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  THE MAN WITH THE CANDY

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1974 by Jack Olsen

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole of in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Eve Metz

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data:

  Olsen, Jack

  The man with the candy; the story of the Houston mass murders.

  1. Murder-Houston, Texas Case studies. I. Title.

  HV6534.H8043 364.1′523′097641411 74-7260

  ISBN: 0-7432-1283-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2870-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1283-0

  FOR FLORENCE MAE DRECKSAGE OLSEN

  I love Texas, but she drives her people crazy. I’ve wondered whether it’s the heat, or the money, or maybe both. A republic of outlaws loosely allied with the United States, Texas survives, and survives quite well by breaking the rules. —Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty, 1973

  Two of Your Sons Are Missing

  IN HIS CANARY-YELLOW HOUSE on shady Twenty-seventh Street in The Heights, a worn-out section of Houston, Fred Hilligiest got up long before the sun. A gaunt, wind-dried man of forty-nine, he striped streets for the city of Houston on weekdays and ran a small painting business in his spare time. This morning he had to be on the job at five; the Gulf sun would catch him soon enough and sear another layer of brown into his deep-lined face, as dark and dry as old parchment.

  Dorothy Hilligiest, a radiant, pudgy woman with china-doll hands and a small voice to match, saw her husband off and began to work through a list of chores. In a few days, the family would begin its annual vacation to the riverside town of Kerrville and there were still errands to run—to the bank, the car wash, the grocery, the hardware store, to Sears for the last few pints of paint to finish trimming the windows. The Hilligiests worked on their house endlessly, landscaping and painting and decorating till the little bungalow gleamed like a model home on its corner lot. The fact that The Heights was generally considered run-down did not discourage the Hilligiests. A family could live in only one house at a time, and theirs was more than adequate. Others had weakened and lost heart, but Fred and Dorothy, deeply religious Catholics, intended to complete their ordained task of raising a family within these familiar walls.

  Two children were already married and gone; three sons and a daughter remained, and by the time Mrs. Hilligiest returned from her first batch of errands in town, they were up and babbling about the vacation to come. It was May 29, 1971, Memorial Day weekend blazing hot in Houston. There was talk among the three boys about going to the pool at the Bohemian lodge to perfect a few strokes they would use later at the river. On the previous year’s visit to Kerrville, they had met a couple of young water nymphs who had impressed and outswum them; this year would be different.

  David, the family’s blond-haired court jester and jazz drummer, called a friend to suggest a swim, but the friend was busy. By lunchtime, David still had not been able to round up a swimming companion for himself—being thirteen, he did not relish accompanying his younger brothers—and he ate his customary skimpy meal, a hot dog and a glass of root beer. As usual, Dorothy Hilligiest worried about him. He was a small boy with delicate features, five feet three inches tall and not yet a hundred pounds in weight, and he ate like a gerbil. “Don’t worry,” Fred Hilligiest had told his wife. “He’s as strong as a li’l ol’ bull.” Sometimes the boy earned a dollar an hour working for his father’s striping company and pulled a man’s load without complaint.

  After lunch, eleven-year-old Gregory and nine-year-old Stanley left for the pool, a mile away. David stayed in the house, looking to his mother “sort of lost,” and then announced, “I think I’ll go with them.”

  Mrs. Hilligiest felt better; David would watch over his brothers at the pool. She heard him call “Wait up!” but then he said, “Oh, never mind,” and began walking slowly through the alley that led to Twenty-sixth Street. She made a mental note that his blue bell-bottom pants would have to be passed down to Gregory; they were at least two inches too short. The rest of his clothes fit neatly: a blue plaid shirt and nearly new tennis shoes. He was wearing his bathing suit underneath.

  An hour later, the phone rang. It was Gregory, asking his mother to drive to the park and pick up him and Stanley; the pool had been too crowded. “Well, where’s David?” Mrs. Hilligiest asked.

