Lise Olsen is an investigative reporter, editor, and award-winning author of Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the Secret System That Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle. Her reports have contributed to the prosecutions of a former congressman and a federal judge, inspired laws and reforms, helped solve cold cases, restored names to unidentified murder victims, and freed wrongfully held prisoners. Her writing has appeared in the Texas Observer, NBC News, Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. She’s featured in Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, Paramount+’s The Pillowcase Murders, CNN’s Death Row Stories, and the A&E series The Eleven. She lives near Houston, Texas. Her new book is The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys.
Book Festival Author
Lise Olsen
More About Lise Olsen
-
The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston's Lost Boys
Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston police department dismissed them as runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.
It was only after their killer, Dean Corll, was murdered by an accomplice that many of those boys’ bodies were discovered in mass graves. Corll, known as the “Candy Man,” was a local sweet-shop owner who had enlisted two teens to lure their friends to parties, where they would be tortured and killed.
All of Corll’s victims’ bodies were badly decomposed; some were only skeletal. Known collectively as the Lost Boys, many were never identified and some remained undiscovered. Decades later, when forensic anthropologist Sharon Derrick discovered a box of remains marked “1973 Murders” in the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office, she recalled the horrifying crime from her own childhood, and knew she had to act. It would take prison interviews with Corll’s accomplices, advanced scientific techniques, and years of tireless effort to identify these young men.
Investigative journalist Lise Olsen brings to life the teens who were hunted by a killer hiding in plain sight and the extraordinary woman who would finally give his unknown victims back their names and their dignity. With newly uncovered information about the case, "The Scientist and the Serial Killer" immerses readers in an astonishing story and reveals why these horrific events remain relevant decades later.
