In Houston in the late 60s and early 70s, a peaceful and tranquil American city, a serial murder that shocked the whole country and the world, the demon and his two young accomplices committed the most evil crimes in the history of human crime.
Chapter 1: The Demon's Early Life
Dean Cole was born in 1939 to a conflicted family in Indiana that was always at odds. Still in his infancy, Dean's parents divorced. Interestingly, a few years later, when World War II ended, the divorced couple reunited again, and Dean's mother, Mary, gave birth to her second son, Stanley. However, Dean's father, Arnold Cole, despised his children and often punched and kicked them at them for their small mistakes.
Dean Cole (left) with mother Mary and brother Stanley
A few more years later, the couple separated again, Arnold Cole abandoned the children completely, and mother Mary had to work alone to support the family. The frail Dean often missed school, and the Dean brothers later moved to Texas to live because their mother remarried. In Texas, Dean's mother and stepfather began to run a candy company, a business that soon became a source of livelihood for the family, and Dean generously distributed candy samples to children of the same age as a means for him to make new friends.
In 1964, at the age of 25, Dean enlisted in the army when he suffered from heart disease. In the army, Dean had relationships with other soldiers. Dean hated military life, and shortly after joining the army, Dean applied to leave the army on the grounds that the family's candy business was in desperate need of help, because of his behavior in the army, and the army even held an honor ceremony for him. In 1969, Dean, who returned to Texas, was depressed and sensitive. Soon, relying on the electrical repair skills he learned in the military, Dean found a new job at the Houston Electric Company.
Dean Cole during his service
In 1969, Dean met 14-year-old boy David Brooks. Brooks was born into a troubled family, his father was an alcoholic, and he frequently abused his family. After his parents divorced, no one seemed to care about Brooks' life, and the wandering teenager met Dean through the candy store. Unlike his father, Dean never resented Brooks' shortcomings, but instead allowed Dean to live in his apartment when Brooks ran away from home, and gradually Brooks saw Dean as a substitute for his biological father. In the late '60s, Dean began handing out free candy to teenagers like Brooks and hosting frequent and exciting parties, during which time Dean began to show sadistic tendencies.
David Brooks, during the trial
One day in 1970, Brooks, who stumbled into Dean's apartment, bumped into Dean naked, dean sternly questioned why Brooks hadn't informed himself of coming in advance, and shouted that he was looking for fun, Brooks glimpsed two boys in the bedroom tied to a plank. The scene was awkward, and Dean acquiesced to Brooks' departure. A few days later, Dean gave Brooks a used car and told him that brooks had seen two boys sold to a organization in California that day, and Dean wanted Brooks to help him kidnap the boys, saying that he was holding a hostage to a California juvenile trafficking network and that he would pay Brooks $200 if he helped himself abduct boys, if it was really good looking boys then he would offer a higher honorarium. Soon after, Dean corrected his statement, telling Brooks that the two boys he had seen that day had been killed by him.
The two boys Brooks saw were once suspected to be Jimmy Glass and Danny Yates in later investigations. The pair lived in Spring Branch, Houston, when they were both 14 years old. One night in December, two teenagers traveled to The Heights with Jimmy's father and brother Willie to attend a church anti-drug youth rally and liturgy called the Temple of the Gospel, with Jimmy and Danny sitting in the front row. Many years later, when Willie, a retired 64-year-old firefighter, recalled the scene, she said, "In between ceremonies, I saw them walk up the aisle as if they were going to the bathroom. That's it. They disappeared into thin air. ”
Jimmy, the son of a mining engineer, was a handsome teenager dressed fashionably, with shirts printed with huge motifs, wide lapels, leather necklaces embellished with beads, and a leather jacket with tassels hanging from the sleeves. He brushed his thick brown hair gently over his eyebrows, fascinating the girls. Danny's father was a worker at Union Electric, and Danny was just as pretty, with curly brown hair, blue eyes, and a face with pink fluff," recalled his then-girlfriend, Betty. Betty, now 54, lives in a small town far from Houston in Mississippi, where she married and has a teenage son, but she still has two pictures of Danny in a jewelry box, "He's my first love," she said. "The first time he kissed me, we were in the laundry room of the apartment building, and it was a kiss that girls will never forget."
To this day, no one knows how Dean met the two boys that day and persuaded them to leave with him. Danny's sister Cindy said Danny and Jimmy once talked about a man, and she later realized that the description of the man was very similar to Dean's, who had taken them to the cinema and bought them beer.
