THE MAN WITH THE CANDY: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders

by Jack Olsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1974

In Houston there are those who say that once a mass murder record was set -- 26 bodies -- detectives simply stopped digging. Just as distressing (but not surprising) is that in a city that makes a big to-do about law 'n order (private ownership of guns is a given) there is in fact so little of it. (Houston holds several other crime records as well.) Hence the police had been indifferent to parents' reports from 1971 to 1973 that their teen-age sons -- several were even younger -- had been disappearing, all of them from the same working-class neighborhood, the Heights. And the police seem to have been almost as apathetic, as is Olsen, about going beyond the confession of how Dean Corll, the 33-year-old homosexual murderer, was in turn killed by one of bis accomplices, the 18-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. who has recently been tried and convicted. It's a bizarre, sensational story and Olsen reports it with dignity but little depth. As yet one more proof of the banality of evil is how the author perceives the case -- right down to quoting such cliche reminiscences from Corll's friends that he was a ""nice"" person. And re the boys who apparently went off willingly with their killer, what are we to make of the author's dismissal of such lives, that ""they are born, they go to school, they drop out, they get menial jobs, they reproduce others like themselves, and they die""?

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1974

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION