Henry Lee Lucas (Cont. 4)

By Katherine Ramsland

Love in Prison

In 1991, Ottis Toole received four more life sentences for the murders of three women and a man in Florida between 1980 and 1981.  Lucas was charged along with him but not brought to Florida for prosecution.  Five years later in 1996, Toole died in prison from cirrhosis of the liver.  Before that happened, a curious incident involved his former partner, Lucas.
Many serial killer attract groupies, and while Lucas was not among the best looking men, he was certainly notorious and had his share of admirers.  One woman, Phyllis Wilcox, even came up with a plot to free him by posing as his supposedly murdered former girlfriend.  Ryan MacMichael includes an interview with her on his Web site, given after she wrote to him in 2000 when he posted an online blog about Lucas.
According to this story, in October 1992, Wilcox posed as Becky, all grown up (although some fifteen years older than Becky would have been at that time), claiming that she was still alive so that she could get him out of that murder rap.  She was actually a mother and grandmother, age 40 and living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  She met Lucas via correspondence after reading a book about him, and she soon visited.  She indicates that although she was nervous about going into prison and quite intimidated by the sight of Lucas in handcuffs surrounded by guards, she had a wonderful time and made many more visits thereafter.  Among the subjects they discussed was Becky Powell.
Lucas apparently claimed that he'd seen Becky get into a truck, but he'd told authorities that he'd killed her so they wouldn't attempt to implicate her in the murders that he'd committed.  In other words (she says), he told Wilcox that Becky was still alive.
Lucas also denied killing Kate Rich and Orange Socks, indicating that the oven in which he supposedly had burned Kate was too small for a woman as fat as she was and would not have gotten hot enough to have burned her to ash.  He was sure that the authorities found some chicken bones, nothing more, and exaggerated their significance.  About Orange Socks, he claimed that the bruises around her neck did not even fit his hands. But he did admit that he'd murdered his mother. 

Lucas in handcuffs with the Sheriff

Wilcox bought it all and confessed to MacMichael that despite being married she soon became obsessed with Lucas, thinking and dreaming about him all the time.  She knew she was falling in love.  He accepted her feelings and told her he loved her, too.  It wasn't long before Wilcox grew afraid that Lucas might be executed, so she devised a plan to make sure that didn't happen.  She believed that he was innocent of the charges.  She had even come up with a way to exonerate him in her mind of killing his mother by blaming someone else.  So she posed as Becky and Lucas backed her up.  He said that he'd only confessed to murdering Becky because he wanted to embarrass the police.  (He seems to have forgotten that they actually picked up Becky's remains, as Lucas showed them where each piece was.)  They didn't get away with it.
Frasier indicates that Wilcox was revealed when this hoax unraveled as a diagnosed schizophrenic who had also corresponded with John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson.  But Lucas was still determined to beat his death sentence.

Legal Challenge

While it was clear that Lucas had committed four murders, including his mother, even one of those—"Orange Socks"—eventually came under doubt.  The only thing linking Lucas to "Orange Socks" was, essentially, his confession.  In fact, some 213 cases had been "cleared" through Lucas's confessions, which concerned the writers of the "Lucas Report," a document commissioned by the Texas Attorney General's office.  

Texas Attorney General Seal

Ultimately, Lucas was convicted of only eleven homicides, says Egger, though some criminologists believe he was responsible for between forty to fifty murders.  Still, no one knows for sure.  The death sentence for the murder of Orange Socks stood for many years, although Lucas received two stays of execution because the evidence was too slim.  Apparently it was now the case that the work records that had been discredited at the trial were now considered viable evidence on Lucas's behalf.  That's because a lot more research had been done.
Former Attorney General's investigator Michael Feary had developed a thick file about Lucas's whereabouts on the night that Orange Socks had been murdered. The documentation made it clear that he was indeed in Jacksonville, Florida.  Feary had utilized records such as paycheck stubs and insurance reports to track Lucas as he drifted around the southeast.  He was ready to submit all of this on Lucas's behalf, and it was entered into evidence when Lucas received a hearing in 1996 about his death sentence.
Lucas took the witness stand, writes Jean Pagel for the Associated Press, to say that he did not kill the woman known as Orange Socks.  He cried and for about fifteen minutes spoke in a trembling voice before U. S. District Judge Sam R. Cummings.  Lucas said that he'd given false information when he'd confessed to the murder and added that he was able to give a lot of facts about the crime because he had read the case file.  In fact, he had an alibi — he was in Florida putting out a car fire.  The Assistant Texas Attorney General, Gena Blount, took him to task for playing games with investigators, and Lucas denied that it had been a game.  "I had my reasons," he responded.  He received the stay and two years later, the matter went to the governor.

