Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001) was an American convicted serial killer whose crimes spanned from 1960 to 1983. He was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for the murder of Debra Jackson, although his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. Lucas rose to infamy after confessing to more than 100 murders to the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials while in prison. He died of congestive heart failure in 2001.
An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper later discredited many of Lucas' murder confessions and resulted in a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas. The investigation concluded that Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed. Lucas himself recanted the confessions as a hoax.
Lucas' case resulted in a re-evaluation in police techniques and greater awareness of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the petty privileges – fancy steak dinners, milkshakes, TV privileges – granted by the "confession" interviews would prompt further confessions. Investigators also allowed Lucas to see case files to "refresh his memory," giving him access to knowledge only the perpetrator(s) would know.
Early life
Lucas was born on August 23, 1936, in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia. Lucas lost an eye at age 10 after it became infected due to a fight with his brother. A friend later described him as a child who would often get attention by displaying frighteningly strange behavior. Lucas' mother, a prostitute, would force him to watch her having sex with her clients and make him cross-dress in public, purportedly so she could later pimp him out to men and women alike. Eventually, his schoolteachers complained about the cross-dressing and a court order put an end to it.
In December 1949, Lucas' alcoholic father, Anderson Lucas, died of hypothermia after going home drunk and collapsing outside during a blizzard. Shortly thereafter, while in the sixth grade, Lucas dropped out of school and ran away from home, drifting around Virginia. Lucas claimed to have committed his first murder in 1951 when he strangled 17-year-old Laura Burnsley after she refused his sexual advances. As with most of his confessions, he later retracted this claim.
On June 10, 1954, Lucas was convicted on over a dozen counts of burglary in and around Richmond, Virginia, and was sentenced to four years in prison. He escaped in 1957, was recaptured three days later, and was subsequently released on September 2, 1959.
In late 1959, Lucas traveled to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with his half-sister, Opal. Around this time Lucas was engaged to marry a pen pal with whom he had corresponded while incarcerated. When his mother visited him for Christmas, she disapproved of her son's fiancée and insisted he move back to Blacksburg. He refused, and they argued repeatedly during the visit about his upcoming nuptials.
Matricide
On January 11, 1960, in Tecumseh, Michigan, Lucas killed his mother during an argument regarding whether or not he should return home to her house to care for her as she grew older. He claimed she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he stabbed her in the neck. Lucas then fled the scene. He subsequently said:
All I remember was slapping her alongside the neck, but after I did that I saw her fall and decided to grab her. But she fell to the floor and when I went back to pick her up, I realized she was dead. Then I noticed that I had my knife in my hand and she had been cut.
Opal returned later and discovered their mother alive but in a pool of blood. She called an ambulance, but it turned out to be too late to save Viola's life. The official police report stated she died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault. Lucas was arrested in Ohio on the outstanding Michigan warrant. Lucas claimed to have killed his mother in self-defense, but his claim was rejected, and he was sentenced to between 20 and 40 years' imprisonment in Michigan for second-degree murder. After serving 10 years in prison, he was released in June 1970 due to prison overcrowding.
Drifter
Lucas and Ottis Toole.
In 1971, Lucas was convicted of attempting to kidnap three schoolgirls. While serving a five-year sentence for the crime, he established a relationship with a family friend and single mother who had written to him. They married on his release in 1975, but he left the marriage two years later after his stepdaughter accused him of sexually abusing her. Lucas began moving between various relatives and one got him a job in West Virginia, where he established a relationship that ended when his girlfriend's family confronted him about abuse.
Lucas befriended Ottis Toole and settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where he lived with Toole's parents and became close to his adolescent niece Frieda "Becky" Powell, who had a mild intellectual impairment and had escaped from a juvenile detention center. A period of stability followed, with Lucas working as a roofer, fixing neighbors' cars and scavenging scrap.
Arrest, confession to murders of Powell and Rich
Powell was put in a state shelter by the authorities after her mother and grandmother died in 1982. Lucas convinced her to run away with him and they lived on the road, eventually traveling to California, where an employer's wife asked them to work for her infirm mother, 82-year-old Kate Rich. Rich's family turned Lucas and Powell out, accusing them of failing to do their jobs and writing checks on Rich's account. While hitchhiking, they were picked up by the minister of a Stoneburg,Texas religious commune called "The House of Prayer."
Believing Lucas and the 15-year-old Powell were a married couple, he found Lucas a job as a roofer while allowing the couple to stay in a small apartment on the commune. Powell had become argumentative and homesick for Florida, and Lucas said she left at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.
In June 1983, he was arrested on charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan. Later, he confessed to the murders of Frieda Powell and Kate Rich. In addition to confessing, Lucas led the police to remains said to be Powell and Rich, although forensic evidence alone was inconclusive and the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either set of remains. His participation in the investigation would serve to boost his credibility in later confessions to other crimes. Lucas later denied involvement, but the consensus agrees he did murder Powell and Rich.
