The FBI states, ‘For children growing up, the quality of their attachments to parents and to other members of the family is most important as to how these children, as adults, relate to, and value other members of society. Essentially, these early life attachments (sometimes called bonding) translate into a map of how a child will perceive situations outside the family.’
Psychotherapist, neuropsychologist and neuroscientist, Dr R Joseph, is highly recognised as a creative, insightful and profound theorist and scientist. He is one of a handful of experts on both the brain and the mind, so what does Dr Joseph have to say on this subject? In his book The Right Brain and the Unconscious, he writes,
As a tree grows, the young tree that once was, never disappears; rather, layer by layer, comes to be superimposed on its core. Deep inside, the baby tree that it once was is still alive. The way in which the young tree took shape, the forces that acted on it, the twists, turns and bends and breaks that have been caused by wind and rain, humans, or disease, all determine the shape the tree assumes as it matures and ages. No matter how well it is cared for, it will never completely outgrow any neglect when it was just a sapling. If we were to cut down and examine the innermost portion of this tree, we would discover that the young tree that it once was continues to exist at its central core. It is alive and forever retains its original form. What the young tree was, it will always be. What it was becomes the foundation for what it will be.
The adult tree retains this living core, having grown outward from it. If we were to root out this central core, the tree would die, as the integrity of the tree depends on it [for survival]. If the central core is weak and diseased, then no matter how expert the care, the adult tree will be as feeble as its foundation.
Just as the living tree retains its early core, within the core of each of us is the Child that we once were. This Child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.
Reflecting on Henry’s childhood, there is no doubt that he was psychologically damaged during his formative years. However, as most authorities will agree, millions of people, from all walks of life and cultures, suffer similar abuse, and they don’t turn into serial killers.
In his book called, Serial Killers – the Growing Menace, the late Joel Norris mentions Henry’s diet as a child:
These years of malnutrition, especially during childhood, resulted in stunted development in the cerebral tissue as well as an impaired judgement and cognitive performance. It was only during his incarceration that his diet was stabilised to the point where he no longer suffered from elevated levels of blood sugar and severe vitamin deficiencies.
Yet, although this may have the ring of truth about Lucas’s problems, I doubt, given the available case history, that this is the entire story.
We know that Lucas’s behaviour, while in prison, was extremely psychotic and antisocial to say the least, and that is why he was prescribed Prozac, a drug that effectively controlled his emotions. It was this treatment, perhaps in concert with the balanced diet, that combined to settle Lucas down during his lengthy periods behind bars. However, inmates often calm down and act more responsibly within the structured penal system, so in this respect, Lucas was not unique.
Before his death, I interviewed Lucas a number of times. He comes across as something of a zombie, but an affable zombie. Without doubt, the cocktail of psychological and physical child abuse, use of drugs, accidents, four packs of cigarettes a day, large consumption of alcohol and a poor diet, caused a progressive degeneration of his neurological system. As Joel Norris points out, ‘The physical connections between the different areas of the brain, the hundreds of millions of electromechanical switches that balance primeval feelings of violence with logical, socially disordered behaviour, simply didn’t work properly.’
So, here is a man, therefore, who, like so many of his killer breed, died emotionally and socially before he was into his teens, and for whom life itself had just become a search to satisfy his dysfunctional urges from one day to the next. Of course, none of what has been suggested is intended to imply that Lucas was, by legal definition, insane. He knew the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. He knew he was taking long strides outside the social order, and he didn’t care a jot about the consequences, the carnage and heartbreak that he caused during the years of his homicidal spree.
During the last interview with Lucas, he argued that he had never killed anyone. Becky Powell was still alive and well, he said, even though police have since recovered a set of bleached bones from a site in Denton County identified by Lucas. But there was no forensic evidence categorically stating that these were the remains of Becky Powell. Furthermore, it would be in Lucas’s interest to report that, recently, a woman has come forward to claim that she is Becky Powell. She has even offered to take a polygraph test and give blood samples, which could be used for DNA analysis. The police will not entertain the idea, even if it was for a little fun, or an interesting exercise. But what if Becky was still alive? The Devil’s work, with his ‘Black Hand of Death’ cult of followers? Real-life zombies returning from a Texas grave. This is the sort of stuff for which the Hammer House of Horror film production company would pay a handsome fee!
‘I did not kill Kate Rich, either,’ Henry protested. And it could be argued that only the widow’s ashes were left blowing in the wind. No one could identify her from those grey traces. Nevertheless, parts of her spectacles were found near the wood-burning stove, the very same stove in which he originally claimed he had cremated the body.
As the last interview drew to a close, Henry was asked how it was that he had led so many law officers to shallow graves. How he had described details that could only have been known to the murderer. His convoluted answer was that he had been shown pictures of the bodies in situ, so he was able to repeat that information. This, of course, begged the question: ‘How did you know where the bodies had been dumped?’
Once again, Lucas gave what he thought was a credible answer. ‘They [the police] done took me there beforehand, and then they came back to me afterwards and asked me where the bodies were.’
The problem with this answer is that the police had no idea where these corpses were, until Henry told them.
