11

The Cases That Awakened America

The Atlanta child murders lasted from July 1979 until June 1981, reached a figure of twenty-one (or twenty-nine, depending on which estimate you prefer to believe), and ceased with the arrest of the chief suspect, Wayne Williams. Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas were both called to Atlanta to work on the murders, and it was a suggestion by Douglas that led to Williams being detained for the first time.

The case began, almost unobtrusively, on July 28, 1979, when a woman searching for empty bottles to recycle for cash noticed a disgusting smell near some roadside undergrowth in a slum neighborhood of southwestern Atlanta, Georgia. When she spotted a leg sticking out of the tangle, she reported her find to the police, who uncovered the body of fourteen-year-old Edward Smith. He had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber gun. The last time he had been seen was a week earlier, when he left a skating rink after meeting his girlfriend there.

The buzzing of flies led the police to another body, fifty feet away in the woods—another black youth, Alfred Evans, thirteen, who had disappeared four days earlier. Partial decomposition made it hard to determine the cause of his death, but it could have been strangulation.

The boys were friends, although they lived in different parts of town. There was no sign of sexual assault upon either boy, but Smith’s football shirt was missing; so were his socks. Evans was wearing a belt that was not his own. In each case, this could imply that the boy had been undressed.

Because both victims were black, even the double murder failed to attract widespread attention. The police hinted that the deaths were “drug-related.”

Milton Harvey, fourteen, lived in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in northwest Atlanta, a far cry from the slums in which Evans and Smith lived. On September 4, Harvey cycled to the bank on an errand for his mother, and disappeared. His bicycle was found a week later on a deserted dirt lane.

On October 21, 1979, a neighbor asked nine-year-old Yusuf Bell to fetch her a box of snuff. Yusuf, the son of an ex–civil rights worker, Camille Bell, was an unusually gifted child whose hobby was mathematics, and who read encyclopedias for recreation. He also disappeared, and was reported to have been seen getting into a blue car. This time, the event stirred up some media excitement, since Camille Bell was a well-known figure in the Mechanicsville neighborhood where she lived, and made on-air pleas to the abductor to release her son. A week later, a decomposed corpse was found near College Park; it proved to be the missing Milton Harvey. Then Yusuf’s body was found stuffed into the crawl space of an abandoned elementary school. He had been strangled. Although he had been missing for ten days, it was clear that he had not been dead for more than half that time. His clothes had been cleaned, and the body washed. His funeral became a media event, with black leaders and politicians in attendance. They all promised a full investigation into Yusuf’s death. His had not yet been linked to the three other boys’—although Camille Bell and her friends saw a definite connection.

In early March 1980, a twelve-year-old black girl, Angel Lenair, was found tied to a tree with panties that were not her own stuffed down her throat; her hymen had been broken and minor abrasions to the genitals suggested sexual attack, but police concluded that she had not been raped. It was difficult to assess whether this murder was related to the other killings, since the assumption was that the killer—now known to black children as “the Man”—was homosexual. Cause of death was strangulation by an electrical cord.

The day after Angel’s body had been found, ten-year-old Jefferey Mathis left home to buy cigarettes for his mother from a nearby store; he also vanished. After his family had searched all night his mother rang the missing person’s department, but they paid little attention, the assumption being that a missing child was probably a runaway. But a witness later reported seeing the child get into a blue car, possibly a Buick.

The vanishings continued. On May 18, Eric Middlebrooks, fourteen, received a phone call at 10:30 at night and, grabbing his tools, told his foster mother that he was going out to repair his bike. His bludgeoned body was found early the next morning. On June 9, twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson disappeared on his way to a swimming pool in nearby middle-class Decatur.

A seven-year-old girl, LaTonya Wilson, was carried from her bedroom during the early morning hours of June 22, presumably by someone who knew the house well. Like the murder of Angel Lenair, authorities assumed that this abduction had no connection to the previous disappearances and deaths of young boys.

The day after Wilson’s kidnapping, the body of ten-year-old Aaron Wyche was found under a railway bridge in DeKalb County; police said he had died of an accidental fall, but his parents insisted that he was terrified of heights; a second autopsy concluded he had died violently.

Although the Atlanta police department was receiving its share of criticism for its inability to solve any of these murders, in mid-June, Deputy Chief Morris Redding had decided to consult the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. When Roy Hazelwood arrived in Atlanta, the police were still insisting that the murders were unconnected, citing the high crime rates in their city. Hazelwood had immediate experience of the high Atlanta crime rate when his wallet was stolen before he could even leave the airport, and he had to borrow $200 from a friend at the Atlanta FBI.

