In March 1972, Lucas was back before the courts and sentenced to a further five years in prison, for attempted abduction and kidnapping. Following his release, on 22 August 1975, Lucas travelled to Port Deposit, Maryland, to visit his half-sister, Almeda Kiser, and her daughter, Aomia Pierce. Records show that he stayed there for three days, after which he moved to Chatham, Pennsylvania, with Aomia Pierce and her husband. He found menial work as a farm hand before being introduced to Betty Crawford, the widow of one of his nephews. Initially, they were just friends but the relationship developed steadily until they were finally married, on 5 December 1975.
After living with the Pierces for a short time, Lucas, Crawford and her three children moved back to Port Deposit to live in a trailer park. Henry drifted from job to job earning only small amounts of money. The bulk of the family’s income was provided by Betty’s social security payments. The family lived in this manner until June 1976, when, in company with another family from the trailer park, they moved to Hurst, Texas. The plan was for Betty to visit her mother while Henry looked for work. When this plan failed, they moved to Illinois, before returning to Maryland.
Shortly after returning, Betty Crawford accused Lucas of molesting her daughters. Lucas denied the charges but told her that he had decided to leave anyway. On 7 July, Lucas packed his few belongings and headed off towards Florida. On the way south, he stopped off to stay with Opal. Less than a month later, Henry and his brother-in-law, Wade Kiser, travelled to West Virginia for a family reunion. On the way, while caught in heavy traffic, Henry struck up a conversation with another man and, shortly after, he left Kiser, to team up with the stranger for a trip to Shreveport, Louisiana. After a brief stop-over in Virginia, to visit his half-brother, Harry Waugh, Lucas arrived at his destination.
While in Shreveport, Henry was offered the job of driving a car to Los Angeles but declined after he became convinced that he would be working for the Mafia. He left Louisiana and went back to Port Deposit. He didn’t stay long and moved on to Wilmington, Delaware, where a relative, Leland Crawford, gave him work in a carpet store. This employment lasted for several months, then he returned again to Port Deposit to spend Christmas with another relative, Nora Crawford. The following January, he left Nora and moved to Hinton, West Virginia, and went to work for Joe Crawford, who was not only a relative, but also owned a carpet store. While in Hinton, he met a woman called Rhonda Knuckles and lived with her, until March 1978 when he tired of the relationship and returned yet again to Port Deposit. Lucas stayed for a short time until his sister Almeda offered him lodgings and a job in her husband’s wrecking yard. Henry seemed settled until Almeda accused him of sexually molesting her granddaughter. Again, he denied the accusation.
On or about 4 September 1977, Lucas says he was in California, where he claims to have murdered Elizabeth Wolf, in Davis, a medium-size city, some 25 miles west of Sacramento. Quite what he was doing, so far south, remains a mystery, although, his late mother had had a relationship with a man named Dixon, who hailed from a city of the same name, 15 miles from where he killed Elizabeth Wolf. Perhaps he was searching for his natural father?
After stabbing Mrs Wolf, Lucas hightailed it to Houston, Texas, where, on 7 September, he shot to death Glenda Beth Goff. On 17 September 1977, he was arrested for a misdemeanour in Jacksonville, Florida, and was jailed for 45 days. The morning after his release, he told the Kisers that he needed their truck and tools, to collect a couple of wrecked cars for the yard. When Lucas didn’t return that night, or the following day, the Kisers reported the car as stolen. The vehicle was later recovered outside Jacksonville, Florida, in an undrivable condition. It was here that Lucas met his future sidekick, Ottis Toole.
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Ottis Elwood Toole was born on 5 March 1947, in Florida. His background was similar to Henry’s, and, aged four, Ottis was run over by a car. By the age of six, his alcoholic father had been sexually abusing him for several years and, when his genetic father left home, Robert, an equally perverted stepfather, moved in and took over where his predecessor had left off.
Aged eight, Ottis fell through a broken board on his front porch, impaling his forehead on a nail that went three inches into the frontal lobe of his brain. That injury, it is said, resulted in his suffering from grand mal epileptic seizures for the rest of his life.
