Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 210: Dean Corll Part I - The Pouting Room

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

It's teenage boy mass-murderer Dean Corll up next on the Heavy Hitter series as we cover his childhood in the Klan-ridden hellhole that is Vidor, TX and his career at the Corll Candy Company of Houston where he earned his reputation as the Candyman.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Welcome to the last podcast on the Left Ever What. I am Ben Gessel, as always with Marcus Parks. Hello. And the wayward sun has returned. Yes. Yes, I am 15 pounds heavier filled with ergon meat. Oh, that's exciting. I'm so shocked you didn't die in Atlanta. I remember I had, so did I tell you how about having lamb testicles at my favorite place in Atlanta?

No, you did. Not Henry Zabrowski. The guy who came forward, yes. I'm lamb testicles Henry Zabrowski. Farmers favorite Henry Zabrowski because I finish all the scraps. But they come and these guys were like, have you had the new lamb fries on the menu? And I was like, no, as a matter of fact, I have. And they're like, you got to check it out. These things are flying out the door and they brought it out. And it was just fried dick balls like normal. Lamb balls and they called them lamb fries.

Lamb fries and you eat them. They were fantastic. They got an organic flavor. I don't know how to describe an organic flavor. It's like kind of like a blood flavor. Oh, I've eaten testicles. Problem though is, I don't want to ask this to our listeners as well. Has anyone ever seen dick on the menu? I've never seen an animal's cock served in any just alone. It's just skin. They're blood sacks. No, it's not. It's got cartilage. It's got some meat in there.

Well, I don't know. We'll talk about that on the B side. Actually, we'll talk about that on episode three of Dean Corral. That's right. We're talking about Dean Corral speaking of blood sacks and disgusting edible things. Man, Dean Corral would have gone hog wild for some hog penis at Holman and Finch in Atlanta, Georgia. Come and get hog wild on hog penis. Maybe that could help a lot of our more dangerous pedophiles if we serve more open cock in restaurants, like actual pieces of cock, that they can personally buy, and then they go, and they tear out like a dog in heat.

You think that's the major issue? Yep. Okay. Well, that's great. Let's get to something more disturbing than Henry's diet, Dean Corral. Well, first of all, the sources for this series are the Texas Monthly article, The Lost Boys by Skip Hollinsworth. Check it out. It's absolutely fantastic. Check out all of Skip Hollinsworth articles. He's a fantastic journalist. And also the books, Mass Murder in Houston by John Gerwell and The Man with the Candy by Jack Olsen,

which is one of the best true crime books that I've read in the last few months. It's pretty wonderful. The description of Houston, which we'll get into in the next episode, is absolutely incredible. You get to really understand where Dean Corral came from and what he's all about. Yeah. And the title alone, I mean, I would be so easily tricked if I was a child once again, The Man with the Candy. I want to meet him. That was a problem. You were too obvious. Yes.

You just walk around being like, I don't care if you rape me. Just give me the goddamn candy. You got Charleston Chew back there? Yeah. All right. I'll suck your dick. I'm just telling you. I loved Charleston Chew. They were the longest of all the candies. Well, if you don't know who Dean Corral is, and a lot of people don't, he was an American serial killer that, along with accomplices David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., killed at minimum 29 teenage boys almost exclusively in one small Houston neighborhood over a period of three years from 1970 to 1973.

And Corral's killing spree ended only when one of his accomplices shot and killed him in the midst of a murder. And Corral held the record for most confirmed kills in the United States until John Wayne Gacy was apprehended four years later in 1978 with a confirmed murder count of 33. I couldn't help but think of it pennywise and dairy. This is an extremely it type of story. In fact, that's what kept coming up in my mind when I was reading The Man with the Candy. It's a very much like an it type of situation where just teenagers are going missing left and right and no one's really say anything about it except for the kids.

And literally an area of Houston called the Heights, which is like two miles by three miles. It's like it's a very small town. It's a little area of Houston where these kids are just disappearing and they just, we're going to find out how Houston is ran by the police. It's sort of a laissez-faire attitude. As long as the crime did not involve either a rich person or a black person, the Houston police did nothing. And these kids, they just had other runaways, which makes me really consider the fact that every child, if you have a child and you listen to this podcast,

that child is about 60% of the way ready to leave your home. Lock up the windows and shut the doors. They're ready to go. Tether up the child. They just want to leave. But Dean Coral is sort of like a precursor to John Wayne Gacy, the same exact kind of man, a man who held a lot of esteem in his community who used that to lure boys in there. And what is it about working at a candy shop and wanting to have sex with dead boys?

If you're around sweets at work, you want to have something sour at home. But you think about it, between Jeffrey Dahmer, or Jeffrey Dahmer working at a chocolate factory, these are just employees of candy factories. What about the owners? It's always the inverse. What about William Hubert Hershey's, who's sitting in a fucking, is he in a castle in Transylvania where he's like, our only drink, come. This is like pewter goblets filled with frothy semen. Yes.

And they put that, that's the milk in the chocolate. So since Dean Coral was murdered before he was apprehended, it's important to know that most of what we know about Dean's formative years comes from his mother, Mary. Now Mary is what you might describe as a real piece of work. She loved her son to a fault. Yes. Which is kind of the problems when you continue to love your son after he's raped, tortured, and murdered 29 boys.

And she's very edgene. She was kind of all over his childhood and treated him like a king and was very, ultra-ly, in the end, too protective of Dean. Yeah, and they were extremely protective of each other. Some people who worked at the candy factory with them said that their relationship sometimes was of Dean being the father and Mary being the daughter. It was a very odd symbiotic two-way relationship that they had. And as Henry said, Mary, even after her son's crimes came to light,

even after it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that her son had committed these crimes, she never had a single bad word to say about him, not a single one, not a single critical word to say about him. Ben, you're looking a little wistful there. I'm just gonna say, in the mother's defense, a lot of people are saying a lot of bad things about her son, but she remembers when he was just six months old inside of her and how nice he was sucking his thumb inside her womb. No, I read that article where it said he shoved that steel wire up the penis of one of those young boys.

