Henry Lee Lucas – Blood, Sex and Death

Henry Lee Lucas might be the most evil killer ever. But it is equally possible that most of his victims are products of his own highly active imagination.

Cindy was 16 or 17 years old, a runaway from somewhere up north, hitch-hiking through the southern United States to nowhere in particular. She was heavily made-up, “very sext and well built, large bust,” according to the scruffy, one-eyed man driving south on the interstate, and that was enough to make him pull over and offer the girl a ride. In the car, she was glad to take his offer of a beer.


“We kept talking,” he wrote later, in his half-literate but strangely vivid style, “and I ask her to slide over beside me and she did. I become to feel of her tittys and she ask me if I like that and I said yes. She was only playing me I could tell so I said I wanted to **** her and she said maybe. I said I was going to stop and get some and she said not yet we’ll have plenty of time and I said no we don’t.”


Cindy shifted away from the driver, towards the passenger door. Possibly, she was going to risk jumping from the car. But just moving away made the driver mad. He reached out his right hand and pulled her back towards him, and put his arm around her neck. Cindy lashed out, hitting at the driver as she struggled to pull free of his grasp.


As the driver fought to control the angry, frightened teenager the car nearly went off the road. Cindy figured a wreck might not be such a bad thing. She made a grab for the steering wheel. That was too much for the driver.


“I rammed the butcher knife into her. She said something but I could not make it out. She fell between the seat and dash next to the door. She stayed like that until I pulled her out of the car and while I was pulling her she began to moan or something.”


He dragged the girl into a field, then chocked the last remnants of life out of her. He made a sketch of the girl as he remembered her, to illustrate his gruesome account.


One of many


Cindy’s killing was just one of the dozens of murders to which Henry Lee Lucas confessed, in writing or in interviews, to Texas Ranger Phil Ryan in June 1983 at the County Jail in Montague, 100 miles northwest of Dallas, in north-east Texas.


One-eyed drifter, car mechanic, ex-con, and self confessed cannibal, born-again Christian and matricide, Henry Lee Lucas was to confess, in due course, to some thing over 1,000 such killings. Of some, there is no police record, and many seem to be the product of his own imagination. Lucas had been sentenced to death in Texas, having been convicted of 11 murders. Not the hundreds of victims he had claimed, but still enough to make his a very evil man.


Lucas, by his own account, killed his first woman when he was 14 or 15 years old. The victim was 17, waiting at a bus stop when Lucas cornered her. He beat her senseless, tried to rape her and, when she came round and began to struggle, he throttled her to death.


He wasn’t caught. But Lucas did spend a year in the Beaumont Training School for Boys, in Virginia, from September 1952 for breaking and entering and , nine months after his release, went down for four years at the Virginia State Penitentiary for burglary. In May 1956 he broke out, stole a car, was captured in Michigan, and served time for the theft in the federal prison in Chillithicoe, Ohio. Then he returned to Virginia to complete his original sentence, and was finally paroled in September 1959.


Mother murdered


Four months later, he killed his mother. To most people, to kill a parent is the hardest crime of all even to imagine, let alone commit. But to Lucas, Viola was not a mother. She was a monster. And he hated her.


During Lucas’ time on the run in 1956 in Monroe, Michigan, he had met and fallen in love with a girl named Stella Curtis. After his release from the Virginia state pen in 1959, he met up with her again in Tecumseh, Michigan, where he was staying with his half-sister. They decided to marry. When Viola showed up to visit her daughter, she objected violently to the planned marriage. She wanted Henry back home in Virginia. Caught in the crossfire which erupted in a Tecumseh bar, Stella fled. Henry went back to his half-sister’s apartment, and Viola followed to abuse him further. In the end she reverted to her old ways and hit him with a broom handle. Henry, reduced to a child again, but now with the strength of a man, hit her back. This time he had a knife in his hand.


Lucas was tried in March 1960 and was sentenced to spend 20 to 40 years in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson. In August 1961, after several suicide attempts, he was admitted to the Ionia State Mental Hospital, where his already damaged brain was further subjected to massive ‘treatments’ with electric shocks (without anaesthetic), brutal behaviour therapy, and heave doses of tranquillisers and anti-depressants. He spent four years in the mental hospital before returning to Jackson.


