The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees. Listener discretion is advised from my Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Monster presents Insomniac. I'm Scott Benjamin and everything I'm about to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. Beginning in nineteen and all the way through August of nineteen seventy three, there was a pattern forming in the community of Houston Heights in the northwest central area of Houston, Texas. Young boys, lots of them, were disappearing, more than forty in all before it finally ended. Parents were frantic reporting the missing children to the Houston police, but the police were quick to dismiss the cases, all of them as runaways. It was a decision that they would later regret, as community backlash was intense when the real nature of the disappearances was soon uncovered. Occasionally, the parents would receive a note from their missing sons, written in their own handwriting, stating that they had moved away to find work, or they were going to stay with a friend for a while. Some even received telephone calls and their missing sons stating the same. Of course, none of that was true. The boys were forced to write those notes or to make those calls to their parents. Now that the circle of rust included Elmer Wayne Henley, Dean Coral raised the stakes in his deadly game. He offered both of his young companions, Brooks and Henley, two hundred dollars for each boy they could lure into his house as a victim. Henley waiter claimed that he ignored Coral's offer until early nine, when his family was in need of the money. The truth is, we'll never really know the first time Henley claimed his two bounty for the life of a friend, but we do know that it became a regular occurrence. Here's the way it worked. Henley and Coral came up with a plan that coincidentally was almost identical to what John Wayne Gacy was doing in Chicago at the very same time. They thought of a way to get a team to willingly wear a pair of handcuffs. It was almost like a game him to them. Henley would first wear the cuffs himself behind his back, and he would somehow escape, making it look easy. The secret was he had a key hidden in his back pocket. The teenage victim would attempt the same, but when the cuffs didn't release, Dean would pounce on the victim, quickly binding and gagging them so that no one could hear them scream. Henley claimed that's when he would leave the victim alone with Coral, believing that he was to be delivered to the Dallas based sex slavery ring. Again, there was never any evidence of Dean Coral belonging to such a group. Maybe the most chilling part of all this, at least so far, is that the teens and younger kids in the neighborhood that Brooks and Henley were delivering to Dean Coral for just two dollars each were their neighbors and childhood friends, the same kids they grew up with and the same kids they went to school with. The date was auguste and Henley, now aged seventeen, had invited a friend, Timothy Curly, aged nineteen, to a party at Dean's house. When Henley and Curly made it to Dean's house that evening, they drank alcohol, had sniffed paint fumes before leaving around midnight to buy some sandwiches David Brooks was not at Dean's house that evening. Along the way, the two teens stopped near Henley's house, and Henley walked to the home of Rhonda Williams, aged fifteen. She was a friend of Henley's and her drunk father had beaten her early in the evening. She said she wanted to get out of the house until he was sober. Henley invited her to join them at Dean Coral's home that evening, and the three teens drove to Dean's house in Pasadena. It was about three am on August eight when the three arrived at Dean's house. Dean was extremely angry with Henley for inviting a girl to his house, telling him that he had ruined everything. Henley explained the situation to Coral, and he seemed to calm down as he offered the three of them more alcohol and marijuana. As they continued to sniff paint fumes, Dean sat back and watched. After two hours, all of the teens had passed out. When Henley finally awoke, he was lying on his stomach and Dean Coral was placing handcuffs on his wrists. He already had his mouth taped shut and his ankles were bound together. Both Timothy Curly and Rohnda Williams were lying beside Henley on the floor similar to his situation. They were both gagged with tape and bound with nylon rope. Timothy Curley was already completely naked, while Ronda Williams still had her clothes on. When Dean noticed that Henley was awake, he removed his gag just long enough to tell him that he had made a fatal mistake in bringing a girl to the house. He was going to kill all three of them after he tortured Curly. Dean then shoved a twenty two caliber pistol into Henley's stomach and threatened to shoot him. Henley was able to calm Coral by telling him that he would assist him in the torture and murder of the other two teens, but he would have to release him from his restraints. Surprisingly, Dean agreed to this and untied Henley and then tied Curly and Williams to opposite sides of his torture board. Dean's plan was for Henley to rape and kill Williams while he raped and killed Curly. By now the other two teens had awakened and the reality of the situation was sinking in. Both were terrified, and