Bush's Only Commutation

In 1998, based on a lack of evidence connecting Lucas to the murder and the existence of contradictory evidence, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush commuted Lucas's sentence to life — the only man to receive this during Bush's reign.  Seven years later in 2005, in the New York Review of Books, Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, wrote about Bush's decision. 

Then-Texas Governor
George W. Bush

She suggested that he had been motivated "more by expediency than conscience," and offered the relevant supporting facts: during his six years a governor of Texas, Bush had presided over 152 executions — more than any other governor in any other state in recent history.  He had commuted no other death sentences to life, although there were factors as significant as any that Lucas's attorneys offered.  Journalist Alan Berlow apparently discovered that Bush's examination of at least 57 of these cases involved only cursory reviews of brief death penalty memos on the day before a scheduled execution.  In one case, Bush had skipped over evidence that the convicted man was mentally retarded and therefore not even eligible for the death penalty.

Lucas in prison

Prejean calls the Texas Board of Pardons and Appeals a "farce" that Bush did nothing to reform.  Then she writes about Lucas: "In the Henry Lee Lucas case in 1998, Bush showed where the real power lay." He intervened with the board before they had a chance to make a recommendation, and afterward the board approved his decision in a 17—1 vote. 
Prejean points out that it was common knowledge by then that Lucas could not have murdered the woman known as Orange Socks.  "Additionally," she writes, "it was clear that Lucas would never be a threat to society because he was already serving six life sentences for other murders, which he may or may not have committed, since on a fairly regular basis he confessed falsely to hundreds of murders. Bush pointed out that jurors at his trial 'did not know' certain facts that later came to light."  Thus, he took the opportunity, she claims, to exercise apparent compassion, although in the context of his actual record, his compassion diminishes into mere politics.

Final Words

A recent photo of Lucas flanked by prison guards.

No one knows exactly how many murders Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole committed. Given Lucas's trickster methods and propensity to lie, it's likely that no one will ever know, beyond his mother, Kate Rich and Becky Powell. There seems to be good evidence that he killed others, but judges would not admit his confessions, so it was difficult to bring the cases to trial.
In March 2001, Henry Lee Lucas died in prison of natural causes. Thus ended one of the most unusual cases in the annals of criminal psychology.

***

Bobby Joe Long

On a side note, during the 1990s, Lucas's distant cousin, Bobby Joe Long, was convicted in Florida of ten murders. He had also raped as many as fifty women, he admitted, finding them through classified ads.

Bibliography

Call, Max.  Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story. Louisiana: Prescott Press, 1985.
Cox, Mike.  The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas, New York: Pocket, 1991.
Draper, Robert.  "The Twilight of the Texas Rangers," Texas Monthly. February 1994.
Egger, Steven A.  The Killers among Us, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.
Frasier, David K. Murder Cases of the Twentieth Century. North Carolina: McFarland, 1996.
"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," Maljack Productions, 1986.
"The Lucas Case," The Washington Post, June 22, 1998.
MacMichael, Ryan.  "An Interview with Phyllis Wilcox about Henry Lee Lucas," www.laze.net, 2002.
"Myth of a Serial Killer: The Henry Lee Lucas Story," A&E, American Justice, 1997.
Newton, Michael.  The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.  NY: Checkmark Books, 2000.
Norris, Joel.  The Shocking True Story of America's Most Notorious Serial Killer.  New York: Kensington, 1991.
Pagel, Jean. "Lucas Tearfully Denies Slaying that Landed Him on Death Row." Houston Chronicle 9 Jan. 1996. 24 Mar. 1999.
Prejean, Sister Helen. "Death in Texas," New York Review of Books. Vol. 52, No. 1, January 13, 2005.
Schechter, Harold.  The Serial Killer Files.  New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Thurman, Sam. "No Evidence Lucas Murdered Woman." Amarillo Globe-News Online 25 Jun. 1998; March 24, 1999.