Released from jail


Henry Lee Lucas was released from Jackson on 3 June 1970, having served a little over a quarter of his maximum sentence. Overcrowding in the penitentiary had brought on a spate of early releases for long-serving prisoners, Lucas among them. He was now free to put his plan for a unique way of life, which happened to mean a unique line in other people’s deaths, into action.


How far he got at this stage is up for question. He claimed to have killed two women immediately on his release, “almost within sight of the prison walls”, although state authorities cannot confirm the deaths. But Lucas certainly tried. He was sentenced in December 1971 to a four to five-year term for attempting to abduct a 15-year old schoolgirl at gunpoint. He went back to Jackson, and stayed there until 29th August 1975, six days after his 39th birthday.


Precisely when Henry Lee Lucas began killing after his release from Jackson in August 1975 is not clear. He first went to Perryville, Maryland, then to Chatham, Pennsylvania, staying briefly with relatives. In November he was living in Port Deposit, Michigan; on 5 December he married Berry Crawford, a widow 10 years his junior, and they rented a mobile home in the town. For the next 18 months Lucas worked for his brother-in-law Wade Kiser, a salvager and wrecker, gutting or fixing cars. But from time to time he would disappear out of town for a few days, apparently on drinking sprees.


They were probably more than that. According to some sources, during his short stay in Pennsylvania in 1975, Lucas had met 28-year old petty thief, and it seems that the pair had enough in common to meet up again later that year after Tool returned to his mother’s home in Jacksonville, Florida. One thing they did have in common, apart from having been habitually dressed as girls when they were children, was an unhealthy interest in rape and death, although not necessarily in that order.


Drinking and robbing


What started as drinking and cruising turned into robberies of convenience stores and gas stations in western Pennsylvania. From there they began to travel further afield, into Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, even as far as northern Georgia. And the further they went the madder they became. The slightest resistance would be greeted with shots from Toole’s favourite weapon, a .22 revolver or semi-automatic.


When it came to sheer pleasure, their favourite targets were hitch-hikers or lone women stranded with a broken-down car. According to Toole, on the night of Sunday 5 November 1978, they had travelled as far as Round Rock, about 11 miles north of Austin, Texas, on Interstate 35, and picked up a teenage couple whose 1974 Ford Torino had run out of petrol. No sooner were they in the can than Toole pulled out his .22 semi-auto and pointed it at the boy.


The teenager responded by offering to hand over his wallet. Lucas, at the wheel, took the car off the Interstate and soon pulled up. Toole got out, opened the rear door, pulled out the boy, and shot him once. The boy tried to run a few steps. Toole smiling, emptied the pistol into him. Then he got back into the car, this time taking the wheel. He drove back to I-35, and headed north for Waco.


Another killing


At some point Lucas clambered into the back with the girl while Toole drove on. Finally he ground to a halt on a service road just south of Waco, ordered the girl out of the car, and pumped six shots into her.


Lucas left Port Deposit in February 1979 and headed for Florida, because his half-sister Almeda had threatened to report him for sexually abusing her grand-daughter. For transport, he stole his nephew Randy Kiser’s pick-up truck. Once in Jacksonville he made contact with Toole, and stayed in the apartment that Toole shared with his wife Novella. In the adjoining house lived Toole’s mother Sarah Hartley and her husband Bob, and Toole’s drug-addicted sister Drusilla Powell, with her two children, 12-year old Frieda Lorraine, knows as Becky, and 10-year old Frank. Given Drusilla’s problems, the two children were mostly looked after by their grandmother.


On the road


Toole for Lucas a job with the roofing company he worked for. Soon, Henry Lee was helping Sarah take care of the two children. At first, he’d drive them around town on his various errands. Then he and Ottis started taking off with the two children for weeks at a time, heading north into Georgia and beyond on I-95, or west on I-10 towards Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.


In early October 1979, the odd foursome was on I-35 in Austin, Texas, in a 1971 Chevrolet Malibu, when they saw a woman by the roadside, bent over the engine of a black Dodge Diplomat sedan. On 8 October the nude body of 34-year old Sandra Mae Dubbs was found in some field miles away down the interstate in Travis County. She had been stabbed 37 times.


