Dean Arnold Corll Sociology

Assignment 1
1. Dean Arnold Corll also known as the Candy Man, was born into a nice loving family. Although his parents divorced in 1946 they thought it would best for their two young sons to have both parents, so they remarried in 1950, only to get divorced once again three years later. After Dean’s parents divorced for a second time his mother remarried his step father Jake West. Dean Corll was a shy, but serious child who didn’t socialize much with other kids it was said that he appeared to be a lonely child. At a young age he developed a heart murmur. Overall it was said that Corll was a good student who maintained generally good grades. His mother owned a small candy business that Dean worked in while in high school. In 1963, it was reported

Army. It was in the army that Dean came into the realization of his homosexuality and he had his first homosexual encounter. This shed light into the sociological explanations of why Dean Corll would go on to become a serial murderer. Corll was a lonely, smart child who at a very young age witnessed his parents go through many problems in their relationship. But overall, it seemed that Corll had an average childhood. He wasn’t mistreated or harmed as a child, he seemed to be loved by both of his parents. As a young child he began having feeling of attraction towards the opposite sex and as he grew older he began to act on them. The army only strengthen his curiosity towards the opposite sex and once he was out of the army and living on his own he began acting on these feeling but with underage non-consenting boys. I believe Corll had one objective in his murderous ways, and that was a sexual gain. Corll wanted one thing from his victims, which were only teenage males, and that was sex. Of course he brutally tortured his victims and that I believe was to gain some type of power control over the victim, but his main objective in these vicious murders was sexual (page 64). The fractured identity theory gives some insight into what may have triggered Corll

The ideal victim in this case was young white boys who were preyed upon by the usage of two young white boys. Corll would employee two young boys by the name of David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. to lure young white boys to his home to be raped, tortured, and then murdered. Henley was at the time 17 years old when he was lured to the home of Corll, by Brooks as a victim. My thought is Corll found Henley to be more useful alive than dead. Corll did not rape, torture or kill Henley he instead hired him on as a recruiter to assist Brooks in finding more potential victims. Considering Brooks and Henley’s age and the fact that they were in school and knew many kids, they became the perfect duo in Corll’s eyes to assist him in finding potential victims. Henley and Brooks did just that, they would lure in their own friends and classmates, in promises of smoking marijuana and drinking directly to Corll’s home and eventually after a tremendous amount of torture, to their deaths. Corll had a type of victim he sought. He only wanted white males, never females, and their ages ranged from 13-20. Most of the victims were abducted from Houston Heights located in downtown Houston, which was also were Corll’s family business was located at the time. The victims were then brought back to Corll’s home were they were bound, gagged and tied to Corll’s torture board. Corll would then rape, torture and eventually strangle or shoot and kill the young teens. Afterwards Brooks and/or Henley