Williams, whose gag was now also removed, asked Henley is this for real? Henley told her it was, and then as Dean if he could take Williams into the other room, Coral was busy violating curly and ignored Henley's request. It was at this point that Henley made a grab for Dean's pistol and began shouting a Dean that he had gone far enough. He couldn't go on any longer. He couldn't have Dean killing all of his friends. Dean shouted back defiantly and taunted Henley by yelling kill me, Wayne, and then as he moved closer to Henley, he yelled, you won't do it. That's when Henley fired the first shot, hitting Dean Coral in the forehead, but the bullet didn't go through his skull. As Dean moved even closer, Henley fired another two rounds into Coral's left shoulder. This stopped him, and Dean staggered out of the room. As Henley fired three more rounds into his lower back and shoulder, Dean was dead. Henley had killed Dean Coral and saved the lives of two of his friends as well as his own. Curly and Williams were released in the torture board by Henley, and the three of them dressed and talked about what they should do next. Henley just wanted to leave, but Curly said l they should call the police. They all agreed and Henley made the call. Aside from the Corvette that Dean Coral had purchased for David Owen Brooks, which Dean still had limited access to, he owned another flashy car, a Plymouth GTX. It wasn't a coincidence that he drove a car like this. It was fast and loud, and it seemed to attract the attention of all the teenage boys in the neighborhood, exactly what Dean wanted. Coral, along with Brooks and Henley, would cruise the neighborhood looking for potential victims and then lure the boys either into the car or to Coral's home with a promise of candy or alcohol, or even a party. But the g t X wasn't Dean's only car. He owned another vehicle that served a more useful purpose afford a con line van. This is the universal sketchy van that your parents warned you to stay away from. Prior to his killing, years, Coral would occasionally invite the neighborhood kids that lived near the candy store to picnic with him at the beach, using the van for transportation. Of course, according to those that had accepted a ride years earlier, it was much nicer at the time, carpeted and clean. However, by the time the authority sees the van immediately after Dean's death, it was just as creepy an awful inside as you might guess. By then, it was in regular use to haul dead bodies from Dean's house to one of several burial places. It was even rumored that he used this as a mobile torture van, similar to the torture room he had set up in the bedroom of his house, complete with pegboard like walls featuring drilled holes that served the same purpose as his torture board did in his home. The van's room windows were completely covered by thick blue curtains, impossible to see in and impossible to see out. The cargo area of the van was no longer neatly carpeted, but instead hold a worn out section of a beige rug. It was covered in stains. Police also found a length of rope and a handbuilt wooden crate with air holes drilled in the sides. Around the same time, police found a similar wooden crate in Dean Coral's backyard, but inside that one they also found strands of human hair, leaving little doubt that Dean used these creates to secure and transport some of his victims. The sad truth is all of the young boys that we're seeing getting into the van or car along with Dean and his two accomplices between the years of nineteen seventy in ninety three, well, they never came back. Initially, Henley was treated as a hero saving the lives of two of his friends from a real life monster, but Henley soon began to tell the authorities a lot more than they ever bargained for. He told them how he and David Brooks were in charge of finding teenage boys for Dean Coral's rape, torture and murder fantasies. He also told them he himself had assisted in several abductions and murders and helped to torture and mutilate six or eight victims before they were killed. He told them about the Southwest Houston boat storage shed that Dean Coral had rented, where most of the victims had been buried, while others were buried at High Island Beach and Lake sam Rayburn. Police didn't want to believe his stories initially, that is until he mentioned a few specific names of the boys he had helped to a Ductford Dean. All of the names he provided were listed as missing children. Later that very same day, AUGUSTE. Henley agreed to go to the Southwest Houston boat storeage shed with the authorities. He claimed he could lead them to the bodies of the missing children. When they opened the door to the enclosed boat shed, there was some sort of junk to be moved, a half stripped stolen car, a kid's bicycle, two sacks of lime, and boxes full of teenage boy's clothing. When it came time to dig, the work was done by prison trustees and the soft dirt inside the boat shed was relatively easy to move. Almost right away they uncovered the body of a young teenage boy, wrapped in clear plastic and buried beneath a layer of lime. As they continued to dig, they found several more sets of human remains, each in different stages of decomposition. Most of the bodies were wrapped in the same thick, clear plastic sheeting. Some had been strangled