HOUSTON—One after another, as a steamy summer evening faded from dusk to darkness, the bodies of young boys were pulled from the dirt floor of boat stall No. 11.

By night’s end on Aug. 8, 1973, eight corpses had been recovered from makeshift graves. The next day, nine more were discovered inside the corrugated metal shed in southwest Houston.

Another 10 bodies were found on remote High Island beach, 80 miles east of Houston, and in a wooded area near Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas.

Twenty-seven dead. Some as young as 13, none older than 21.

All victims of one killer, Dean Corll, and his two teenage accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks.

The term serial killer had not yet been coined, so this unfolding horror was simply called the Houston Mass Murders—at the time, the worst in U.S. history.

Most of the bodies were badly decomposed, their identities obscured by time and elements.

A few were buried with mementos that whispered of their youth and the fashions of the day: a brown fringed leather jacket, ankle-high leather boots, shorts in a tie-dyed pattern.

The condition of their bodies hinted of agony in their final minutes.

Some were wrapped in plastic, and encased by a thin layer of lime powder.

Others had cords wrapped around their necks, and tape strapped around their feet and mouths.

A few had been sexually mutilated. One boy was found curled in a fetal position.

All over Houston, all over the country, parents of missing boys learned of the murders and feared the worst. In the working-class Houston neighborhood where Henley and Brooks lived, where Corll had once owned a candy shop across from an elementary school, where dozens of boys had seemed to vanish over the previous three years, the dread was almost unbearable.

Were our boys, our sons, among the dead?

For some families, the answer would come swiftly. For others, it would take decades. But some have been trapped in a limbo that has stretched from the Nixon administration into the 21st century.

Three bodies remain—three young men, believed to have been 15 to 20 years old, their bodies chilled to 38 degrees in the long-term storage unit of the Harris County medical examiner’s office.

The 11th and 16th bodies unearthed from Southwest Boat Storage.

One of the young men found at Lake Sam Rayburn.

ML73-3349. ML73-3356. ML73-3378.

Nameless. But not forgotten.

Not by Sharon Derrick, a forensic anthropologist with the medical examiner’s office. Not by the families who still contact her, seeking word of long-vanished sons and brothers.

At the coroner’s office, the search for their identities has not ended. Instead, it has intensified.

Parents and other relatives are aging. Many have passed away. The window for finding family members is closing—and with it, the possibility of finding the names to match the numbers.

“We need to get the word out, because at some point before too awful long, there won’t be anyone living that will have memories of them,” said Derrick. “We really need to push this.”

She displays three images—forensic facial approximations—that show what the three might have looked like at the time of their deaths.

One wore a navy blue jacket with red lining, and denim jeans with a 30-inch waist. He was buried with an orange plastic pocket comb. Another had cowboy boots, corduroy slacks, red, green and blue-striped swim trunks and a knotted rope bracelet popular in the 1970s.

Also found with the boys: a tie-dyed T-shirt emblazoned with a peace sign.

“I can’t quite let go of them yet. I’ve spent long hours with their remains and I’ve seen what they went through and I just want them to be taken care of,” said Derrick. She speaks of the three victims with an almost maternal tenderness, her hands brushing across the images as if caressing their cheeks.

Somewhere, in the voluminous police case file of the murders, yellowed news clippings, and 12-inch stack of old missing persons reports, Derrick believes there may be some name, some incident, some clue that might lead her to the right families.

Somewhere, in the hundreds of plaintive letters written by parents trying to find lost sons, there may lie the path to the three nameless boys’ identities:

“I have a son missing who was, when last heard from, ‘heading toward Texas.’ If he is among those found, would you please notify me?”

“Dear Officers! I am watching the terrible news from Houston ... our Dear Son is missing for a long time. He is very handsome and proud and I fear the worst.”

“I know you are getting thousands of letters like this one but I just have to try to find out something. ...”

One thought has propelled Derrick though months of fruitless investigation.

“Their families need to know,” Derrick said.

“If there’s an 80-year-old mother who has thought, ‘Well, maybe my son just didn’t love me and just took off and never wanted to see me again,’ I would want her to know that he would have come home, that it wasn’t his fault he didn’t come home.”

Last year, Derrick sent samples from the three boys to the University of North Texas for DNA testing, hopeful that advances in technology could result in a breakthrough.

She hit the jackpot. There was mitochondrial DNA from all three boys.

Now, she needed a relative to provide a match.

So she again pored through the paperwork. One name caught her eye: Randell Lee Harvey.

The 15-year-old fit the physical description of one of the remaining victims. His disappearance in March 1971 fit the time frame.

His last known addresses in the Heights fit the right neighborhood.

And his name turned up again and again.

It was included on a list of 22 missing boys compiled by Houston police 10 days after the bodies were discovered.

Another report noted that a local man had mentioned a boy named Randy Harvey had vanished without taking any of his clothes or any other personal belongings.

A third report, dated Aug. 11, 1973, shows that police contacted Randy’s mother, who had previously filed a missing persons report on her son. They asked her to provide dental records for the medical examiner.

But there was no record of the results, no further mention of his name.

Derrick finally found Lenore McNiel and Donna Lovrek, Randy’s two sisters, in Trinity, Texas.

For decades, the two have suspected that their brother was one of the Corll victims. One of Lenore’s boyfriends, Malley Winkle, was found in the boat shed, and they had friends among the dead.

Their mother, Frances Conley, died just after Mark Scott was identified through DNA. But she did not want to go in for testing.

“When Randy went missing, she knew in her heart that he was dead.

“She didn’t want to go through that heartbreak again,” said Lovrek.

But Lovrek and her sister want to know. In late May, they submitted samples of DNA for comparison with the unidentified victims.

“I tried every resource to find him. It was like he dropped off the face of the Earth,” said Lovrek.

“Now, I’m relieved and scared and terrified that it could be him. Relieved, because if it is him, I can put him to rest. Scared that what happened to other boys, happened to him.”

It may take up to two months to get results. But then, perhaps, she’ll know, leaving only two nameless young men in the coroner’s cold storage.