But I will say, he always combed his hair. Mary, you raised him right. I raised him right. Mary, you raised him right. I know he had a shiny bell buckle on when he was having sex with all those boys against their wheel, but at the same time, boys will be boys and boys raping boys and boys raping boys. And he always combed his hair. Mary, you raised him right.

I raised him right. You raised Margarita, another Margarita. No, bring me the woman named Margarita who's supposed to clean up these other empty Margaritas. You raised him right. The reason why we only know about Dean's childhood from his mother is because the rest of his family, including his younger brother and his father, Arnold, never gave a single detail about Dean's childhood. They never talked to the press.

We don't know anything about them other than what Mary told us. So it is important to kind of treat some of this with a bit of skepticism or to at least know that there is a lot of things about Dean's childhood that Mary conveniently left out. Well, absolutely, because obviously what he grew into is very different than the child she raised. Yes. Do you think that she purposely lied? I mean, you fill your mind with the moments you want to remember, right? I think it's lying by omission and choosing to not talk about that.

I think it's just choosing, like, well, I'm not sure if I remember that correctly. I think she's choosing to lie. I think what we discovered a lot when we talk about serial killers all the time is that a lot of times they're never really like, oh, he was always, like, totally fine and totally quiet and totally normal. There's always something fucked up about a serial killer, even as a child. And the mothers always know, you know, when the kid's over there and he's just like, I just wish that some of these dolls you gave me would squeal, mommy, squeal with fear. It's like, well, comb your hair.

Gotta have a nice set of hair. Well, Dean Arnold Coral was born on Christmas Eve 1939 in Wayne Della, Indiana. And as far as what Mary says about him as a child, he was said to be a very solitary child. Didn't like to hang out with other kids, but Mary said that this all went back to an incident at a birthday party in which all the other kids got prizes, but Dean didn't get any prize. So she thought that this made him a little bit of a recluse because he didn't want to get hurt again. For everyone who's upset about living in a generation where everyone gets a prize, just remember, the one kid who doesn't will kill your child.

You will kill a child thinking about your child that did it to him first. Just give him a prize. Always give him a prize. Even if it's a little little noisemaker or like a little like an eraser. Any kids love anything. You can tell him anything's a prize. Sure. Give him a pool net. Anything they didn't have walking in and they walk out with it, that's a prize.

Yeah, exactly. And Arnold and Mary's marriage was unstable to say the least, but it is important to note that Mary claimed that Arnold, Dean's father, was strict but was never physically abusive towards Dean or to his brother. And personally, I think she's telling the truth on this one, because when you take Mary's personality into account, if Dean's father had been abusive in any way, I think she would have used it to explain away some of his bad behavior or some of his odd behavior. And I also think that she would have used it to garner sympathy for herself.

Well, it sounds like Mary is a pretty classic clinical narcissist, which is something that my vampire of a grandmother was diagnosed with, which is a true kind of chemical misunderstanding that there are other people that other people have feelings. And I mentioned as a narcissist, you look at the child as sort of an extension of yourself, because if something was wrong with Dean Coral, that would mean there was something wrong with how she raised him, and all of the fault would go on her and her mind, and it's not about him. It never was about Dean.

It was about her raising a boy as a feminine way, as humanly possible, and probably protecting him from his father. Absolutely. I'm going to have to call up a Ben Kissle bullshit, because back in the day, not being an abusive father meant that you didn't publicly beat your kid with a stick. You didn't beat him within an inch of his life. Exactly. He didn't go to school with two black guys, as if he just fought Mike Tyson in the early 90s.

So I think that his father probably was physically abusive. I mean, you know, this was a time where, you know... We all got tough enough, though. Yeah, but I mean, and think about, you know, the way that we were treated as kids nowadays, we would be in protective custody. So imagine way back in the 50s, you know, when he was coming up in the world, I would assume his father took some licks at him. Yeah, I'm sure.

Especially him prancing around talking about how much he loves mommy. Right. Why don't you love me, damn it? Well, either way, the marriage with Arnold disintegrated twice after a divorce and a quick re-up of a marriage which soon fell apart as soon as the family moved to Houston. And after the divorce, the second divorce, by the way, Dean was sent to live with his grandmother in Indiana for a summer, and in Mary's view, and I might point out that Mary is from the Midwest,

not Texas. The summer on the farm removed any need for sex education. This is what she said about that. You know, when they came back, I didn't see that there was much that I had to tell them. What kind of sex training do you have to give a boy that's lived on a farm? You don't have to tell them nothing. You got a lot of reversing to do. Whatever he thought he learned about sex on the farm is not going to be treated well in the city.

No, because it's just some weird cryptic farmer going to be like, every time old Bissy acts up, what I like to do is take my fucking ring finger and my pinky finger and I jigger Jagger it all here to back in her cleft, right? Because they say every horse has got a little spot up underneath to make its knees shudder. And what I do is go gill, gill, gill, gill, gill, gill. Every time she acts up, and if that don't do her right, I shoot her in the fucking head. That's all I have to know about sex.

That's it. Oh, wow. Because I do the same thing to old Mary. She looks so happy. Well, what Mary said is that even though he'd gotten his sex education by watching various farm animals, but she said that regardless of that, Dean was largely unconcerned with sex. But he was still 10. What do you mean?

This is the weird thing where she says this thing like it would be normal for a child who is like 10 years old to be like, mommy, sometimes I just think like, I want to fuck on a vagina. Mommy, you have one, right? That would be weird to me. No, it's not how kids speak. I mean, usually I guess kids nowadays, what do you learn? What was the first thing that you realized sex was? You know, I guess you play with dolls like a Barbie and I had a friend would come over.

