Book Review - The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen

The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys by Lise Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating recounting of the identification of the last of Houston’s Candy Man serial killer’s victims.

The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys by Lise Olsen is a meticulously researched and amazingly detailed accounting of one woman’s dedicated work to finally reunite some of the long-unidentified victims from the early 1970s serial killer known as “The Candy Man” with their names and families.

In a three-year period during the early 1970s, Dean Arnold Corll, with the help of two teenaged accomplices, abducted, tortured, assaulted, and murdered at least 29 boys and male teens in the Houston and Pasadena cities of Texas. Author Lise Olsen reveals the story by alternating between how the victims came to be introduced to their murderer and 30 years later as Dr. Sharon Derrick, Ph.D., an experienced bioarchaeologist pursuing a career in forensic anthropology, works to match the still unidentified victims with whom they were in life. Even with the focus on the processes Derrick went through, the story is riveting, and readers will not want to put the book down.

The story is fascinating for a number of reasons, one being that even with the advancements in science and the tools available to help identify anonymous corpses (from 1973 when the bodies were uncovered to the mid-2000s when Derrick’s journey begins), Dr. Derrick still faced an extraordinarily difficult and complex task. Thirty years and more had passed from the victims’ deaths and their rough burials in unprotected, unmarked graves, the evidence degrading even further. Possible family members of the dead had moved around, moved on, or passed on themselves, eliminating useful sources of information for identification. DNA identification was still a much sought-after and months-long process, and commercial DNA testing for the general public, such as 23 and Me or Ancestry.com, was still years away. On top of that, the original law enforcement reporting and handling of the missing person’s reports in Houston were given little attention. In addition to this, law enforcement and its tools were quite different then. The 70s were pre-community policing, pre-Amber Alerts, pre-cellphones, pre-personal computers, pre-Internet, and even pre-in-patrol-vehicle-computer monitors connected to centralized policing software. Houston PD didn’t see the connection among the reports of missing boys clustered in certain neighborhoods, indicating there was a bigger problem than runaways: no one did until after Corll had been killed by one of his teenage accomplices who confessed what he knew.

The story of Derrick’s determination despite so many obstacles, both in the evidence and in the situation, is pretty amazing. Each case has fascinating elements to it, and her work finally puts a name to tragic victim after tragic victim. The author’s presentation of how this was accomplished is compelling and heart-wrenching, as after each successful identification, she provides a photo of the victim with a summary of his short life. It really brings home that, at one time, these were real, living, breathing children who laughed and played, had hopes and dreams, families and friends, with their entire lives still ahead of them. More than fifty years later, their heartbreaking stories are finally being completed.

I recommend THE SCIENTIST AND THE SERIAL KILLER to readers of non-fiction, especially those who enjoy true crime or forensics.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from the author through "Lone Star Book Campaigns."

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