by Colin Wilson
Another telling argument by the prosecution was that Williams had lied extensively about the evening he stopped on the bridge, offering various alibis that proved to be false.
The trial began in January 1982, and ended in March when, after twelve hours’ deliberation, the jury found him guilty of the two murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
John Douglas comments: “Wayne Williams fit our profile in every key respect, including his ownership of a German shepherd. He was a police buff who had been arrested some years earlier for impersonating a law officer. After that, he had driven a surplus police vehicle and used police scanners to get to crime scenes to take pictures. In retrospect, several witnesses recalled seeing him along Sigmon Road when the police were reacting to the phone tip and searching for the nonexistent body. He had been taking photographs there, which he offered to the police.”
Too little is known about Wayne Williams and his motivations, which is why many writers on the case—including novelist James Baldwin—have doubted his guilt. In the last analysis, the story of the Atlanta child murders is as frustrating as a jigsaw puzzle with a crucial piece missing. But the missing piece may well have been destroyed by Williams himself. According to Chet Dettlinger in his book The List, in the days following the incident on the bridge, Williams and his father “did a major cleanup job around their house. They carried out boxes and carted them off in the station wagon. They burned negatives and photographic prints in the outdoor grill.” Photographs of what? They may have been anything from innocent shots of young blacks he had auditioned to photographs of actual murder victims, or even of the bodies.
The picture of Williams that emerges is of a “wannabe” with a strong desire to impress, bringing to mind in many respects “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi. But if the motive behind the murders was not sex, then what was it?
The descriptions of the bodies seem to provide a clue. This killer committed strangulation again and again and again. Many of the victims still had the rope around their throats. Is it possible that this is the answer? In a case of the 1870s—recorded by the psychologist Krafft-Ebing—an Italian youth named Vincent Verzeni committed two strangulation murders and attempted more. Krafft-Ebing notes: “As soon as he has grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations are experienced . . . accompanied by erection and ejaculation. Usually simply choking them satisfied him, and then he allowed his victims to live . . .”
The same was true of the German mass murderer of the 1920s, Peter Kürten. Throttling was a crucial part of his sexual pleasure, and if it brought a climax before the victim died, he let her go. Even when being examined in prison by a psychiatrist, he admitted that the white throat of the stenographer produced a powerful desire to squeeze it.
Is this the reason that two of the victims had premonitions they were going to die? Had Williams already practiced throttling on them?
Whether or not the prosecution established the guilt of Wayne Williams beyond doubt, one thing is clear: after his arrest, the Atlanta child murders ceased.
Although the Atlanta child murders made a worldwide sensation, it was another case that finally made the American public aware of what was meant by the term “serial killer.”
Over a period of months, a drifter named Henry Lee Lucas confessed to committing 360 murders. If true, this would make him the worst serial killer in American history—in fact, in world history.
The story that was to make world headlines began on June 15, 1983, when Joe Don Weaver, the jailer on duty in the Montague County Jail, Texas, was told by a five-foot eight-inch drifter, who was in jail for a minor weapons offence: “Joe Don, I done some pretty bad things.”
Weaver said sternly, “If it’s what I think it is, Henry, you better get on your knees and pray.”
Lucas said, “Joe Don, can I have some paper and a pencil?”
Half an hour later, Lucas handed the letter out through the hole in his cell door. It was addressed to Sheriff Bill F. Conway, and began:
I have tryed to get help for so long, and no one will believe me. I have killed for the past ten years and no one will believe me. I cannot go own [sic] doing this. I allso killed The only Girl I ever loved . . .
Weaver hurried to the telephone. He knew this was the break Sheriff Conway had been waiting for.
The unshaven, smelly little vagrant who now waited in his dark cell had been a hard nut to crack. Since the previous September, he had been suspected of killing eighty-year-old widow Kate Rich, who had vanished from her home; Sheriff Conway had learned that she had been employing an odd-job man called Henry Lee Lucas, together with his common-law wife, fifteen-year-old Becky Powell. Lucas had left Mrs. Rich’s employment under a cloud, and gone to live in a local religious commune. Not long after that, Becky had also disappeared.