and the ropes were still wrapped around their neck, while others had been shot. Digging up to cane bodies in an enclosed metal shed is hard enough to imagine, but when you also consider this was Texas in August, the heat and the smell must have been unbearable. On that first day, the bodies of eight young boys were pulled from the ground in the boat shed. All of them had been sodomized, and all of them showed evidence of sexual torture, including chew genitals, objects inserted into the rectums, pubic hair is plucked out, and one other particularly sadistic treatment. Authorities learned through examining the bodies the dean coral had inserted glass rides into the boy's penises, and then he would snap them off and shatter them while they were inside. The pain that's inflicted would make a person beg to be put out of their misery. The coral would keep the teens alive for several days of this type of abuse. While conducting my research for the Dean Coral story, I kept returning to the one fact I simply couldn't wrap my mind around for the longest time, and to be honest with you, I still can't completely understand it. My question was this, why weren't the Houston police more concerned about the pattern of missing teens Over a relatively short span of time, Around two and a half years, there were approximately fortys missing from the same neighborhood. Two families had lost not just one son, but two kids each, teen brothers, all taken at separate times. What had to happen for the authorities to finally take action? What was the hesitation? Well, I think I found the answer, or at least the best explanation I've heard so far. It comes from a book written in four by a man named Jack Olsen titled The Man with the Candy The Story of the Houston mass Murders. In it, Olsen states that it was not just one factor, but rather a combination of factors that led to the oversight. First, the Houston Police Department simply lacked the resources to search for missing children's request to do so, or often declined. It's also true that teens occasionally choose to leave home in pursuit of something new, different and exciting, a perceived new life just somewhere else. It was easy for the police to tell the parents that they're missing teen was merely a runaway, easy because that's what they truly believed it happened. It's also important to remember that the term serial killer wasn't even coined until ninety Before that it was almost unimaginable that a killer of this sort was living in the same neighborhood along with the families of the kids he was killing. Unimaginable, that is until Henley shot and killed Dean Coral in the early morning hours of auguste, and the truth was then known. Any way you look at it, this was an especially dark time for the community of Houston Heights, the senseless destruction of dozens of young men, all with the rest of their lives ahead of m as they were taken far too young, being Coral's oldest victim was twenty years old, his youngest was only nine. David Brooks turned himself in at the Houston Police Station. He was accompanied by his father as He denied being involved in the murders, but stated that he did know that Coral had raped and killed two boys. In the next day, August nine, Henley accompanied the authorities to Lake sam Rayburn, where two additional bodies were found in shallow, lime covered graves. At the same time, police continued to search the boat shed, and they discovered an additional nine bodies on their second day of digging. Henley insisted there were still two more bodies inside, but they were never located. Later that evening, David Brooks finally gave a full confession, admitting to being present while some of the killings occurred and helping to bury some of the bodies. The next day, August t, Henley accompanied the authorities to Lake sam Rayburn, where they were able to find two more bodies. That same afternoon, both Henley and Brooks went with the authorities to High Island Beach and led the police to two more shallow graves. Days later, on August Hemley and Brooks returned to High Island Beach with the police, where they located four more bodies. Again, Henley insisted that there were still two additional bodies to be found on the beach, but they were never located. In total, they had uncovered twenty seven known victims, with the possibility of at least four more. According to Henley. At the time, it was the worst killing spree in American history, a grizzly record that would only stand for five more years until John Wayne Gaze he was captured in after killing thirty three young men and boys and burying them in his crawl space. In the end, Dean Coral was the only one who escaped without suffering to consequences. Maybe he paid the ultimate price, losing his life, but it was his young accomplices that eventually had to answer for all of his wrongdoings, along with her own, of course, and they're still paying for it today. In David Owen Brooks was found guilty of abduction and murder and received a life sentence. He's been up for p roll several times, but has been denied every time. His most recent chance for freedom came in two thousand and fifteen. He's still locked away. Elmer Wayne Henley is currently serving six consecutive terms of ninety nine years for a grand total of five years in prison for his role in the Houston