The youngest of four children, Ottis had been born into a family that was totally inbred, schizophrenic and psychopathic. His mother, Sarah, a Bible-bashing Baptist who chanted verse at the drop of a hat, had grown accustomed to her second husband passing young Ottis around his drinking cronies for sex. And if that form of abuse was not bad enough, the lad was bullied, 24 hours a day, by his elder brothers and sexually abused by his sisters, Drusilla and Vonetta, who made him dress up as a girl and made him wait on them like a little Cinderella. Notwithstanding this torment, Ottis grew into a strapping, 6ft 2in hulk, with large hands and a powerful 200lb physique.
The Toole’s run-down, clapboard house was set deep in alligator country, in Springfield, Florida, and it put a leaking roof over the heads of Ottis’s family as they came and went in this explosive powder keg of overcrowding, poverty and sexual deviation. Perhaps no one can sum up Ottis Toole better than the American author, Sondra London. Sondra interviewed Toole at the Appalachee Correctional Institute, in July 1991, and she made this observation about this serial killer in her book, Knockin’ on Joe:
To him, life itself is so unmeaning, and the distinction between living and dead people so blurred, that killing is no more than swatting a fly. Retarded and illiterate, he has been out of control since his early childhood. Born in the shadow of the ‘’Gator Bowl’, Ottis is a real live ‘’gator’ – a bottom feeder, more reptilian than human, scuttling through the swamps of society, ceaselessly scanning for helpless prey.
Lucas met his future sidekick in a soup kitchen, not far from Jacksonville. At this time, Ottis was sharing a house with his mother, Sarah, and her husband, Robert, Ottis’s wife, Novella, a nephew, Frank Powell Jr, and Frieda ‘Becky’ Powell, Ottis’s 11-year-old niece. It seems that the Toole family was quite used to Ottis bringing home strange men from the mission. Sarah Pierce, a one-time house guest, later told police that Ottis, a known bisexual, often picked up men to bring home for sexual purposes. As well as his homosexual tendencies, Ottis also enjoyed watching his male guests have sex with his wife and the under-age Becky. Henry soon adapted to his new home, and soon he shared the main bedroom with Ottis, after Novella was sent to stay with neighbours.
Ottis got a job for Henry in the paint factory where he worked, but it was only a few days before he quit and headed south to his former hunting grounds in Texas, where, on 22 October 1977, he shot dead Lily Pearl Darty with two bullets to the back of her head. On 1 November, in Bellmead, near Waco, Texas, he shot Glen D Parks, twice, with a .38-calibre revolver, after first hog-tying his victim.
Lucas’s next murder spree started in and around Jacksonville in late 1978, but not until he and Toole had, by his own claim, joined a satanic cult called The Hand of Death. In fact, Lucas attributed his most heinous crimes – ‘The Crucifixion Killings’ – to the Devil and ‘his doings’. Later, he claimed that he underwent cult training in the Florida Everglades some time after he was released from prison. According to a 1985 book called, The Hand of Death, which was written by Lucas and co-authored by Max Call, there were some 200 inductees in his class, representing six different nations, and all ethnic groups and social classes. Henry further claims that during his first week of training, he began by teaching a class in the techniques of killing with a knife. They practised hand-to-hand combat, studied law enforcement manuals, and memorised radio communication codes. All of this must have been an uphill struggle for Henry with an extremely low IQ. After careful research by this author, it was realised that this large class of students, and the training they enjoyed, only existed in the fantasy-driven imaginings of Lucas’s mind, and nowhere else. He also says that they read a
satanic bible, and since the participants believed that acts of perversion would provoke the reincarnation of the Devil, and glorify Satan, the group leaders encouraged the practice of sodomy, sadomasochism, bestiality and necrophilia that followed each Black Mass, all of which were subjects that Lucas was already at home with.
During these alleged Devil-worshipping ceremonies, Henry told the author that they sacrificed kidnapped children, or traitorous members, on an altar within a sacred circle. Dancing worshippers carried the luckless victims on their shoulders while the remainder of the group chanted ‘Ambe iske ho a secco’, which remains a mystery! Nevertheless, Lucas has it that a high priest, called ‘The Hand’, wearing the obligatory cloak, walked, through rings of fire, to the altar where he slaughtered the victims, and everyone was required to drink the blood and eat the flesh. Henry says that he left the camp after seven weeks, to carry out the murderous orders of a superior called Don Meteric.