His review of the murders so far left him convinced that a serial killer was at work, although he doubted that the two girls were his victims. A few of the murders struck him as possible copycat killings. But his most important conclusion was that the killer was black. As he took a drive with black officers in an unmarked car through one of the neighborhoods from which children had disappeared, people stopped whatever they were doing to stare at him; obviously, a strange white man would have been noticed instantly.

By the beginning of July 1980, in what was later aptly labeled the “Summer of Death,” the murders had continued for a year, and seven black children had been murdered and three had vanished. Understandably, there was outrage on the part of the African American community, which still assumed that the killer was a white man who hated blacks. One outrageous rumor asserted that scientists needed the penises of recently dead blacks to make the protein interferon for combating cancer. But a far more widespread rumor was that the Ku Klux Klan was behind the murders. Blacks all over the country were convinced that a white racist was responsible. Camille Bell and the mothers of two other murdered children, Mary Mapp and Venus Taylor, mobilized a group of parents who had lost children, and in early July the newly formed STOP called a press conference to protest police inaction, arguing that even if the killer was an African American, the police were dragging their feet because the victims were not white children.

Two more children vanished that month: On July 6, nine-year-old Anthony Carter, who was found behind a warehouse near his home the next day. He had been stabbed to death. On July 13, eleven-year-old Earl Terrell vanished after leaving the South Bend Park swimming pool. His aunt received a call from a man claiming that he had the boy with him in Alabama and demanding $200 for his return.

The crime of kidnapping and transporting a person across state lines falls under FBI jurisdiction. It was soon decided, however, that the ransom call had been a hoax; nevertheless, Agent John Douglas went down to join Hazelwood. Meanwhile, the task force had been increased from five members to twenty-five. Civic groups raised a $100,000 reward for the killer, and a plan was set up to promote athletic and cultural programs to keep young blacks off the streets. Later, a curfew on children would be imposed.

Some blacks held a theory that the killer was a policeman, but the police argued that he was more likely to be a black teenager, who would be trusted by other teens. The belief that the killings were racially motivated was strengthened by the fact that, with the exception of Angel Lenair, none of the victims had been sexually assaulted.

The last killing of the summer was that of thirteen-year-old Clifford Jones, who was visiting his grandmother in Atlanta. His strangled body was found in a Dumpster on August 20. He was dressed in clothes that were not his own.

On September 14, fourteen-year-old Darron Glass disappeared. By then, although many of the killings were still considered unconnected, authorities knew they had a crisis on their hands. Mayor Maynard Jackson asked the White House for help, but it was still a question of whether there had even been any interstate violations to justify the FBI’s involvement in the situation. Nevertheless, Douglas and Hazlewood began their joint investigation using the methods of the BSU—studying crime-scene photographs, interviewing family members, studying the dumpsites. Their problem was to put themselves into the mind of the killer, and they even took a test under a psychologist to try to view the world through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic—the psychologist was deeply impressed by their results.

As had Hazelwood, Douglas concluded that this killer was a young black man, probably about twenty-nine years of age. This would explain why the children would trust him enough to accept a lift. He would be a “police buff,” who enjoyed posing as a police officer and probably carried a badge. He might even have a police-type dog.

As to motivation, the killer would be homosexual, attracted to young boys, but sexually inadequate, which would explain why there had been no rapes. He would probably have some kind of practiced ruse to attract the kids, and Douglas thought that he might pose as a music promoter. He hypothesized that the children probably knew their killer, and trusted him—these were not casual pickups.

The Atlanta Police Department checked through their records of known pedophiles, and ended with a list of fifteen hundred possible suspects. But not all Atlanta cops were impressed by the profile—one black officer told Douglas, “I’ve seen your profile and I think it’s shit.”

In Conyers, a small town twenty-five miles away, police thought they had a lead when they received a tape from someone who claimed to be the killer, declaring that he had left a body on Sigmon Road. He sounded like a white man with strong racist views. Douglas said immediately: “This is not the killer, but you have to catch him because he’ll keep on calling and distracting us until you do.” He then suggested how this could be done. The taunting tone implied that the man saw the police as idiots. Douglas advised them to go and search Sigmon Road, and make sure that they looked incompetent and failed to follow the caller’s instructions. Just as he expected, the man rang to tell them what fools they were; they were waiting for his call, traced it, and arrested him in his own house—from which he had been stupid enough to make the call.

