Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  Here, for the first time, the American public had an opportunity to satisfy its morbid curiosity about Lucas’s rampage of crime. The story that emerged lacked the detail of later studies, but it was horrific enough.

  Lucas, Call revealed, had spent most of his life from 1960 (when he was twenty-six years old) to 1975 in jail. After his release he had an unsuccessful marriage—which broke up when his wife realized he was having sex with her two small daughters—and lived for a while with his sister Wanda, leaving when she accused him of sexually abusing her young daughter. He seems to have met Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1978. Ottis had a long prison record for stealing cars and petty theft, and he invited Lucas back home, where he was soon regarded as a member of the family.

  According to Lucas, he had already committed a number of casual murders as he wandered around. These were mostly crimes of opportunity—as when he offered a lift to a young woman called Tina Williams, near Oklahoma City, after her car had broken down. He shot her twice and had intercourse with the body. Police later confirmed Lucas’s confession.

  Even so, the meeting with Toole seems to have been a turning point. Now, according to both of them, they began killing “for fun.” According to Toole’s confession, they saw a teenaged couple walking along the road in November 1978, their car having run out of fuel. Lucas forced the girl into the car, while Toole shot the boy in the head and chest. Then, as Toole drove, Lucas repeatedly raped the girl in the back of the car. Finally, Toole began to feel jealous about his lover, and when they pulled up, shot her six times, and left her body by the road. The police were also able to confirm this case: the youth was called Kevin Key, the young woman Rita Salazar.

  The case was the first of more than a score of similar murders along Interstate 35 that kept Sheriff Boutwell, now chief investigator, busy for the next five years. The victims included teenaged hitchhikers, elderly women abducted from their homes, tramps, and men who were killed for robbery. Lucas was later to confess to most of these crimes.

  Lucas and Toole began robbing convenience stores, forcing the proprietor or store clerk into the back. Lucas described how, on one occasion, they tied up a young female clerk, but she continued to try to get free. So he shot her through the head, and Toole had intercourse with her body.

  On October 31, 1979, the naked body of a young woman was found in a culvert on Interstate 35, her clothes missing, except for a pair of orange socks laying by the body. After his arrest, Lucas described how he and Toole had picked up “Orange Socks,” who was hitchhiking, and when she had refused to let Lucas have sex with her, he strangled her. Lucas would eventually receive the death sentence for the murder of the still unidentified young woman.

  When Lucas and Toole abducted Becky and her brother, Frank, in January 1982, they took the kids with them when they robbed convenience stores; Becky looked so innocent that the proprietor took little notice of the two smelly vagrants who accompanied her—until one of them produced a gun and demanded the money from the till. And, according to Lucas, Becky and Frank often became witnesses to murder—in fact, in one confession he even claimed that they had taken part in the killings.

  Eventually, Frank and Toole returned home to Florida, while Becky and Lucas continued “on the road.” In January 1982, a couple named Smart, who ran an antiques store in Hemet, California, picked them up, and for five months Lucas worked for them. When the Smarts asked Lucas if he would like to go back to Texas to look after Mrs. Smart’s mother, Kate Rich, he accepted their offer. Yet after only a few weeks, the Smarts received a telephone call from another sister in Texas, telling them that the new handyman was spending Mrs. Rich’s money on large quantities of beer and cigarettes in the local grocery store. Another sister who went to investigate found Mrs. Rich’s house filthy, and Lucas and Becky drunk in bed.

  Lucas was politely fired. But his luck held. Only a few miles away, he was offered a lift by the Reverend Reuben Moore, who had started his own religious community in nearby Stoneburg. Moore also took pity on the couple, and they moved into the House of Prayer. There everyone liked Becky, and she seemed happy. She badly needed a home and security. Both she and Henry became “converts.”

  Becky nonetheless began to feel homesick, and begged Henry to take her back to Florida. A few days later, pieces of her dismembered body were scattered around a field near Denton. And Lucas’s nightmare odyssey of murder was drawing to a close.

  The American public, which at first followed Lucas’s confessions with horrified attention, soon began to lose interest. After all, he was already sentenced. So was Ottis Toole (who would also be later condemned to death for the arson murder of George Sonenberg). And as newspapers ran stories declaring that Lucas had withdrawn his confessions yet again, or that some police officer had proved he was lying, there was a growing feeling that Lucas was not, after all, the worst mass murderer in American history.

  It was a couple named Bob and Joyce Lemons who first placed this conviction on a solid foundation. An intruder had murdered their daughter, Barbara Sue Williamson, in Lubbock, Texas, in August 1975. Lucas confessed to this murder when asked about it by Lubbock lawmen. When the Lemons heard the confession they felt sure it was a hoax. Lucas said he recalled the house as being white, that he had entered by the screen door, and killed the newly married woman in her bedroom. It was a green house, the screen door had been sealed shut at the time, and Barbara had been killed outside.

  The Lemons went and talked to Lucas’s relatives, and soon came up with a list of the periods when he had stayed in Florida, which contradicted dozens of his “confessions.” But when they confronted Texas Ranger Bob Prince with these discoveries, he became hostile and ordered them out of his office.

