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CRIMINAL MOTIVATION FOR PEDERASTY: RAGE
BY PARKER ROSSMAN

 

The following is one of the sections of the fourth chapter of Dr. Parker Rossman’s Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys (originally published in 1976), entitled "Why Do They?", introduced here, and intended to explain why in general some men desire boys, though in practice limited in its evidence to what was then recent in countries with a Judaeo-Christian tradition.

 

Criminal Motivation: Rage

A number of pederasts with Houston connections have discussed the case of Dean Corell, who sexually abused and murdered many teenage boys in the Houston area.[1] What motivated him? Was he a pederast? Gay-homosexuals have rushed in to disclaim any relationship between the murders and homosexuality, pointing out that heterosexuality would not have been blamed had he raped and murdered girls. In the pederast context, however, no such easily dismissed implication is possible. Some factors in the case which are circulating as rumors through pederast networks may tend to throw some light on these bizarre and horrible crimes.

Dean Corll, ca. 1960

Up to the time of the disclosure of the murders, Houston was a city of extensive pederast prostitution, where hundreds of young boys were on the prowl every day to solicit men, largely through hitchhiking.[2] If the Houston police knew, they either ignored it or lacked adequate resources to cope with it, for the problem was so far out of hand that no simple solution was possible. Young boys from Houston hitchhiked to other cities, even as far away as the East and West Coasts, and a good many of them were subjects of pornographic films for sale as far away as Denmark. Some parents were so lax as not to care, and some parents even accepted money for permission to use their sons in pornography. A pederast visitor to Houston could make one phone call and be offered a choice of boys for a night, for a week end, or for a long trip.

Dean Corell, the murderer of many of these boys, was apparently not a sexual adventurer who patronized the amateur boy prostitutes of the city, but was at first simply an arrested-adolescent-type who enjoyed the company of boys. Initially gentle and kind, he was horrified at his discovery that the boys he was fond of were “hustling.” His horror, however, was not directed at the boys or their customers, so much as at himself. He was infuriated to the point of rage with boys who sexually aroused him, at his being tempted; for it was typical of people he knew to have a compulsive homophobia which scorned and detested any type of homosexuality as the most vile of sins. To admit even to one’s self such homosexual temptations was like admitting that one was a devil. Corell had high moral principles with regard to women and sex, which made his own sexual arousal and temptation by boys even more frightening - as when he tried to lecture a young “hustler” that he had known since the youngster was ten or eleven years old and whom he had always thought of as a sweet and innocent boy. Stunned is the right word to use for the changes wrought in Corell’s psychological stance when the boy defended his right to take money for deviant sex, and accused Corell of being a “fag” like his customers. Perhaps the boy shouted the accusations out of intuition or perhaps as a weapon to fight back against someone who was much larger. In any case Corell, though perhaps never really a conscious pederast, was wounded by the boy’s probing at a sore point. Corell did not know that many men have such temptations and learn to manage and control them. Apparently he became obsessed with the notion that he was “bewitched by evil.”

Jerry Lynn Waldrop, 13, raped and strangled with his brother by Corll on 30 January 1971

The newspapers suggest that Corell sought out, or sent others to hunt for, innocent boys for his sadist amusements. At first, however, his cunning and rage may have been directed only at boy prostitutes. This explanation of his behavior is considered to be only partly true, however, because it is too simple. If he later began a systematic policy of torturing, shaming, and killing boys he thought to be prostituting themselves this happened only after he had killed the first one more or less accidentally. One rumor says that he had tied the boy up simply to make him tell the truth about which boys had seduced the victim into hustling.” The boy’s refusal to blame anyone infuriated Corell and the first killing may have happened when the chair the boy was tied to was knocked over. In any case, once Corell knew himself to be a murderer, his awareness of himself as a “devil” was confirmed. It was then much easier for him to set out deliberately to hunt down and murder the boys he felt to be corrupting innocent youngsters, or those who were ‘bewitching’ Corell himself.

How, then, could it happen that he also began to murder his young friends? His affection for innocent boys turned into sadistic rage - as a result of the impact of this experience on his personality - whenever he saw signs of behavior which he interpreted as sexually arousing. Corell’s mother knew of his indignation about homosexuality and of his disapproval of “sex play for fun,” and that he saw red at anything he interpreted as a homosexual overture. As his obsession grew he began to molest boys to see if they were aroused by homosexual acts; for, if so, this would be proof that they were evil and had to be destroyed for the sake of the world and humanity.

Roy Eugene Bunton murdered at 19 by Corll with two shots in his head, August 1972

Evidently Corell could not cope with his own pederast tendencies and suppressed desires, especially the direction they now took as a result of the torture murders in which he found needed sexual and emotional satisfaction. Yet he kept moving to get away from boys. Was he running away from his murderous temptations? Or from the more innocent boys he liked and didn’t want to involve? When he finally accepted his homosexual tendencies, he made some unsuccessful efforts to relate sexually to adult men, and he evidently continued to blame his homosexuality - his devil character – on the seduction of the young. Had he himself ever been seduced? It is quite probable that he never had any happy or authentically pleasurable sexual intercourse. He was puzzled and sad about that and read a good deal in an effort to understand sex. He was not prepared by education or point of view to accept his pederasty, and nothing he had read or heard helped him accept it and cope with it, so he concluded that he was a “monster.” He not only accepted emotionally this self-interpretation but he also acted it out in his murders. His problem, therefore, was not so much homosexuality as being morbidly anti-homosexual. His confirmed identity was not “I am queer” or “I am a pederast who is erotically attracted to boys,” but “I am a monster and the demon in me can be exorcised only by destroying the corruptors.” The process by which he condemned himself was similar to that described by Sartre,[3] who portrayed an adolescent resolved to become “the evil person society says I am.” Corell may well have been seduced and motivated by his own homophobia.

 

[1] Dean Arnold Corll (1939-73) abducted raped and murdered twenty-eight youths aged 13 to 20 between 1970 and 1973, before being killed by his own teenage accomplice.

[2] Jack Olsen, The Man With the Candy (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1974) gives a somewhat different interpretation of the Houston murders, but does confirm the difficulties of the police (p. 240), the lax and naive attitude of parents, the “hustling” of the boys (“They were male whores,” said one policeman), and how youngsters involved were in a semi-underground to conceal sex and drug activities (p. 64, etc.) [Author’s footnote]

[3] “Sartre (1951)” is the author’s footnote, but either it is erroneous or he omitted the book from his bibliography, but it sounds like what is meant is Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Childhood of a Leader” in The Wall, New York: New Directions, 1948.

 

 

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