself? Where did you land in terms of your overall perspective about this phenomena The Apprentice, Well, I.
Already knew about Tracy's work, so I knew that we had a bigger story. I already knew that Wayne was a reflective and intelligent guys. Absolutely, he's going to be quite different than Dennis Rader, for example. But where it was going to go, I really didn't know. I honestly didn't know, and I like to work that way. I want I want the person to emerge to me without my filters on them. That's how I really work with anybody. So I really couldn't anticipate where it was going to go.
I want to applaud you for this another groundbreaking psychological examination of this incredible story. The serial Killers Apprentice, the true story of how Houston's deadliest murderer turned a kid into a killing machine. For those people that might want to look at your other work and find out more about this, can you refer us to a website and any social media you do? Well?
Actually, Facebook is probably the best. I have a ban Facebook page and a regular Facebook page. My website is released strictly for the novel series I'm writing, so it doesn't so just too many I have seventy two books. I can't keep up with all that stuff on my website, so it's better, I think, to find me on Facebook, and most of my books are on the various online distributors Amazon and Barnes and Noble whatnot.
Thank you so much for this interview. Catherine Ramsland The serial Killer's Apprentice, the true story of how Houston's deadliest murderer turned a kid into a killing machine. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening, and good night, good night.