In 1973, 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley, the subject of HBO’s new true crime documentary The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, got into a fight with his friend, 33-year-old Dean Corll, and killed him.
He then led police to the bodies of young men he and Corll had murdered with the help of another accomplice, David Brooks. In all, 27 men and boys had been killed; Henley was tried and convicted on six counts of murder with malice.
According to police notes of Henley’s confession, the three killers “would pull their pubic hair out slowly, shove glass rods up their penis[es], and. . . they castrated some of them.”
As Henley led police to the bodies, detectives noticed how at ease he was. In the car, he chatted about how strangling people wasn’t as easy as it looked in movies, and eagerly posed for a photo.
You might think Henley would be an unsympathetic subject for a documentary. But The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, which was HBO’s most-watched film when it was released last month, seeks to reframe Henley as misunderstood—a vulnerable high-school dropout led astray by Corll, a hardened psychopath.
There is no villain so odious that he can’t be recast through the lens of a trauma framework—and a sympathetic explanation can always be found through extensive talking.
