Henry Lee Lucas remembered for hoax confessions

Convicted killer Lucas dies in prisonDrifter remembered for hoax confessions

Photo of Tony Freemantle
Henry Lee Lucas , a dissolute drifter with a glass eye who once claimed to have killed as many as 600 people and then said he had made it all up, died in state prison Monday almost three years after becoming the only death row prisoner in Texas to be spared by then-Gov.
George W. Bush .

Lucas, who was 64, was admitted unconscious to the infirmary at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Ellis Unit near Huntsville after experiencing chest pains Monday evening. Prison medical staff were unable to revive him.

The cause of death was not known Tuesday, said TDCJ spokesman Larry Fitzgerald. He said an autopsy is pending, but a preliminary ruling indicated that Lucas, who had suffered from many illnesses in recent years, succumbed to "coronary problems."

On June 15, 1983, after being arrested in Montague County on murder charges, Lucas called a jailer to his cell and, citing a vision from God, began confessing to a string of slayings that he said he and his sidekick, Ottis Toole, had committed during an eight-year, cross-country orgy of rapes and killings.

Toole died in prison in 1996.

At first, Lucas said he and Toole killed 60 people, then 100, then 360, then 600.

By the time he had finished talking, and despite the fact there was only enough evidence to tie him to two slayings, police agencies in 26 states, according to numbers compiled by the Texas Rangers, had closed their books on 229 murders. Nine cases in Houston were attributed to Lucas and Toole and provisionally cleared.

During the next two years, he became the sole focus of a special Texas Rangers task force. They flew him around the country to point out places where he had killed. He was interviewed on national television. A movie was made about his life.

In one infamous videotape, Lucas took apparent pleasure in boasting how he and Toole dispatched alleged victims.

"We killed 'em every way there is except one," he said. "I haven't poisoned anyone. We cut 'em up. We ran 'em down in cars. We stabbed 'em. We beat 'em. We drowned 'em. There's crucification (sic). There's people we filleted like fish. There's people we burnt. We strangled 'em. We even stabbed them when we strangled them. We even tied 'em so they would strangle themselves."

By 1985, Lucas' fantasy world was becoming ever more bizarre, and his web of deceit began to unravel.

Jim Mattox, Texas attorney general at the time, initiated an investigation into Lucas' increasingly bizarre claims and concluded after a year of probing that not only was Lucas lying in many of his so-called confessions, but also that some police agencies were so eager to clear unsolved cases that they had unwittingly fed Lucas crime details.

Lucas also began recanting his confessions, saying that in all those years he really had only killed his mother, and that was in self-defense.

In 1986, evidence also began to surface that Lucas' account of a rootless life on the road -- in which he once said he, Toole and Lucas' girlfriend, Becky Powell, crisscrossed the country in old cars -- was also a figment of his bizarre, twisted imagination.

In fact, it began to appear that instead of drifting around, Lucas was not present at the scene of many slayings when they occurred and that for many of those eight years he lived in Maryland, where he was briefly married, and then in Jacksonville, Fla.

In 1982, Lucas and Powell, who was only 15, ended up in Stoneburg in Montague County, where they worked as caretakers for an elderly woman, Kate Rich. A few months later, Lucas said, he killed Powell because she threatened to leave him, and then he killed Rich.

Despite the evidence that he could not have committed many of the murders, many law enforcement officers clung to their belief that Lucas was a major serial killer.

Sgt. Boyd Smith of the Houston Police Department's homicide division remains convinced that Lucas and Toole are responsible for the nine cases Lucas confessed to in Houston.

"There is no question in my mind they committed these cases," Smith said. "They led us places we didn't know about."

Despite his recantations, Lucas was convicted of capital murder in one case, the 1979 killing of woman whose body was found in a ditch alongside Interstate 35, about 25 miles north of Austin. The unidentified victim became known as "Orange Socks" because that's all she was wearing when she was found.

Other than his confessions, there was no evidence linking Lucas to Orange Socks' death. And because it was the only case in which he received the death penalty -- he was sentenced to six life sentences and 210 years in prison for three other slayings -- it was the case that received most of the attention.

Records from a roofing company in Jacksonville indicated that Lucas was working the day Orange Socks was killed and that he cashed a paycheck the next day. Even Mattox concluded Lucas had killed only three people -- his mother, Powell and Rich.

Questions about whether Lucas could have killed Orange Socks eventually led the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in May 1998 to recommend to then-Gov. Bush that he commute Lucas' death sentence to life, which he did 48 hours before Lucas was scheduled to die.

Mattox told the Associated Press that Lucas will go down in history not as the greatest serial killer the state has ever known, but as the person who committed one of the greatest hoaxes ever on law enforcement.

"Nobody should have any sympathy for Lucas as a result of his convictions," Mattox said, "but I think after you've dealt with the individual, you had to give him some credit for being able to engage in the kind of hoax he engaged in."