Serial Killer Investigations

by Colin Wilson

  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 80-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, 15-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 let him go. 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. When he smiled, he showed a row of rotten, tobacco-stained teeth. In the small office, his body odour 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 80-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, then undressed and raped her. After that, he dragged 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 feeling of nausea. Lucas had met Becky Powell in 1978, when she was 11 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 slightly mentally retarded. Even at 11 she was not a virgin. The family situation was something of a sexual hothouse. Ottis Toole had been seduced by his elder sister Drusilla when he was a child. 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, Becky’s mother Drusilla committed suicide, and Becky and her younger brother, Frank, were placed 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 goodnight 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 12, Becky looked as if she was 19.

  But Becky had suddenly become homesick, and begged him to take her back to Florida. Reluctantly, Henry agreed; 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 sympathised 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 eyeglasses.

  In the House of Prayer, near Stoneburg, they looked into 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 into 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. Agai
n, it was clear that Lucas was telling the truth.

  On 17 June 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 21 June 1983, the unimpressive little man who looked like an out-of-work road sweeper was led in 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 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 headlines that were a variant 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 murders. 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 ofViolent 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 5 August 1983, he was sentenced to 15 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 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 1 October 1983, in the courtroom where he had been arraigned, Lucas was sentenced to 75 years for the murder of Kate Rich. And on 8 November 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 75 years, four more life sentences, and a further 65 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 closely believed that for a moment. Too many of his confessions had turned out to be accurate.

  For example, on 2 August 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 23 October 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 8 October 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 had hidden and watched the fire engines; a 65-year-old man was finally carried out, badly burned. He had 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 4 January 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 a 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 revelled 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.

  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 26) to 1975 in jail. After his release he had an unsuccessful marriage—which broke up when his wife realised 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.
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  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 teenage 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 raped the girl repeatedly 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 teenage 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 31 October 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 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 they had taken part in the killings.