False confession spree
In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas. Lucas reported that he was roughly treated by inmates and attempted suicide. Lucas claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, tortured his genitalia, and did not allow him to contact an attorney. In interviews with law enforcement personnel Lucas confessed to numerous additional unsolved killings. It was thought that there was positive corroboration with Lucas' confessions in 28 unsolved murders, and so the Lucas Task Force was established by James B. Adams, the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The task force officially "cleared" 213 previously unsolved murders as a result of the confessions. Lucas received preferential treatment rarely offered to convicts, being frequently taken to restaurants and cafes for his participation. He was rarely handcuffed, often allowed to wander police stations and jails at will, and even knew codes for security doors.
Later attempts at determining Lucas' involvement in his confessed crimes were complicated when it was discovered Lucas was given access to information on the files of cases he was confessing to. There were suggestions that the interview tapes showed that Lucas would read the reactions of those interviewing him and altered what he was saying, thereby making his confessions more consistent with facts known to law enforcement. The most serious allegation against investigators is that they had let Lucas read case files on unsolved crimes and thus enabled him to come up with convincingly detailed confessions, which made it virtually impossible to determine if he had been telling the truth to the Lucas Task Force about a relatively large number of the murders.
In 1983, Lucas claimed to have killed an unidentified young woman, later identified as Michelle Busha, along Interstate 90 in Minnesota. When questioned by police, he gave inconsistent details on the way he murdered the victim and was eliminated as a suspect.
In 1984, Lucas confessed to the murder of an unidentified girl who was discovered shot to death in a field at Caledonia, New York on November 10, 1979. The unidentified girl was referred to at the time as "Caledonia Jane Doe." Investigators, however, found insufficient evidence to support the confession. In early 2015, over 35 years later, "Caledonia Jane Doe" was identified through a DNA match as Tammy Alexander.
Lucas also is believed to have falsely confessed to the 1980 slaying of Carol Cole in Louisiana. Cole was unidentified until 2015.
Discredited
Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated the veracity of Lucas' claims for articles that appeared in The Dallas Times Herald. They calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) in one month to have committed the crimes police attributed to him. After the story appeared in April 1985 and revealed the flawed methods of the Lucas Task Force, law enforcement opinion began to turn against the claims that crimes had been solved.
The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas' claimed murders. The report compared Lucas' claims to reliable, verifiable sources for his whereabouts; the results often contradicted his confessions, and thus cast doubt on most of the crimes in which he was implicated. Attorney General Jim Mattox wrote that "when Lucas was confessing to hundreds of murders, those with custody of Lucas did nothing to bring an end to this hoax" and "we have found information that would lead us to believe that some officials 'cleared cases' just to get them off the books".
Commutation of death sentence
Lucas remained convicted of 11 homicides. He had been sentenced to death for one, a then-unidentified woman dubbed as "Orange Socks," whose body was found in Williamson County, Texas, on Halloween 1979, despite a time sheet recording his presence at work in Jacksonville, Florida. Lucas was granted a stay on his death sentence after it was discovered that details in his confession came from the case file, which he had been given to read. The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998 by then-Governor George W. Bush. In 2019, "Orange Socks" was officially identified as Debra Jackson, who was 23 years old at the time of her death.
Death
On March 12, 2001, at 11:00 pm, Lucas was found dead in prison from heart failure at age 64. He is buried at Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas. As of 2012, Lucas' grave is unmarked due to vandalism and theft.
Differing opinions
Lucas' credibility was damaged by his lack of precision: he initially admitted to having killed 60 people, a number he raised to over 100 victims, which police accepted, and then to a figure of 3,000 that led to him not being taken seriously. He remained, however, publicized as America's most prolific murderer, despite denials such as flatly stating "I am not a serial killer" in a letter to author Shellady.
Some continue to believe he was responsible for a huge number of killings nonetheless. Eric W. Hickey cites an unnamed "investigator" who interviewed Lucas several times and concluded that Lucas had probably killed about 40 people. Such assertions were given little credence, with lawmen involved refusing to corroborate these claims.
An experienced Texas Ranger to whom Ryan's team allowed access to Lucas said that although it was obvious to him that Lucas often lied, there was an instance where he demonstrated guilty knowledge. "I remember him trying to cop to one he didn't do, but there was another murder case where I'll kiss your butt if he didn't lead us right to the deer stand where the murder took place. Ain't no way he could've guessed that, and I damn sure didn't tell him. I think he did that one." Other Rangers had similar experiences with Lucas.
DNA evidence has verified that Lucas did not kill twenty of his supposed victims.
A woman claiming to be Becky Powell, Lucas’ girlfriend who was one of his first confessed murders, turned out to be an adoring fan of Lucas.
Media
There have been several books on the case. Four narrative films have been made based on Lucas' confessions: 1985's Confessions of a Serial Killer, 1986's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, played by Michael Rooker, 1996's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part II, and the 2009 film Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas. Two documentary films were released in 1995: The Serial Killers and the television documentary, Henry Lee Lucas: The Confession Killer.
In 2019, Netflix released a five-part serialized documentary The Confession Killer focusing on the far-reaching fallout of the investigation.
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