Dean Corll’s torture board.

A 33-year-old Houston electrician named Dean Corll, whose mass murder of boys was brought to light when he was shot dead by an accomplice. On 8 August 1973 the 18-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley told the police that he had killed Corll in his house at Pasadena. Corll, a homosexual with sadistic tastes, had been shot 6 times with a .22 pistol. His house had a torture room in which the furniture consisted of a wooden board with handcuffs fitted at each corner. Henley told of Corll’s dope parties, and how he sodomized boys on his torture board before killing them. Reference to the names of two boys known to be missing led the police to a boat-shed rented by Corll in Houston. The bodies of seventeen boys were recovered from under the floor of the shed, and ten more were found at two other burial sites. These corpses represented the largest mass murder in America’s history at that time. Henley said that Corll, whom he had known for about two years, paid him $200 a head to procure boys for him. Corll loved to play with children; he took them for rides in his van and gave them candy. He was known as ‘a real good neighbour and a real good guy’. Corll arranged children’s parties to help him and his accomplices, Henley and another youth, set up prospective victims for his torture room. He strangled and shot the boys, after indulging in sexual abuse and mutilation. But the murder mill ground to a halt in Pasadena, when Corll lost his domination over his procurers and was shot dead by Henley. Henley told how after a dope session with Corll woke up on the torture board, he talked his way out and when released, he shot Corll dead. Wayne Henley, who admitted killing some of the victims, was tried for murder in July 1974. Found guilty, he was sentenced to six 99-year terms of imprisonment. His killing of Dean Corll was judged to be a justifiable homicide.

The serial murder case of Randy Kraft is distinct for several reasons. The first is that he murdered only males, both straight and gay. Kraft foraged for many of his victims at gay bars after he and his male lover had fallen out in an argument. As a result, it could be possible that Kraft’s rage at his victims was a derivative of the abandoning boyfriend, and the targeted victims was conceptualized on a more impersonal level. A sadistic serial murderer, Kraft’s crime scene actions were predominantly organized. For example, it was determined later by the police investigators that Kraft brought some of his victims back to his apartment, drugged them, and proceeded to torture them until they passed out and died. Kraft seemed to find the intentional treatment of his victims as vehicles intensely gratifying, and he took pleasure in their torment, anguish, distress, helplessness, and suffering. Kraft’s assaults on his male victims involved bondage, torture, and ritualistic acts. Kraft tortured many of his victims by inserting small, slim objects into their urethrae. Since Kraft did not interact with his victims’ bodies for a great deal of time, his actions were primarily impersonal. Kraft’s obsession with fetishistic toys, such as dildos, was also clear. In fact, when the police searched Kraft’s apartment, they found in a bedside cabinet a can of cooking oil along with assorted dildos that varied in widths and lengths.

The Murder of Rasputin - On December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin’s influence over the Tsaritsa had made him a threat to the empire, a group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the right-wing politician Vladimir Purishkevich apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs’ Moika Palace  by intimating that Yusupov’s wife, Princess Irina, would be present and receiving friends. (In point of fact, she was away in the Crimea.)The group led him down to the cellar, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a massive amount of cyanide. According to legend, Rasputin was unaffected, although Vasily Maklakov had supplied enough poison to kill five men. Determined to finish the job, Prince Yusupov became anxious about the possibility that Rasputin might live until the morning, leaving the conspirators no time to conceal his body. Yusupov ran upstairs to consult the others and then came back down to shoot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell, and the company left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to get one, and while at the palace, he went to check on the body. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes and lunged at Yusupov. He grabbed Yusupov, ominously whispered in his ear, “you bad boy,” and attempted to strangle him. At that moment, however, the other conspirators arrived and fired at Rasputin. After being hit three times in the back, he fell once more. As they neared his body, the party found that, remarkably, he was still alive, struggling to get up. They clubbed him into submission. Some accounts say that his killers also sexually mutilated him, severing his penis. After binding his body and wrapping him in a carpet, they threw him into the icy Neva River. He broke out of his bonds and the carpet wrapping him, but drowned in the river.

Three days later, Rasputin’s body, poisoned, shot four times, badly beaten, and drowned, was recovered from the river. An autopsy established that the cause of death was drowning. His arms were found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice. It was found that he had indeed been poisoned, and that the poison alone should have been enough to kill him. There is a report that after his body was recovered, water was found in the lungs, supporting the idea that he was still alive before submersion into the partially frozen river.

A 33-year-old Houston electrician named Dean Corll, whose mass murder of boys was brought to light when he was shot dead by an accomplice. On 8 August 1973 the 18-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley told the police that he had killed Corll in his house at Pasadena. Corll, a homosexual with sadistic tastes, had been shot 6 times with a .22 pistol. His house had a torture room in which the furniture consisted of a wooden board with handcuffs fitted at each corner. Henley told of Corll’s dope parties, and how he sodomized boys on his torture board before killing them. Reference to the names of two boys known to be missing led the police to a boat-shed rented by Corll in Houston. The bodies of seventeen boys were recovered from under the floor of the shed, and ten more were found at two other burial sites. These corpses represented the largest mass murder in America’s history at that time. Henley said that Corll, whom he had known for about two years, paid him $200 a head to procure boys for him. Corll loved to play with children; he took them for rides in his van and gave them candy. He was known as ‘a real good neighbour and a real good guy’. Corll arranged children’s parties to help him and his accomplices, Henley and another youth, set up prospective victims for his torture room. He strangled and shot the boys, after indulging in sexual abuse and mutilation. But the murder mill ground to a halt in Pasadena, when Corll lost his domination over his procurers and was shot dead by Henley. Henley told how after a dope session with Corll woke up on the torture board, he talked his way out and when released, he shot Corll dead. Wayne Henley, who admitted killing some of the victims, was tried for murder in July 1974. Found guilty, he was sentenced to six 99-year terms of imprisonment. His killing of Dean Corll was judged to be a justifiable homicide.