  “David?” Gregory answered. “He’s not here. He didn’t come with us.”

  Mrs. Hilligiest was surprised. It was unlike any of her sons to take off without telling her where they were going. She and David had had plenty of conversations about that. But it was still afternoon and she decided that he must have happened on a ball game or a friend, or even gone to the pool by himself. Later he would call and put her mind at ease.

  When Fred Hilligiest arrived home and flipped open the first beer of his precious evening hours, David still had not arrived, nor was he home by the time Dorothy was ready to serve dinner. Fred called the lodge and was told that his son had not signed the pool registry that afternoon. He called a few neighbors and learned that David had been seen by no one except a boy who had exchanged brief greetings with him about 2 P.M., right after he had left home. While dinner went cold, Fred and Dorothy perused their son’s room and found nothing out of the ordinary. His life savings of twenty dollars were in a drawer. His wallet, watch and ring were there, his clothes neatly hung in the closet. Wherever he had gone, he had planned no lengthy stay. The parents knew that something was wrong. Another thirteen-year-old might come home for dinner an hour or two late or not show up till the next day or even the next week without panicking his parents—depending on how the household was run—but an hour’s lateness by any of the Hilligiest children was cause for alarm. Dorothy and Fred began a sweep of the neighborhood, checking with anyone who might have seen the boy, and calling his name. Periodically they returned to the house, to see if he had come back or telephoned, and then resumed their search in the family’s Ford Galaxy.

  At three in the morning, they began checking hospitals, but there was no record of the boy. At sunup, Dorothy Hilligiest called the police to ask for a city-wide lookout. The sleepy voice on the other end of the line told her not to worry, that David was probably staying overnight with a friend. “Boys do that all the time,” she was told.

  “No, sir!” Mrs. Hilligiest said firmly. “That cain’t be. Our chil’ren have never been allowed to stay overnight without permission. We always know where they are, even in the daytime. It’s just not David’s nature to worry us like this.”

  The policeman advised her that times had changed, that boys were running away from the best of homes nowadays, and said he would have to list David in the runaway classification. No, there would be no official search for the child, but if he was spotted during school hours, he would be stopped and questioned. That was all the law allowed. A runaway was not a criminal.

  Mrs. Hilligiest was aghast. In her an
guished mind, she had imagined teams of detectives coming to the neighborhood, running down every clue, checking out every tip, and squads of uniformed policemen swarming the streets in an effort to retrieve something so precious as a son. “That’s all you’ll do?” she asked, incredulous. “You won’t come look for him?”

  “No, ma’am,” the policeman said. “That’s not our procedure.” He explained that there was only a light crew on duty this Sunday morning, and when Dorothy insisted that at least a few of them be spared, he advised her to call back the next day.

  She was crying when she put down the phone. “David’s a human being!” she told Fred, himself red-eyed and exhausted from worry. “He’s a child! And they won’t even look for him.”

  Neither of the Hilligiests could sleep. They fed the other children as they arose, and then climbed back into the family car and cruised the narrow streets of The Heights, calling David’s name at every corner, peering down the alleyways of small factories a few blocks from their home, inquiring in pizza parlors and fried-chicken restaurants as they opened, interrogating neighbors on the way home from church. It was late in the day before they picked up their first clue: David had been seen the afternoon before with a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Gregory Malley Winkle.

  The widow Selma Geraldine “Gerry” Winkle lived with her two sons in a five-thousand-dollar orange-sided frame house with walls akimbo, like most walls in The Heights. She was a tall brunette of forty-nine, with thin patrician nose and glowing skin that she anointed with cream every night before going to sleep. “People always laughed and teased me about it,” she told her close friends, “but I just can’t sleep without creamin’ it off.”