Henry Lee Lucas (Cont. 3)

World's Most Dangerous Killer

After Thanksgiving in 1983, the Texas Rangers spearheaded the Henry Lee Lucas Task Force.  In a one-day event sponsored by the Texas Department of Public Safety, on December 7, Texas lawmen questioned Lucas in the hope of closing their open cases.  At this time, Lucas had taken credit for around 126 murders, and the Rangers believed that thirty-five were clearly associated with him.  However, they were also aware that Lucas had lied about some and had said he was unclear about details of others because he'd been under the influence of alcohol of drugs.  While they collected information and contacted other agencies, they filled in gaps about Lucas's whereabouts as best they could during his murdering years.
Then for three days in January 1984, 107 officers from eighteen states and the District of Columbia filled the Holidome in Monroe, Louisiana for a second conference about the homicides allegedly committed by Henry Lee Lucas (the first one, drawing not quite as many, had been in October).  At that time, it was announced that 72 cases had been cleared on Lucas and Toole, and they were suspects in 71 more cases.  He was going to be allowed to book interviews by phone or in person until his murder trial in March for the Orange Socks murder.  He had two court-appointed attorneys looking after his rights.  The Rangers urged officers not to give Lucas too many details or photographs, because they wanted to be certain that cases that were cleared stayed cleared.
Lucas did appear to close cases and accurately lead investigators to crime scenes.  He knew details about murders to which he confessed that had not been published in the press.  In a case in Kennewick, Washington, he described the murder of a woman in impressive detail, and his blood was matched to blood on a towel—which he said he'd used to wipe his hand after cutting himself with the murder weapon.
"I had no feelings for the people themselves, or any of the crimes," he stated.  "...I'd pick them up hitchhiking, running, and playing, stuff like 'at.  We'd get to going and having a good time.  First thing you know, I'd killed her and throwed her out somewhere."
Finally, he faced his most serious charge.

Orange Socks

The trial for the murder of the victim known only as Orange Socks took place in March in San Angelo, Texas. District Attorney Ed Walsh was the chief prosecutor, while Don Higginbotham and Parker McCollough defended Lucas.  The case was to be heard before Judge John Carter, who had recently presided over the trial of nurse Genene Jones for the murder of a child.

Judge John Carter

The trial began with reports of how the victim had been murdered, including Lucas's edited confession.  In a written statement and on tape, he had described how he'd picked her up as a hitchhiker, had sex with her, killed her, had sex again, and dumped her in the culvert, skinning his knee on a guard rail.  A videotape showed Lucas directing police officers to where he had dropped the victim's body.
However, the defense attorneys proved that the unedited tape revealed that Lucas sometimes contradicted himself and suffered from key lapses in memory.  The sheriff even had had to refresh his memory at times during the interview, which suggested that Lucas simply "read" the sheriff's desire for information and gave him what he wanted.  The defense also used work records to show the Lucas had been in Florida on October 31 and had cashed a check on November 1, and they tied it all up with psychiatric testimony to show that Lucas was insane.  Psychologist Tom Kubiszyn said that Lucas had an IQ of 84, a desire to feel important, a feeling of inferiority, and a belief that he could not direct his own actions.  He also had schizophrenia.  Lucas cried in court when he heard all this, forcing a recess.
The prosecution hit back with evidence that suggested that Lucas's boss might have recorded his presence at work when he was not there.  They also supplied psychiatric testimony that Lucas was not insane.  In addition, on one of the tapes, Lucas claimed 360 murders: "We killed 'em most every way there is except poison," detailing exactly what he meant.
Despite the defense's best efforts, not the least of which was a client who had proved most helpful to the other side, the jury convicted Lucas and sentenced him to die.  Afterward, he seemed unfazed, even happy.  It was if he'd finally become someone of importance.  Yet not everyone who had been at the trial agreed with the verdict.  It seemed that Lucas only knew key facts about the crime after the sheriff had "refreshed" his memory.  "It was the worst confession," said Hugh Aynesworth, a reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald, who decided to do some more digging.