Lucas insisted that he knew nothing about the disappearance of Kate Rich. As to Becky Powell, he claimed that she had run off with a truck driver when they were trying to hitchhike back to her home in Florida. He had passed several lie-detector tests, and the sheriff had finally been forced to release him. Then a week later he was arrested for owning a gun—which, since he was an ex-convict, was against the law.
A few hours later, Henry Lee Lucas sat in Sheriff Conway’s office, a large pot of black coffee and a packet of Lucky Strikes in front of him. He was a strange-looking man, with a glass eye, a thin, haggard face, and a loose, down-turned mouth like a shark’s. When he smiled, he showed a row of rotten, tobacco-stained teeth. In the small office, his body odor was overpowering.
“Henry,” said the sheriff kindly, “you say in this note you want to tell me about some murders.”
“That’s right. The light told me I had to confess my sins.”
“The light?”
“There was a light in my cell, and it said: ‘I will forgive you, but you must confess your sins.’ So that’s what I aim to do.”
“Tell me what you did to Kate Rich.”
There followed a chillingly detailed confession—Lucas seemed to have total recall—of the murder of the eighty-year-old woman and the violation of her dead body. Lucas described how he had gone to Kate Rich’s house and offered to take her to church. She had asked him questions about the disappearance of his “wife” Becky Powell, and at some point, Lucas had decided to kill her. He had taken the butcher’s knife that lay between them on the bench seat of the old car, and suddenly jammed it into her left side. The knife entered her heart and she had collapsed immediately. Then, speaking as calmly as if he was narrating some everyday occurrence, Lucas described how he had dragged her down an embankment, undressed her, and raped her. After that, he hauled her to a wide section of drainpipe that ran under the road, and stuffed her into it. Later, he had returned with two plastic garbage bags, and used them as a kind of makeshift shroud. He buried her clothes nearby. He drove back to his room in the religious hostel called House of Prayer, made a huge fire in the stove, and burned the body. The few bones that were left he buried in the compost heap outside.
Conway then asked him what had happened to Becky Powell. This time the story was longer, and Lucas’s single eye often overflowed with tears. By the time it was over, Conway was trying to hide his nausea. Lucas had met Becky Powell in 1978, when she was eleven years old; she was the niece of his friend Ottis Toole, and Lucas was staying at the home of her great-aunt in Jacksonville, Florida. Becky’s full name was Frieda Lorraine Powell, and she was mildly retarded. Even at eleven she was not a virgin. The family situation was something of a sexual hothouse. As a child, Ottis Toole had been seduced by his elder sister, Drusilla (who was Becky’s mother). He grew up bisexual, and liked picking up lovers of both sexes—including Henry Lee Lucas. And he liked watching his pickups make love to Becky or her elder sister, Sarah.
Ottis had another peculiarity; he liked burning down houses because it stimulated him sexually.
In December 1981, Drusilla committed suicide, and Becky and her younger brother, Frank, were pla
ced in juvenile care. Lucas decided to “rescue” her, and in January 1982, he and Ottis fled with Becky and Frank; they lived on the proceeds of robbery—mostly small grocery stores. Lucas felt heavily protective about Becky, he explained, and she called him “Daddy.” But one night, as he was saying good night to her, and he was making her shriek with laughter by tickling her, they began to kiss. Becky had raised no objection as he undressed her, and then himself. After that, the father-daughter relation changed into something more like husband and wife. At twelve, Becky looked as if she was nineteen.
But Becky had suddenly become homesick, and begged him to take her back to Florida. Reluctantly, Henry agreed, and they set out hitchhiking. Later, in the warm June night, they settled down with blankets in a field. But when they began arguing about her decision to go home, Becky had lost her temper and struck him in the face. Instantly, like a striking snake, Lucas grabbed a carving knife that lay nearby, and stabbed her through the heart. After that he violated her body. And then, since the ground was too hard to dig a grave, he cut her into nine pieces with the carving knife, then scattered the pieces in the thick undergrowth. He told people who knew her that she had run away with a truck driver. His sorrow was obviously so genuine that everyone sympathized with him. In fact, Lucas told the lawmen, he felt as if he had killed a part of himself.
