Behavior: The Mind of the Mass Murderer

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.

A combination of per verse sex and killing has also characterized many of the notorious mass murderers of history. Gilles de Rais, body guard to Joan of Arc, con fessed at his trial to slaugh tering hundreds of boys in the 15th century “solely for the pleasure and delectation of lust.” Henri Landru, the French Bluebeard, specialized in ravishing and killing lonely women until the guillotine ended his career in 1922. A German schoolteacher named Wagner, who was obsessed with an act of sodomy that he said he committed when he was 27, killed his family of five, nine other people and a number of cows in 1913. Fritz Haarmann, the “ogre of Hannover,” combined homosexuality with the killing of at least 24 victims shortly after World War I. His lover, Hans Grans, was also convicted in the murders. In 1958 Charles Starkweather ran amuck in Nebraska with his 14-year-old girl friend, Caril Fugate, and killed ten people; he interrupted his murderous spree with an abnormal sexual assault on the body of one of his victims, a teen-age girl.

Oddly enough, the murder of Dean Corll seems to have been touched off by an aversion to sex with women. Henley had brought 15-year-old Rhonda Williams to Corll’s house. She was strapped to a board face up (a boy was manacled to the same board face down). Corll, according to Henley, “was mad because I brought the chick over there.” That led to their fatal argument. Afterward Henley protested, “I didn’t go to bed with that girl.”

Despite the mass of seeming evidence, many experts dispute the view that aberrant sex is causally related to mass murder. Harry Kozol, director of the Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Dangerous Persons in Massachusetts, emphasizes that “while homosexual murders attract great attention, their incidence is rare.” In mass murder, he has found, “sex doesn’t seem to be the motivation.” One trait that Kozol has found in common among mass murderers: “A certain homogeneity about the victims.” Jack the Ripper, for example, invariably chose prostitutes, and the Boston Strangler (13 victims) selected mostly elderly women.

Perverted Sex. Psychiatrist Sher-vert Frazier, a Harvard Medical School expert on multicide and a member of the Texas panel that studied Charles Whitman (who shot 13 people from a tower in Austin in 1966), also insists that there is “no connection between homosexuality and murder per se.” In Frazier’s nearly two decades of experience with murders and mass murders, perverted sex has not played an important role in any of the cases he had studied.

Frazier also takes issue with his colleagues who try to draw a psychiatric profile of a murderer. “From what we know now,” he says, “we cannot predict either who is going to commit murder or which people will commit single murders and which will do multiple murders.”

Nonetheless, the 65 murderers and multiple murderers recently analyzed by Frazier did have some traits in common. They did not “know how to be men” because many had grown up in fatherless homes or suffered “repeated brutalization by a father who was inconsistent or unpredictably violent.” Corll, Henley and Brooks all came from broken homes. Mrs. Mary Henley told reporters that Wayne, her eldest son, dropped out of high school in 1970 because his father (now divorced from Mrs. Henley) had beaten him and shot at her.

Other similarities between Frazier’s murderers included “loner-type” isolation, episodes of inability to control impulses, periodic buildups of restlessness and anxiety, an unusual familiarity with weapons, a lack of guilt over their acts and “a high incidence of repeated personal humiliation and a sense of powerlessness and personal inadequacy.”

Another list has been compiled by Joseph Wepman, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. His “commonalities” among mass murderers: inability to hold a job; no apparent feelings toward the victims; seeing the victims as objects, not people and often not viewing their crime as murder.

Still other experts believe that certain physical abnormalities play an important role in producing a mass murderer. Among them: chromosome irregularities, hormonal imbalances and brain damage. Charles Whitman, for instance, was found to have a brain tumor. Another mass murderer, Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, suffered severe head injuries as a child. The psychiatrist who examined him prior to trial, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, believes that he became a killer because of ensuing brain damage.

Ziporyn, who has since written a book on Speck and examined more than 300 other murderers, also contends that they seem “normal” until that “moment when the brakes go”—when the right combination of chemical, physical, psychic and social factors sends them out of control. “In a serial crime like Houston,” Ziporyn says, “it’s probably safe to say that after the first murder Corll saw it was easy to kill, and the rest of his victims were not people to him, they were like dolls.”

* Surpassing the 25 farm-worker victims of Labor Contractor Juan Corona, who were found two years ago in graves near Yuba City, Calif.