America, 1960-1983
Henry Lee Lucas is notorious not just because of the huge number of murders he may have committed, but because of the movie that was loosely based on his story.
No-one knows how many victims Lucas had – he himself used to say that once he had committed a killing, he forgot about it. It is likely he had over 200 victims as he drifted around America.
Lucas, like many serial killers, had a terrible childhood. He said his earliest memories were degrading, as his mother dressed him in girls’ clothing, which lasted for three years, including his first day at school. He was treated appallingly and beaten mercilessly. Those beatings left him with brain damage, particularly to the brain areas that control behaviour and emotion, and his physical and mental anguish left him a psychopath. He was also blind in one eye after his brother accidentally stabbed him.
So by his early teens, Henry was already showing seriously abnormal behaviour, including sadism and bestiality. He has claimed he committed his first murder at the age of 13, killing his school teacher when she snubbed his fumbling attempts to seduce her.
At the age of 18, in 1954, he was convicted of over a dozen burglaries and served 5 years in jail.
KILLING HIS MOTHER
The first murder that we can be certain Lucas committed was of his mother, in January 1960 when he was 24. He stabbed her to death and was convicted by a court, but found insane. He was committed to the Ionia State Psychiatric Hospital after being sentenced to 20 to 40 years. He was soon diagnosed as a psychopath with sadistic tendencies, but was released from the hospital ten years later, because the state prisons were over-crowded. In fact, Lucas knew he was still dangerous and pleaded with the authorities not to release him, and he killed again the same day he was released – a young woman within yards of the hospital gates.
A THIRTEEN YEAR KILLING SPREE
Lucas drifted around America, murdering randomly and regularly. Lucas changed his story many times, so it is impossible to know which murders were committed by him.
In 1971 he tried to kidnap three schoolgirls, and served 4 years in jail. During this time, he became involved with a single mother and family friend, who he married when he left prison in 1975. But he abused his step-daughter and left the home when she accused him publicly.
In the early 1980s, he teamed up with a pyromaniac called Ottis Elwood Toole and his learning-disabled niece, 13-year-old Frieda Powell, living with Toole’s mother in Jacksonville, Florida. They travelled together for a year – Toole committed arsons, Henry committed murders and Freida was sexually abused by both of the men.
Eventually, in California in 1982, Toole decided the life was too much from him, and left, leaving Frieda and Lucas. Henry worked as a handyman for an 80-year-old widow called Kate Rich. Rich’s family accused Henry of faking cheques from Mrs Rich, and they threw him out. Rich disappeared at the same time, but Lucas and Powell moved to Stoneburg, Texas after being picked up as hitchhikers by a priest from the Texas village.
In June 1983, a Texas Ranger arrested Lucas for possession of a firearm without a permit. Lucas then confessed to murdering Rich and Powell, and showed police remains he said were theirs (although corners found that evidence was inconclusive).
While in jail, Lucas confessed to a number of murders, and Texas police are believed to have definitely linked him to 28. He was tried for 11 homicides, and sentenced to death for one (the victim was unidentified at that time, and known as “Orange Socks” – she has now been identified as Debra Jackson). After doubts were cast on that conviction, as Lucas appeared to be at work in Jacksonville when the murder was committed, his sentence was commuted to life without parole.
A nationwide task-force assigned a total of 213 unsolved murders to Lucas, although there are doubts about how many he actually did, and he did get privileged treatment as a prisoner after his confessions, which may have encouraged him to confess to crimes he didn’t actually commit. By 1985 a journalist had cast doubt on the claims, and some police forces quietly changed their minds about many of the “closed” cases.
DOUBTS
Lucas died in 2001 in prison of a heart attack. The biggest concern is that he had incentives to confess to murders, as he got better treatment. But police officers also showed him case files of murders he then confessed to, and his storied about some murders were inconsistent. Some Texas rangers have said that his confessions were patchy – they were sure he was admitting to killings he didn’t do, but then there were others where he led police to the bodies and knew details not in case files, so he almost certainly did do them.
Lucas did commit multiple murders, but over 200? There is no doubt it was not that many (20 murders he confessed to have now been removed from a list of his victims after DNA evidence showed the murderer was someone else). Because of the notoriety of his case, there are many investigators reviewing the cases, and so it is likely the number of his victims will come down. But it is also unlikely we will ever know exactly how many Lucas killed.