Pasadena Police Department
The Pasadena Police Department (Pasadena, Texas) is relevant to this vault as the agency that responded when Elmer Wayne Henley shot Dean Corll on August 8, 1973, initiating the investigation that revealed Corll's murder of at least 28 young males from 1970 to 1973.
The Pasadena Police Department is the municipal law enforcement agency for Pasadena, Texas, an industrial city of approximately 150,000 people located in the southeast Houston metropolitan area along the Houston Ship Channel. Pasadena is part of Harris County and is distinct from Pasadena, California.
Role in the Corll Investigation
The department's principal relevance to this vault is its initial response to the shooting of Dean Arnold Corll on August 8, 1973. Corll, a Houston area electrician, was shot and killed at his residence at 2020 Lamar Drive in Pasadena by seventeen-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley, one of his accomplices in a series of murders spanning 1970 to 1973.
Henley called the Pasadena Police Department at approximately 8:30 a.m. on August 8, 1973, to report that he had shot a man. Officers responding to the call found Corll's body. Henley, in initial statements to Pasadena officers, disclosed the existence of a boat storage facility on Silver Bell Street in southwest Houston where bodies of victims were buried. He subsequently disclosed additional burial sites.1
The scale of what Henley disclosed - at least 28 victims buried in multiple locations in Houston, Pasadena, and on High Island beach - quickly exceeded the Pasadena department's resources and jurisdiction. The Houston Police Department and Harris County authorities took over primary investigative responsibility, with the Houston Police Department eventually leading the exhumation and identification efforts. The Pasadena department retained jurisdiction over the initial homicide at 2020 Lamar Drive.
The case, known in press and public memory as the Houston Mass Murders or the Corll murders, remained the largest confirmed mass murder case in United States history until the discovery of John Wayne Gacy's crimes in Chicago in December 1978.1
Sources
- Gurwell, John K. Mass Murder in Houston. Cordovan Press, 1974. This is the primary contemporaneous account of the Corll murders and the investigation, written by a Houston journalist who covered the story. ↩
Local network
Pasadena Police Department's direct connections. Click any node to navigate, drag to pan, scroll (or pinch) to zoom. + 2‑hop expands the neighborhood one level further.