Led to the burial sites by Elmer Wayne Henley, 17, and David Owen Brooks, 18, police last week recovered the bodies of four more teen-age boys from shallow graves. That brought to 27 the body count in Houston's homosexual-torture murders (TIME, Aug. 20), establishing a grisly new record* for a series of mass killings in the U.S.
At midweek only nine of the bodies had been identified. But that was enough for a Harris County (Houston) grand jury; it indicted Henley and Brooks for murder. Henley was charged with shooting one youth and strangling another, and Brooks and Henley were accused of strangling a boy of 15.
Before being silenced by their court-appointed lawyers, both had freely admitted that over the past three years they had lured the boys to paint-and glue-sniffing parties at the home of Dean Arnold Corll, 33. There the victims — mostly runaways from the Hous ton area (see box) — were homosexually assaulted and then shot or strangled.
Although the lurid details of the killings seemed to be well established, there were few clues about the psychological factors that led to the orgy of murder. Corll, who has been painted as the evil mastermind of the operation, was dead; it was his murder by Henley (who claims that he shot Corll in self-defense when the older man threatened to molest him sexually and kill him) that brought the multiple murders to light. Both Henley and Brooks, on the advice of their lawyers, have refused to speak to a psychiatrist appointed by the prosecutor.
Thus behavioral experts had to rely largely on their studies of previous mass murderers in speculating about what motivated the Houston killers.
To many of the experts, the sexual perversion described by Henley and Brooks seemed a particularly significant ingredient of the multicide, or mass murder. "Almost invariably, mass murderers have a sexual motivation," says Charles Wall, a professor of clinical psychiatry at U.C.L.A. "Such persons are turned on by inflicting pain on others."
Dr. James Lomax, a Galveston, Texas, physician and murder researcher, adds that the olence" "mingling occurs of sex with frequently vi in the mind of the murderer. In one recent study, Lomax found that 25% of the young male murderers he investi gated had engaged in sexual acts, often aberrant, immediately after the murder.