mass murders. With no chance of parole. He'll die in prison. There's no question my entire view of the world around me has changed. When I started this journey, I wanted to know why serial killers did what they did, what motivated them, what made them tick and well. I did find some answers to those questions. I also found darkness, a lot of darkness to go along with it. I know they are good people around us, but we should also never forget. They're bad people around us too, very bad people who are capable of doing things you and I could never imagine everything I've gone through my personal life. In addition to delving into the lives of these serial killers, the sadness and death that I've read about every single day has led me to the biggest question of all. Is this healthy? We all consume violence in one way or another on a daily basis. It's on our televisions, it's on the radio, and in our podcasts. Is what drives storylines and plots? We turned to true crime as a means of enjoyment. I'm guilty of this myself. But what are the consequences, the long lasting implications on all of us as individuals, as a society. I don't know. If I'll ever be able to forget what I've seen in my third year so years a true crime infatuation. But I'm hoping some of those vivid images will begin to fade into the distance as I grow older. I haven't been able to entirely stabilize or separate my dreams from reality. I'm still working on it. For now, though I've reached the end of my fascination with true crime. It's time to take a break, and hopefully with that break the nightmares that have kept me up all night, we'll transition back into normal dreams once again. Well, today is one of those unusual days when I actually got some sleep last night, about six hours of sleep, and I feel pretty good. Um it's almost like a like a fog is lifted from my head, like I can I can think clearly. I'm kind of ready for the day, which is really pretty unusual. They's pasted a few uh well years, but um, yash, I don't know. It feels good. It feels like today might be a good day and I'm kind of looking forward to it. So not all doom and gloom all the time, um as far as sleep goes, But most of the time it is, but I thought, you know, hey, I'm having a good day. I'll talk about that too. Insomniac is a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins, Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Josh Than. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, Set and cover by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at Insomniac Podcast, and at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily represent those of I Heart Media, Stuff Media, or its employees. Listener discretion is advised from my Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Monster presents Insomniac. I'm Scott Benjamin and everything I'm about to tell you is real. This is Insomniac. Beginning in nineteen and all the way through August of nineteen seventy three, there was a pattern forming in the community of Houston Heights in the northwest central area of Houston, Texas. Young boys, lots of them, were disappearing, more than forty in all before it finally ended. Parents were frantic reporting the missing children to the Houston police, but the police were quick to dismiss the cases, all of them as runaways. It was a decision that they would later regret, as community backlash was intense when the real nature of the disappearances was soon uncovered. Occasionally, the parents would receive a note from their missing sons, written in their own handwriting, stating that they had moved away to find work, or they were going to stay with a friend for a while. Some even received telephone calls and their missing sons stating the same. Of course, none of that was true. The boys were forced to write those notes or to make those calls to their parents. Now that the circle of rust included Elmer Wayne Henley, Dean Coral raised the stakes in his deadly game. He offered both of his young companions, Brooks and Henley, two hundred dollars for each boy they could lure into his house as a victim. Henley waiter claimed that he ignored Coral's offer until early nine, when his family was in need of the money. The truth is, we'll never really know the first time Henley claimed his two bounty for the life of a friend, but we do know that it became a regular occurrence. Here's the way it worked. Henley and Coral came up with a plan that coincidentally was almost identical to what John Wayne Gacy was doing in Chicago at the very same time. They thought of a way to get a team to willingly wear a pair of handcuffs. It was almost like a game him to them. Henley would first wear the cuffs himself behind his back, and he would somehow escape, making it look easy. The secret was he had a key hidden in his back pocket. The teenage victim would attempt the same, but when the cuffs didn't release, Dean would pounce on the victim, quickly binding and gagging them so that no one could hear them scream. Henley claimed that's when he would leave the victim alone with Coral, believing that he was to be delivered to the Dallas based sex slavery ring. Again, there was never any evidence of Dean Coral belonging to such a group. Maybe the most chilling part of all this, at least so far, is that the teens and younger kids in the neighborhood