However, the police did nothing about the disappearance of the two boys. At the time, the tracking of the disappearance of the Houston teenager was the responsibility of different police officers, and when the police officer who received reports of Jimmy and Danny's disappearance learned that Jimmy had a precedent of arguing with his father and running away from home with friends, he characterized Jimmy's disappearance as running away from home. The police officer who received the report of Danny's disappearance also characterized Danny's disappearance as running away from home because he had heard that someone had suspected of having seen Danny somewhere. The work processes and perfunctory attitudes of the police department are shocking, and in the United States in the 1970s, two teenagers who disappeared at the same time were dealt with so rashly, and there was a serious lack of collaboration between police officers and police departments.
When parents protested, the police said flippantly that all kinds of children would run away from home, hitchhiking across the country on the highway, into different neighborhoods, and become part of the "hippie" movement. Investigators said a formal search could not be conducted unless there was clear evidence of a violation. They simply promised the families that if their son was caught wandering the streets, they would be told to go back to school, and that was it.
Desperate Jimmy and Danny's parents, who are left to look for their children on their own, drive around houston every weekend to search for clues about missing teenagers, posting missing notices on the streets and spending money to advertise in local newspapers in which they promise Jimmy and Danny to buy motorcycles for them whenever they get home. Danny's sister Cindy recalls: "Once someone told our father that he saw Danny somewhere in Mexico and his father drove directly from the United States to Mexico. When he returned empty-handed, I found that he was about to collapse, and he kept blaming himself for being too harsh on Danny." It wasn't until the summer of 1973 that Jimmy and Danny's family learned that all their searches were doomed to be in vain, and that the two boys had long since been killed by Dean.
Jimmy and Danny
After Jimmy and Danny were killed, Dean moved to one Mangum Road apartment, five miles northwest of the Highlands, and on January 30, 1971, he struck again. But this time he had Brooks as a helper. He and Brooks drove up to the heights and saw two boys, 15-year-old Donald Waldrop, and his 13-year-old brother Jerry, on their way to the bowling alley. The lives of the two ended in Dean's apartment, where Brooks said in his confession that he saw Dean strangle them and that Donald was supposed to celebrate his 16th birthday the next day.
Although the Woldrop brothers' home is only half a mile from the church where Jimmy and Danny disappeared, police still haven't investigated. The Waldrop brothers' father, Everett, a burly, divorced construction worker, later told the Houston Chronicle that he filled out missing persons reports at the police station and then "camped in front of the police station for 8 months," but they said only, "Why are you here?" You know your child is running away from home."
The sin could have stopped here, and Brooks only had to go to the police station and confess everything, but he didn't do that. The out-of-school teenager didn't have the courage and morality to face everything, in fact, he had spent more time with Dean than with his family. In return for his loyalty to Brooks, Dean bought a green Corvette for Brooks as a gift for his 16th birthday, and Donald lost the chance to greet his 16th birthday forever. The bodies of him and his brother Jerry were wrapped in plastic bags and buried under Dean's dark, gloomy dock.
On March 9 of the same year, Dean and Brooks found 15-year-old Randall Harvey, who was riding his bicycle to work at an FINA station. Brooks knew Harvey, and it was probably Brooks who persuaded the teenager to throw his bike into the back seat of Dean's car and promised to give him a ride. Dean took Harvey to his apartment, raped, tortured, and finally shot him in the head. Two and a half months later, they followed two boys north of the highlands as they headed to a nearby swimming pool. One of them is Marley Winkel, 16, who worked with his mother in Dean's candy factory a few years ago. The other was 14-year-old David Hilligister, whom David knew Dean, who had nostalgia for parties at Dean's candy shop as a child and often stayed there for too long until his mother rushed in to urge him home.
When police heard that Marley had called his mother on the night of his disappearance, saying that he and his friends were swimming at the beach, they again flippantly characterized the teenager's disappearance as running away from home. David's parents, who disappeared together, didn't buy it, not believing their son would say goodbye without warning, as the family was preparing for a scenic vacation the next day, and David had packed up his clothes and put $20 on his cabinet for the trip. The two parents immediately set off for the beach that Marley had mentioned on the night of his disappearance, showing photographs of the two teenagers to visitors and local residents on the beach, to nothing.
Marley's family printed 500 search notices, promised a $1,000 reward, and even hired private investigators to investigate the disappearance of two teenagers. When they learned that the boy might have been trafficked to a venue, Marley and David's family waited outside the site, hoping to see the two teenagers in and out, all in vain. Because Marley and David had been strangled in Dean's apartment and buried under Dean's dock.
Weeks passed, and David's mother kept calling the police to report any news she heard and pleading with police to question potential witnesses. One day, she told police she knew Marley had a friend, the CapeLymouth GTX, and she said she saw a GTX car with the license plate TMF 724 speeding nearby. If even a police officer bothered to investigate the matter, he would have found that the car belonged to Dean. However, none of the police investigated.
Chapter 2: The Trio of Sins (To be continued... ）