She would have had Barbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I had those and they had sex, so that's kind of a weird fetish. I like skinny girls and turtles now, I guess. That explains a lot. No, it was the exact same thing with me, yeah. Yeah, I had G.I. Joe's that I would make make love. Right. And also we had hardcore porno on the television because we had a legal cable box.

Oh, there you go. I wouldn't know what they were doing, but I'd be like, I'm interested. So I'd just sit there like, my eyes would be locked on, I knew I had to shut it off. I was like five or six. So I guess this farm animals is the 1949 version of scrambled spice network. I still don't know if watching old Greg fucking have sex with a chicken behind a barn. Like, you know, like having silo sex with a bunch of grain around your knees with like a couple of ducks. But that's how you're supposed to learn.

Different time. Well, Mary said that the weirdest thing that the kids got into is that they never like to wear clothes and they just ran around the house naked all the time, which really isn't even that weird. I was that type of kid. I didn't like to wear clothes. And Marcus is completely normal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, no, not weird.

I'm not tying boys to boards and chewing their dicks off. Sounds like somebody is arguing a bit too hard about this. I don't know. Interesting. Well, maybe not. Well, when Dean was 14, his mother moved him and his brother to Vidor, Texas, which is just outside of Beaumont on the Texas Louisiana border. Now Vidor was what was called a sundown town. And those are so called because of signs that were posted on the city limits warning black people about the dangers of being caught in said town after dark.

Fun. They did not put it that delicately. Right. And in other words, Vidor was just, it was one of those terrifying towns full of psychopaths that just litter the Texas Louisiana border and even went as far in as central Texas. These towns still existed when I was growing up in the 90s. Ours was called Throckmorton that had a sign outside a town that says, don't let the sun set on your black ass. Like, yeah, cool.

The kids in my school, the black kids refused to go and play games there because it was terrifying. The kids would open the kids on basketball courts would openly elbow them in the face and the referees who were hired by the Throckmorton school made a point to not call fouls that were made on black kids. So it's sort of like being a reverse vampire. You can go out in the daylight, but get out when the moon comes up. Question is, can't we burn these places down? Well, I mean, I think they sort of looked like they're burnt out already. These towns are not thriving metropolises. No, I don't think so.

Yeah, they don't get a whole lot of influx of populations. Industry doesn't come and invest in Throckmorton, Texas. We're not getting a lot of good house music from Throckmorton, Texas. Not a lot of Tumblr DJs. I'm not even sure what that sentence is. What would it sound like, I guess, a milk jug in a rickety chair? Sort of just... I don't know how to do it.

Never mind. I mean, Sundown towns, they have a very specific flavor to them. You definitely, I mean, it's not a friendly type of place. It's a town where their entire identity is hate. It sounds like one of those bizarre towns where it's so racist, where they don't have chocolate ice cream, there's no black cats, they don't paint a house black. If you have a black car, you're the most diverse person on the block. But I gotta say, every once in a while, now don't tell your mother,

I got a little piece of 85% dark chocolate because of the antioxidants. Risky move. Well, I mean, this reporter, Sally Bixby-Defty, which is my favorite star reporter name that I ever heard, she described Vidor as, quote, essentially the kind of place where the big event for the kids is to pour kerosene on a cat and set it on fire. And I also want to point this out, it's like when people talk about making a murderer

and saying it's Steven Avery, you know, they're making a big deal about him setting fire to this cat, like one of the crimes they were getting. It's like, you gotta understand, these are powerfully bored and dumb people alone. It's not that uncommon. It's really not as uncommon as you want to think it is. Steve Avery, whatever you want to believe about his innocence, he is dumb. And everybody around him was backwards, incest-ridden, plains people. Yeah.

And that's what they do for fun. You know you're from there. Yeah. Yeah. True story. In my hometown, my friend's father drowned their cat, his sister's favorite cat, in a little bucket, in a 10-gallon bucket. He just did that.

Yeah. And we knew it was kind of weird and his sister was very upset with her father. We knew Reddix and Porter that would do that. They would have a problem with it. They'd be like, oh, this cat. We can't take care of this cat. And they would just fucking drown it. Right.

I mean, I'm not saying it's great. I think it's terrible. Yeah, you don't drown it. You shoot it. Oh, cool. You see, that's what it is. Yeah, of course. Regardless, you don't put kerosene on it and light it on fire.

No, you don't. You definitely don't do that. The funnest way to kill a cat is you take a bunch of bungees and you tie it to the front of your car and then you scare it to death driving down the highway. I see. Well, Dean Coral, when he moved to Vidor, he had his own, and I got to say, this is a pretty unique style of animal mutilation, and I have to admit, someone would just... Wipe that smile off your face immediately, Marcus.

No, no, no. I'm going to say, as far as animal mutilation goes... It's whimsical. Whimsical. That was the word that I was about to say. All right. Whimsical. His favorite target was the local fly and squirrel population.

And after trapping the squirrels, Dean would either chain them around his neck and stroll about town or take them to school stuffed in his cowboy boots. Whimsical. I would say, also, it's the most fabulous way to show off that you've killed a bunch of flying squirrels. Well, yeah. I mean, it's just... It's a wealthy woman on the Upper West Side in a mink jacket, but they just didn't do

any of the work to make it wearable. Legitimately, I imagine Dean Coral as that, as a sort of genteel, like a little weird redneck boy. You just walk around being like, I hope you like my new statement, necklace. It looks like your necklace is known at its other parts, like there's a... Get there! Get there! Get there!

Your necklace is known at... Get there! Okay. Now it's beautiful. It's very nice. Do you like my boots? They're turquoise. And with Dean, when he wasn't tortured in squirrels, Dean was said to be a very passionate trombone

player in the high school marching band. And the only... It seems a very similar mouth movement to what he would later do. Interesting. It just seems very indicative. I'm not saying that we should arrest all people who play trombone. No. Or assume that everybody plays a hum...