On his first mission, presumably with the Devil sitting on his shoulder, Lucas claims he kidnapped small children and dropped them off at a large sheep ranch, just across the Mexican border. When he returned to the cult, his superiors tattooed a scorpion on his hand. Metric then asked Lucas and Toole to kill a man. This victim was lured to a beach where Lucas cut his throat as the victim took a drink from a bottle of whisky. Lucas’s reward, for committing this crime, was a second tattoo. Later, he was tattooed with a snake, then the Devil holding a cross, for abducting young prostitutes, who were forced to take part in pornographic snuff movies.
When I asked Lucas to reveal his tattoos, he blandly explained that they had vanished after he turned to Christianity. He apparently turned to God immediately after murdering 72-year-old Librada Apodaca in El Paso, Texas, on 27 May 1983.
If one were to believe a single word about the cult – and there isn’t one iota of evidence to support even a hint that it ever existed – one is left wondering how Lucas and Toole found the time to drive to Kennewick, Nevada, where it is known that the duo raped and killed Lisa Martini, in her apartment, on 31 October 1978. By his own reckoning, Lucas was either in the Everglades learning radio procedures – obviously vital for Devil-worshipping – or in Mexico, trading in kidnapped children, of which law enforcement has no knowledge whatsoever. The killer then returned to Jacksonville and resumed his old job. Later, Ottis’s mother bought a house and moved her extended family into it. Henry quit his job again and went into the scrap metal business, soon filling the backyard of the new house with wrecked vehicles and parts.
On 5 November 1978, police established that the two serial killers were driving along Interstate 35 in Texas, when they spotted a teenage couple walking along the side of the road after their car had run out of petrol. Toole shot Kevin Kay in the back and head with a .22-calibre pistol, while Lucas raped Rita Salazar, before firing six bullets into her. Kevin Kay, who had a minor criminal record, was identified through fingerprints, and the attractive Rita was his steady girlfriend.
Now, ever mobile, the two men drove to Michigan where, on 3 October 1979, they robbed, raped and murdered Sandra Mae Stubbs. Then, they turned around and headed south, to Austin, Texas, where Harry and Molly Schlesinger were shot to death in their liquor store ten days later. Throughout this short period, the killers financed their criminal activities through robbery, culminating in murder.
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Arguably, the most infamous Lucas/Toole murder was the raping and shooting of a still-unidentified young woman in the case that has become dubbed ‘The Orange Socks Murder’. Found in a culvert on Hallowe’en, 31 October 1979, the victim wore no clothes except for a pair of orange socks. A motorist, who had been driving north on Interstate 35, stopped to relieve himself and, to his horror, he found himself peering down at a corpse, lying face down and hugging the dirty concrete. ‘I had just taken ma pecker out,’ he told a police officer, who arrived quickly on the scene, ‘an’ shit! Ya know, Jesus, fuckin’ shit! It was there, ya know. Took a pee anyways, though.’
This murder fell under the jurisdiction of Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell and, back at his jail in Denton, some ten miles north of Fort Worth, the veteran cop pored over the few clues available. He was hoping that they would reveal something positive. He was looking for anything that could lead to identifying ‘Orange Socks’ and her killer.
The attractive female was in her mid-twenties. She had reddish-brown hair, weighed between 125–130lb, and was 5ft 9in tall. Apart from the orange socks, she wore a silver, inlaid abalone ring. There was no purse, handbag or driver’s licence. There was nothing else whatsoever.
At autopsy, the body gave up a few clues, one of which indicated that she had venereal disease. There were tiny insect bites on her ankles, probably flea bites. Her stomach contents contained traces of a partially digested meal – burger, fries and Coke. Her teeth were almost perfect, so dental records might not even exist, and an X-ray showed no broken bones. On more intimate examination, a makeshift tampon made from toilet tissue was removed from the vagina, and that was all Boutwell had to go on. There was nothing that could help identify her to family or friends, and circulating her photograph around the entire North American continent was out of the question.
After his arrest in Montague County, Texas, Lucas admitted that he had killed ‘Orange Socks’, but he refused to name Toole as an accomplice. Lucas says he picked her up while she was hitch-hiking out of Oklahoma City. He thought her name was either Joannie or Judy. They drove south down Interstate 35, and he said they had consensual sex before they ate a meal at a truck stop. He described the meal, which was consistent with the medical examiner’s evidence.
