As police dug into Dean Corll's reputation and past, early returns suggested that the 33-year-old man was the victim not the monster that Henley made him out to be. This sentiment was summed up in comments like this:

All my friends knew him,
and my friends' folks knew
him, and they never thought anything [bad] about him...
They always thought Dean
was a good dude. He'd
help me; he'd help them, anything.

Then an old girlfriend, Betty Hawkins, a divorcee with two small boys, came forward. She had