  Unsurprisingly, Ressler’s own attitude toward Lucas is skeptical. In Whoever Fights Monsters, he writes:

  By the time I interviewed Lucas, years after the controversy had died down, the dust had settled and Lucas said that he had actually committed none of the murders to which he had previously confessed. Under closer questioning, he did admit that since 1975 he had “killed a few,” fewer than ten, perhaps five. He just wasn’t sure. He had told all those lies in order to have fun, and to show up what he termed the stupidity of the police.

  This figure, however, is obviously as much an underestimate as Lucas’s original claim of 350 (or even, at one stage, 650) was an exaggeration. As noted above, many of Lucas’s claims were confirmed on investigation. It seems, on the whole, that he was probably telling something like the truth in his first statement that he had killed “about a hundred.”

  Ressler adds:

  It took several years for the Lucas fiasco to be resolved. The task-force member had been right, though: If we had had VICAP up and running at the time Lucas made his first startling admission, it would have been easy to see what was truth and what was falsehood in his confession. First, we would have asked the police departments to fill out VICAP forms on their unsolved murders and enter them into the computer system. Then we would have analyzed them by date, location, and MO, and would quickly have been able to show that several of them had been committed on the same date in widely separated locations, thus eliminating the possibility that they were committed by the same man. By such processes of elimination, we would have narrowed the field very quickly and allowed investigators to concentrate on the real possibilities.

  Lucas, sentenced to several life terms as well as to death in the 1980s, began the usual process of appeal, then spent thirteen years on death row. By June 1998, when it seemed that he could no longer delay the death sentence, then Governor George Bush commuted it to life imprisonment.

  Ottis Toole died in September 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver.

  12

  The Most Evil?

  Sadism, the enjoyment of another person’s suffering, is a relatively rare perversion. As Roy Hazelwood told Stephen Michaud, however, “. . . those who harbor it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They ar
e the great white sharks of deviant crime.”

  He was referring to Mike DeBardeleben, whose criminal career spanned eighteen years. When he was arrested on May 25, 1983, it was not for murder or rape—although in both these fields he was a repeat offender—but passing counterfeit bills.

  By 1980, one of the Secret Service’s serious headaches was a counterfeiter agents called the “Mall Passer,” who they had been trying to find for three years. The Mall Passer unloaded fake $20 bills in shopping malls all over the country by handing them over in exchange for small items, such as cigarettes and men’s socks, and taking the change. He obviously drove far and wide; in one year, he traveled to thirty-eight states and unloaded as much as $30,000 in fake bills. It was the task of the hunters, led by Secret Service agents Greg Mertz, Dennis Foos, and Mike Stephens, to try to discern some kind of pattern in his crimes and lay a trap. The number of fake bills passed in the Washington D.C. and northern Virginia area suggested that this might be where he lived.

  Police artist drew up sketches of the Mall Passer based on the descriptions of store clerks who had seen him, and these were passed to every mall he had ever visited. In the late afternoon of Thursday, April 25, 1983, staff of the Eastridge Mall in Gastonia, North Carolina, was on the lookout for the Mall Passer, since a local FBI agent had worked out that this might well be his target that month.

  When a customer offered a $20 bill in payment for a paperback book, the clerk thought he recognized the wanted man, and noted that the $20 bill did not seem genuine. At the first opportunity he called the security guard, only to discover that his cell phone was out of order. But the Mall Passer had now moved on to other stores, where he continued to pass counterfeit bills. Finally, the Mall Passer—a thin, dark-haired man with a tight, straight mouth—was followed to his car. Some sixth sense must have told the fugitive that he was being observed, for one clerk noticed that he was so nervous that he was shaking. The police arrived shortly after he had driven away.

  A month later, on May 25, the Passer was recognized by a bookstore clerk in West Knoxville, Tennessee, who dialed the police. The man had realized he was being tailed, and broke into a run, with two agents after him, when he found himself confronted by two policemen who had been summoned by radio.

  But the thin, tight-lipped man was uncooperative with the police, even though he knew that they had found more phony bills and stolen license plates in his car, as well as a large quantity of pornography.

  His wallet identified him as Roger Collin Blanchard, but his car was registered to a James R. Jones of Alexandria, Virginia. Fingerprint identification, however, revealed him to be James Mitchell DeBardeleben II, known as “Mike,” and that in 1976 he had spent two years in jail for passing dud $100 bills.

  In his apartment, investigators discovered a Yellow Pages directory with a tiny slip of paper slipped between the pages listing storage facilities. And a visit to the one nearest his home uncovered a storeroom full of the kind of items that indicated a car thief, and someone who posed as a policeman—a police badge, bubble lights, handcuffs, and a siren. And together with more pornography, they found dozens of photographs of women in various stages of undress, many looking terrified and battered. There could be little doubt that these latter were not posed by models—a bag containing bloodied panties, a chain, handcuffs, a dildo, and a lubricant suggested why the women looked so terrified. There were also tapes that made it clear that DeBardeleben enjoyed having women at his mercy—and forcing them to say that they were enjoying the rapes and tortures he was inflicting on them.