Handling Lucas

Texas Rangers' patch

Lucas's case occurred in the midst of an incident in Texas that provides some context for its eventual unraveling, so let's first look at that one.   Roger Draper, in a lengthy 1994 article about the one-time "frontier ethic" of the Texas Rangers for Texas Monthly, discusses Lucas in the context of what he refers to as the "infamous Brandley case."  Draper states that this "epitomized the wrongheadedness of the Ranger Way."

Clarence Brandley

On August 28, 1980, Ranger Wesley Styles investigated the assault and strangulation murder of a high school cheerleader.  He arrested the custodian, Clarence Brandley, the next day, without having questioned a single witness.  He was quickly charged with capital murder.  A jury later convicted him on nothing more than tenuous circumstantial evidence.  But Styles' tunnel vision approach was reviewed in 1989 by the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the justices found that he had ignored evidence that pointed to other suspects.  He had also threatened the state's star witness and lied on the stand.  Brandley, on death row, was freed.
Before that conviction was overturned, and the Rangers embarrassed by one of their own, they were already going through a much more humiliating process at the hands of Lucas.  Their zeal was commendable but not their approach.  One Ranger in particular bought the whole package. 

Whisper of Demons

Max Call was one of the Texas Rangers who took over the Lucas case.  Although Call's book, Hand of Death, is generally discredited, since he not only befriended Lucas but also accepted everything Lucas said at face value (Call even named Lucas as a member of the Lucas Task Force), it may nevertheless the best account available about what Lucas actually said.  Call makes it clear that Lucas was getting plenty of attention, a high-security cell, good food, and numerous trips in the company of two Texas Rangers.  That's motivation for a man with nothing to keep making up whoppers.
"Henry worshipped Satan," Call writes, "and believed his lies because he found justification for his fantasies in Satan's service."  Call believed that Lucas had joined Toole in the so-called Hand of Death cult in the Florida Everglades, and he thought that by writing the book he would be warning people about this dangerous organization.  He seems to genuinely believe that Henry Lee Lucas assisted in 360 rapes and murders at the behest of the Hand of Death, which supposedly had links to organized crime and practiced the sacrifice of females.  In fact, Lucas indicated that they had recruited and trained him specifically to become a killing machine and he was able to describe just how these supposed sacrifices worked. 

Lucas in 1984

Call's gullibility is obvious when he says that Lucas wanted to confess as a way of exposing the cult and it's likely that Lucas keyed into Call's own religious beliefs to hook him and play him.  The book is replete with religious ideology, especially when it seems that Becky has found the way out through the Bible.  Call seems to like this moral angle, playing it up whenever he can.  In addition, he accepts whatever Lucas tells him.  For example, Lucas apparently described Toole as a "nice-looking young man," when in fact Toole is closer to winning the contest for homeliest serial killer.
Unfortunately, most of Call's chapter about Lucas's childhood experience with his mother was clearly uncorroborated, and there is no way of knowing how much is factual. Lucas was angry at his mother and he likely skewed the story to make her look as evil as possible.  Other authors have picked up on this account, including psychologists and criminologists, so it's important to reiterate that there is little in Lucas's account of his childhood that bears the stamp of corroborated fact.  Anything that Call writes about must be viewed with some skepticism, especially since he recreates it as a story, with dialogue and incidents he never witnessed.
As Lucas's death toll climbed to some 600 victims in twenty-seven different states and in Canada, according to some accounts (though others cap it at 360), it began to seem as if he was just a compulsive confessor.  He had added in the Satanic cult activity, which at the time seemed to justify his numbers, but it only made some people suspicious that it was all a hoax.

The Game

Hugh Aynesworth

Cox describes how reporter Hugh Aynesworth, co-writer with Stephen Michaud on a book about Ted Bundy, sat through Lucas's trial and had his doubts.  He did some sleuthing and found that Lucas had been out of state or in prison at times when some of the murders to which he had confessed had occurred.  That inspired McLennan County DA Vic Feazell to look into Lucas's confessions to two murders in his own area. Apparently Lucas had written a letter to a reporter in Fort Worth suggesting that he was not actually responsible for all the murders he had claimed, and then the parents of one of Lucas's supposed victims decided after reviewing his statement that he was not the killer of their daughter. Aynesworth had interviewed Lucas himself and wrote a lengthy piece that was published on April 14, 1984.  He asked the important question: was it all a hoax?  He believed it was and accused the task force of failing to follow leads that may have undermined Lucas's credibility, such as noting the distance between crime scenes that made it virtually impossible for Lucas to have committed some murders that were close together in time.  He thought the information about many of the murders had been fed to Lucas in order to close the cases.  Supposedly Lucas had finally admitted that he was good for only three murders in his life: his mother, Becky, and Kate.