After eating, they drove further south, and Henry said he asked her for more sex, but she refused. A struggle ensued with him nearly losing control of the car, which screeched to a standstill in a cloud of dust after almost leaving the road. ‘After I pulled over,’ he said, ‘I done choked her until she died. I had sex with her again, then I pulled her out of the car and dropped her down the culvert.’ He also mentioned that she wore some kind of sanitary towel, which he called a ‘Kotex’.
Sheriff Boutwell would not leave this particular case alone; he was determined to solve it for he reasoned that this was just one of a string of sexually-related homicides committed along the Interstate 35 corridor. Bodies just kept turning up on the much-travelled highway between Laredo on the Mexican border, and Gainesville, Cooke County, in the north.
On 27 November 1979, Lucas and Toole were back in Jacksonville. In Cherokee County that night, during the course of robbing a motel, Lucas raped, then shot to death, 31-year-old Elizabeth Dianne Knotts. Two weeks later, an 18-year-old was raped and stabbed to death in her home. Debra Lynn O’Quinn’s remains were later discovered in woods close by.
On 5 January 1980, the two men wheedled their way into the home of 76-year-old Jamie L Collins, whom the two men sexually assaulted and stabbed.
27 March brought the beating and hacking to death of 45-year-old Jo Scheffer. Her body was found, in a day-care centre, 12 hours later.
On 12 July, 24-year-old Regina Azell Campbell was found dead underneath a car. She had been raped by both men, then strangled.
20 July witnessed the brutal rape and murder of Tammy Keel Conners. Aged 19, this beautiful young woman, with aspirations of becoming a model and actress, had been dragged screaming from the roadside, and subjected to unspeakable acts of savagery before being tossed, half-alive, into a ravine, near Jacksonville.
There is no way of ascertaining the total victim count of Lucas and Toole. The eight murders may only be the tip of the iceberg. However, it is known that the two men struck again, on 22 December, when the 28-year-old mother of two children, Brenda Elaine Harden, was found raped and stabbed to death in her bedroom.
1981 brought no respite for the residents of the area as the festive season ended. Lucas says they killed again and again. Certainly they ended the life of down-and-out, 58-year-old Shirley Ogden, for her mortal remains were found ne
ar trash cans, on an alley, on 14 April.
Toole was also enjoying his criminal hobby of arson. He has claimed to have started ‘100 of ’em’. On 4 January 1982, the two men killed 65-year-old George Sonenberg, who died an agonising death a week after Toole poured petrol over him, while he lay in a drunken stupor, and set him alight. By all accounts, this offence started as a robbery which went wrong, and as was their usual practice when committing arson, the men watched from the brush as the flames shot into the night sky, laying low as the fire-fighters fought the inferno, rescuing a fatally burned Sonenberg during the process. With any evidence of the robbery and attempted murder reduced to cinders, the police believed that the victim had tragically set fire to himself after dropping a lit cigarette as he dozed off. That Sonenberg reeked of gasoline appears to have been overlooked by the police. Toole later confessed to this murder when law officers visited him, after his arrest, and while he was a resident at the Raiford Penitentiary. For this crime, Toole received the death sentence.
On 9 January 1982, and just five days after torching George Sonenberg, Lucas and Toole broke into the Jacksonville Home for Children and ‘rescued’, as they say, Becky and Frank. The foursome hit the road on a crime spree that would encompass many more States, including Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.
* * *
Back at the ranch, so to speak, the indefatigable Sheriff Boutwell had a list of 20 unsolved homicides cluttering his desk. It had not been an easy four months for him and, back in October 1981, he had been forced to take a bold initiative. With the assistance of Texas Rangers company ‘F’, based in Waco, and the Crime Analysis Section of the Department of Public Services, in Austin, Boutwell had organised a meeting to pool any information on the Interstate murders. From border to border, 29 officers and agents, from the 500-mile stretch of I-35, came together for the first time. Methodically, they sifted through photographs, witness reports and evidence, comparing modus operandi in an effort to disentangle the mystery surrounding the killings.
Talking with Serial Killers Page 31