In a last ditch effort to get Henry to tell the whole truth, he was asked about the murder of his mother. Wiping the dripping green gunge, from his false eye, with his shirt cuff, he replied, ‘Nope. I just never killed no one. I just always thought I’d killed her dead. But my sister said on her deathbed that she’d killed my mom … I never knew that. There was a witness to that, but she’s dead, too.’
Just two weeks previously, Lucas had been visited by police officers. During the interview, he confessed to another two murders, and gave them details of the burial sites. The bodies were subsequently recovered.
Henry Lee Lucas was like a rare, prehistoric specimen preserved in amber. He was insidious in a fascinating sort of way. Ugly, mentally flawed, he wore perfectly the persona of a serial killer in that human warehouse known as the Texas Department of Corrections.
* * *
Ottis Elwood Toole died in prison, of cirrhosis of the liver, in September 1996. Convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas was rescued from Death Row and almost certain execution by the then Governor of Texas, now President of the United States, George W Bush, on 25 June 1998.
Bush said, ‘While Henry Lee Lucas is guilty of committing a number of horrible crimes, serious concerns have been raised about his guilt in this case [Orange Socks].’
Work records and a cashed pay cheque indicated that Lucas had been in Florida, where he worked as a roofer, and these records coincided exactly with the date of this murder. Clearly, Lucas could not have been in two places at once, and now there is good reason to believe that the late Sheriff Boutwell knew this, too.
In Texas, a governor has the legal authority to commute a death sentence, only on the recommendation of a majority of the 18-member Board of Pardons and P
aroles. The same panel rejected a clemency plea from Karla Faye Tucker, a 38-year-old woman, who confessed to the pick-axe slayings of two people, but said she had become Christian in prison and asked for mercy. She was executed on 3 February 1998.
Since Governor Bush had been in office, a majority of the Board has voted to recommend commutation of a death sentence on only only one occasion. The only independent authority that a Texas governor has, in a death penalty case, is to grant a one-time, 30-day delay of execution. There had been 134 executions between the time Bush took office and the date of Lucas’s commutation.
‘There’s an 80 per cent chance I will walk out of prison some day,’ Lucas told Associated Press writer Michael Graczyk. ‘He [Bush] stood up for what he believes in the law and law says no innocent person should be executed,’ added Henry, who had been set for lethal injection on 30 June for the 1979 slaying, in Williamson County, of Orange Socks.
On 30 June, he was taken from Death Row to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Diagnostic Centre in Huntsville, where he underwent medical and psychiatric tests to see if he was sane enough to be executed. His conversation with psychiatrists lasted about a minute. ‘They changed my record,’ he said afterwards. ‘They said I was a nut. They sent it back over here; I went back down to these people. They said, “They changed you to a nut.” These people changed my record back to the way it’s supposed to be. I’m just a person trying to do their time, trying to clear these false cases and get back to my own life. That’s all I am trying to do.’
Escaping execution by the skin of his teeth, Henry was returned a week later to Ellis Unit, about 15 miles north-east of the town. But instead of returning to Death Row at Ellis, he was placed amongst the general prison population.
His life in the general population was not without adjustments. He still walked the corridors with his hands behind his back, a routine procedure on Death Row, where inmates are handcuffed. He also had a new prison number, trading his three-digit Death Row ID for a six-digit regular number.
‘Down there, it’s something different completely,’ he said of Death Row. ‘It’s a tight feeling. Once you get to population, it’s not that way.’ He explained that when he arrived at his new cell, his cellmate requested an immediate transfer when he learned Lucas would be his partner. Henry was given a cell of his own.
Bush, who had said that Lucas would never be released from prison, said questions raised by Lucas, and others, about the murder for which he was subsequently given the death sentence, convinced him to allow the commutation. ‘It shocked me, to be honest,’ Lucas said. ‘I didn’t think he was going to do it. Everybody was against it. He stood up for what he believed in. I gave up, yeah. Anybody would, with the kind of record I’ve got. But I only killed my mom, an’ I served my time for that.’
Aged 64, Henry Lee Lucas died of a heart-attack during the late hours of Monday, 12 March 2001. He was removed from his cell and transported to the medical area at Ellis Unit after complaining of chest pains, and he was pronounced dead at 10.17pm. After an autopsy at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, he was buried at Peckerwood Hill Cemetery, the final resting place of thousands of Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmates whose bodies have been unclaimed by friends and family, in Huntsville on Thursday 15 March.
Over 500 people attended the service: more than three times the number to attend any killer’s funeral in history.
This chapter is based on exclusive Death Row interviews between Christopher Berry-Dee and Henry Lee Lucas within Ellis Unit, Huntsville, Texas in 1996, and additional correspondence and research.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER BERRY-DEE is the Editor of The New Criminologist and Director of the Criminology Research Centre. His first book, written with Robin Odell, was Dad, Help Me Please, the story of Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig. He has written numerous other crime titles, including Unmasking Mr Kipper, a study of the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh. He was also the researcher and interviewer for the 13-part TV series The Serial Killers, and frequently appears on television discussions regarding all issues relating to serious crime.
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Talking with Serial Killers Page 33