One of the more prolific of these sprees took place in the spring of 1980, when Lucas and Toole took off for a couple of weeks in Georgia with Ottis’ niece and nephew. Once in Georgia on I-95, the two ‘adults’ kidnapped a 16-year old girl and killed her. What else they did, Lucas refrained from saying. They dumped her body in an artificial lake. In Brunswick the next Sunday, they tried to buy beer, but were turned away. Ottis Toole left the store in a rage, then returned and killed the cashier out of spite. In Savannah, they picked up ‘a young blondish girl” at a truck stop. Somewhere in some woods south of the city they killed her. Afterwards, Toole mutilated the body.


Killing spree


In the YMCA parking lot at Heinzville, Lucas stabbed “short of a middle-aged white woman” to death. Near Dublin, in the course of robbing a store, Toole shot an unarmed bystander. Just over the state line in Alabama, Lucas killed “a resident, a white female”. Back in Georgia, in Donalsonville, Toole took Becky into a convenience store. She returned to the car, and Lucas drove down the road while Toole tool the cashier into the bathroom at the store and killed her.


In Douglasville, west of Atlanta, the pair picked up a young man and drove him into the country. When he refused to have sex with Toole because he was “too dirty”, Toole went crazy and beat the man to death.


They were heading back home now, by way of Albany. Here, they broke into a store, found a woman inside, and Lucas stabbed her to death. Just before they crossed the line into Florida, much the same thing happened again. This time, the victim of Lucas’ angry blade was male.


Just how many people Henry Lee Lucas killed, with or without the willing assistance of Ottis Toole, will probably never be known. While Lucas confessed to over 1,000 murders, he had been linked with reasonable certainty to considerably fewer.


But the United States is a huge country, with endless, wide-open space, and thousands of communities large and small. In a nation where it is not difficult to disappear from one place and reappear in another with a new identity without anyone knowing or caring, it is just as easy to disappear and die, with the same effects. As one commentator remarked, many of those who might have been witnesses against Lucas are probably dead, for often the only people who knew of his crimes were the victims themselves.


What is certain is that his pattern of working at buying and selling junk, wrecked cars and auto parts for periods between jaunts on to the interstate highways continued through 1980 and 1981. In May 1980, the two men and two children headed west, reaching Tucson, Arizona, before Frank and Becky got homesick, the car broke down, and they began to make their way back to Jacksonville by riding freight cars and hitching rides on the highway. In July they were Delaware and Virginia.


Plain evil


For food, they wold go to missions and soup kitchens; for cash, they sold their blood. For drink, they’d rob and kill/ they would rape and kill anyway, for fun our out of a profound hatred for humanity, from being “plain evil”, as Lucas once called it, or just because Lucas, at least, preferred his women dead before he had sex with them.


This bizarre, blood-soaked existence continued sporadically until 16 December 1981, when Becky’s mother Drusilla committed suicide. At this point the Florida authorities stepped in, and put Becky and Frank into a juvenile home in Bartow. Lucas hated to be parted from Becky and, early in January 1982, he and Toole broke into the home and sprang her. Then they headed west. By 20 January they were in Huston, Texas.


Six days later they raped, killed and decapitated another victim on I-20 between Abilene and Colorado City, then drove into Arizona. Here, near Scottsdale, they dumped the woman’s head in the desert. After this, Ottis Toole went back to Florida under his own steam. He was never to see his niece again.


Lucas and Becky carried on west into California to Beaumont. Lucas was later to claim that he had a contract killing to carry out there. Whether that is true or not, it was on a county road, near Beaumont’s junction of I-10 and State Route 79, that antique dealer Jack Smart, from nearby Hemet, stopped one rainy night in late January 1982 to give the unlikely pair a ride.


He did more: he gave Lucas and Becky, who was now presenting herself as Henry Lee’s wife, a small apartment in which to live, in return for doing repair jobs around his shop and his home. And when it turned out that Mrs Smart’s 80-year old and almost blind mother, ‘Granny’ Kate Rich, needed someone to look after her, Lucas and Becky had so impressed the Smart’s with their hard work that they offered the job to them. Lucas and Becky caught the Greyhound bus to Ringgold, in Montague County, Texas, where Granny Rich lived, early in May 1982.