that Brooks and Henley were delivering to Dean Coral for just two dollars each were their neighbors and childhood friends, the same kids they grew up with and the same kids they went to school with. The date was auguste and Henley, now aged seventeen, had invited a friend, Timothy Curly, aged nineteen, to a party at Dean's house. When Henley and Curly made it to Dean's house that evening, they drank alcohol, had sniffed paint fumes before leaving around midnight to buy some sandwiches David Brooks was not at Dean's house that evening. Along the way, the two teens stopped near Henley's house, and Henley walked to the home of Rhonda Williams, aged fifteen. She was a friend of Henley's and her drunk father had beaten her early in the evening. She said she wanted to get out of the house until he was sober. Henley invited her to join them at Dean Coral's home that evening, and the three teens drove to Dean's house in Pasadena. It was about three am on August eight when the three arrived at Dean's house. Dean was extremely angry with Henley for inviting a girl to his house, telling him that he had ruined everything. Henley explained the situation to Coral, and he seemed to calm down as he offered the three of them more alcohol and marijuana. As they continued to sniff paint fumes, Dean sat back and watched. After two hours, all of the teens had passed out. When Henley finally awoke, he was lying on his stomach and Dean Coral was placing handcuffs on his wrists. He already had his mouth taped shut and his ankles were bound together. Both Timothy Curly and Rohnda Williams were lying beside Henley on the floor similar to his situation. They were both gagged with tape and bound with nylon rope. Timothy Curley was already completely naked, while Ronda Williams still had her clothes on. When Dean noticed that Henley was awake, he removed his gag just long enough to tell him that he had made a fatal mistake in bringing a girl to the house. He was going to kill all three of them after he tortured Curly. Dean then shoved a twenty two caliber pistol into Henley's stomach and threatened to shoot him. Henley was able to calm Coral by telling him that he would assist him in the torture and murder of the other two teens, but he would have to release him from his restraints. Surprisingly, Dean agreed to this and untied Henley and then tied Curly and Williams to opposite sides of his torture board. Dean's plan was for Henley to rape and kill Williams while he raped and killed Curly. By now the other two teens had awakened and the reality of the situation was sinking in. Both were terrified, and Williams, whose gag was now also removed, asked Henley is this for real? Henley told her it was, and then as Dean if he could take Williams into the other room, Coral was busy violating curly and ignored Henley's request. It was at this point that Henley made a grab for Dean's pistol and began shouting a Dean that he had gone far enough. He couldn't go on any longer. He couldn't have Dean killing all of his friends. Dean shouted back defiantly and taunted Henley by yelling kill me, Wayne, and then as he moved closer to Henley, he yelled, you won't do it. That's when Henley fired the first shot, hitting Dean Coral in the forehead, but the bullet didn't go through his skull. As Dean moved even closer, Henley fired another two rounds into Coral's left shoulder. This stopped him, and Dean staggered out of the room. As Henley fired three more rounds into his lower back and shoulder, Dean was dead. Henley had killed Dean Coral and saved the lives of two of his friends as well as his own. Curly and Williams were released in the torture board by Henley, and the three of them dressed and talked about what they should do next. Henley just wanted to leave, but Curly said l they should call the police. They all agreed and Henley made the call. Aside from the Corvette that Dean Coral had purchased for David Owen Brooks, which Dean still had limited access to, he owned another flashy car, a Plymouth GTX. It wasn't a coincidence that he drove a car like this. It was fast and loud, and it seemed to attract the attention of all the teenage boys in the neighborhood, exactly what Dean wanted. Coral, along with Brooks and Henley, would cruise the neighborhood looking for potential victims and then lure the boys either into the car or to Coral's home with a promise of candy or alcohol, or even a party. But the g t X wasn't Dean's only car. He owned another vehicle that served a more useful purpose afford a con line van. This is the universal sketchy van that your parents warned you to stay away from. Prior to his killing, years, Coral would occasionally invite the neighborhood kids that lived near the candy store to picnic with him at the beach, using the van for transportation. Of course, according to those that had accepted a ride years earlier, it was much nicer at the time, carpeted and clean. However, by the time the authority sees the van immediately after Dean's death, it was just as creepy an awful inside as you might guess. By then, it was in regular use to haul dead bodies from Dean's house to one of several burial places. It was even rumored that he used this as a mobile torture van, similar to the torture room he had set up in the bedroom of his house, complete with pegboard like walls featuring drilled