Heights teen was a victim of infamous serial killer

By PEGGY O'HARE Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Oct. 22, 2008, 10:52PM

More than three decades after his body was pulled from a shallow grave, forensic anthropologists at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office have identified a teenager believed to be the victim of Houston's infamous serial killer Dean Corll.

Randell Lee Harvey was just 15 when he disappeared on March 11, 1971, and his family has never known what happened to him. The boy's remains — stored in a locker at the morgue for 35 years — were officially identified recently after DNA comparison with family reference samples taken from two of his siblings.

Harvey — who lived in the Heights, like so many of Corll's victims — had been shot in the head. His remains were found Aug. 8, 1973, along with the bodies of other Corll victims unearthed at a boat shed at 2500 Silver Bell in southwest Houston.

Corll is believed to have killed at least 26 boys in a sexually sadistic spree that began in 1971. He, along with two teenage accomplices, lured victims ranging from 13 to 20 years old, to various locations where they were sexually assaulted, tortured and killed.

Police learned of the crimes on Aug. 8, 1973, when one of the accomplices, 16-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley, shot and killed Corll at Corll's Pasadena home after hours of drinking and glue-sniffing. Henley then led police to the bodies buried in shallow graves at Corll's boat shed on Silver Bell and to others hidden on a Galveston beach and near Lake Sam Rayburn.

Henley and the other accomplice, David Owen Brooks, then 18, each received 99-year prison sentences — Henley for six of the deaths, Brooks for one.

Harvey's skeletal remains are one of three sets kept in a cooler at the county morgue since that shocking day in 1973. Over the years, the three have been known only as No. 11, No. 16 and No. 22.

Bones tested for DNA

They are among the last of Corll's 26 known victims. Because of new technology, the morgue's forensic anthropologists submitted the boys' bone samples to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for mitochondrial DNA, or mDNA, testing.

The Associated Press reported those tests were inconclusive, so Harvey was identified through circumstantial evidence. The remains were officially identified on Friday.

Harvey's mother is now dead, but two sisters — Donna Harvey Lovrek, 55, and Lenore Lovrek McNiel, 51 — still live in the area. Neither could be reached for comment Wednesday night.

They were 17 and 13 years old when their brother disappeared.

Efforts to get comments from Harris County Medical Examiner's personnel who worked on the case and helped identify the boy's remains were unsuccessful Wednesday night.

The other two boys whose bodies are still housed at the morgue remain unidentified.