Wayne Williams poses along the fence line at Valdosta State Prison in Georgia. His 1982 conviction for the slayings of two adults, and the decision by authorities to blame him for the murders of twenty-two others without taking him to trial for those crimes, officially ended what became known throughout the world as the “Atlanta child murders.” (Associated Press)

The killing went on. After Darron Glass, twelve-year-old Charles Stevens disappeared on October 9; his body was found the next day, suffocated. Nine days later, a search of woodland area revealed the body of the missing LaTonya Wilson, but the body was too badly decomposed for the cause of death to be determined. By then, the Atlanta police chief, George Napper, was admitting that all leads had been exhausted. Fearing a Halloween attack on trick-or-treaters, the mayor initiated a citywide curfew, and police patrols were beefed up. Nonetheless, the suffocated body of nine-year-old Aaron Jackson was found on November 2. Although he had been a friend of an earlier victim, Aaron Wyche, there was still no clue to the identity of the killer. On November 10, sixteen-year-old Patrick Rogers disappeared. Rogers had once had a crush on Aaron Jackson’s older sister. His body was found on December 21, facedown in the Chattahoochee River. A blow to the head had killed him. On January 4, 1981, Lubie Geter disappeared from a shopping mall. Five days later, police found the badly decomposed bodies of two missing children in a wood south of Atlanta—Christopher Richardson and Earl Terrell. Lubie Geter was found in early February.

Also in early February 1981, the Task Force received a call from eleven-year-old Patrick Baltazar, saying that he thought the killer was coming after him. Unfortunately, the detectives failed to ask him why he thought so, and when Baltazar vanished on February 6, it was too late. His body was found a week later in an office car park, strangled with a rope. It was announced that a hair fiber found on his body matched that found on five previous victims.

On February 22, fifteen-year-old Terry Pue was last seen at a hamburger restaurant; he was a friend of Lubie Geter. An anonymous white caller told the police where his body could be found on Sigmon Road, in Rockdale County. The body was found there, strangled with a rope, and police announced that they had been able to raise a fingerprint from the flesh, but no match proved to be on record.

Douglas recalled that there had been another Sigmon Road in the case, and that the police search there had been widely publicized. Was it possible, he wondered, that the killer was carefully following the press reports, pleased at the level of interest he was generating, and that he dumped the last body in another Sigmon Road as if making the point that he could abandon bodies wherever he liked? The two Sigmon Roads were more than twenty miles apart, so the killer had a long drive in order to make his point. Might it be possible to manipulate the killer through publicity? Would he now start dumping bodies in the river, to wash away evidence? Douglas’s insight proved correct; the next body to be found, thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker, was in the South River. That same day, the remains of Jefferey Mathis, who had been missing for more than a year, were finally uncovered. His funeral made national news.

FBI agents now strongly advised that a surveillance team should be set up to watch the rivers, particularly the Chattahoochee, Atlanta’s main waterway. This was not easy, since it involved several police jurisdictions. It took the best part of two months to organize it, but by April it was in operation.

After Curtis Walker, the next two bodies, fifteen-year-old Joseph “Jo-Jo” Bell and his friend Timothy Hill, thirteen, were found in the Chattahoochee River, Timothy on March 30, Jo-Jo on April 19. Like Patrick Baltazar, both boys had been stripped of their outer garments. Two days after he had gone missing on March 2, a coworker of Bell had told his manager at the seafood restaurant where they worked that Jo-Jo had called him and told him that he was “almost dead” and pleaded for his help.

These were the last child victims. For reasons unknown, the killer now moved on to adults. Yet it is possible that the reason for the choice of the first adult victim, Eddie Duncan, twenty-one, was once again dictated by publicity. Residents of the Techwood Homes housing project took to the streets to protest that the police force was not doing its job. Residents decided to form a patrol carrying baseball bats. It was on the day this “bat patrol” started, March 20, 1981, that Duncan, who was both physically and mentally disabled, disappeared. His body was found in the Chattahoochee River on April 8.