holes that served the same purpose as his torture board did in his home. The van's room windows were completely covered by thick blue curtains, impossible to see in and impossible to see out. The cargo area of the van was no longer neatly carpeted, but instead hold a worn out section of a beige rug. It was covered in stains. Police also found a length of rope and a handbuilt wooden crate with air holes drilled in the sides. Around the same time, police found a similar wooden crate in Dean Coral's backyard, but inside that one they also found strands of human hair, leaving little doubt that Dean used these creates to secure and transport some of his victims. The sad truth is all of the young boys that we're seeing getting into the van or car along with Dean and his two accomplices between the years of nineteen seventy in ninety three, well, they never came back. Initially, Henley was treated as a hero saving the lives of two of his friends from a real life monster, but Henley soon began to tell the authorities a lot more than they ever bargained for. He told them how he and David Brooks were in charge of finding teenage boys for Dean Coral's rape, torture and murder fantasies. He also told them he himself had assisted in several abductions and murders and helped to torture and mutilate six or eight victims before they were killed. He told them about the Southwest Houston boat storage shed that Dean Coral had rented, where most of the victims had been buried, while others were buried at High Island Beach and Lake sam Rayburn. Police didn't want to believe his stories initially, that is until he mentioned a few specific names of the boys he had helped to a Ductford Dean. All of the names he provided were listed as missing children. Later that very same day, AUGUSTE. Henley agreed to go to the Southwest Houston boat storeage shed with the authorities. He claimed he could lead them to the bodies of the missing children. When they opened the door to the enclosed boat shed, there was some sort of junk to be moved, a half stripped stolen car, a kid's bicycle, two sacks of lime, and boxes full of teenage boy's clothing. When it came time to dig, the work was done by prison trustees and the soft dirt inside the boat shed was relatively easy to move. Almost right away they uncovered the body of a young teenage boy, wrapped in clear plastic and buried beneath a layer of lime. As they continued to dig, they found several more sets of human remains, each in different stages of decomposition. Most of the bodies were wrapped in the same thick, clear plastic sheeting. Some had been strangled and the ropes were still wrapped around their neck, while others had been shot. Digging up to cane bodies in an enclosed metal shed is hard enough to imagine, but when you also consider this was Texas in August, the heat and the smell must have been unbearable. On that first day, the bodies of eight young boys were pulled from the ground in the boat shed. All of them had been sodomized, and all of them showed evidence of sexual torture, including chew genitals, objects inserted into the rectums, pubic hair is plucked out, and one other particularly sadistic treatment. Authorities learned through examining the bodies the dean coral had inserted glass rides into the boy's penises, and then he would snap them off and shatter them while they were inside. The pain that's inflicted would make a person beg to be put out of their misery. The coral would keep the teens alive for several days of this type of abuse. While conducting my research for the Dean Coral story, I kept returning to the one fact I simply couldn't wrap my mind around for the longest time, and to be honest with you, I still can't completely understand it. My question was this, why weren't the Houston police more concerned about the pattern of missing teens Over a relatively short span of time, Around two and a half years, there were approximately fortys missing from the same neighborhood. Two families had lost not just one son, but two kids each, teen brothers, all taken at separate times. What had to happen for the authorities to finally take action? What was the hesitation? Well, I think I found the answer, or at least the best explanation I've heard so far. It comes from a book written in four by a man named Jack Olsen titled The Man with the Candy The Story of the Houston mass Murders. In it, Olsen states that it was not just one factor, but rather a combination of factors that led to the oversight. First, the Houston Police Department simply lacked the resources to search for missing children's request to do so, or often declined. It's also true that teens occasionally choose to leave home in pursuit of something new, different and exciting, a perceived new life just somewhere else. It was easy for the police to tell the parents that they're missing teen was merely a runaway, easy because that's what they truly believed it happened. It's also important to remember that the term serial killer wasn't even coined until ninety Before that it was almost unimaginable that a killer of this sort was living in the same neighborhood along with the families of the kids he was killing. Unimaginable, that is until Henley shot and killed Dean Coral in the early morning hours of auguste, and the truth was then known. Any way you look at it, this