Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001), also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper showed that many of the murders Lucas confessed to were impossible for him to have committed. While the Rangers defended their work, a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas concluded Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed. Lucas' death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. Lucas later recanted his confessions as a hoax with the exception of his confession to murdering his mother. He died of congestive heart failure in 2001.[2]
Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Ranger Division, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the apparently trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confessions" to crimes of extreme seriousness might encourage prisoners such as Lucas, who had little to lose, to make false confessions. Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know. The police also did not record their interviews, making it impossible to know for sure how much information interviewers gave Lucas unprompted.
Early life and criminal history
Background
Henry Lucas was born the youngest of nine children on August 23, 1936, in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia to parents Nellie Viola Lucas (1888 – 1960) and Anderson Lucas (1901 – 1951), a double amputee.[3] Lucas' father earned the nickname "No Legs" after losing both of his legs in a freight train accident. "My daddy didn't do anything," Lucas later said. "He just sold pencils." When Lucas was eight, he was beaten by his mother about the head with a wooden plank which caused him to spend three days in a coma. Lucas developed an infection in his left eye at age ten, when one of his brothers struck him with a knife.[4] His mother ignored the injury for several days until a teacher swiped him over his eye with a steel-tipped ruler and the eyeball burst; it had to be surgically removed and it was replaced with a glass prosthetic.
Lucas' mother was a prostitute who would force her son to watch her engaging in sex with clients. "First thing I can remember was when my mom was in bed with another man in the house, and she made me watch it," Lucas said. "I just couldn't stand there and watch. I had to turn my back and walk out of the house, and after I did that, she beat me, 'cause I didn't watch it." Nellie would also make him cross-dress in public, purportedly so she could later pimp him out to men and women alike.[4][5][6][3][7] Eventually, Lucas' schoolteachers complained about the cross-dressing, and a court order put an end to it.[7] Despite this, Nellie continued to abuse and torment Lucas by shooting and killing a mule given to him by an uncle and proceeding to beat him because she had to pay to have the animal carcass removed.
Lucas was frequently ridiculed as a child and later cited the mass rejection by his peers as a cause for his misanthropy. Commenting on his childhood, Lucas stated:
I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by my mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein' would want to do.[8]
On October 24, 1951, Lucas' alcoholic father died of hypothermia after drinking to intoxication 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. As an adolescent, Lucas began an incestuoussexual relationship with his half-brother and started engaging in bestiality, often capturing small animals and performing sexual acts on them before killing them. 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.[9][10]
First murder
Lucas claimed to have committed his first homicide in 1951, when he strangled 17-year-old Laura Everlean Burnsley.[11] Burnsley disappeared from a bus stop in Lynchburg, Virginia in March 1951; Lucas confessed to her murder on February 15, 1984. According to Lucas, he picked her up near Lynchburg, Virginia and after she refused his sexual advances and resisted an unsuccessful rape attempt, he killed her and buried her body in a secluded wooded area near Harrisburg, Virginia. "It scared me quite a bit," Lucas said. "Because the first girl I killed was when I was 14-years-old. I wanted to try the sex I'd been watching." "I got to playing too rough with her," he said. "The pressure of seeing my mom hit me—and my emotions more or less took over, and I couldn't quite handle it." As with most of his confessions, Lucas later retracted this claim.[9][10] Burnsley has never been found.
Matricide
In late-1959, Lucas traveled to Tecumseh, Michigan, to live with his half-sister, Opal Retta Jennings. Around this time, he was engaged to marry a pen pal, Stella Curtis, with whom he had corresponded while incarcerated. When Lucas' mother, 71-year-old Nellie Viola Lucas, visited him for Christmas, she disapproved of her son's fiancée and insisted he move back to Blacksburg, Virginia to take care of her as she grew older. When he refused, they argued repeatedly.[3] These arguments escalated until January 11, 1960, when she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he stabbed her in the neck.[3] Lucas then fled the scene. "I was pretty well drunk when she started arguing with me, wanting me to go back to live with her to Virginia, but I told her I didn’t want nothing to do with her," Lucas remembered. He elaborated:
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.[3]
Opal returned later and discovered their mother alive on the bedroom floor, but in a pool of her own blood. She called an ambulance, but it arrived too late. The official police report stated that Lucas' mother died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault. Lucas was soon arrested in Ohio on the outstanding Michigan warrant. He claimed to have killed his mother in self-defense; Lucas said, "I’ve got gashes in the back of my head. I’ve got black and blue marks on my body from being beaten every day. If I didn’t do something she wanted, I got beaten." But his claim was rejected and he was sentenced to up to 40 years imprisonment in Jackson State Penitentiary in southern Michigan for second-degree murder. Lucas attempted suicide several times by slashing his wrists and stomach with a razor.