Despite massive media attention and rewards offered for any help in capturing the killer or killers, the body count continued to rise. Twenty-year-old Larry Rogers was the second adult added to the list of victims. As was Duncan, Rogers was retarded. His strangled body was found in an abandoned apartment. Next came twenty-three-year-old Michael McIntosh, who had known Jo-Jo Bell and was pulled from the Chattahootchee River in April. John Porter was twenty-eight when he was found stabbed to death that same month. The body of twenty-one-year-old Jimmy Ray Payne was also found floating in the Chattahoochee that April. In May, seventeen-year-old William Barrett was found strangled and stabbed after leaving home to pay a bill for his mother.

On May 22 came the break. Police posted close to the Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River spotted headlights, heard a splash, and saw a man climb into a station wagon. They stopped it, and found that it was driven by a plump young black man who identified himself as Wayne Williams, age twenty-three. He claimed to be a freelance photographer and music promoter, traveling across the bridge to audition a woman named Cheryl Johnson. In fact, her phone number was incorrect and her address did not exist. Williams was questioned for an hour, but the police could see no reason to detain him, so he was allowed to go, and placed under constant surveillance.

Two days later, the body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater, the oldest victim, was found floating in the river. Dog hairs found on the body matched those found in Williams’s station wagon and in his home. One witness testified to seeing Williams leaving a theater hand in hand with Cater just before his disappearance. Another witness testified to seeing Williams in the company of another of the victims, Jimmy Ray Payne, also found in the river. A young black who knew Williams well testified that Williams had offered him money to perform oral sex, and another described how, after he had accepted a lift, Williams had fondled him through his trousers, then stopped the car in secluded woods; the teenager had jumped out and run away. He also said that he had seen Williams with Lubie Geter. When laboratory examination established that fibers and dog hairs found on ten more victims were similar to those found in Williams’s bedroom, the police decided to arrest him. He was charged only with the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne.

Wayne Bertram Williams was the only child of two schoolteachers, Homer and Fay Williams, in their mid-forties when he was born on May 27, 1958. He was a brilliant and spoiled child. He studied the sky through a telescope and set up a home-built radio station. When his transmitter was powerful enough to reach a mile, he began selling advertising time. He was featured in local magazines and on TV. When he left school at eighteen he became obsessed by police work and bought a car that resembled an unmarked police car.

The prosecution later described him as the typical “Manichean” personality (the Manichees were world-haters): intelligent, literate, and “talented, but a pathological liar” (“a bullshitter” as one friend described him). He was a frustrated dreamer, and a man who felt himself to be a failure. He was obsessed by a desire for quick success, and first became a photographer, studying television camera work. He claimed to be a talent scout, trying to set up a pop group to sing soul music. He seemed to hate other blacks, according to several witnesses, referring to them as “niggers.” Yet he distributed leaflets offering blacks between the age of eleven and twenty-one “free” interviews about a musical career. One of the victims, Patrick Rogers, was a would-be singer.

The evidence was, as the prosecutor conceded in the trial that opened on December 28, 1981, entirely circumstantial, and it was with some reluctance that the judge, Clarence Cooper, allowed it to be strengthened by details relating to other murders besides those with which Williams was charged.

Carpet fiber was a key component of the prosecution’s case. Fibers found on the bodies of the victims were similar to fibers found in Williams’s home and automobile—twenty-eight fiber types linked to nineteen items from the house, bedroom, and vehicles driven by Williams.

Five bloodstains were also found in Williams’s station wagon, matched to the blood of victims William Barrett and John Porter.

Another telling argument by the prosecution was that Williams had lied extensively about the evening he stopped on the bridge, offering various alibis that proved to be false.

The trial began in January 1982, and ended in March when, after twelve hours’ deliberation, the jury found him guilty of the two murders. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

John Douglas comments: “Wayne Williams fit our profile in every key respect, including his ownership of a German shepherd. He was a police buff who had been arrested some years earlier for impersonating a law officer. After that, he had driven a surplus police vehicle and used police scanners to get to crime scenes to take pictures. In retrospect, several witnesses recalled seeing him along Sigmon Road when the police were reacting to the phone tip and searching for the nonexistent body. He had been taking photographs there, which he offered to the police.”

Too little is known about Wayne Williams and his motivations, which is why many writers on the case—including novelist James Baldwin—have doubted his guilt. In the last analysis, the story of the Atlanta child murders is as frustrating as a jigsaw puzzle with a crucial piece missing. But the missing piece may well have been destroyed by Williams himself. According to Chet Dettlinger in his book The List, in the days following the incident on the bridge, Williams and his father “did a major cleanup job around their house. They carried out boxes and carted them off in the station wagon. They burned negatives and photographic prints in the outdoor grill.” Photographs of what? They may have been anything from innocent shots of young blacks he had auditioned to photographs of actual murder victims, or even of the bodies.

