Henry Lee Lucas was born on August 23, 1938 in Blacksburg, Virginia. He lived in a two room dirt floor family home in a cabin in the woods outside of town where his parents brewed bootleg whiskey and his mother did part time prositution. Viola Lucas ran her house with a sturdy hand, while his father Anderson known as “no legs” from and encounter with a freight train, pulled himself around the house drinking himself out of his misery.
Henry Lee Lucas was one of nine children, but most of the children were sent to other relatives, institutions and foster homes over a period years. Henry was one of the nine who didn’t get shuffled around like the others, he remained with his parents even though his mother Viola seemed to hate him from the moment he had been born, taking every opportunity she had to make his life a living hell.
Henry as well as his father were the targets of her violent outbursts. She would beat Henry as well as his father on a regular basis. Henry’s father was forced to watch Viola participate in sexual escapades with numerous men who would come to the house. Anderson couldn’t bare anymore and went outside one evening while Viola did her thing with the men, this time staying outside all night long in the winter snow. As a result, Anderson was ill with pneumonia that eventually killed him.
In 1943, Henry started school. Viola would dress him up as a girl, she went so far to put his hair in ringlets, sending him off to school this way daily. Henry would also have to go to school without shoes, since money was tight. A kid teacher offered to by a pair a shoes, Henry gladly agreed, not knowing the beating that would come from him accepting the gift.
Henry wasn’t even aloud to have pets. If he was to bring one home that he found, his mother would kill it immediately. At one time Henry had accidentely cut his eye with a knife while playing around and his mother made him sit there while it had gotten so bad that the doctor’s had to surgically remove it and replace it with a glass eye. Even after being left unconscience for 3 days after his mother beat him with a piece of wood, his mother did nothing. Her live in boyfriend known to Henry as “Uncle Bernie” had to bring the boy to the hospital to be treated.
Bernie not the best person for a young man to look up to, introduced Henry to bestiality, teaching Henry to kill animals after he had raped and tortured them. At the very young age of 15, Henry picked up a young girl near Lynchburg and strangled her to death after she resisted his sexual advances on her. He then buried 17 year old Laura Burnley in the woods near Harrisburg, Virginia.
This was Henry Lee Lucas’ first murder.
In 1954 a series of burglaries around the Richmond area sentenced Henry to a six year prison sentence. Whole working with the road gang, Henry walked away on September 14, 1957 and was recaptured 3 months later at his sister’s house in Tecumseh, Michigan. In December of 1957, Henry once again escaped but was recaptured the same day. On September02, 1959, Henry was discharged from prison.
Back at his sister’s house on Tecumseh, Henry was livid when his 74 year old mother showed up at the door, bothering Henry to return to Blacksburg to meet her demands. On the night of January 11, 1960, Henry and his mother, both drinking when Henry’s mother came up behind him with a broom and struck him with a broom. With not a second of thought Henry then grabbed a knife and stabbed Viola in the back, leaving her dead on the floor.
Five days later Henry Lee Lucas was arrested in Ohio and confessed to the murder and rape of his mother’s corpse. In March 1960 he was sentenced to a 20 to 40 year prison sentence. Two months later Henry was transferred to Ionia’s state hospital for the criminally insane, where he would stay until April of 1966. He was then paroled on June 3, 1970 and went back to Tecumseh to move back with his sister.
December 1971, Henry was once again picked up by police for the molestation of two teenage girls. Charges were reduced to kidnapping and Henry went back to jail at Jackson. He was paroled once again in August of 1975.
He then found work at a mushroom farm. Once working he would marry the widow of a cousin, Betty Crawford in December of 1975. The two moved to Port Deposit, Maryland, the marriage did not last that long. Betty divorced Henry in the summer of 1977 stating that Henry had molested her two daughters from a previous marriage.
In 1976, Henry met 29 year old Ottis Toole at a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida. Ottis who was a homosexual was already an arsonist and a serial killer in his own way. The two men hit it off immediately, swapping tales of their sick and twisted lives. Occasionally lovers at times, but definitely serial killers on the loose.
In 1978, Henry would move in with Ottis and his family, there he would fall in love with his 10 year old niece, Frieda (Becky) as well as meet his nephew Frank who would eventually be put into a mental institution from all the things he had seen Henry and Ottis perform. In 1982 after Becky left with Henry, the authorities came looking for her, the two fled west.
Once in Hemet, California the pair met Jack and O’Bere Smart, staying in their house for four months the couple then hired Henry and Becky to care for O’Bere’s 80 year old mother Kate RIch who lived in Stoneburg, Texas. After only 4 days of caring for the elderly woman, Henry and Becky were told to leave after cashing four $50 dollar checks out of Kate Rich’s account.
