Henry Lee Lucas

On January 11, 1960, in Tecumseh, Michigan, Lucas killed his mother during an argument regarding whether or not he should return home to her house to care for her as she grew older. He claimed she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he stabbed her in the neck.[3] Lucas then fled the scene. He subsequently said,

All I remember was slapping her alongside the neck, but after I did that I saw her fall and decided to grab her. But she fell to the floor and when I went back to pick her up, I realized she was dead. Then I noticed that I had my knife in my hand and she had been cut.[3]

Opal returned later and discovered their mother alive but in a pool of blood. She called an ambulance, but it turned out to be too late to save Viola's life. The official police report stated she died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault. Lucas was arrested in Ohio on the outstanding Michigan warrant. Lucas claimed to have killed his mother in self-defense, but his claim was rejected, and he was sentenced to between 20 and 40 years' imprisonment in Michigan for second-degree murder. After serving 10 years in prison, he was released in June 1970 due to prison overcrowding.[3]

Powell was put in a state shelter by the authorities after her mother and grandmother died in 1982. Lucas convinced Powell to run away with him and they lived on the road, eventually traveling to California, where an employer's wife asked them to work for her infirm mother, 82-year-old Kate Rich.[11] Rich's family turned Lucas and Powell out, accusing them of failing to do their jobs and writing checks on Rich's account. While hitchhiking, they were picked up by the minister of a Stoneburg, Texas religious commune called "The House of Prayer."[14]

Believing Lucas and the 15-year-old Powell were a married couple, he found Lucas a job as a roofer while allowing the couple to stay in a small apartment on the commune. Powell had become argumentative and homesick for Florida, and Lucas said she left at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.

In June 1983, he was arrested on charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan. Later, he confessed to the murders of Frieda Powell and Kate Rich. In addition to confessing, Lucas led the police to remains said to be Powell and Rich, although forensic evidence alone was inconclusive and the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either set of remains. His participation in the investigation would serve to boost his credibility in later confessions to other crimes. Lucas later denied involvement, but the consensus agrees he did murder Powell and Rich.[14]

In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas. Lucas reported that he was roughly treated by inmates and attempted suicide. Lucas claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, tortured his genitalia, and did not allow him to contact an attorney.[15] In interviews with law enforcement personnel Lucas confessed to numerous additional unsolved killings. It was thought that there was positive corroboration with Lucas's confessions in 28 unsolved murders, and so the Lucas Task Force was established by James B. Adams, the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.[15]

The task force officially "cleared" 213 previously unsolved murders as a result of the confessions. Lucas received preferential treatment rarely offered to convicts, being frequently taken to restaurants and cafes for his participation. He was rarely handcuffed, often allowed to wander police stations and jails at will, and even knew codes for security doors.[16][14]

Later attempts at determining Lucas's involvement in his confessed crimes were complicated when it was discovered Lucas was given access to information on the files of cases he was confessing to.[17] There were suggestions that the interview tapes showed that Lucas would read the reactions of those interviewing him and altered what he was saying, thereby making his confessions more consistent with facts known to law enforcement. The most serious allegation against investigators is that they had let Lucas read case files on unsolved crimes and thus enabled him to come up with convincingly detailed confessions, which made it virtually impossible to determine if he had been telling the truth to the Lucas Task Force about a relatively large number of the murders.[17]

In 1983, Lucas claimed to have killed an unidentified young woman, later identified as Michelle Busha, along Interstate 90 in Minnesota. When questioned by police, he gave inconsistent details on the way he murdered the victim and was eliminated as a suspect.[18]

In 1984, Lucas confessed to the murder of an unidentified girl who was discovered shot to death in a field at Caledonia, New York on November 10, 1979. The unidentified girl was referred to at the time as "Caledonia Jane Doe." Investigators, however, found insufficient evidence to support the confession.[19] In early 2015, over 35 years later, "Caledonia Jane Doe" was identified through a DNA match as Tammy Alexander.

Lucas also is believed to have falsely confessed to the 1980 slaying of Carol Cole in Louisiana. Cole was unidentified until 2015.[20]

Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated the veracity of Lucas's claims for articles that appeared in The Dallas Times Herald. They calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometres) in one month to have committed the crimes police attributed to him.[5] After the story appeared in April 1985 and revealed the flawed methods of the Lucas Task Force, law enforcement opinion began to turn against the claims that crimes had been solved.[21][22]

The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas's claimed murders. The report compared Lucas' claims to reliable, verifiable sources for his whereabouts; the results often contradicted his confessions, and thus cast doubt on most of the crimes in which he was implicated. Attorney General Jim Mattox wrote that "when Lucas was confessing to hundreds of murders, those with custody of Lucas did nothing to bring an end to this hoax" and "we have found information that would lead us to believe that some officials 'cleared cases' just to get them off the books".[14]

Lucas remained convicted of 11 homicides. He had been sentenced to death for one, a then-unidentified woman dubbed as "Orange Socks," whose body was found in Williamson County, Texas, on Halloween 1979, despite a time sheet recording his presence at work in Jacksonville, Florida.[23][24][25][26][27] Lucas was granted a stay on his death sentence after it was discovered that details in his confession came from the case file, which he had been given to read. The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998 by then-Governor George W. Bush.[28] In 2019, "Orange Socks" was officially identified as Debra Jackson, who was 23 years old at the time of her death.[29]

Reconstruction of "Orange Socks," created prior to her official 2019 identification, which estimated how she may have looked when she was alive.