Trombone is a homosexual because that's also not necessarily the truth. That's right. That's right. One would... Stereotype. Stereotype. One eye open, my friend. The only other thing besides flying squirrels and the trombone that could occupy Dean's

mind in Vidor was candy. For Vidor, Texas would become the birthplace of the Coral Candy Company, for which Dean would become so well known for. For one fateful afternoon, a pecan salesman dropped by to find Mary baking several pies all at once, and the salesman, no doubt looking to take advantage of the manic stay-at-home mom by making a regular customer of her, suggested that Mary might enjoy making and selling her own candy since she had all that extra energy anyway. No.

She was fucking that pecan salesman. I hope so. Because that's the other way he's been like... Because I can imagine Mary rolling off and being like, you sure got a lot of energy, Mary. Yeah, but selling these candies as well. Sorry, I know I'm looking at your large naked body, but I still... I'm only thinking about candy.

Yep, as he puts on his boots. So Mary loaded up the family in the car, drove an hour and a half to a candy factory in Houston, and bought a praline recipe for $50. Now I know we're going to get a lot of flack on that. Some people say praline, some people say proline. No, I've never heard the term proline. Yeah, proline. That's not a thing.

Some people in Texas maintain that you say it praline, and if you say it praline, then you're out of whack. It's praline. You're a backwards people. It's not your fault. It started at the beginning of the country. We didn't have enough people there to start, and so there was a lot of families on top of each other.

Yeah, and they gave us the snake coil flag, which I think is one of a cool... It's a cool flag. Don't tread on me. Don't tread on me. Yeah, that's nice. And chicken fried steak. Oh, I love that. Dean, always eager to please his mother, soon took over operations of the Coral Candy Company.

He ran the machines, he wrapped the candy in the boxes, and he delivered them. One high school friend of Dean said, that's one reason why he didn't have a whole lot of social life, also because he was a big old fucking weirdo who reeked a candy 24-7, was always talking about how he'd like to stick his dick in a yodel. And we were said, yodel, you mean the chocolate little cake? He's like, no, I like to call little boys yodels. Interesting. They should have caught that earlier, I guess.

So he's cooking and delivering candy the whole time flying squirrels in his shoes, huh? That's the other thing. Does that... There's some code? Let's not talk about the gigantic box of horse bones we have in the basement of this Mexican restaurant. No, no, no. Cow bones.

They're cow bones. Yeah. I gathered them myself. Very good. Creepy. Yeah. Some campaigns sure seem to be loving all these bones that I'm cleaning and harvesting. He really, absolutely.

Yes. Idaon.com slash Last Podcast on the left for $20, you can get your own custom cleaned and cut bone. I'm only... Straight from Four High Point Ranch in Dayton, Texas. As long as we all know that these are horse bones. Right. And not people...

Cow bones. Whatever bones they are. Cow bones. Yes, as long as I don't see one human looking bone, like this whole Patreon thing as some sort of scam to cover your many crimes. And I do want to point out, the creepiest thing about the box of bones is in the bottom of the box, there is a praline pie, which his mother just packed there with it. So I guess they just sort of use it like the little popcorn things.

Well, I mean, yes, you do make jokes about being in the candy factory and boots full of dead squirrels, but those were the three centerpieces of his life. It was the squirrels, the candy factory, and the trombone. If he wasn't at the candy factory, he was in the band room, practicing that trombone. If he wasn't practicing the trombone, he was out trying to capture and stomp to the flying squirrels in order to make jewelry frames. Right. Right.

Completely normal childhood. It protects us, maybe. Well, yeah. I mean, the 1958 Vidore Yearbook, The Pirate's Treasure, described him as, quote, sweet to know, very occupied. That's great. I mean, honestly, actually, he does seem to be the most decidedly friendly of all the serial killers that we speak about at this time in their life, right?

Not really, though. That's what they said. He didn't actually have many friends. But he was busy working and doing things that would technically make a good, upstanding member of society. Working with his mother on a conveyor belt making sweets. That's not bad. Practicing the trombone alone, normal, or killing squirrels and wearing them.

A little abnormal, yes. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a left turn there at the end. But remember the town that we're talking about here. Right. Remember, this is Vidore. This is a sundown town.

These are the worst towns in America. Like, these are the, I mean, they're towns full of psychopaths built on hate. Their standard of normal is not quite what the rest of the countries is. Right. This is where, if Texas Chainsaw Massacre was real, it would happen in Throckmorton. Like, it would happen in one of these places. Yeah. Or any of these places.

Yeah. There are cruel places that allow somebody like Dean Coral, who I mentioned at the time, probably received a great deal of hate for probably kind of, he probably kept to himself, super tortured, knew that he was different than the other kids, was probably all fucked up, and then he's just basically surrounded by budding psychopaths that couldn't wait to see any sort of aberrant behavior so they could stomp it out. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it depends on, someone should send Gawker over there and write an eviscerating blog post about Throckmorton. 10 things you didn't know about Throckmorton. So after high school, Dean returned to his grandmother's farm in Indiana, where he got the sex education, and got a job at a coil factory to help out his grandmother after his grandfather died. And this, as far as we know, is when Dean started hanging out almost exclusively with children.

His regular playmates were, surprisingly, a pair of sisters, who lived about a half mile down the road, who Dean used to make innocent eight-millimeter movies with. The movies, reportedly comedic in nature, showed the girls performing mock operations using chicken in trails in the place of real organs. Yeah. And, you know, this- I'm totally fine with it. I actually have no problem with that.

That's the most wholesome thing he's done so far. Yeah. It's the most creative thing, too. One aspect about Dean Curl that is completely against type that we'll kind of see again and again. Dean Curl is a very against type serial killer. He had no record of theft, no record of vandalism, no record of sexual assault, no arson in his younger years.

