Henry Lee Lucas-A Gruesome Tale of Murder

WARNING: THIS HUB CONTAINS GRAPHIC INFORMATION THAT SOME MAY FIND DISTURBING AND OFFENSIVE.

Almost anyone living in Texas during the 1980s will recall the name "Henry Lee Lucas".

He was a lanky one-eyed drifter from the backwoods of Virginia that took Texas by storm and captured the attention of law enforcement and the media worldwide.

I worked for a central Texas County in the 80s and had a rare opportunity to see the man they also called "the monster". A co-worker and I managed to secure a position amongst the media to catch a glimpse of the man not twenty feet in front of us.

This is his grisly story.

As a child, Henry Lee Lucas lived in a dirt-floored one room log cabin in a life of abuse and neglect. His alcoholic parents brewed moonshine whiskey in the Appalachian hills of Virginia. His mother, Viola was known as a violent prostitute and bootlegger was at least 50 years old when she had Henry. His alcoholic father, Anderson, was nicknamed "No Legs" after a train accident that resulted in him losing both his legs. He later committed suicide in 1950 after being repeatedly humiliated by his abusive wife who often brought men home and had sex with them in front of him and Henry. Henry was even forced to go to school barefooted wearing a dress and curls. When he came home from school wearing a pair of shoes given to him by a teacher his mother beat him for accepting charity. He dropped out in fifth grade and remained semi-literate for the rest of his life.

As a teenager he enjoyed, tortured, and had sex with dead animals. He claims to have raped a girl when he was 15. At 17, he slashed his eye while playing with a knife with his brother Andrew. His mother refused to have it treated and he ended up losing his one eye and had a glass eye put in its place. Once he was beaten so severely by his mother with wooden plank that he was semi-conscious for days before his mother's boyfriend took him to the hospital for treatment.

Lucas spent his teen years in and out of jail for a string of burglaries and was sentenced to prison. But he repeatedly escaped and fled to his sister Opal's house. Despite his escapes he was released a year early from his sentence. His mother hunted him down insisting he come back to live with her.

On January 11, 1960, in a drunken binge, he and his mother fought over him coming back to live with her. She struck him with a broom and he stabbed her and then raped her dead corpse. He stole a car and fled to Ohio. He was arrested five days later. He told the officers that he "didn't like live sex, he liked dead sex".

He was sentenced for forty years for matricide and was sent to Jackson State Penitentiary in southern Michigan. He attempted suicide twice and was finally transferred to a mental facility for the criminally insane. He was diagnosed as a suicidal psychopath, sadist and sexual deviant. He was released in 1970 after serving 10 years due to prison overcrowding.

In 1971, trouble had already found Henry. He was arrested for the attempted kidnapping of three girls and sentenced to five years. While in jail, he received a letter from family friend Betty Crawford. They continued to write each other and once he was released they married. He began sexually abusing her two young daughters and told the young girls he would kill their mother if they told anyone. After two years of abuse, he left. He then lived with various family members drifting from place to place..

In 1975, he met Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida. They became quick friends and according to Toole, they were even lovers. They moved into Toole's mother's house where Toole's 12 year old niece, Becky Powell lived as well. Lucas and the young girl, who had been diagnosed with a mild form of mental retardation, become close.

In 1981, they were forced to move from the house when Toole's mother died. This is when Lucas and Toole split up but Lucas and Becky began roaming around the countryside. In May 1982, they ended up in Ringgold, Texas and moved in with an elderly woman named Kate Rich until her family forced them to leave.

Lucas and Becky at the House of Prayer

Lucas, now 45, and Becky, now a teenager, next ended up in Stoneburg, Texas at the House of Prayer run by roofer and evangelist Ruben Moore. It was an abandoned chicken ranch turned commune. According to Lucas, these were the best years of his life. On August 23, 1982, Lucas' 46^th birthday, Ruben Moore reportedly dropped them off at a truck stop. The next day Lucas returned to his apartment in the House of Prayer without Becky saying that she had boarded a truck and left. No one ever heard from Becky again.

When the elderly Kate Rich learned of young Becky's disappearance she suspected Lucas had done something and began asking questions. Then, Kate Rich showed up missing and her family filed a missing persons report. Lucas denied having anything to do with it.

