The Man with the Candy

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, show more 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. show less

There was a lot of focus on the victims of Corll's murderous streak and I liked that a lot. They weren't quite my contemporaries, but the era in which they grew up was well within my memory. It didn't take much for my heart to go out to them or to their parents.

The stories of Corll's accomplices were awful too. This book is the first I've read about the murders, so I was unaware of the connections between Corll and the teenagers that helped him and then escaped his grasp. I'm pretty sure Henley and Brooks would have ended up dead in the storehouse too.

Corll's story is more or less typical for serial killers with a distinct lack of a strong father figure and an overpowering/protective and delusional mother. It amazes me how the stories show more of these killers are riddled with the same background. The interview with Mary Corll was very good. Word for word, it showed how delusional, emotionally manipulative and powerful she was.

It's a good read if you like this kind of stuff. show less

This was about Dean Corll the serial killer. I found the book hard to read at the beggining, but it picked up after Dean was killed and it told more of what actually happened. I enjoyed it from that point onward.

The story of the Houston mass murders. More than 30 pre-teen and adolescent boys were sexually abused, tortured and killed.