Vic Feazell & Lucas

But Lucas told a lay sister who then told other reporters that he had lied to Aynesworth and was in fact the monstrous killer he'd claimed; his newfound religion forced him to tell the truth.  Officers involved insisted that they did not believe everything Lucas said, but when he knew key unpublished details and could lead them directly to a crime scene, that was convincing evidence.  He certainly had killed far more than three.  In fact, by that point, writes Cox, 189 murders had been cleared and attributed to him.  On April 23, he said that the only person he'd ever killed was his mother, and that had been an accident.  He'd been able to "clear" so many murders because the Rangers had given him everything he needed to do so — pictures, reports, and even leading him to the crime scenes.  He got a live appearance on Good Morning America to repeat his allegations.  His decision to recant, he said, was based on his belief in God (the same reason he'd earlier given to confess to so many murders).This news was just as stunning as his initial confession, and the officers involved quickly mobilized to try to piece together some dignity.

Shapeshifter

Apparently Lucas enjoyed shocking law enforcement with numbers, perverse activities and gruesome details.  Nevertheless, he did point to places where victims were found and it's now estimated by some that he was responsible for some 40 to 50 murders.  On the other hand, those who make this estimation may also be saving face, not willing to admit they may have fed him information.
Ryan reports the manner in which Lucas typically confessed to a number of unsolved murders: If a police agency suspected Lucas, and if Lucas admitted involvement—and his total of some 3,000 confessions suggests he rarely denied complicity—they would send the Lucas Task Force a case file with information pertaining to the unsolved crime.  Lucas would be questioned at length and sometimes even allowed to read police reports, thus learning any number of details previously known only to police, which he could then regurgitate at will.
The Rangers insisted that Lucas was a serial killer, and they were reportedly annoyed with Feazell for interfering.  They claimed that they had taken much more care in keeping details from Lucas than they were being accused of.  Yet Draper says that one Ranger told the DA, "I'm going to make you regret this if it's the last thing I do." 

Lucas in custody

But the damage had been done.  The media had picked up on this hoax, that was nearly too good to be true, and Lucas's status changed from one of the world's most notorious killers to one of the world's most notorious liars.  No matter what he said now, no one would believe it.  This made all those in law enforcement who had rushed to interview him and who had closed cases look rather lame.  Several retired Rangers later said that it was their impression during the interrogations that Lucas was a liar.  Still, it was difficult for them to accept that in cases where Lucas led them to the right spot where a body had lain, he had nothing to do with it.  He simply knew too much about certain crimes on his own, without assistance.
Then on April 29, Lucas returned to some of his original statements.  He gave an interview to a radio show personality, indicating that "I have killed the people I said I killed."  He again put the figure at 360.  Then he said that everything was a lie and indicated that the Hands of Death cult was going to assassinate him.  No one knew quite what to make of a killer confessing to so many crimes he did not do, but then he insisted that he'd been forced to recant.  His persistent waffling further reduced his credibility.

False Confessions

Police are familiar with several types of false confessions, including from people who confess spontaneously to something they did not do.  That's usually in response to a high profile case, in the hope of becoming famous.  Sometimes it's about misplaced guilt, where the confessor believes he should be punished for something...anything.  There are also coerced confessions, usually offered when the person under interrogation is exhausted, naïve, frightened, or mentally impaired. Some people fear that the interrogation will be stressful so they capitulate quickly, but on rare occasions, a person may internalize the event and actually believe he or she did it.  That occurs when an interrogator seems confident of the suspect's guilt and may even lie or use manipulative tactics.  The characteristics of those most likely to falsely confess include youth, a low IQ, mental illness or confusion, a high degree of suggestibility, a trusting nature, low self-esteem, high anxiety, and a poor memory.
But the person seeking to attach himself to a specific case seems closest to what Lucas did.  In Texas Monthly, Draper indicates that the Rangers had been over-eager in their desire to close open cases, so they provided Lucas some of the details he needed to confess.  They called it helping to refresh his memory, and he fully exploited it for his own ends.  He had nothing whatsoever to lose, but plenty to gain by way of entertainment and feeling empowered.