The picture of Williams that emerges is of a “wannabe” with a strong desire to impress, bringing to mind in many respects “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi. But if the motive behind the murders was not sex, then what was it?

The descriptions of the bodies seem to provide a clue. This killer committed strangulation again and again and again. Many of the victims still had the rope around their throats. Is it possible that this is the answer? In a case of the 1870s—recorded by the psychologist Krafft-Ebing—an Italian youth named Vincent Verzeni committed two strangulation murders and attempted more. Krafft-Ebing notes: “As soon as he has grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations are experienced . . . accompanied by erection and ejaculation. Usually simply choking them satisfied him, and then he allowed his victims to live . . .”

The same was true of the German mass murderer of the 1920s, Peter Kürten. Throttling was a crucial part of his sexual pleasure, and if it brought a climax before the victim died, he let her go. Even when being examined in prison by a psychiatrist, he admitted that the white throat of the stenographer produced a powerful desire to squeeze it.

Is this the reason that two of the victims had premonitions they were going to die? Had Williams already practiced throttling on them?

Whether or not the prosecution established the guilt of Wayne Williams beyond doubt, one thing is clear: after his arrest, the Atlanta child murders ceased.

Although the Atlanta child murders made a worldwide sensation, it was another case that finally made the American public aware of what was meant by the term “serial killer.”

Over a period of months, a drifter named Henry Lee Lucas confessed to committing 360 murders. If true, this would make him the worst serial killer in American history—in fact, in world history.

The story that was to make world headlines began on June 15, 1983, when Joe Don Weaver, the jailer on duty in the Montague County Jail, Texas, was told by a five-foot eight-inch drifter, who was in jail for a minor weapons offence: “Joe Don, I done some pretty bad things.”

Weaver said sternly, “If it’s what I think it is, Henry, you better get on your knees and pray.”

Lucas said, “Joe Don, can I have some paper and a pencil?”

Half an hour later, Lucas handed the letter out through the hole in his cell door. It was addressed to Sheriff Bill F. Conway, and began:

I have tryed to get help for so long, and no one will believe me. I have killed for the past ten years and no one will believe me. I cannot go own [sic] doing this. I allso killed The only Girl I ever loved . . .

Weaver hurried to the telephone. He knew this was the break Sheriff Conway had been waiting for.

The unshaven, smelly little vagrant who now waited in his dark cell had been a hard nut to crack. Since the previous September, he had been suspected of killing eighty-year-old widow Kate Rich, who had vanished from her home; Sheriff Conway had learned that she had been employing an odd-job man called Henry Lee Lucas, together with his common-law wife, fifteen-year-old Becky Powell. Lucas had left Mrs. Rich’s employment under a cloud, and gone to live in a local religious commune. Not long after that, Becky had also disappeared.

Lucas insisted that he knew nothing about the disappearance of Kate Rich. As to Becky Powell, he claimed that she had run off with a truck driver when they were trying to hitchhike back to her home in Florida. He had passed several lie-detector tests, and the sheriff had finally been forced to release him. Then a week later he was arrested for owning a gun—which, since he was an ex-convict, was against the law.

A few hours later, Henry Lee Lucas sat in Sheriff Conway’s office, a large pot of black coffee and a packet of Lucky Strikes in front of him. He was a strange-looking man, with a glass eye, a thin, haggard face, and a loose, down-turned mouth like a shark’s. When he smiled, he showed a row of rotten, tobacco-stained teeth. In the small office, his body odor was overpowering.

“Henry,” said the sheriff kindly, “you say in this note you want to tell me about some murders.”

“That’s right. The light told me I had to confess my sins.”

“The light?”

“There was a light in my cell, and it said: ‘I will forgive you, but you must confess your sins.’ So that’s what I aim to do.”

“Tell me what you did to Kate Rich.”

