Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
One of the best-known and, at the same time, most controversial American serial killers is Henry Lee Lucas, better known as the ‘Confessor’, as he claimed to have killed over 600 people. But how credible are his confessions really? On the one hand, Lucas relished the media attention, which hailed him as the ‘most notorious of all serial killers’. On the other hand, Texas investigators employed questionable methods to get him to talk. Lucas was born on 23 August 1936 into poverty in Blacksburg, Virginia, and grew up with eight siblings in a single-room log cabin. His parents, both alcoholics, paid little attention to their children. His father, Anderson Lucas, was known simply as ‘No-Legs’, as both his legs had to be amputated following a train accident. From then on, he earned a living by illegally distilling moonshine, which is why Lucas was exposed to alcohol from an early age. His mother in particular, Viola Dixon Waugh – who was half-Native American – was a domineering and violent woman, under whose rule Lucas suffered greatly. She forced Lucas to watch her work as a prostitute and humiliated him by sending him to school dressed in girls’ clothes. Viola even shot his beloved mule for the sheer pleasure of psychologically abusing Lucas. At the age of just 10, Lucas lost an eye when, whilst playing with his older brother Andrew, he reached for Andrew’s knife. A violent scuffle ensued, during which Lucas was injured in the eye. It was not until four days later that Viola noticed Lucas’s injury. By that point, the wound had already become infected, so Lucas’s eye had to be surgically removed; from then on, he wore a glass eye. These traumatic experiences left a deep mark on him. Even in his youth, Lucas exhibited disturbing behaviour and later claimed to have had sex with animals and an incestuous relationship with his half-brother. Lucas left school after Year 6; from then on, he supported himself through burglary and was heavily addicted to alcohol. His first murder victim was reportedly 17-year-old Laura Burnley in March 1951, whom Lucas – then aged just 15 – abducted from a bus stop, raped and strangled. After serving several prison sentences for theft, Lucas moved in with one of his sisters. During a visit from his mother – his father had already died in 1949 after freezing to death whilst drunk in a snowstorm – a fatal altercation took place. Lucas claimed to have acted in self-defence when he stabbed his mother to death on 11 January 1960. He was sentenced to up to 40 years’ imprisonment for second-degree murder, but was released on 3 June 1970 after only ten years due to prison overcrowding. Whilst serving his sentence at Jackson State Prison, he attempted suicide twice. Shortly after his release on parole, Lucas was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in December 1971 for the attempted abduction of a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint. Following his second release in 1975, Lucas married the widow Betty Crawford. The marriage did not last long, as Betty accused Lucas of sexually abusing her two daughters, whereupon Lucas left Betty. Shortly afterwards, Lucas met the petty criminal Ottis Toole. The two became friends; like Lucas, Toole harboured sexually deviant fantasies. Ottis Toole had a mentally disabled niece named Becky Powell; together with her, they travelled across the USA in 1979 until Lucas eloped with Becky, who was only 15 years old at the time, leaving Ottis behind. Although Lucas later emphasised his love for Powell, he stabbed her to death on 24 August 1982 in a field in Denton. He then dismembered her body and scattered the remains across the field. His third confirmed murder was that of an 82-year-old woman named Kate Rich, with whom the pair had been staying. Three weeks later, on 16 September, Lucas persuaded the elderly lady to help him search for Becky; he then killed her at a campsite in Ringgold and stuffed her body into a drainpipe. On 10 June 1983, Lucas was arrested in Texas for illegal possession of a firearm. Whilst on remand, he confessed to the murders of Powell and Rich, even though there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crimes. The Texas investigators quickly took a liking to their confessed suspect, who soon admitted to hundreds of murders. The Texas Rangers subsequently set up the ‘Lucas Task Force’. Whenever Lucas confessed to an unsolved murder, he was allowed to sleep in hotels and eat in restaurants without handcuffs as a reward. To refresh his memory, the officers even presented him with the case files. In the end, over 200 unsolved murders were attributed to Lucas. He himself eventually spoke of over 600 homicides. Lucas was ultimately found guilty in Texas of nine murders, including that of a female victim in Texas in 1979 who had not yet been identified at the time and was known only as ‘Orange Socks’, for which he received the death penalty. However, Lucas could not have committed the murder of ‘Orange Socks’ – who was identified in 2019 as Debora Louise Jackson – as he had been working as a roofer in Florida at the time of her murder. Six days before his execution in 1998, George W. Bush, who was the Governor of Texas at the time, commuted Lucas’s death sentence to life imprisonment. This was Bush’s only pardon during his term in office. Doubts about Lucas’s confessions had already arisen as early as 1985, when a journalist from the Dallas Times-Herald began to critically scrutinise the serial killer’s statements. Many of the murders Lucas confessed to could not be proven, as it was established that he had been elsewhere in the country at the time of the crimes. Nevertheless, many murder cases were closed on the basis of his confessions. On death row, Lucas turned to the Christian faith and spent his final years as a model prisoner. On 12 March 2001, he died of natural causes at the age of 64. Today, it is believed that Lucas committed at least eleven murders. Nevertheless, he is remembered as one of the most enigmatic figures in criminal history, less for his crimes than for the manipulation and controversial methods that led to his numerous confessions.
