Free The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter Page B

Friday the 13th. They have also been retold by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand in his popular collections of urban legends, beginning with The Vanishing Hitchhiker.

    Henry Lee Lucas

    Portrait of Henry Lee Lucas by Chris Pelletiere
    Henry Lee Lucas might be America’s most prolific serial killer. On the other hand, he might be the biggest liar since Baron von Münchhausen. After experiencing a self-described “religious conversion” in prison, he decided to bare his soul and confess to an astronomical number of murders. Later, however, he recanted most of his testimony. Among law enforcement officials, the exact number of his crimes remains a matter of debate. Still, even if Lucas’s final body count falls far short of the five hundred victims he originally claimed, he nevertheless ranks as one of the most depraved serial killers in history.
    Subjected to untold horrors by his insanely abusive mother (see Upbringing ), Lucas began indulging in sadistic depravity while still a child. By thirteen, he was engaging in sex with his older half-brother, who also introduced Henry to the joys of bestiality and Animal Torture . (One of their favorite activities was slitting the throats of small animals, then sexually violating the corpses.)
    One year later, he committed his first murder, strangling a seventeen-year-old girl who resisted his efforts to rape her. In 1954, the eighteen-year-old Lucas received a six-year prison sentence for burglary. Soon after his release in 1959, he got into a drunken argument with his seventy-four-year-oldmother and stabbed her to death. (He also confessed to raping her corpse, though he later retracted that detail.)
    Receiving a forty-year sentence for second-degree murder, Lucas ended up in a state psychiatric facility. In spite of his own protestations—“When they put me out on parole, I said I’m not ready to go. I told them all, the warden, the psychologist, everybody, that I was going to kill”—he was released after only ten years. Eighteen months later he was back in prison for molesting two teenage girls.
    Lucas was discharged from the state pen in 1975. Not long afterward, he met Ottis Toole, a vicious psychopath who became Lucas’s partner in one of the most appalling killing sprees in the annals of American crime. For the next seven years, this deranged duo roamed the country, murdering and mutilating an untold number of victims. Like Lucas, the profoundly depraved Toole also had a taste for Necrophilia . He also indulged in occasional Cannibalism (an atrocity that Lucas tended to shun, since he found human flesh too gamy). For much of their odyssey, they were accompanied by Toole’s preadolescent niece, Frieda “Becky” Powell, who became Lucas’s lover, common-law wife, and—ultimately—victim.
    Lucas was picked up on a weapons charge in 1983. A few days later, after apparently being stricken by an uncharacteristic attack of bad conscience, he summoned his jailer. “I done some pretty bad things,” he muttered. With that, he began spilling his guts, admitting to a staggering number of murders. Some of these have been confirmed, others have proven false, many remain open cases. According to certain investigators, Lucas may have killed as many as sixty-nine victims; others put the number at eighty-one or possibly even higher. At his 1985 trial, he was convicted of ten homicides—more than enough to get him the death sentence.
    In the end, Lucas’s life would be spared. The state of Texas’s leniency came from the most unlikely source. Then-governor George W. Bush, who allowed one hundred fifty-two people to be executed during his term, used his power to commute a death sentence only once—and that was for Lucas in 1998. He based his decision on the findings of the State Board of Pardons and Parole, which indicated Lucas might have been in Florida at the time one of his supposed victims—a female hitchhiker whose corpse was clad in nothing but a pair of orange