About book The Man With The Candy: The Story Of The Houston Mass Murders (1974)
Oh, shit! I don't usually read these 'true crime' bks for a slew of reasons. &, now, here I am reviewing them. I'm severely disturbed by knowing about these people b/c I'm hyper-aware that they're really HERE, they're really w/ us, AND they're inside US too. I'm sickened by the people who vicariously get off on these things, who see such crimes as 'entertainment' safely viewed from a distance. There is no safe distance. Being an introspective person, I study the psychopathology in myself - & reading about the psychopathology of someone like mass murderer & torturer Dean Corll is almost like knowing that there's a tumor in one's own brain that's eating away at everything that one values about one's self - except that, in this case, what's being eaten away is not in my personal body but in the body politic. & Corll, like many others of his ilk, had accomplices. The back cover of the bk advertises it w/ this: "How could almost thirty teen-age boys from the same neighborhood disappear without a trace?" The parental warning "Don't take candy from strangers" might've originated w/ Dean Corll. I don't know. He wasn't the only one who used candy as a lure but he might be the only one who actually had a candymaking business. I think my aversion to Houston probably started w/ reading this bk. I already have a low opinion of Texas as a place that produces an abnormally high percentage of deranged killers, after all, look at the president, but reading this bk made me feel like kidnapping, raping, torturing, & killing teen-age boys was little more than an average day in the average life of some average people in an average neighborhood in Houston. These particular crimes didn't happen w/o a social enviroment that supported it somehow - if only by being so sexually oppressive that for males like Corll this was the 'logical' outlet. & what about the people who WRITE these bks? How many have a sincere drive to take a hard look at what's there that 'normals' wd rather be in denial about? I think of someone like Genesis P. Orridge as being in the category of sincere investigators (even though he hasn't written such a bk). How many write them for the money? Knowing that such 'sensational crimes' are hot items for the flip side of the very same 'normals'? The 'sickness' of alienated capitalist society (or, perhaps, any large society) is the very same 'sickness' that produces people like Corll & people like the people who surreptitiously get off on Corll at the same time that they hypocritically disavow the possibility of the potential to BE HIM w/in themselves.
I have read more than my share of true crime and this is by far the most horrifying and frustrating case of them all. Dean Corl," a "candy shop" owner, raped, tortured, castrated, mutilated and murdered TWENTY SEVEN boys from 1970-73 in a shitty Texas town near Houston. Some of the boys were tortured and abused for days before being murdered, by either strangulation, beating or shooting and then buried in Corl's shed. He took a teenage boy under his wing and somehow got him to assist him in the kidnapping and murdering of boys just like himself. Even more horrifying than the "grisly details" of the murders is the fact that the boys kept disappearing, one after another and nobody connected the dots or considered that there may be a maniac afoot. The authorities couldn't have cared less or been more inept. One father of a boy who had disappeared was quoted as saying something like "boys just keep on disappearin' around here, soon there will be none left". There is speculation that there may be even more victims, creepily buried under or around Corll's candy shop, but Texas authorities showed no continuing interest in pursuing this. CASE CLOSED.
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i read a couple of books and watched a movie or two on this serial killer. since it happened around the time i was born, and most likely when my parents were starting to go to mcfaddin beach area (close to where i grew up), it was interesting to me. the lazy attention paid to missing children for days that led into the fear we live in today is fascinating. also, this killer had numbers that blew other killers away and Gacy admired him so much. very much a must read if you are from SE texas or are interested in serial killers and motives.
—Jenna