  Mrs. Winkle had been a sailor’s wife, following her husband all the way to the Philippines, bearing his children and seeing the world like the old song about the Navy. A treasured snapshot showed her in Oriental pajamas, lifting a few inches of pant leg to expose a slender ankle. “Oh, don’t look at that!” she told friends, laughing girlishly. A larger picture, improved by delicate tinting, showed Harold “Wink” Winkle, first-class petty officer, U.S.N., in a wide grin and a sailor suit. That was before he was gripped by Huntington’s chorea, a crippling nervous disorder that kept him bedridden and spasmodically suicidal for five years, a nightmare that ended for Gerry Winkle in divorce. “Wink” Winkle died soon after, and bitter relatives disowned his former wife. By that time there were two sons, Malley and Benjamin, and Mrs. Winkle went to work emptying bedpans and scrubbing floors in a Houston hospital while she studied to become a practical nurse.

  On a total income that never exceeded two dollars and thirty-one cents an hour, plus an occasional part-time job when she could find one, Geraldine Winkle struggled to bring up her two lively boys. When she made a down payment on the house on Twenty-sixth Street in 1965, most of the paint was flaked off and the insides were riddled with rot. She scraped and repainted, shingled the roof, paneled the tiny rooms with ash, and installed homey touches: a false fireplace with stacked logs, bowls of artificial flowers and wax roses, a gold mirror bracketed by scarlet candles in gilt sconces. She wanted the house to be attractive to her sons, to contain them happily while she worked at the hospital from early afternoon till nearly midnight. She was mother and father. “When it was time for discipline, I’d say, ‘This is comin’ straight from your daddy, ’cause he’s not here to do it himself.’ When I spanked them, I was their daddy, and when I cooked their meals, I loved them as their mother.” Sometimes she worried about how the simple house looked to her sons’ friends, till one day Malley, barely in his teens, reassured her. Proudly she recited the quote to friends: “‘Mother, I wish you’d stop worrying. I’m proud to bring children in this house ’cause you’ve always got the smell of something good in the oven and a nice clean house. In some of my friends’ places, everything is upside down and you can’t even find the beds ’cause of the junk on ’em.’”

  Slowly Malley had taken over the role of the family’s male protector, watching after his little brother Ben and trying to help his mother with the finances. From the age of ten, he worked: first on a paper route, then as a busboy, a janitor, a handyman mowing lawns and washing windows, anything that would produce a few dollars for his mother. He left comforting notes:

  Mother, I went over to a friend’s house. I’ll be back after-while. Love Malley.

  He remembered special occasions:

  Dear mother this $10 well $5 of it is for your mothers day gift, not for bills, for something that you want.

  Spend it on yourself!

  This $5 doesn’t come out of the money that I owe you, I still owe you $25.

  This is your mothers day gift.

  P.S. I didn’t know what to buy you. I love you!

  One summer he went to a public camp and dispatched a letter reminiscent of the wry satire of Allan Sherman:

  Dear Mother I hope every thang is alright there. I am having fun at camp. I am going to go shoping after I get to Houston and then I will be home. One of my best friends got bit buy a copper-head snake when he was going on and highk. Give Ben a kiss for me. I love you. Malley W. xxxxxooooooo.

  He was a handsome boy, with blond wavy hair, oversize blue eyes with long lashes and thick brows, and an easy, wide grin that he bestowed on everyone, as though there was something hugely amusing about his fellow man.

  Privately he suffered the agonies of youth. “He used to get hair straightener like the colored people use,” his mother said, “and work on his hair by the hour, ’cause he wanted it like all the other kids.’ But he couldn’t get it straight, and he was furious.” By his sixteenth birthday, Malley had grown to five feet seven inches, only two inches shorter than his mother, with a slender build accented by broad shoulders. Little Benjamin, eight years younger, lionized his “Bubba.” Mrs. Winkle said, ‘I’d take Ben to the baby-sitter before I went to work, and he’d run right back home to Bubba. One day I took him to the sitter and a little while later I eased back through the front door and there was Ben with the TV on and a dog in his lap that he was pattin’ on the head, and he had a glass of milk and a sandwich and he was sittin’ in the rocker relaxin’, and pretty soon he picked up a plastic pipe I’d bought him and he puffs on the pipe like a li’l ol’ gray-headed man. I was gonna spank him, but I had to laugh.”