Lucas was arrested in June 1983 for a minor weapons charge. Within days of being deprived of coffee and cigarettes, he confessed to the September 1982 murder of 82 yr old Kate Rich. He said he had picked her up to go to church and instead drove around a bit and then decided to kill her. He stabbed her to death in an oilfield, dragged her down an embankment and raped her corpse. Then he stuffed her in a culvert. Later he returned and took her body back to his apartment at the House of Prayer, stuffed her body into a wood-burning stove in his yard and burned her over two days.

Investigators found human bone fragments and ashes in the stove. Lucas ws charged with 1^st degree murder.

Then, out of the blue, Lucas confessed to killing Becky Powell. Lucas said he and Becky Powell argued at the truck stop. He didn't want to go back to Florida because of an outstanding warrant. In their argument she evidently lost her temper with Lucas and struck him on the face, he retaliated by taking a knife and stabbing her in the heart killing her instantly. He then raped her corpse, dismembered her and stuffed her into pillowcases and left them strewn over a field.

In a videotaped interview he said "I guess it became a part of my life...having sexual intercourse with the dead".

Lucas was again charged with murder when skeletal remains were found in the field that matched a female the size and age of Becky.

After he was sentenced to life in prison, he congratulated the prosecutors and continued to confess to over 3000 murders throughout the United States. Detectives from 40 states wanted to visit him with thousands of homicides they hoped he could clear. Lawmen from all over the country requested samples of Lucas' saliva, fingerprints and hair. One investigator said at one point, they had run out of pubic hair to get from Lucas to send to all of them. It became one of the greatest mockeries of the US legal system.

According to Lucas' confession, he and Toole would routinely pick up most of their victims along the interstate. The confessions included tales of necrophilia, dismemberment and cannibalism. At one point, Henry Lee Lucas even confessed to carrying the poison to Guyana as a favor to his good friend Jim Jones in what would become known as the Jonestown Massacre in November 1978.

Lucas toured the country in law enforcement planes as a star killer as lawmen and local media looked for evidence linking him to unsolved cases. Nothing was ever uncovered by the excursions. He became a criminal celebrity.

As I told you at the beginning of this article. I personally stood within 20 feet of Henry Lee Lucas in the 80s while I was an employee with a central Texas county. He was heavily guarded and paraded through the courthouse with a frenzy of media attention. He seemed calm and unaffected by the attention.

Later, Lucas recanted his confessions saying that he wanted to make the police look stupid.

On Halloween 1979, a nude female body was found along I-35 near Georgetown, Texas. The murder victim was nicknamed "Orange Socks" because she was found dead wearing only orange socks. Even though Lucas confessed at least four times to killing her, Florida naval air station work records and a cashed paycheck indicate he was in Florida at the time of her murder. Lucas claimed these records were falsified.

On April 2, 1984 Lucas faced his fourth murder trial for death of Orange Socks. He was found guilty and received the death penalty (lethal injection) by the State of Texas.

On April 14, 1985, The Dallas Times Herald ran a front page story indicating that Lucas had been lying to law enforcement. According to one of the newspaper reports who had been meeting with Lucas regularly for two years, Lucas told him that he had only killed three people, his mother, Kate Rich and Becky Powell. The rest were false confessions. He said his reason was to get back at law enforcement for how they had treated him. He reportedly told the reporter:

"They think I'm stupid. When all of this is over, they'll know who's really stupid".

Some believed his motivation surrounding his confessions was due to the preferential treatment he got when he confessed. He said he was treated well, given steaks, cigarettes, cable TV in his cell. He said he was treated like a king as long as he continued to confess. He said the moment he stopped confessing he'd be sent to death row. He was living a far better life in jail than he had ever lived on the outside.

On March 31, 1998, Texas State District Judge John Carter set June 30^th as the execution date for Henry Lee Lucas for the 1979 murder of "Orange Socks".

On June 27, 1998, just 3 days before he was to be executed, Henry Lee Lucas was spared execution by then Texas Governor and now former US President George W. Bush because of overwhelming evidence proving that Henry Lee Lucas was not in Texas when "Orange Socks" was murdered. A lie detector test later concluded that Lucas did not kill Orange Socks and he was in Florida at the time.

It might be interesting to note that as governor, George W. Bush executed 152 inmates, but issued only this one pardon. Lucas was still serving five other life sentences and 210 in prison for three other murders and was ordered back to prison and no longer on death row.

Lucas was unhappy about losing the limelight he had on death row.

Lucas died of massive heart failure in March 2001.

Over 200 murder cases were permanently closed due to the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. That's 200 murderers he walked free because of the hoax he played. That may be one of the biggest tragedies of all.