  In his study of DeBardeleben, Lethal Shadow, Stephen Michaud remarks that investigators concluded that he was “the most dangerous felon ever at large in America.” Michaud also comments: “For Mike DeBardeleben, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control.” “There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her,” DeBardeleben wrote in his private journal. “To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the constant domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.”

  The problems with chronicling DeBardeleben’s criminal career were, as Michaud soon discovered, enormous. Even with the help of Roy Hazelwood, who had collected all of the evidence that figured in DeBardeleben’s trials (no less than six), and which finally sent him to prison for 365 years, there was no possibility of constructing a timeline of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities. He had covered his trail far too well. Ted Bundy—about whom Michaud also wrote a book—continued to deny his guilt until his death sentence produced a state of desperation in which he was willing to bargain for time with confessions dribbled out piecemeal. DeBardeleben was never under this pressure, and so had no motivation to tell the whole truth. Michaud, like the police investigators, had to work backwards, telling the story in reverse order. For practical purposes, this began with DeBardeleben’s release from prison in May 1978, where he had spent two years for passing counterfeit bills.

  In the early hours of Sunday, September 4, 1978, DeBardeleben passed a nineteen-year-old nurse (whom Michaud calls “Lucy Alexander”) who had quarreled with her boyfriend and was walking towards her home. He politely asked if he could help. She climbed into his luxury car. Minutes later he produced a police badge and told her she was under arrest for hitchhiking. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, and gagged and blindfolded her with adhesive tape. Two hours later they stopped at a house and he took her indoors. On a mattress on the floor he undressed her, leaving the blindfold in place, and then raped her for an hour without reaching a climax. He then sodomized her, ordering her to call him “Daddy.” After a sleep, he drank root beer, smoked a cigarette, and forced her to fellate him. As she did this he abused her verbally—obviously an integral part of the pleasure of the rape.

  In lulls between further rapes, he told her about his former wife; “all she did was spend money.” During the next eighteen hours she was raped four times vaginally and anally. Finally, he allowed her to dress, drove her to an isolated area, and released her.

  On the afternoon of February 4, 1979, DeBardeleben went into the trailer sales office of a real estate company, and told the realtor, thirty-one-year-old Elizabeth Mason (again a pseudonym), that he was a federal employee about to be transferred to Arlington, Virginia, and was looking for a home for himself and his wife. He asked her to take him to see some houses in the $100,000 range. Finally, in an empty house, he pointed a .389 automatic at her. Recalling an article she had read by the TV hostess Carol Burnett, she decided to scream and yell and flail at him.

  He tried to shoot her, but the gun jammed. He then began hitting her with the gun. Eventually, declaring that he only wanted her purse and that he would then leave, he got her to agree to being tied up. This proved to be a mistake; when she was tied, he throttled her, banging her head on the floor and shouting, “Pass out, bitch.” Finally she did.

  When she woke up, her slacks had been removed, and the man had taken her car. She was in such a state of trauma that it was two days before a detective could question her. Her head required thirty-one stitches. It was not until she was in the hospital that she realized that her sanitary pad was still in place and that she had not been raped.

  On June 1, 1979, a twenty-year-old woman (Michaud calls her “Laurie Jensen”) was on her way home toward midnight from the convenience store she managed when a sedan pulled up and the driver said, “Police,” and ordered her into the car. Then he told her she was suspected of being an accomplice in a burglary.

  Soon he abandoned the pretense, and handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged her. A two-hour drive followed, which ended when he made her walk into a house. There he undressed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. She noticed the small size of his penis. After achieving an erection with difficulty he sodomized her, ordering her to call him “Daddy” as he did so.

  That afternoon he made her pose for photographs, tape-recorded her as she was forced to tell him how m
uch she enjoyed what he was doing to her, and then locked her in a closet. He told her that he was resentful about a previous wife and wanted “to get back at all women.” After keeping her for twenty-four hours, with more sodomy and oral sex, he drove her to within a few blocks of her home.

  Frustrated investigators consulted the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and it was John Douglas who profiled the rapist. What he said was to prove remarkably accurate when DeBardeleben was finally arrested. Douglas said that a man who did this kind of thing was raised by an overbearing, domineering mother, and had a passive father. He had probably been arrested in his teens, had been in the military, but would have such problems adjusting to discipline that he would probably have been discharged. He would also be sexually inadequate.

  DeBardeleben’s next attempt at abduction showed how his hatred of women could explode if he was resisted. On November 1, 1980, a twenty-five-year-old named Diane Overton was pulled over at 4 a.m. by a man who claimed to be a policeman. He ordered her out of the car, and when she opened the door, snapped handcuffs on her wrists. When he put his hand over her mouth she bit him hard. She then began screaming and honking her horn. But in spite of being in the middle of a residential district, no one responded. He dragged her into his car, but she stalled it by kicking it out of gear. Then she managed to open the door and fell out. The open door hit a cement wall and jammed. He managed to get it free and drove at her; she twisted out of the way, but he turned at a closed gas station and drove at her again. She succeeded in escaping by hiding under a concrete stairway, until her attacker finally drove off. She was lucky to escape; in his fury, DeBardeleben would undoubtedly have tortured as well as killed her.