  The incident made Gerry Winkle realize that she could no longer depend on the inexpensive baby-sitters of the neighborhood, and she laid plans to send Ben twenty miles away to Boy’s Harbor, a foster home operated by the Shriners. By now both sons had begun to squirm out from under her control; from the time she went to work in the early afternoons, Malley was completely his own boss, and he was traveling with a gang of older boys. One night Gerry Winkle came home to find that her son had been arrested for stealing one of the precious ten-speed racers that every child in the neighborhood coveted.

  “The police kept him in jail for about a month,” Mrs. Winkle recalled. “They said I could take him home if I wanted to, ’cause it wasn’t Malley’s fault. It was the other boys with him that really stole the bike, and all Malley did was ride it. But the police said the sooner he learned the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, the better off he’d be. They said, ‘Miz Winkle, he has the chance to be the President of the United States if he learns his lesson young.’ They were so impressed by him. They loved him!”

  Malley was put on juvenile probation and returned home. In an outburst of boyish ingenuousness, he admitted that he had smoked marijuana two or three times, drunk a little, and sniffed glue and acrylic paint, but he swore to reform. Gerry Winkle forgave her firstborn son. “A kid that’s had it tough all his life, how can you not forgive him? He never had a chance, with no father and all.”

  On a Saturday afternoon soon after the bicycle incident, David Hilligiest knocked on the door just as Mrs. Winkle was getting ready to leave for her job at the hospital. She was surprised to see him. She knew that Mrs. Hilligiest was an extremely protective mother who lately had frow
ned on the close friendship between the two boys.

  David wanted to go swimming, and Malley asked his mother for eighty cents to get into the Bohemian lodge pool. Mrs. Winkle gave him a dollar and a half, but Malley insisted on handing back fifty cents; “that’s the kind of guy he was.” When she saw the two boys last, Malley was wearing gray-and-white-striped swimming trunks and a towel.

  That night when Geraldine Winkle came home from work at eleven-thirty, the telephone was ringing as she stepped into the hot, dark house. “Mother,” Malley’s voice said, “I called ’cause I knew you’d be worried.”

  “Malley!” Mrs. Winkle said. “Where in the world are you?”

  For a moment the line went silent. She heard her son whisper to someone else, and a muffled response.

  “We’re in Freeport, Mother,” Malley said. “I called to let you know where I was at.”

  Freeport was a popular swimming and surfing spot on the Gulf of Mexico, and Mrs. Winkle was thoroughly disturbed that her son had gone so far. “What are you doin’ out there?” she said. “What in the world are you doin’ there? Malley, you know better. You’ve never—”

  “I’m out here with the kids.”

  “What kids?”

  “Oh, just the kids,” Malley answered.

  Mrs. Winkle said she certainly hoped there were adults along, but Malley said no. “I’m just with some kids. Joe and the kids.”

  “Are there any girls?”

  “Mama, there’s just a buncha boys and we’re havin’ a swim out here.”

  Gerry Winkle asked how he had managed to get to Freeport, sixty miles away, and Malley said the “kids” had driven him. He said the others were out now, but any minute someone would return and drive him home to Houston.

  Mrs. Winkle said, “You know better than to be out this late.” She hung up the phone.

  For hours, the troubled woman fought off sleep. She remembered a time when Malley had gone to the Astroworld amusement park, eight miles away, and become so enthralled that he had missed the last bus home. He walked all the way, or so he told her when he came in at 3 A.M. Poor kid, she thought, I had to rub his feet and put him to bed. He was almost crying, he was so worn out. Well, at least he won’t have to walk this time. Drowsily, she wondered why Malley had had to ask someone else where he was. He knew Freeport backwards. Could he have been blindfolded? She was letting her imagination run away.