The adjective that came up again and again, both when he was in high school and as he got older all throughout his twenties, the one adjective that people would always use was vanilla. Yeah. And in one of the- in the book, Man with a Candy, that's how they describe Dean. It's being like, yeah, he's vanilla. There's nothing wrong with vanilla. They would always kind of say that because it was about what we'll learn in Houston.

The big thing, especially the heights, was about keeping an air of normalcy. In order to be as long as you don't have a beard or like hippie glasses or wear hippie clothes, you were totally ignored in these towns. Yeah. That's what they said. As long as you didn't make a fool of yourself and as long as you were clean cut knowing cared what you did. But I look at these crimes and I think he did have a sadistic predilection, of course,

but I think a lot of it is sort of like John Wayne Gacy, where I think a lot of the murder started as a way to cover up his crimes, cover up his sexuality, and that he was having sex and he liked rough, intense sex with these fucking- with boys, he's a pedophile. And then what he- the murder came about as a way to cover it up and then eventually grew to be a part of his sexual fantasies. Yeah, absolutely. So at the age of 24, Dean was drafted into the army where he served as a radio repairman in Fort Hood.

Now this follows the pattern that we've observed with both David Berkowitz and Leonard Lake serial killers, and this is something that I didn't really know before or didn't really notice before, but the pattern that we start to see is that serial killers usually don't see a moment's action, even though all three of the men, David Berkowitz, Leonard Lake, and Dean Coral, they were all in the army during Vietnam, but they don't see any action at all. For people that are in the armed service listening, answer me this question. Do you think that a lot of that is to do with the fact that they show basically two willingness

to murder? Whether they show up and they're so enthused by getting the gun and going through the training and there's like, like Leonard Lake? Like I imagine somebody which we're going to see out of Dean Coral later likes to dominate and likes to put his pain on people, like I wonder if even drill sergeants would like see that in training and they're like, oh no, no, no, he's not going to go anywhere near the fucking room. I think it's because as soon as the drill sergeant asks them to do a sit-up, they break

down and cry like pansy boys, and then Dean Coral is like the dog in the movie Up. Every time he sees a squirrel, he shouts and chases the damn thing. Necklace! Necklace! Why does he call squirrels necklaces? Yeah, I think it does have something to do with, I think it's more towards like what Bill was talking about is that they just don't have the kind of instinct that it takes to be a soldier.

Their instinct to kill is there, but that doesn't make a soldier. That's not what a soldier is really there for. It's like discipline and teamwork and that kind of stuff, that's what shows a good soldier. Willingness to kill is not at the top. But I also find it interesting that they join the military, I think a lot of it's also because they feel aimless in life. Well, they're drafted. Yeah.

Was he drafted? He was drafted. Everyone. Oh, okay. Well, Leonard Lake volunteered, as did David Berkowitz. Both those guys volunteered for the army, but Dean Coral was drafted. But it is interesting how I don't know of a single serial killer or mass murderer that saw combat.

It's very interesting. It's worth looking into later. But the army is also where a friend of Dean's claimed that Dean had his first homosexual experience. About that, the friend said, He told me that's where it started when, you know, it was like the first time I died. He turned faggy, really? I guess that's the only way I can say it.

Is that what he says? There's a lot of different ways you can say it. That's the only way I can say it. He told me that's where it started when, you know, the first time you ever turned into a fag, really? I guess that's the only way I can say it. Yeah. It was Vietnam.

There's a lot of different ways you can say it. Yeah. It was when he had his, I just did it a totally different way when he had his first homosexual experience. You could just say he was gay. He was born gay and loved it. It was the only time I saw him happy because he was expressing himself in the first time. I'll say he was bored, who knows?

Not a lot to do is a radio technician there. Now that experience actually must have happened pretty goddamn fast because Dean spent less than a year in the army before his mother got him out on a hardship exemption saying that she couldn't possibly run the candy factory without him. And that has got to be one of the sissiest letters the army will ever receive, which is your mother writing a letter for you saying she can't run the candy factory without you because he's just too deft with the divinity machine pouring the meringues. She's out there like Lucy on the conveyor belt.

She has to start eating all the candies herself to keep up. I mean, it was a nightmare for that poor woman, Mary. And I mean, to be fair to Mary, business at the crawl candy factory or the crawl candy company was booming. Dean was apparently a genius at the candy making business. These always come with new recipes for pralines and pecan rolls and divinity and little chewies. Little chewies, that's taking an ironic twist there for the guy, kind of at the end, after we find out what he did there, kind of a different little chewy.

Ruby Jenkins, who ran the candy apple business that shared the facility with the triple C, would recall Dean's interactions with children through the lens of a pleasant and fun memory, which you kind of get this from a lot of people that had memories of Dean. They would recall him as just kind of a, you know, he's fine, he's all right, like he wasn't that bad of a guy. But they said it was very interesting, they said his relationship, they were like, you know, they're like, well, Dean is a little too friendly with the kids, but then they were like, the way they equate it, they're like, well, maybe it's weird, but actually

it's, you know, like maybe he's more like a scout master, where he loves the children, he just loves to be there and some people were just put on earth to help others, that's what they would say, and not be rampant molesters and murderers. It was very disturbing, as a child we took in a lot of foster brothers and sisters and many of them had fathers that were similar to Coral and I watched one sit-in meeting where they all got together and obviously they were supervised visits and there was an enthusiasm to the father playing with the children, a very perverse enthusiasm, and I could tell that something was wrong, I was only 11 years old.

But yeah, they do lighten up, I guess, and they do become very animated around children. But that's not to say that there aren't men out there who actually are very good scout masters, who actually can help out children. The vast airs may be the three. The vast majority of them. The vast majority of them. No, I don't think so. No.