Forging cheques


Before the end of the month, they were summarily thrown out of Granny Rich’s house by two of her daughters. They had been summoned from Wichita Falls by the clerk at the Ringgold general store, who was sure Lucas was forging cheques on Mrs Rich’s bank account. They found the place filthy and unkempt, and gave the pair money for a bus fare to get out of town.


Lucas pocketed the money and decided they should hitch-hike back to California. But the pair were soon picked up by a local preacher, the Reverend Ruban Moore, who ran a small religious community called the House of Prayer just outside nearby Stoneburg. Moore offered them a place to stay, one of the community’s shacks, in return for Lucas’ help as a roofer and general repairman. Lucas could not have known it, but accepting Moore’s generous offer was the beginning of the end, for Becky, and for him.


Becky’s sin, in Lucas’ eyes, was not so much getting religion, as what she meant to do as a result, and what that would mean to him. By the beginning of August Becky had become so enmeshed n the religious atmosphere that pervaded the House of Prayer that she felt she needed to confess her sins and repent. That entailed going back to Florida, giving herself up, taking whatever punishment might be coming, and re-joining Henry Lee as soon as she was free again.


At first, Lucas resisted, but finally gave in. On his birthday, 23 August 1982, they packed up. Everything they owned fitted into three suitcases. The Reverend Moore gave them a lift to the truck stop at Alvord. From here, they would start the long hitch back to Jacksonville.


Stabbed to death


They never made it. They got two rides that took them to Denton, 37 miles north of Dallas, Texas, on I-35. They waited on the access road to the interstate until 2 a.m., but no-one stopped. Finally they made their way into a field off the road and undid their bedrolls, got undressed, and wold have settled down to sleep. Lucas, however, decided to persuade Becky that the sensible thing to do was return to Stoneburg and the House of Prayer. He was terrified that Becky’s intention to confess her sins include confessing his sins too, and those of her uncle Ottis. Before long, they were arguing furiously.


“We kept on arguin’, cussin’ each other,” Lucas said later. “Finally I just told her we were going back the next morning regardless. She hollered out and hit me at the side of the head, and that was it. Well, I stabbed her with the knife. I just picked it up offa the blanket and brought it around and hit her right in the chest with it.


“She just sort of sat there for a little bit, and then dropped over, y’know. Well, after that, I cut her up in little teeny pieces and stuffed it in three pillows that we had. I dumped the snuff out of the pillows and stuffed all of her in there except her legs and, I’d guess you’d say, her thighs.”


Cover-up story


Over the next two days, Lucas made his way back to Ruben Moore’s House of Prayer. There, he tearfully told Moore how Becky had taken off with a truck driver, heading east. Moore believed him, and offered Lucas time and space to recover. He saw Lucas as a penitent sinner.


Since May, word had got round the sparsely populated community that Lucas and Becky were at the House of Prayer, and Kate Rich had maintained contact with Becky by telephone. When she heard the child-wife of Henry Lee Lucas had apparently run off, she called him. Lucas agreed to drive her to church one Sunday. On 16 September, Lucas took Moore’s car and drove to Ringgold to pick her up.


During the drive to church, Granny Rich questioned Lucas about Becky’s departure. Then, she openly doubted his story. She persisted in questioning everything Lucas had to say about Becky’s vanishing trick, and eventually he got mad. He told her he was taking her back home, then swung off the highway on to a dirt road just outside Ringgold and pulled up on a piece of waste ground. Then he picked up the butcher’s knife he always had to hand and plunged it into her heart.


Lucas pulled Kate Rich’s body from the car and mutilated it. After that, he stuffed her body into a drain running under the road. Lucas had broken his own rules twice within three weeks. He had killed two people, now, with whom his connections were well-known. Perhaps, in his own perverse way, he was finally asking to get caught.


Lucas arrested


Careful detective work by Montague County Sheriff’s ‘Hound Dog’ Conway and Texas Ranger Phil Ryan brought Henry Lee Lucas in for questioning over Mrs Rich’s disappearance, the body had not been found, in October 1982, but he stuck to his stories and was released. One of the first things Lucas did after that was to retrieve Granny Rich’s decomposing remains from her hiding place and take them back to the House of Prayer, where he burned them in an incinerator. Then he took off for New Mexico.


