Serial killers and true crime

HOUSTON (FOX 26) -An infamous serial killer is up for parole. Elmer Wayne Henley participated in a plot that ultimately took the lives of almost 30 Houston-area teenagers. Many of them vanished from The Heights in the early 1970s. One of them was an 18 year old named Frank Aguirre. One month shy of graduation, Aguirre clocked out of his job at a Heights fast-food restaurant and vanished.”He was fun,” recalled his younger sister, Deborah Aguirre. “He was fun-loving, had a lot of friends. And Henley was one of them.”

Frank Aguirre didn’t know it, but Elmer Wayne Henley was helping an older man, Dean Corll, satisfy his sadistic desires.

 “[Henley] was the one that sought out the boys, brought them there,” said Houston victim advocate Andy Kahan, “knowing full well that they were going to be not only abducted, raped and tortured, but eventually murdered in a horrific manner.”

And so it continued. For three years.

Boys from the working class Heights would go missing. Many of them were friends of Elmer Wayne Henley.

 “Couple months after my brother disappeared, [Henley] actually did come back to our house,” remembered Deborah Aguirre. “[He] asked my mother, ‘Have you heard anything?’ He knew where my brother was. He helped bury him.”

Police eventually found them – bodies stacked upon bodies – but only after Henley shot Corll dead on the heels of an argument.

“Even though he got six life sentences in 1973 — in 1980, because of the way the statutes were written, he was eligible for parole,” said Kahan.

Life needs to mean life!

 It’s unprecedented, says Kahan, but this is the 20th time Henley has come up for parole.

Through a quirk in the law, he adds, while murderers can be set-off up to five years until their next review, capital murderers can only be set-off three years, max.

“Criminal justice and logic sometimes don’t meet. This is living proof of that.”

It’s a joyless hamster wheel for folks like Deborah Aguirre. They’re constantly battling to keep behind bars Henley and his accomplice, David Brooks.

 The victims’ relatives now have a Facebook page devoted to denying the killers parole.

I have tried to friend them.

And Aguirre has just a few questions she wants to ask the panel that will ultimately decide Henley’s fate, this summer.

• “Would you want this guy living next door to you?
• Do you have small children?
• Do you have little boys? Because that’s what he likes.”

She hopes to have her say in August at Henley’s review.

But it will give her no more joy than visiting her brother’s burial plot at Forest Park Lawndale.

Deborah at Frank’s grave

“It’s hard to go there,” said Deborah Aguirre. “That’s all we have left is a headstone.”

The Harris County Medical Examiner’s office told FOX 26 News that two victims of the murderous trio remain unidentified, to this day.

The ME’s office is actively seeking DNA samples from the families of young men who disappeared, here in Houston, between 1970 and 1973.

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