Let's leave scout masters alone. No, the vast majority of these guys are totally cool dudes and are actually doing something good for the community, little league coaches, scout masters, like these guys are actually doing this shit because they enjoy doing it, not because they want to put their mouths on the little boys' balls. And women are good at it, too. Watch the movie, Troop Beverly Hills. Great feature film.

Well, this is what Ruby Jenkins said about Dean's attitude towards kids. She said, he was a regular pod popper, everybody told him to stop, but he wouldn't stop. The principal even called and said, please don't encourage the kids, they're crossing the street to get the candy the parents are complaining, but Dean, he would just still give it out. God, man, it's so crazy because he made the candy, I mean, it's like the full process. Well, what she meant by, you know, the kids, you know, not letting the kids run or anything like that, this was almost, this was like fate stepping in in an extremely horrible

way, because while Dean was in the army, Mary set up the candy factory across the street from an elementary school. Do you, so is this really one of the, is this why we get the whole candy in children being lured in by the pedophile trope? No, I just think pedophiles have been using candy to get kids since there's been candy kids in pedophiles. But let's just say, okay, let's just say he ran a factory that made lug nuts. Would we just be like, Hey, so somebody stopped in a red van and offered you lug nuts?

Do not talk to that man. Yeah. Would it change? Bill, I gotta say, you know, I'm a sucker for free lug nuts. The next thing I know, I'm over at this guy's Dean's house and he's got lug nuts as far as the eye can see, and I'm pretty much drooling. The next thing I know, I'm getting raped behind a silo if it's what it is. Not good.

Yeah. I mean, and that's what happened when Dean came back, all of these kids found out that there was this candy factory across the street. So they'd line up at the door trying to get free samples and Dean would just go out there and he'd just hand out all of the irregular pralines that they couldn't sell. And this is where he started grooming his later victims. Exactly. He's known a lot of the victims that you'll find later on.

He'd known them since they were little, since they were five or six, and they've known him forever, which is kind of that thing that goes along to a lot of times in molestation cases and child abuse cases, it's from somebody that they know because he's already built this sort of inner structure of trust with them so that they never want to report him being weird. So he'd be like, Tommy, you know me, I knew you since you were little, and now even you're a little bit less little. Yes, this guy's a, yeah, he was a monster, yeah, he was like the bookie, he was a bookie

man. Yeah, it sounds like the definition of all what we think of when we think of pedophiles, it seems to be him, right? Yeah, I mean, he is, yeah, he's a bit of a prototype, definitely. And after he'd been grooming these kids for a few years with the candy, eventually he installs a pool table in the back room of the factory. So now you've got a steady stream of 14 and 15 year old kids coming in and out every single day.

And you gotta tell me, those are the problem, because they were trying to do a reality television show, Pimp Your Candy Store, but the problem is that they kept, exhibit kept making all these pleasure domes for pedophiles. Oh, no idea, man, they gotta cancel that show. And it was also around the time that the 14 and 15 year old boys were coming in and out constantly, and Dean started hanging around him, it was around the time the factory workers noticed that Dean wasn't exactly all that interested in women. A lot of them would say, you know, he would get a little giddy around young boys and women,

but a lot of them also said that, like, well, he's a nice guy, he's a hard worker, he doesn't seem to be doing anything terrible, let's just not talk about it, and everything will be fine. But you do stuff like, you know, we took that one, one woman finally convinced him, going on a date with him, and then they go out to the beach to meet for the date, and he shows up with a van filled with 14 year old boys. Which is like really fucked up. And then, I like this point you made too, but when Dean's mother says that she maintained

that the children were just Dean's protection against getting involved with anybody emotionally, because she had been divorced and married fucking three times, and then also divorced and married Dean's father twice. Yeah, divorced and married Dean's father twice, once to a salesman that lasted very quickly, and then we'll find out here in a little bit what her fourth and fifth marriages were like, which scrambled him up even more. But oh, and by the way, that van that he showed up in with all the kids, windowless white Akana line van.

Ooh, that's actually a nice van. It is you like a good van. It is a nice van. It's a super nice van. But he's not a young punk band, is he? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's not operation ivy in that van.

He is funny. He is, it's a pedophile special. Oh, different. He was a black flag 1981, but he did play the trombone and he kept playing it. If you know what I mean. Oh, yeah, we covered it earlier. Sucking dick with it. Little chewy.

Little chewy. So even after Dean was killed and all of his crimes came to light and it was extremely obvious that Dean was gay, his mother still didn't believe it. And this was mostly because a psychic who did Dean's chart told Mary that because of the exact time and date that Dean was born, it was astrologically impossible that Dean could be a homosexual. But she didn't know that what he meant was astrologically and he had spelled it A-S-S and he was winking the whole time.

Do you get it? I hate to go all MSNBC, it is a little problematic to call him gay. He is a pedophile. No, he's gay. He's gay? Yeah, he's gay, absolutely. He had homosexual relationships with men. Yeah, he had with older men as well.

He just skewed young because he could manipulate them. There are homosexual pedophiles and heterosexual pedophiles. Those are three different classifications. I'd say he was candy maker first, trombone player second, pedophile third. And then gay. Yes. All right. Just want to lump the two together.

No, absolutely not. No, absolutely not. That's where your brain went. Yeah, your thing. No, the theory of the gay person has been for years thought of as if they were predators. You're absolutely right. You're very right that those two things. But Dean Krull did have homosexual relationships with adults outside.

He just didn't like it. Yeah, he was like a little down for it, but still it wasn't quite getting him... It's like hunts ketchup. It's just not Heinz. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. The good stuff.

Yeah. I used to hate eating at the family's house who had the hunts ketchup. It's like, what is wrong with you people? Just put some salt in it. Just have sex with the boy. Oh, come on now. But you know, even though Mary didn't accept that her son was homosexual, everybody at the factory knew it.