The Grand Jury votes

In fact, Lucas confessed to a murder in Little Rock, Arkansas that had already been solved, which made a D.A. there suspicious of his admissions.  The same thing happened with West Virginia officials when Lucas claimed credit for killing a police officer whose death was determined to have been a suicide.  In another Arkansas case, Lucas could not offer details until after state police had shown him a crime scene video they had made.  It was easy, then, for him to give them whatever they needed to tie him to that murder.  He also confessed to a killing in Delaware in which there was already a suspect in custody; that suspect eventually confessed as well.
"I set out to break and corrupt any law enforcement officer I could get," Lucas said. "I think I did a pretty good job."
Through "dubious methods," says Draper, "the Rangers extracted literally hundreds of confessions from Henry Lee Lucas."  Perhaps Lucas was living by the principle that Egger attributes to him: "If rules benefited him, he went along.  If they did not, he broke them."  In other words, he cleaved to whatever he thought was in his best interest in the moment.
On June 11, 1984, further investigations of open cases were halted, while many of the "cleared" cases had already been reopened.  Lucas was transferred to the state prison at Huntsville, claming that his rights prior to the trial for Orange Socks had been violated.  Somehow, he believed that by undermining law enforcement as he had done, he would regain his freedom.  He told one officer he would be free in a month.

Henry Lee Lucas (Cont. 2)

By Katherine Ramsland

Killing Mom

Lucas was born on August 23, 1936 in the backwoods of Virginia to a man who'd lost both legs in a train accident (some sources say this was his stepfather) and a woman named Viola, a half-Chippewa who made a living for her small family with prostitution and bootlegging.  Reportedly she was mean when she drank. Lucas said that she would entertain clients in front of him, his brother and his father. (Some sources indicate he had eight siblings.)  He even claims (difficult as it is to believe) that when he walked out one time in disgust, his mother found him and beat him for not watching her with a client.  He also said that she used to dress him up as a little girl, which humiliated him.  Egger says that a half-sister claimed to have a picture of Henry with curls and wearing a dress.  Psychologists who later evaluated Lucas indicate that his hatred of his mother was the source of his violent misogyny. Lucas's father reportedly dragged himself outside into the snow one day and contracted a fatal case of pneumonia.

Henry Lee Lucas as a boy.

Once when he was five, his mother struck him in the head with a wooden board.  He claimed that she knocked him out for a period of three days (some sources say one day, others indicate eleven hours), and thereafter he suffered from headaches, dizzy spells, and blackouts.  He also took a knife wound to his left eye, which left him with a vulnerable area on his face that was soon hurt in an accident at school.  His damaged eye was replaced with a glass eye that left him with a drooping eyelid.  According to Egger, children who knew him found him sullen and antisocial. 
Another story Lucas told is that one of his mother's lovers got him interested in bestiality with the slain carcasses of dogs and sheep.  He first killed someone, he said, just before he turned fifteen in 1951. The reason he murdered this teenage girl was to see what it was like to have sex with a human, or so the story goes.  Lucas certainly enjoyed the reactions his tales received, and interviewers duly wrote them down.

Henry Lee Lucas, young

In 1952, Lucas got into trouble with the law.  On June 12, 1952, he burglarized an appliance store and was sent to a reformatory for two years.  Upon release, he committed a felony and got four years at the Virginia State Penitentiary.  He escaped, stole a car and made his way to Michigan, where he was arrested and returned to prison.  When he was finally done with his sentence, he went to live with his half-sister in Tecumseh, Michigan.  Then his mother came for a visit.  She was 74 at the time.
On January 11, 1960, after drinking too much, Lucas and his mother got into an argument, supposedly over a woman Lucas wanted to marry.  He grabbed a knife and plunged it into her neck.  (He remembered only that he knocked her a little and she had a heart attack.)  Lucas was convicted of second-degree murder and sent to the state prison in southern Michigan.  There he tried to commit suicide and was transferred to a forensic psychiatric hospital.  For his mother's murder, he served ten years of a twenty-year sentence.  But then as soon as he was released, he got three and a half years for trying to kidnap two girls.  Once he was out, he moved to Pennsylvania and got married in 1975, but abandoned his wife when she accused him of molesting her daughters.  That's when the one-eyed killer started to travel.  In Florida, he took up with Toole and they went cross country together.