Becky started to grow homesick in August and the two started to hitchhike once more. Camped out one night, Becky and Henry started fighting, Becky made a grave mistake by slapping Henry in the face. Henry immediately reacted by stabbing Becky and dismembering her body leaving her body parts all over the desert. By morning, Henry was back in Stoneburg, telling everyone that Becky had run off with a trucker.
Kate Rich disappears on September 16th. Police start to get suspicious of Henry when he leaves town the very next day. Henry’s car is found in Needles, California on September 21. On October 17th, Kate Rich’s house is burned down by an arsonist.
Returning to Stoneburg on June 11th, Henry was arrested for an ex-con possessing a hand gun. After only 4 nights in the jail Henry called a police officer to his cell and whispered ” Iv’e done some bad things” .
Over the next 18 months, Henry would confess to over 500 murders.
Ottis Toole who was serving time in Florida on an arson charge was implicated in most of the crimes. Ottis who confessed to even more of his own claimed that the two had been committing murders under the orders from a satanic cult known as the “Hand of Death”. While confessing to the murders, Toole also stated that he had eaten some of the victims, when asked why, he simply said, “I don’t like barbecue sauce.” .
In October of 1983, Detectives from all around the country gathered in Monroe, Louisana to compare notes. They were convinced that Henry and Ottis had committed 69 murders. Then in January of 1984, the total went up to 81. By March of 1985, police officers in 20 states cleared 90 murders for Henry alone, and 108 committed with Ottis as an accomplice. Henry still stood convicted of 9 deaths, including a death sentence for an unidentified hitchhiker, he was then formally charged with 30 more across country.
Police officers were visiting Henry from all across the United States. Henry would even be transported from state to state at crime scenes, spilling gruesome details to officers. In California alone in the month of August 1984, Henry had cleared 14 cases alone. 5 months later in New Orleans he cleared 5 more unsolved murders. In April of 1985, Henry would then again clear another 10 murders in Georgia.
On April 15th a journalist Hugh Aynesworth prepared a series of headline articles saying that Henry Lee Lucas had mislead homicide detectives and the public. According to Aynesworth, detectives had given Henry bits and pieces of information from the murders he cleared. Henry who agreed with Aynesworth claimed that the only murders he had committed were those of two people, besides his mother, Becky Powell and Kate RIch.
Police officers knew that Henry had a graphic imagination due to the fact that with one confession regarding a Virginia school teacher, the police had located her alive and well. He had confessed to murders in the Japan as well as Spain, he also confessed to murders in Guyana. The police tried to focus on the confessions that seemed realistic and pushed aside those that sounded insane.
In the next few months, Henry and Hugh Aynesworth’s relationship would come into question. Aynesworth who claimed to hear of the hoax straight from Henry’s mouth signed a contract to write the biography of Henry Lee Lucas.
September of 1984, Aynesworth appeared on CBS Nightwatch offering no objections as video tapes of Henry’s confessions were aired. Through the whole ordeal the Times Herald stayed quiet, allowing the hoax to proceed while hundreds of killers presumably remained on the basis of Henry’s false confessions.
Aynesworth’s story was unfolding slowly. The reporter had set up an elaborate time line that had many flaws in it. Aynesworth ruled out many murders by saying that there had been a meeting between Ottis and Henry in 1979, while most people stated that they had met in 1976, infact in 1978 Henry was living with Ottis and his family. Aynesworth’s also claimed that Henry spent all his time with girlfriend Rhonda Knuckles between January and March 1978. At one time Aynesworth was so anxious to clear Henry’s name that he lists once victim twice on the time line. Murdered on two occasions, four days apart.
By 1985, police in 18 states had reopened 90 of the Lucas cases. In November of 1983, police recorded a conversation of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, the pair had not seen one another for over 7 months, this is what was said :
Henry : Ottis, I don’t want you to think I’m doing this for revenge.
Ottis : No. I don’t want you to hold back anything about me.
Henry : See, we got so many of them, Ottis. We got to turn up the bodies. Now, this boy and girl, I don’t know anything about.
Ottis : Well, maybe that’s the two I killed my own self. Just like that Mexican that wasn’t going to let me out of the house. I took an ax and chopped him all up. What made me — I been meaning to ask you. That time when I cooked some of those people. Why’d I do that?
Henry : I think it was just the hands doing it. I know a lot of the things we done, in human sight, are impossible to believe.
Unfortunately the truth of the murders committed or not committed by Henry Lee Lucan and Ottis Toole may never be solved. Police still seem to think that the two were responsible for over 100 murders. Henry Lee Lucas received the death sentence, but it was over turned to life imprisonment on June 26, 1998. On March 12, 2001, Henry Lee Lucas died in prison.
Henry Lee Lucas still got the last word even in death.
In November of 1978, DNA tests done 2 months after Henry died eliminated him as a suspect in the murder of Lisa Martini, one of the confessions he had made in 1984.