After this second confession, the sheriff asked: “Is that all?”
Lucas shook his head. “Not by a long way. I reckon I killed more ’n a hundred people.”
If he was telling the truth—and Conway was inclined to doubt it—he was far and away the worst mass murderer in American criminal history.
The first step was to check his story about Kate Rich. Lucas had pointed out the spot he’d stashed her body on a map. Conway and Texas Ranger Phil Ryan drove there in the darkness. They quickly located the wide drainage pipe that ran under the road, and lying close to its entrance, a pair of knickers, of the type that would be worn by an old woman. On the other side of the road, they also found broken lenses from a woman’s pair of eyeglasses.
In the House of Prayer, near Stoneburg, they searched through the unutterably filthy room that Lucas had occupied in a converted chicken barn, and in the stove, found fragments of burnt flesh, and some pieces of charred bone. On the trash heap they found more bone fragments.
In the field where Lucas said he had killed Becky Powell, they found a human skull, a pelvis, and various body parts in an advanced stage of decomposition. Becky’s orange suitcase still lay nearby, and articles of female clothing and makeup were strewn around.
Even after killing Becky, Lucas told them, he had murdered another woman. He had drifted to Missouri, and there he saw a young woman waiting by the gas pumps. He went up to her, pushed a knife against her ribs, and told her he needed a lift, and would not harm her. Without speaking, she allowed him to climb into the driver’s seat. All that night he drove south towards Texas, until the woman finally fell into a doze. Lucas had no intention of keeping his promise. He wanted money—and sex. Just before dawn he pulled off the road, and as the woman woke up, plunged the knife into her throat. Then he pushed her out on to the ground, cut off her clothes, and violated the body. After that, he dragged it into a grove of trees, took the money from her handbag, and drove the car to Fredericksburg, Texas, where he abandoned it.
Lucas was unable to tell them the woman’s name, but his description of the place where he abandoned the car offered a lead. In fact, the Texas Rangers near Fredericksburg were able to confirm the finding of an abandoned station wagon the previous October. And a little further checking revealed that the police at Magnolia, Texas, had found the naked body of a woman with her throat cut, at about the same time. Again, it was clear that Lucas was telling the truth.
On June 17, 1983, Henry Lee Lucas appeared in the Montague County Courthouse, accused of murder and of possessing an illegal firearm. A grand jury indicted him on both counts.
On Tuesday, June 21, 1983, the unimpressive little man who looked like an out-of-work road sweeper was led into the courtroom between two deputies. Judge Frank Douthitt listened to the indictment concerning Kate Rich, and then asked the prisoner if he understood the seriousness of the indictment against him. Lucas replied quietly: “Yes, sir, I have about a hundred of them.”
On request he clarified the point: yes, he meant that he had killed a hundred people.
The judge asked him if he had ever had a psychiatric examination. The little man nodded. “I tell them my problems and they didn’t want to do anything about it . . . I know it ain’t normal for a person to go out and kill girls just to have sex with them.”
The following morning, the Austin newspapers carried head-lines that were a variant of a single theme: DRIFTER CONFESSES TO A HUNDRED MURDERS. The wire services immediately picked up the story, and by evening it was on front pages all over the country.
For the preceding ten years, the American public had been kept in a state of shock at the revelations about mass murderers: Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers, the Atlanta child murderer. And now a wandering vagrant was admitting to a total that surpassed them all. And in Quantico, where the NCAVC, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, had just been launched, it was clear that it was not a moment too soon. The “wandering killer” was obviously a new variety of menace. Suddenly, every newspaper in America was talking about serial killers.
Meanwhile, the cause of all this excitement was sitting in his jail cell in Montague County, describing murder after murder to a “task force” headed by Sheriff Jim Boutwell and Texas Ranger Bob Prince. It soon became clear that a large number of these murders had not been committed on his own, but in company with his lover, Ottis Elswood Toole.
Toole, who had a gap in his front teeth and permanent stubble on his chin, looked even more like a tramp than Lucas. And even before Lucas was arrested in Texas, Toole was in prison in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. He was charged with setting fires in Springfield, the area where he lived. On August 5, 1983, he was sentenced to fifteen years for arson.