Henry was then transferred to the Ionia State Hospital, where he was subjected to electric shocks, behavior therapy and heavy doses of anti-depressants. Henry spent four years at Ionia State Hospital before returning to prison in 1966, where a social worker met Lucas while he was incarcerated and described him as "a very inadequate individual with feelings of insecurity and inferiority." After serving 10 years in prison, he was released on June 3, 1970, due to prison overcrowding.[3]
Murders
Claimed killing spree
Photograph of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole taken in prison in the early-1980s after the time they were romantically involved.[12]
In December 1971, he was charged and sentenced to four or five years in prison for attempting to abduct a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint. He was also in violation of his probation by having a handgun in his possession. While serving his sentence for the crime, he established a relationship with a family friend and the widow of a cousin, Betty Crawford, who had written to him. After being released from prison in August 1975, he moved to Port Deposit, Maryland where he married Crawford and moved in with her and her two daughters in Pennsylvania on December 5, 1975, and began working at a mushroom farm. Their marriage ended in 1976 when Betty accused Henry of molesting her daughters.[3]
According to Lucas, during this time they engaged in a multi-state killing spree in which they targeted hitchhikers, sex workers, and migrants. He also claimed that Toole enjoyed crucifying their victims, then barbecuing and eating them. After their arrest, they were caught discussing cannibalism over a prison phone. "Remember how I liked to pour some blood out of them?" Toole asked Lucas. "Some tastes like real meat when it's got barbecue sauce on it."[15] Powell would also occasionally travel with the men as well and may have even helped Lucas and Toole lure potential victims.[11] When interviewed about his crime spree, Lucas stated:
I killed 'em every way there is except poison. There's been strangulations, there's been knifings, there's been shootings, there's been hit-and-runs... I didn't have any [emotions]... I had no feelings for the people themselves, or any of my crimes... I'd pick them up hitchhiking, running and playing, stuff like that. We'd get to going and having a good time. First thing you know, I'd killed her and throwed her out somewhere. I don't know how to really explain why I kept on. It was just, like I say, as though I left my body. And just as though the more you look at them, as though that person wasn't dead. And you just keep stabbing them and imagining that person's not dying.[11]
Arrest, confession to murders of Powell and Rich
On January 20, 1982, Lucas convinced Powell to run away with him to avoid child welfare authorities 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 Katie Pearl "Kate" Rich.[3] However, Rich's family turned the couple out, accusing them of failing to do their jobs and writing cheques on Rich's bank account. While hitchhiking, Lucas and Powell were picked up by the minister of a Pentecostal[16] religious commune called The House of Prayer, located in Stoneburg, Texas.[17] Believing Lucas and the 15-year-old Powell were a married couple, the minister found Lucas a job as a roofer while allowing the couple to stay in a small apartment on the commune where they even attended church services.[18] However, Powell became argumentative and homesick for Florida; when she turned up absent, Lucas claimed that she left at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.
On June 10, 1983, Lucas was arrested on charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas RangerPhil Ryan. While in jail he wrote a letter to the sheriff; "I have killed for the past 10 years and no one will believe me. I cannot go on doing this. I also killed the only girl I ever loved." Later, he confessed to the murders of Powell and Rich, and led the police to their purported remains, although forensic evidence alone was inconclusive and the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either of them.
