Episode 334: The Candy Man, Part 2

The First Degree

Alexis Linkletter and Jac Vanek

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.5 • 10K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, former candy business operator Dean “Candy Man” Arnold Corll builds a reputation in Houston Heights as a trusted individual. The parents of the lower-middle-class neighborhood appreciate how Dean is a role model and caretaker for the local boys and young men. Except this is a ruse. Dean is actually the serial rapist and murderer responsible for multiple missing boys’ disappearances. When Dean’s accomplice, 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley Junior, kills Dean in August of 1973, all is revealed. Wayne shows the authorities Dean’s three dumping sites: a storage unit, a beach, and a forest. Within days, police uncover 27 victims’ nude and plastic-wrapped bodies. Dean’s other accomplice, 18-year-old David Owen Brooks, and Wayne receive justice for their part in these murders, but Dean—the mastermind—will never answer for his crimes. In episode 334, Jac and Alexis break down how Dean’s evil actions terrorized a community without anyone noticing. This is part two of a two-part series.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The first degree.
0:02.0	First degree.
0:03.0	First degree.
0:04.0	First degree.
0:05.0	First degree.
0:06.0	The first degree.
0:08.0	You see it on the news.
0:10.0	You see it on the paper.
0:11.0	You see it on Facebook.
0:13.0	These things are supposed to happen in movies, not in real life.
0:16.0	It was also the era of the godfather.
0:23.6	And I think Wayne saw himself as, I'm in this now.
0:28.6	I'm going to be a good soldier. I'm going to make the best of it.
0:31.6	And Coral made it into a game so that it could seem like fun,
0:36.6	and he would reward them for certain things.
0:40.0	You could understand how a teenager who sees no way out finds a way to make it work for him.
0:47.5	Coral wasn't just an exploiter. He knew how to leverage people so he would put them at a disadvantage.
0:56.0	It was a matter of not seeing him as strictly a serial murderer.
1:02.0	I know that a lot of people in the media had come at him like he was scary,
1:08.0	or that he had this way about him. I had another producer here who's a good friend of
1:13.9	mine say, how do you know he's not manipulating you? But then the other thing I had to do was
1:20.2	switch back to thinking, what if my children were the killers? And my children had so much
	...

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