One week later, in a courtroom in Denton County—where he had killed Becky Powell—Lucas staggered everybody by pleading not guilty to Becky’s murder. He was, in fact, beginning to play a game that would become wearisomely familiar to the police: withdrawing confessions. It looked as if, now that he was in prison, the old Henry Lee Lucas, the Enemy of Society, was reappearing. He could no longer kill at random when he felt the urge, but he could still satisfy his craving for control over victims by playing with his captors like a cat with mice.
It did him no good. On October 1, 1983, in the courtroom where he had been arraigned, Lucas was sentenced to seventy-five years for the murder of Kate Rich. And on November 8, 1983, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Becky Powell. Before the courts had finished with him, he would be sentenced to another seventy-five years, four more life sentences, and an additional sixty-five years, all for murder. For good measure, he was also sentenced to death.
When Henry Lee Lucas began confessing to murders, it seemed to be a genuine case of religious conversion. Later, when he was moved to the Georgetown Jail in Williamson County, he was allowed regular visits from a Catholic laywoman who called herself Sister Clementine, and they spent hours kneeling in prayer. He was visited by many lawmen from all over the country, hoping that he could clear up unsolved killings. Sometimes—if he felt the policeman failed to treat him with due respect—he refused to utter a word. At other times, he confessed freely. The problem was that he sometimes confessed to two murders on the same day, in areas so wide apart that he could not possibly have committed both. This tendency to lie at random led many journalists to conclude that Lucas’s tales of mass murder were mostly invention.
None of the officers who knew him believed that for a moment. Too many of his confessions had turned out to be accurate.
For example, on August 2, 1983, when he was being arraigned
for the murder of a hitchhiker known simply as “Orange Socks,” Lucas was taken to Austin for questioning about another murder. On the way there, seated between two deputies, Lucas pointed to a building they passed and asked if it had been a liquor store at one time. The detectives looked at one another. It had, and it had been run by Harry and Molly Schlesinger, who had been robbed and murdered on October 23, 1979. Lucas admitted that he had been responsible, and described the killings with a wealth of detail that only the killer could have known. He then led the deputies to a field where, on October 8, 1979, the mutilated body of a young woman named Sandra Dubbs had been found. He was also able to point out where her car had been left. There could be no possible doubt that Lucas had killed three people in Travis County in two weeks.
When asked if Ottis Toole had committed any murders on his own, Lucas mentioned a man who had died in a fire set by Toole in Jacksonville. Toole had poured gasoline on the man’s mattress and set it alight. Then they hid and watched the fire fighters; a sixty-five-year-old man was finally carried out, badly burned. He died a week later. Police assumed he had accidentally set the mattress on fire with a cigarette.
Lucas’s description led the police to identify the victim as George Sonenberg, who had been fatally burned in a fire on January 4, 1982. Police drove out to Raiford Penitentiary to interview Toole. He admitted it cheerfully. When asked why he did it, he grinned broadly. “I love fires. Reckon I started a hundred of them over the past several years.”
There could be no possible doubt about it: Toole and Lucas had committed an astronomical number of murders between them. At one point, Lucas insisted that the total was about 360—he went on to detail 175 he committed alone, and 65 with Ottis Toole.
In prison after his original convictions, Lucas seemed a well-satisfied man. Now much plumper, with his rotten teeth replaced or filled, he had ceased to look so sinister. He had a special cell all to himself in Sheriff Boutwell’s jail—other prisoners had treated him very roughly during the brief period he had been among them, and he had to be moved for his own safety. And he was now a national celebrity. Magazines and newspapers begged for interviews, television cameras recorded every public appearance. Police officers turned up by the dozen to ask about unsolved murder cases, and were all warned beforehand to treat Lucas with respect, in case he ceased to cooperate. Now, at least, he was receiving the attention he had always craved, and he reveled in it. And some visitors, like the psychiatrist Joel Norris, the journalist Mike Cox, and the crime writer Max Call, came to interview him in order to learn about his life, and to write books about it. Lucas cooperated fully with Call, who was the first to reach print—as early as 1985—with a strange work called Hand of Death.