And nobody openly acknowledged it. But everyone accepted it because he was such a nice decent person, as they said. And within a couple of years, the factory was just filled with teenage boys, both hanging out and working there. And none of these boys reported any shenanigans or any misgivings whatsoever about Dean, none except for Jimmy. Jimmy just didn't know how to play along. Right.

I mean, at this point, it just reminds me of the foot clan in Shredder. It is a little bit like that, but all of the foot clan is also getting molested. Oh, right, right. We don't... Bebop and Rocksteady had some terrible... You could just imagine Dean Corle just like laying out preylings and divinities just whistling and like grab acid with little boys. That was probably a great time for him.

I guarantee you. Yeah. I guarantee you it was the best time of his life. Now, Jimmy, he hated to be alone with Dean, but he would never tell anybody why. And nobody really pressed the issue because all Jimmy would do when people would ask why he never, ever wanted to work alone with Dean, he'd just hang his shoulder or just hang his head down and just kind of shrug his shoulders and go like, I don't know. And then go ahead and work with him alone anyway and said...

He has to always give me private trombone lessons. All right. Well, no, this poor child. Yeah, yeah. Jimmy was a poor boy. Like, yeah, yeah. Jimmy wasn't having a good time there. And this also wasn't the only hint of Dean's future behavior.

Dean, even though he was considered to be a nice decent guy, he did have a temper, but he kept it very tightly controlled and he kept it very private. Anytime he got angry, he'd retreat to the back of the factory to what eventually came to be known as the pouting room. And nobody knows what Dean did in the pouting room to calm himself down, but he'd always go in there, red faced and angry, and come right back out all smiles again. Did you hear outside the door, you were like, whatever he has to do to calm himself, it works.

And another sign that things were starting to go awry was Dean's newfound passion for digging. His, nobody, let's just put this out there for listeners in general. Well, if you get a buddy, I know Marcus, you love to dig. Marcus, this is his thing. But I'm just saying, but Marcus has always loved to dig because he grew up in piles of dirt. It's a lifelong passion.

Yes. But if someone randomly out of nowhere, your buddy's like, you know what I've been doing lately? A lot of trench digging. You didn't do that a couple of weeks ago. What happened? No, it's like I needed a reason to do it. But anyways, I got to show you my new spade.

It's diamond tip. Do you got to come over sometime? We're going to play some lunch. We're going to have some lunch. We're going to have some beers. We can play with my handcuffs. I'm there. I like the idea of playing lunch anyway.

This is my new LeBron, my LeBron Nike swoosh, my fucking shovel, playoff series shovel. Yeah. I like the idea of people getting together and like play pretending to be their favorite competitive eater. That'd be kind of fun. So Dean's first big digging project was to dig up the floor of his pouting room, board it over, and then cement that. Next, he started to dig holes out near White Oak Bayou, but only at night.

His explanation was that old candy apples drew bees and spoiled pecans were infested with weevils. No. And the best way to dispose of them was to bury them. Completely reasonable. See it is. I actually don't know. Technically, he's got Willy Wonka problems.

He does. These are Wonka problems. And Candy Apple woman Ruby Jenkins said about this, oh, he was real good about it. He did his burying without a word of complaint the way he did everything else. He had this big roll of clear plastic four or five foot wide, and he had sacks and sacks of cement and some other stuff back in his pouting room, but we never asked what he used it for. We never asked questions.

I don't know. I feel like it's just sometimes just go out there and ask a question. Just, you know what, at the same time, when I see somebody collecting bags of cement and having like big old strips of plastic sheeting and shovels and ropes, that's also when I stop asking questions. Yeah, that's kind of a good point. Because it's just like you just, because then you're implicated. Whatever's happened, once it gets to the point where he has purchased with a receipt, plastic

sheeting, and it has it all over his fucking pouting room, a room that everyone has agreed to call his pouting room. You know for a fact he is committing crimes, you just quit, quit the job, you don't come back. If I see anybody with those products, I say, making a gazebo, and then they just say whatever it is. Keep on walking. He's making a gazebo.

Because then they don't have to make up a lie. You give them the lie. Exactly. And because you'll see the relief being like, yes, that is what I'm trying. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Ben. So much. Yes, it is a gazebo.

So many nice people here in Texas making gazebo. So nice. You want to come back by my pouting room for some candy apples and to play with my handcuffs? I've got a job. I actually have to job. You know when I am busy building these gazebo, it's like this gazebo is getting bigger every week on these holes I've got to dig. Well, I just started jogging sometimes.

Well, the digging started around the time that Mary's fourth and fifth marriages came about both to a merchant seaman named Walt Coburn that Mary had met using a 1960s computer dating service. Really? Yeah. Yeah, they used to have these back in the 19s. They'd had those big room computers and they'd send out like apparently what they would do.

They would do punch cards. Yeah, they would do these. They would fill out these questionnaires. They would feed the questionnaire answers into a computer. And then a few days later, it would spit out your match. How flawed was she? She got a longshoreman, a seaman? It's so very funny when you read a man with a candy, several people all say the same thing

about Mary being like, I don't really see why someone's got to go to a computer to find a husband. You just don't be 500 pounds, but at the same time, you can just be 500 pounds. I mean, the computer gave her a man at sea. Yeah. What kind of husband is that? Well, apparently they matched up well because Walt was an extremely violent paranoid schizophrenic that Mary hitched up with after only knowing him for a month or two.

And it was only after the marriage that Mary found out that Walt was highly suspected of killing his first wife by hanging her, then staging it to look like a suicide. A little similar to Tinder. I don't like that, yeah. And Walt was so crazy and unstable that Mary hid in the candy factory for six weeks straight to escape him. And when he found out where she was, he sent her eight dozen flowers and hold her that she'd have the most beautiful funeral you ever saw unless she came back home.