There followed a chillingly detailed confession—Lucas seemed to have total recall—of the murder of the eighty-year-old woman and the violation of her dead body. Lucas described how he had gone to Kate Rich’s house and offered to take her to church. She had asked him questions about the disappearance of his “wife” Becky Powell, and at some point, Lucas had decided to kill her. He had taken the butcher’s knife that lay between them on the bench seat of the old car, and suddenly jammed it into her left side. The knife entered her heart and she had collapsed immediately. Then, speaking as calmly as if he was narrating some everyday occurrence, Lucas described how he had dragged her down an embankment, undressed her, and raped her. After that, he hauled her to a wide section of drainpipe that ran under the road, and stuffed her into it. Later, he had returned with two plastic garbage bags, and used them as a kind of makeshift shroud. He buried her clothes nearby. He drove back to his room in the religious hostel called House of Prayer, made a huge fire in the stove, and burned the body. The few bones that were left he buried in the compost heap outside.

Conway then asked him what had happened to Becky Powell. This time the story was longer, and Lucas’s single eye often overflowed with tears. By the time it was over, Conway was trying to hide his nausea. Lucas had met Becky Powell in 1978, when she was eleven years old; she was the niece of his friend Ottis Toole, and Lucas was staying at the home of her great-aunt in Jacksonville, Florida. Becky’s full name was Frieda Lorraine Powell, and she was mildly retarded. Even at eleven she was not a virgin. The family situation was something of a sexual hothouse. As a child, Ottis Toole had been seduced by his elder sister, Drusilla (who was Becky’s mother). He grew up bisexual, and liked picking up lovers of both sexes—including Henry Lee Lucas. And he liked watching his pickups make love to Becky or her elder sister, Sarah.

Ottis had another peculiarity; he liked burning down houses because it stimulated him sexually.

In December 1981, Drusilla committed suicide, and Becky and her younger brother, Frank, were placed in juvenile care. Lucas decided to “rescue” her, and in January 1982, he and Ottis fled with Becky and Frank; they lived on the proceeds of robbery—mostly small grocery stores. Lucas felt heavily protective about Becky, he explained, and she called him “Daddy.” But one night, as he was saying good night to her, and he was making her shriek with laughter by tickling her, they began to kiss. Becky had raised no objection as he undressed her, and then himself. After that, the father-daughter relation changed into something more like husband and wife. At twelve, Becky looked as if she was nineteen.

But Becky had suddenly become homesick, and begged him to take her back to Florida. Reluctantly, Henry agreed, and they set out hitchhiking. Later, in the warm June night, they settled down with blankets in a field. But when they began arguing about her decision to go home, Becky had lost her temper and struck him in the face. Instantly, like a striking snake, Lucas grabbed a carving knife that lay nearby, and stabbed her through the heart. After that he violated her body. And then, since the ground was too hard to dig a grave, he cut her into nine pieces with the carving knife, then scattered the pieces in the thick undergrowth. He told people who knew her that she had run away with a truck driver. His sorrow was obviously so genuine that everyone sympathized with him. In fact, Lucas told the lawmen, he felt as if he had killed a part of himself.

After this second confession, the sheriff asked: “Is that all?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not by a long way. I reckon I killed more ’n a hundred people.”

If he was telling the truth—and Conway was inclined to doubt it—he was far and away the worst mass murderer in American criminal history.

The first step was to check his story about Kate Rich. Lucas had pointed out the spot he’d stashed her body on a map. Conway and Texas Ranger Phil Ryan drove there in the darkness. They quickly located the wide drainage pipe that ran under the road, and lying close to its entrance, a pair of knickers, of the type that would be worn by an old woman. On the other side of the road, they also found broken lenses from a woman’s pair of eyeglasses.

In the House of Prayer, near Stoneburg, they searched through the unutterably filthy room that Lucas had occupied in a converted chicken barn, and in the stove, found fragments of burnt flesh, and some pieces of charred bone. On the trash heap they found more bone fragments.

In the field where Lucas said he had killed Becky Powell, they found a human skull, a pelvis, and various body parts in an advanced stage of decomposition. Becky’s orange suitcase still lay nearby, and articles of female clothing and makeup were strewn around.

Even after killing Becky, Lucas told them, he had murdered another woman. He had drifted to Missouri, and there he saw a young woman waiting by the gas pumps. He went up to her, pushed a knife against her ribs, and told her he needed a lift, and would not harm her. Without speaking, she allowed him to climb into the driver’s seat. All that night he drove south towards Texas, until the woman finally fell into a doze. Lucas had no intention of keeping his promise. He wanted money—and sex. Just before dawn he pulled off the road, and as the woman woke up, plunged the knife into her throat. Then he pushed her out on to the ground, cut off her clothes, and violated the body. After that, he dragged it into a grove of trees, took the money from her handbag, and drove the car to Fredericksburg, Texas, where he abandoned it.