Lucas claimed he had lured Powell to an isolated field in Denton, Texas on August 23, 1982, stabbed her in the chest; engaged in necrophilia with her corpse, dismembered, decapitated her post-mortem and scattered her body pieces. Then in Ringgold, Texas on September 16, 1982, Lucas lured Rich to join him in a search for Becky on a camping ground. He then stabbed her in the chest; carved an inverted cross on her chest post-mortem and engaged in necrophilia with her corpse as well, before stuffing her body into a drainagepipe. Lucas' participation in the investigation would serve to boost his credibility in later confessions to other crimes. Lucas later denied involvement, but the consensus is that he did murder Powell and Rich.[17]
False confession spree
In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas. He reported that he attempted suicide after receiving rough treatment by the inmates, and claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, mutilated his genitalia, and did not allow him to contact an attorney.[19] After four days in jail, Lucas pleaded guilty to the two murders of Powell and Rich in court but then also claimed to have committed over a hundred additional murders. 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 twenty-eight unsolved murders, so the Lucas Task Force was established by James B. Adams, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.[19]
The task force officially cleared hundreds of previously unsolved homicides as a result of Lucas' confessions. Lucas received preferential treatment that was extremely lax for someone supposedly thought to be a mass murderer. He was frequently taken to restaurants and cafés, rarely handcuffed, allowed to wander police stations and jails, and he even knew codes for security doors.[20][17] Later attempts at determining Lucas' involvement in his confessed crimes were complicated when it was discovered he had been given access to information in the files of cases he was confessing to.[21] There were suggestions that the interview tapes showed that Lucas would read the reactions of those interviewing him and alter what he was saying, thereby making his confessions more consistent with facts known to law enforcement.[21][22][23][24]
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 kilometres) in one month to have committed the crimes police attributed to him.[5] After the story appeared in April 1985 and revealed the flawed methods of the task force, law enforcement opinion began to turn against their claims that crimes had been solved.[25][26]
The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas' claimed murders. The report compared his claims to reliable, verifiable sources for his whereabouts; the results often contradicted his confessions, thus casting doubt on his participation in most of the crimes he had confessed to. Texas Attorney GeneralJim 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... we have found information that would lead us to believe that some officials 'cleared cases' just to get them off the books."[17]
Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Ranger Division, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the apparently trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confessions" to crimes of extreme seriousness might encourage prisoners such as Lucas, who had little to lose, to make false confessions. Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know. The police also did not record their interviews, making it impossible to know for sure how much information interviewers accidentally gave Lucas unprompted.[27]
Reconstruction of "Orange Socks", created prior to her official 2019 identification as Debra Jackson, which conjectured how she may have looked when she was alive.
Victims
Differing opinions
Lucas' credibility was damaged by his lack of precision: he initially admitted to having killed sixty people, a number he raised to over one hundred victims, which police accepted, and then to a figure of six hundred that led to him not being taken seriously. DNA evidence has verified that Lucas did not kill twenty of his supposed victims.[36] Of more than three thousand murder cases in which he was a suspect, police believed more than two hundred cases were committed by him.[37] However, he remained publicized as America's most prolific serial killer, despite denials such as stating, "I am not a serial killer."[17][38]
Some continue to believe, nonetheless, that Lucas was responsible for a massive number of killings. Criminologist Eric Hickey cites an unnamed "investigator" who interviewed Lucas several times and concluded that he had probably killed about forty people.[39] Such assertions were given little credence, with the lawmen involved refusing to corroborate these claims.[40][41] 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."[41] Other Rangers had similar experiences with Lucas.[42]
Convicted
In total, Lucas was convicted of eleven murders including the deaths of Viola Lucas, Becky Powell and Kate Rich. The eight other victims that Lucas was convicted of murder for are as follows:
26-year-old schoolteacherLinda Jane Phillips disappeared on August 8, 1970, in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas while returning from a party to her parents' home in Kaufman County. Her mutilated body was found on August 10. She sustained twenty-six stab wounds and had been sexually abused. Lucas confessed to the murder and claimed he forced Phillips' car off the road at about 2:30 a.m. Lucas then allegedly forced her into his car at gunpoint, made her disrobe and then stabbed her in the throat, chest and stomach.[43]
The body of PatrolmanClemmie Everett Curtis, 30, was found on August 3, 1976, handcuffed near his patrol car in a wooded area just outside of the Huntington, West Virginia city limit. He had been shot through the chest once. Lucas confessed that he and Toole had killed Curtis.[44]
Lillie Pearl Darty, 18, accepted a ride with Lucas on November 11, 1977, at a gas station in Harrison County and later was sexually assaulted and shot in the head.[45] Her decomposing body was found three weeks later in a wooded area north of Marshall, Texas.
