In the early 1970s, Houston was an exciting place to be.
As a home of NASA, the city was looking to the future. But the metropolis was not without a dark undercurrent — and a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys went largely ignored by law enforcement.
It was only after their killer, Dean Corll, was murdered by an accomplice that many of those boys’ bodies were discovered in mass graves.
Lise Olsen, an investigative editor at the Texas Observer, catalogs this tale in her new book, “The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys.”
Olsen joined Texas Standard to discuss the reporting behind this latest project. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This is a chapter that a lot of folks are not at all familiar with. Let’s begin with Dean Corll. What do we know about him and how he operated before he was killed?
Lise Olsen: He was very stealthy and organized. He literally kidnapped boys off the street. He also used other teenagers to lure them to his home with promises of parties and beer and other enticements. Some of these kids were simply walking to the pool.
He was a neighborhood candy man in the Heights. And in the ’70s, for some reason, the police were unaware that there were a number of kids, even from the same neighborhood, from the same junior high school, who had all gone missing under suspicious circumstances.
They were written off as runaways, and the old police reports show that there was very little investigation done. There was no suspicion that there was any kind of a kidnapper or murder at work until Dean Corll was killed.
When I first heard about this, I thought, this sounds a lot like the Atlanta mass murders, the boys that went missing in the early 1980s. And this set off a huge concern, not just in Atlanta, which was where this was happening, but around the nation.
And yet no one had thought to put the stories of these missing boys together where they lived, any of that?
Of course, the parents were causing all kinds of ruckus — going to police and putting up flyers, and some hired private detectives.
But the department at the time was run by a segregationist, a guy whose family had KKK ties and who was very anti-teen, anti-hippie, who deployed officers to an anti-war protest and a lot of these kids were sort of those rebel kids. The kids who might’ve had their hair a little long, and he just wasn’t concerned with them. And that was the tenor of the department.
And when I interviewed people who also had escaped from this ring of torturers and rapists and kidnappers, they didn’t feel comfortable calling the police and telling them that there was something like this happening. So this was a different time.
My story picks up, though, several years/decades later, when, to her shock, a forensic anthropologist who grew up in the ’70s – actually, in Austin – discovers that there are still bones of boys from this case.
Is this the scientist in the title of your book, Sharon Derrick?
It is. She’s a forensic anthropologist and she’s assigned to work on the cold cases in Harris County.
They have over 400 unidentified, long-term, bodies and boxes of bones. And she goes into the cold storage and she sees these boxes on her top shelf that say “1973 Mass Murders.”
And she is just appalled because she remembered these crimes because at the time these bodies were discovered, this made international news. But it just didn’t have the same legs as, say, murders that were discovered just a few years later, the John Wayne Gacy murders. Very similar in some ways.
But in Houston, there was just this attitude that we don’t want to be a murder city. We don’t want to be known for this crime the way Austin was known for the bell tower shootings, the way Dallas was known for the JFK assassination. Houston didn’t want it to be that. It wanted to be the Space City.
So at that time, the authorities really shut down this investigation really quickly. They put the two teenage accomplices in prison and they hid the fact really that there was more to this crime.
There were additional accomplices. There were other secrets. And when Sharon starts making these identifications, some of those other secrets come to light.
This, obviously, is not just about a sensational string of murders. This is, in part, about trying to identify the young teenage victims of these crimes. Did any of their stories stick out to you in particular?
The heart of the book is the efforts to identify the kids who were not identified – the kids who are not named as victims, the kids whose parents didn’t have answers for decades after they went missing.
And Sharon, she goes through the police files because she has to do her investigation on two levels. She has to do the scientific investigation and look again at the old bones to see if she can come up with new clues, because, of course, in the 2000s she has DNA, she has data that’s been collected in research laboratories.
One of the things she does is she goes through the old records and tries to look for kids whose names were among the missing but who never were found, never were identified. And she sees this boy whose name catches her eyes, Randy Harvey, whose little sister has called the morgue a couple of times in the ’70s and left very compelling personal messages – a 13-year-old saying, “My brother Randy would never have left us without telling us where he was going.”
In that investigation, she discovers that the first box of bones she’s seen in that storage area are of a boy that are in fact younger than was originally thought in 1973 and taller. And so when she recalculates, makes those recalculations, it fits Randy.
What made you want to write this book? I mean, this is pretty grim, gruesome stuff. Why tell this story now?
Before I came to Texas, I was very aware of this problem that people call “America’s silent mass disaster.” We have 40,000 unidentified people that we know about in either unmarked graves or in storage like this. And their families are waiting for answers.
So when I moved to Houston, I looked for the forensic anthropologists, because I thought this was a neglected story and something that needed to be told. Both Harris County and Dallas County, for example, in Texas, have some of the largest backlogs of unidentified that are in the country.
It’s sort of a true crime story in reverse. It’s not a “whodunit,” it’s a “who was it” story. And I think it gets at this very large civil rights issue that we have in our country, of the fact that many, many of these cases do not get this kind of attention, do not the full benefit of the technology we have today that can be used to solve missing persons and unidentified persons cases.