Oh, I thought it was sweet, but then it was, but then it wasn't. No, I say the same thing to Natalie every night. Oh, I'm going to make you the most beautiful funeral, hopefully later than sooner. Keep it for the record. Fried eggs. Fried eggs. I know it's four in the morning, but I'm making fried eggs. That's very nice.

Six weeks at her job, why wouldn't he show up at the factory where she worked? Well, he's not a smart guy. He's not a smart man. No, he is absolutely not. So unfortunately, the Coral Candy Company did not survive the stresses that came along with Mary's marriage to a psychotic sailor. So Dean was forced to take a day job with Houston Power and Lighting Company. Man, the Macarena was going strong in the pouting room that night.

So Mary, who is looking to escape her ex-husband completely, moved to Colorado on the advice of another psychic. Now this is very surprising, and no one knows exactly why this came about, but Dean decided to not go with his mother in Colorado. He decided to stay in Houston. Well, it sounds like he already built his little structure. It sounds like he already built his perfect structure of essentially pedophile. Like, he knew what he was going to do by then.

Yeah, he had his plan. Yeah, because we talk about, like, when serial killers allow themselves the little things that make what they then do can be, like, against their will, it's like a thing that they have to do. Yeah. It's because he's now set it all up. It's like, well, now it's too late to go because I set up all these kids, I've been grooming everything.

Right. But that's another thing that, you know, makes Dean Coral so terrifying is that he is devious and he plans and he waits and he is patient. And he, the whole nice guy facade that he puts up, like, this was, like, he was doing it for a reason. It was calculated. It was extremely calculated to get people to trust him. Especially kids.

Yeah, especially kids. And within a couple years of Mary leaving, Dean would transform from just the nice guy with the candy to one of the most prolific and brutal serial killers the world has ever seen. We're going to get, next week, we're going to start getting into him meeting his accomplices, start getting into some of the first abductions and murders. And this case is, it's horrifying. This is one of the most horrifying cases that we're ever going to cover.

I will say, you know, this is maybe a ridiculous deposit, but I think that one thing I like when I read these things, when we go into these guys who kill lots of little boys, is that I'm really glad that I don't read some of the descriptions of the crime and then, like, spontaneously get hard. Right, right, right, right, right. Because that would end, that would just end my life. That would end all of our lives. Yeah, we couldn't do the show because, yeah, that would be bad.

Because I would make the secret grow. You would have to turn you in. Yeah. That's the whole thing. It's a relief. Yeah, it's an absolute relief. Yeah, but also this case to me shows that there may be some truth to the idea that John Wayne Gacy also had co-conspirators.

Yeah. We'll talk about it. So much more to discuss. Well, what a great intro to Dean Coral. Good background. Things will get more disgusting from here on out. Always. And we always promise that.

These are the monsters. We always promise that. And you know what? We always deliver. We do always deliver. Yeah. But we also believe that it is important to understand these monsters as the actual people that they are.

So in the details and the gruesome details are the thing that allow you to, I mean, you know, it's real. And it happened. Yeah. And these have been the monsters that live on the earth. And they are a bunch of them active right now. Your kids are probably hanging out with one right now. No, no, no, no.

It's fine. But do give a phone call. Do check in, please, on your children. All right, everyone. Well, thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for paying, giving cash to the Patreon. That's so sweet. Yeah.

So for our Patreon campaign, if you want to help subsidize the show, go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left. At the $5 level, you get a lot of free bonus content. I'm so sorry that last week we had the technical difficulties and we weren't able to put out a full episode. These things happen. It hasn't happened in years to us, but it's just the way things go sometimes when you put out a show every single week like we do.

And if you want to hear what we were able to salvage from the episode, you can go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left and pledge $5 a month and you'll gain access to that. We'll have new recordings up this week, too, as extra content for those of you that are Patreon supporters. I believe at the $20 level. A $5 level. A $5 level.

Yeah. And so that will also be good for your year heels. Yeah. Every week, we're going to try to put out bonus content every single week for our $5 and up donors. That's right. And thanks so much for supporting all the shows here on CCR. The network is just doing great.

Listen to Sex and Other Human Activities, page seven, the roundtable of Gentleman, Abel and his top hand is heating up with the politics. So that's kind of fun. And everything's been really going in the right direction. So follow us on Instagram at LP on the left. And if you want to, I guess, follow me as well at Dr. Fantasty. That's right. Follow Henry Zabrowski on Twitter at Henry Loves You.

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whatever t-shirts you want to order. And March 11th, Netflix is finally going to have quality content. Henry Zabrowski is starring in a special called Characters. The Characters. Yes. Tell everyone a little bit about it. I was given 30 minutes to do whatever the fuck it is I wanted. And sadly, they let me do that.

And it's pretty adventurous, I will say that. Henry was gracious enough to have a lot of your favorite people here from CCR involved in the project and a lot of different comedians that you've seen on the stage and screen. I'm going to say there's a lot of come in it and also a lot of my nude body. So if you enjoy any of these things, then you'll like that. I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry you like that. That's nice to apologize.

Yes. Just get it out of the way. Just get it done now. So yes, please watch and write into Netflix and tell them Satan commands them to give me an entirely original series order of my own characters. I love the idea. And finally, because our patron has been such a success, we're finally able to do our first live show out of town after Washington DC.

We are going to be doing Baltimore on March 5th at a venue called Autos. We're going to put out all of the details here very soon, but that's going to be us last podcast on the left. And the cowmen are also going to be traveling and doing that show as well. So that's Autos, March 5th in Baltimore. And the more people we get on our Patreon, the more we can travel out and do live shows, the further out we can travel. And again, if you guys want to give to us, that's patreon.com slash last podcast on the

left. And we're going to end this episode with a cowman song if you've never heard us before. Hey, a little bit of a taste. All right. Hail yourselves. Hey then. And hail Gee. ...

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