23-year-old Debra Louise Jackson,[46] informally known as "Orange Socks" when unidentified, is believed to have been murdered on October 30 or 31, 1979, in Georgetown, Texas. Her body was found naked, except for the pair of orange socks from which the nickname was derived.[47][48] She had been strangled, and was believed to have died only hours before the discovery.[49]
On April 26, 1981, Lucas allegedly broke into the apartment of 17-year-old babysitterDianna Lynn Bryant in Brownfield, Texas with the intent of robbing it. He then took a knife he carried to cut loose the cord on a vacuum cleaner and used it to strangle Bryant. Dianna's father was satisfied with Lucas' confession and the case was closed.[50]
Glenna Fay Biggers, 65, was found by a neighbour on December 20, 1982, in Hale County, Texas. A butcher knife had been thrust into her stomach and a fork into her throat. According to Lucas, he broke into her home, killed her and then stole $180.[51]
Laura Marie Purchase, 26, was discovered on March 17, 1983, dead in a burning wooded area near League Line Road in Montgomery County, Texas. Purchase had been reported missing from Houston on March 5. An autopsy determined that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. In 2008, DNA testing ruled Lucas out as suspect in Purchase's case. In 2021, another man was charged with her murder.[52]
On April 16, 1983, 16-year-old Laura Jean Donez skipped school in Houston, Texas, but was never seen again. On April 18, 1983, an oilfield worker spotted a fire burning in a wooded area near a logging road in Montgomery County, Texas. Donez had been strangled, raped, beaten about the head, and her body burned after death. Lucas confessed to Donez's murder and was able to lead police to where her body was discovered.[53]
Suspected
Although almost all of Lucas' confessions have been discredited or entirely proven false, both he and Toole still remain credible suspects in the deaths of several women based on compelling circumstantial evidence. Cases in which they are both seen as viable suspects are as follows:
On June 27, 1977, detectives responded to a wooded area off Old Union Church Road outside of Townsend, Delaware after the remains of 50-year-old Marie Petry Heiser were discovered in an open field.[54] She had suffered blunt-force trauma to her head and had fought back against her assailant. Lucas lived in Elkton, Maryland at the time near to where Heiser's remains were found.[55] Investigators also found that writings Lucas made had many similarities to the crime scene.
45-year-old Stella Ellen McLean disappeared from a restaurant in Scottsbluff, Nebraska on February 7, 1978. On April 15, 1978, her headless body was discovered near Interstate 25 in Platte County, Wyoming. She had been raped and strangled; her head was never recovered.[56] In September 1984, Jim Larson, an investigator for the Scotts Bluff County Sheriff's Department in Nebraska, questioned Lucas about Stella's murder. Larson asked deceptive questions to test Lucas, but apparently, Lucas offered compelling testimony to support his claims of killing McLean.
40-year-old Janet Lee Callies was last seen at the Sandbar, a bar near Interstate 80 in Grand Island, Nebraska on November 15, 1978.[57][58] In 1984, Lucas confessed to Callies' murder and stated that he and Toole had strangled Callies and buried her body "somewhere between the north edge of Grand Island and the South Dakota border."[59] Lucas managed to recall personal details about Callies, such as how she had three children.
19-year-old Cheryl Anne Scherer was last seen working her shift at the Rhoades Rhodes Pump-Ur-Own Station self-service gas station in Scott City, Missouri on April 17, 1979, at 11:45 a.m.[60] Toole and Lucas both admitted to authorities that they had killed and abducted a young woman nearby about the time that Scherer vanished. Scherer was the only girl reported missing in the region at the time, despite Lucas' claims to the contrary when police showed him a photo of her.[61] Even though it was proved that Toole's niece and nephew, as well as Lucas and Toole, were present in Scott City, Missouri at the time of Scherer's disappearance, there was never enough evidence to bring charges against them.[62]
A highway worker discovered the body of an unidentified woman on October 29, 1981, in Iola, Texas. Her cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. The victim, known as the Grimes County Jane Doe, was also wrapped in a plastic bag.[63] Lucas confessed to her murder, stating that he drove the victim to the area from Durham, North Carolina and claiming that her name may have been "Cheryl".[64] He then strangled her while Toole beat her in the head with a tire iron. He was able to lead police to the area in which her body had previously been found.
^ abcdefghiLewis, Brenda Ralph (2009). Mapping the Trail of a Serial Killer: How the World's Most Infamous Murderers Were Tracked Down. New York: Lyons. ISBN978-1-4617-4944-8. OCLC1059274469.
^Horton, Adrian (December 5, 2019). "He was America's most deadly serial killer – but it was all a lie". The Guardian. Retrieved August 31, 2021. The subject of anxious news features and four feature films, Lucas confessed to murdering hundreds of people – at first 100, then 200, then about 600. An odd-jobs drifter with three teeth and a lazy eye, Lucas would recall, often on camera, precise and grisly details about each victim. Police officers from across the country interviewed him for more than 3,000 murder cases, to much fanfare; at least 200 cases were attributed to him, closing them to further investigation and making Lucas the country's most prolific serial killer.