was an especially dark time for the community of Houston Heights, the senseless destruction of dozens of young men, all with the rest of their lives ahead of m as they were taken far too young, being Coral's oldest victim was twenty years old, his youngest was only nine. David Brooks turned himself in at the Houston Police Station. He was accompanied by his father as He denied being involved in the murders, but stated that he did know that Coral had raped and killed two boys. In the next day, August nine, Henley accompanied the authorities to Lake sam Rayburn, where two additional bodies were found in shallow, lime covered graves. At the same time, police continued to search the boat shed, and they discovered an additional nine bodies on their second day of digging. Henley insisted there were still two more bodies inside, but they were never located. Later that evening, David Brooks finally gave a full confession, admitting to being present while some of the killings occurred and helping to bury some of the bodies. The next day, August t, Henley accompanied the authorities to Lake sam Rayburn, where they were able to find two more bodies. That same afternoon, both Henley and Brooks went with the authorities to High Island Beach and led the police to two more shallow graves. Days later, on August Hemley and Brooks returned to High Island Beach with the police, where they located four more bodies. Again, Henley insisted that there were still two additional bodies to be found on the beach, but they were never located. In total, they had uncovered twenty seven known victims, with the possibility of at least four more. According to Henley. At the time, it was the worst killing spree in American history, a grizzly record that would only stand for five more years until John Wayne Gaze he was captured in after killing thirty three young men and boys and burying them in his crawl space. In the end, Dean Coral was the only one who escaped without suffering to consequences. Maybe he paid the ultimate price, losing his life, but it was his young accomplices that eventually had to answer for all of his wrongdoings, along with her own, of course, and they're still paying for it today. In David Owen Brooks was found guilty of abduction and murder and received a life sentence. He's been up for p roll several times, but has been denied every time. His most recent chance for freedom came in two thousand and fifteen. He's still locked away. Elmer Wayne Henley is currently serving six consecutive terms of ninety nine years for a grand total of five years in prison for his role in the Houston mass murders. With no chance of parole. He'll die in prison. There's no question my entire view of the world around me has changed. When I started this journey, I wanted to know why serial killers did what they did, what motivated them, what made them tick and well. I did find some answers to those questions. I also found darkness, a lot of darkness to go along with it. I know they are good people around us, but we should also never forget. They're bad people around us too, very bad people who are capable of doing things you and I could never imagine everything I've gone through my personal life. In addition to delving into the lives of these serial killers, the sadness and death that I've read about every single day has led me to the biggest question of all. Is this healthy? We all consume violence in one way or another on a daily basis. It's on our televisions, it's on the radio, and in our podcasts. Is what drives storylines and plots? We turned to true crime as a means of enjoyment. I'm guilty of this myself. But what are the consequences, the long lasting implications on all of us as individuals, as a society. I don't know. If I'll ever be able to forget what I've seen in my third year so years a true crime infatuation. But I'm hoping some of those vivid images will begin to fade into the distance as I grow older. I haven't been able to entirely stabilize or separate my dreams from reality. I'm still working on it. For now, though I've reached the end of my fascination with true crime. It's time to take a break, and hopefully with that break the nightmares that have kept me up all night, we'll transition back into normal dreams once again. Well, today is one of those unusual days when I actually got some sleep last night, about six hours of sleep, and I feel pretty good. Um it's almost like a like a fog is lifted from my head, like I can I can think clearly. I'm kind of ready for the day, which is really pretty unusual. They's pasted a few uh well years, but um, yash, I don't know. It feels good. It feels like today might be a good day and I'm kind of looking forward to it. So not all doom and gloom all the time, um as far as sleep goes, But most of the time it is, but I thought, you know, hey, I'm having a good day. I'll talk about that too. Insomniac is a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV, written and hosted by Scott Benjamin and produced by Miranda Hawkins, Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Josh Than. Music composed by Makeup and Vanity, Set and cover by Trevor Eisler. Follow on Twitter and Facebook at Insomniac Pod, on Instagram at Insomniac Podcast, and at our website insomniac podcast dot com. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.