Taking Becky

Becky Powell

For a while, Toole's orphaned nephew and niece, Frank and Becky Powell, came with them.  Lucas had started having sex with Becky when she was only 12, while they'd been rolling around on a bed, tickling each other.  She seemed willing to do anything to be with him, and he later said he grew to love her.  He liked that she seemed to accept everything he said.
When Toole's mother died in 1981, he started drinking and taking drugs.  Around this time, on July 27, six-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared from a shopping mall.  On August 10, his head was found in a canal ditch in Vero Beach. Toole later claimed to be his killer, and this murder precipitated the show, America's Most Wanted, hosted by Adam's father, John Walsh. (The assistant police chief believed him, but then later cleared him as a suspect, and he did recant this crime.)

John Walsh

Lucas took Becky with him in 1982, because he wanted her to himself, and Toole was so angered by their betrayal that he allegedly killed nine people in six different states in the course of thirteen months.  He was caught in Florida burning a building and was imprisoned with a twenty-year sentence.  He admitted to having set some forty fires.
But that did not bring back his former lover or his niece.  In fact, Toole would never see Becky again.

The House of Prayer

In the meantime, Lucas had wandered around Texas with his "child bride," finally settling with Kate Rich.  However, relatives disliked them and kicked them out, according to the American Justice documentary. They found a new home near Stoneburg in a Pentecostal commune (a former chicken ranch) known as the House of Prayer.  The head of the group, Ruben Moore, was both a lay minister and a contractor, so he gave Lucas and Becky, who claimed to be husband and wife, a shack to live in (Egger says a trailer) and hired Lucas for some odd jobs.  Max Call indicates that Lucas left Florida when he did to avoid implication in the murder of a female school teacher, and he also writes that the new digs in Texas had connections to the Hand of Death cult in which Lucas was supposedly a member.  Call also described Kate Smith as a member, suggesting that she paid Lucas for activities involving organized crime.  There is no reason to suppose any of that was true.
According to the story Lucas told, Becky eventually tired of the living conditions and wanted to return home.  On August 24, 1982, the day after Lucas's birthday, Becky argued with him, saying she missed her family, but Lucas was afraid that he would lose her if they went back, so he resisted. He also knew he faced a warrant for stealing a truck. But Becky would not give up.  She pouted and cried, so he finally relented and told her to get ready to go. 
Because he had no license plates on his car, he decided they should hitch-hike, and they got a ride as far as Denton, Texas, north of Dallas.  Lucas then got a six-pack of beer and tried again to persuade Becky to give up the idea.  She argued back, which reminded Lucas of his mother, and then Becky slapped him.  He'd reacted by killing her with a meat-carving knife, shoving it straight into her chest.  He was angry, he later said, that she just would not take responsibility for herself.  To his horror, she died quickly: "She was gone before I knew it." 
Then right next to the Interstate, on a blanket that Becky had spread for them to sleep, he raped the corpse.  He thought it was the best sex he'd ever had with her.  He then removed her head, dismembered her (removing her hands with special care), and cut the trunk of her body into two large pieces.  The person who once had been Becky now lay there in nine pieces.  These he placed into a pillowcase, but then removed them and just scattered them around a nearby field.  He also dumped Becky's purse and small suitcase.  No one knew them around these parts, he figured, so no one could trace it.  Later he expressed regret, because he claimed that he'd truly loved Becky.  Once he'd cleaned off her blood, he hitched a ride back to the House of Prayer and told Moore and the others that Becky had gotten into a truck and left him. Then a couple of weeks later, he returned to the area to bury some of the remains in a shallow hole near a copse of trees.  Within another week, he was contemplating another murder.