In June 1983 came the lucky break: the two Texas officers discovered Lucas had been in illegal possession of a deadly weapon. He returned to Stoneburg from New Mexico on 10 June, and was arrested on 11 June. Four days later, in his cell in the Montague County Jail, he began the ling chronicle of his astounding appalling confessions.


In the months and years that followed, Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have committed over 1,000 murders. Law officers from Canada and 40 of the United States stood in line to question him on over 3,000 unsolved killings on their books. As a result, police forces from more than 20 states are satisfied that they have confirmed his involvement in 157 homicides and have closed the files on them.


Convicted of 11 murders


At the end of 1991, Lucas had been convicted of eight murders besides those of his mother, Becky Powell and Granny Rich. His victims and sentences in those cases were:


  • the unidentified female known as ‘Orange Socks’, whose body he dropped into a culvert on I-35 in Williamson County, Texas, in October 1979 (death penalty)
  • 26-year old teacher Linda Phillips, stabbed in Kauffman County, Texas, in August 1970 (life)
  • Police officer Clemmie E. Curtiss, shot in Cabell County, West Virginia, in August 1976 (life)
  • 18-year old Lillie Darty, raped and shot in Harrison County, Texas, in November 1977 (66 years)
  • Diana Bryant, strangled in Brownfield, Texas (75 years)
  • 66-year old Glenna Biggers, stabbed with a 14-inch knife and a three pronged fork in Hale County, Texas, in December 1982 (life)
  • An unidentified female raped and strangled in Montgomery County, Texas, sometime before 17 March 1983 (life)
  • 16-year old Laura Jean Domez, beaten and strangled in the same County on 13 April 1983 (life)


In addition, Lucas had been charged or indicated with 20 other killings, and faces trial in Florida on four more counts of murder.


Did he really kill 157?


Like several other serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas enjoyed, or suffered from, a condition called hypermnesia, the ability to recall events in astonishingly fine detail. It was often his ability to describe tiny details, which could be known only to the killer, that time and again convinced police officers that his confessions were genuine. In many cases, without prompting, Lucas led investigators directly to the scene of the crime.


Lucas’ strange gift was also used as evidence that some police forces had been over-eager to clear unsolved cases from their books by asking him leading questions. Lucas, the accusation went, would pick up enough information in this way to resemble it, with some clever guesswork of his own, into a highly plausible confession.


‘Green River’ murders


There seems little doubt that he did this more than once. Not all of Lucas’ 1,000-plus confessions hold water. For example, he maintained that he was responsible for the spate of killings known as the ‘Green River’ murders in Washington State. But when the first ‘Green River’ bodies were found, in July 1982, he was at Ruben Moore’s House of Prayer in Texas. In this instance he had read in the newspapers.


But two of his confessions, both of which were utterly convincing, seem unlikely both to be true. One or the other is, but not both. The problem is: which one?


The first concerned the rape, sodomy, stabbing to death, mutilation and attempted decapitation, on 4 November 1978, of Lisa M. Martinez, an attractive, dark-haired 19-year old who lived in an apartment in Kennewick, Washington State. Lucas was able to provide a wealth of detail about the young woman, about her apartment and its location, the weather at the time of the killing, and more intimate items (later confirmed) that were not publically known. It seemed clear that he was telling the truth, and that he was the perpetrator.


The second was the double shooting actually by Ottis Toole, although Lucas was admittedly an accomplice, of teenagers Kevin Key and Rita Salazar near interstate 35, 11 miles from Austin, Texas. Once again, Lucas offered a wealth of detail about the killings, much of it unreleased to the public. The innocent couple died on 5 November 1978, one day after Lisa Martinez died in Kennewick, but roughly 2,000 miles away by road. To travel from one place to the other in 24 hours calls for an average speed of a little over 83 MPH, fast, even for Lucas’ reckless style, in a country that then had a blanket speed limit of 55 MPH.


Which murder did he commit?


If Lucas knew so much about both crimes, but committed only one, the logical conclusion is that he knew who did the other. But which did Lucas commit? And who was the other killer? Ottis Toole, his occasional homosexual lover? Or someone else entirely, whose private confession, or boast, stuck in Lucas’ hyperactive memory like a crazed wasp in a pot of honey.


END

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