Kate

It was about three weeks after Becky's demise, on September 16, that things went sour with Kate Rich.  Lucas went into Ringgold where she lived, knocked on her door, and asked if she wanted to help him look for Becky, or so he told the Rangers.  She agreed to go, happy to get out of the house, and Lucas stopped first for beer.  On the car seat between them was a butcher knife.  Lucas clearly had something else in mind, since he knew that Becky was dead.  Whether or not Kate questioned him about going north, the wrong direction, is anyone's guess.
Lucas had downed a lot of beer when he said he was seized with the idea of killing Kate.  He drove down a dirt road past a campground and then stopped the car.  He grabbed the knife and shoved it into Kate's left side, pushing her against the door.  He pulled the knife out and went around to the passenger side.  When he opened the door, Kate fell to the ground.  She was dead from a wound to her heart.  Lucas was immediately aroused, so he pulled the corpse down an embankment and removed the clothing.  "I got naked," he told the Rangers, "and screwed her until I finished."  He then dragged her to a large drainage pipe near the road.  He shoved both the corpse and the clothing into it as far as he could, until he felt certain no one would find her. 
The next day, Lucas left the House of Prayer and took off, getting as far as Needles, California before the car gave out.  But Lucas wasn't finished with Kate.  He drifted for a month, and then returned to where he had hidden the body.  He learned that he was suspected in her disappearance and endured a polygraph examination, but he got away with it.  No one arrested him.  Lucas retrieved the decomposing remains and put them into a stove at the House of Prayer to incinerate them.

Henry Lee Lucas

After his confession, investigators went to where Lucas had indicated he'd killed Kate and found the drainage pipe, a broken pair of women's glasses, and a pair of panties.  Back at the House of Prayer, in the wood-burning stove, they found ashes and what looked like human bone and burnt flesh.  In another area where Lucas had dumped ashes, they also found bone fragments.  Lucas also showed them where he had thrown Kate's purse — exactly the spot where it had been found months before.
Officers, including Texas Rangers, then took Lucas to the Denton area to try to find Becky's remains.  He went right to the copse of trees where he had buried her and pointed to several areas on the ground.  They dug at seven different locations and found clothing, bones, a skull and decomposing remains.  The corroboration of two murders, both of which appeared to show experience with killing and hiding evidence, made the possibility that Lucas was telling the truth about others — even a hundred others - seemed more likely now to at least some of the officers. 
Lucas wanted to clear his conscience entirely, so after he was convicted of Becky's murder, he wrote Ottis Toole a four-page letter to inform him of Becky's death and to get his assistance in recalling the details of the murders they had committed together.  He said that he hadn't yet mentioned Toole (although he had) and would leave it up to him as to whether he wanted to be involved.  In fact, the Jacksonville police had already been contacted about murders in their area committed by these two losers.

Reunion

The letter went to Toole in prison.  He had heard about Lucas's confessions, and he readily backed them up, adding gruesome details of his own.  Toole offered details that seemed to clear some two dozen murders in eleven states, and he agreed that he had participated with Lucas in over one hundred killings.
In one disturbing phone call they were allowed to make (their first contact in two years), Toole urged Lucas to go ahead and "spit it out" if there was a crime that he'd had a hand in.  Toole also tried to goad Lucas into admitting to cannibalism.  On a documentary made for American Justice, he was quoted in a taped conversation as saying, "Remember one time I said I wanted me some ribs?  Did that make me a cannibal?" He indicated that they both had "fileted" some meat from the bodies and mentioned that he'd poured out some blood so he could see what the male victim tasted like.  Lucas responded, "I've seen bodies cut up worser than you've ever seen bodies cut up."  Ottis ignored this one-ups-manship and indicated that with bar-b-que sauce it tasted like real meat. Lucas said that he'd abstained from that behavior because he did not like the taste of barbecue sauce.  He did tell Toole that they had a devil in them that made them do these things that most people didn't.  "You and I have become the same thing that people look at as animals," Lucas stated, as quoted in Cox's book.
After about half an hour, they said good-bye to each other, apparently having thoroughly enjoyed the repulsive show they'd put on for law enforcement.  Bob Prince, from the Lucas Task Force, spotted the game and believed it decreased their credibility.  Despite Lucas's claim to want to do the right thing, he simply took too much delight in what he was doing.  Later the "partners" were brought face to face when Lucas was taken to Jacksonville to talk with officers there, but said nothing of substance.  Toole forgave Lucas for killing Becky, shrugging it off as her time to die.
With new information supplied by Lucas, Toole received a death sentence when it was determined that one of the fires he had set had killed a man.  He received a second death sentence for the murder of an elderly woman, but both were commuted to life.