Lucas was unable to tell them the woman’s name, but his description of the place where he abandoned the car offered a lead. In fact, the Texas Rangers near Fredericksburg were able to confirm the finding of an abandoned station wagon the previous October. And a little further checking revealed that the police at Magnolia, Texas, had found the naked body of a woman with her throat cut, at about the same time. Again, it was clear that Lucas was telling the truth.

On June 17, 1983, Henry Lee Lucas appeared in the Montague County Courthouse, accused of murder and of possessing an illegal firearm. A grand jury indicted him on both counts.

On Tuesday, June 21, 1983, the unimpressive little man who looked like an out-of-work road sweeper was led into the courtroom between two deputies. Judge Frank Douthitt listened to the indictment concerning Kate Rich, and then asked the prisoner if he understood the seriousness of the indictment against him. Lucas replied quietly: “Yes, sir, I have about a hundred of them.”

On request he clarified the point: yes, he meant that he had killed a hundred people.

The judge asked him if he had ever had a psychiatric examination. The little man nodded. “I tell them my problems and they didn’t want to do anything about it . . . I know it ain’t normal for a person to go out and kill girls just to have sex with them.”

The following morning, the Austin newspapers carried head-lines that were a variant of a single theme: DRIFTER CONFESSES TO A HUNDRED MURDERS. The wire services immediately picked up the story, and by evening it was on front pages all over the country.

For the preceding ten years, the American public had been kept in a state of shock at the revelations about mass murderers: Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Dean Corll, John Wayne Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers, the Atlanta child murderer. And now a wandering vagrant was admitting to a total that surpassed them all. And in Quantico, where the NCAVC, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, had just been launched, it was clear that it was not a moment too soon. The “wandering killer” was obviously a new variety of menace. Suddenly, every newspaper in America was talking about serial killers.

Meanwhile, the cause of all this excitement was sitting in his jail cell in Montague County, describing murder after murder to a “task force” headed by Sheriff Jim Boutwell and Texas Ranger Bob Prince. It soon became clear that a large number of these murders had not been committed on his own, but in company with his lover, Ottis Elswood Toole.

Toole, who had a gap in his front teeth and permanent stubble on his chin, looked even more like a tramp than Lucas. And even before Lucas was arrested in Texas, Toole was in prison in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. He was charged with setting fires in Springfield, the area where he lived. On August 5, 1983, he was sentenced to fifteen years for arson.

One week later, in a courtroom in Denton County—where he had killed Becky Powell—Lucas staggered everybody by pleading not guilty to Becky’s murder. He was, in fact, beginning to play a game that would become wearisomely familiar to the police: withdrawing confessions. It looked as if, now that he was in prison, the old Henry Lee Lucas, the Enemy of Society, was reappearing. He could no longer kill at random when he felt the urge, but he could still satisfy his craving for control over victims by playing with his captors like a cat with mice.

It did him no good. On October 1, 1983, in the courtroom where he had been arraigned, Lucas was sentenced to seventy-five years for the murder of Kate Rich. And on November 8, 1983, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Becky Powell. Before the courts had finished with him, he would be sentenced to another seventy-five years, four more life sentences, and an additional sixty-five years, all for murder. For good measure, he was also sentenced to death.

When Henry Lee Lucas began confessing to murders, it seemed to be a genuine case of religious conversion. Later, when he was moved to the Georgetown Jail in Williamson County, he was allowed regular visits from a Catholic laywoman who called herself Sister Clementine, and they spent hours kneeling in prayer. He was visited by many lawmen from all over the country, hoping that he could clear up unsolved killings. Sometimes—if he felt the policeman failed to treat him with due respect—he refused to utter a word. At other times, he confessed freely. The problem was that he sometimes confessed to two murders on the same day, in areas so wide apart that he could not possibly have committed both. This tendency to lie at random led many journalists to conclude that Lucas’s tales of mass murder were mostly invention.

None of the officers who knew him believed that for a moment. Too many of his confessions had turned out to be accurate.

For example, on August 2, 1983, when he was being arraigned for the murder of a hitchhiker known simply as “Orange Socks,” Lucas was taken to Austin for questioning about another murder. On the way there, seated between two deputies, Lucas pointed to a building they passed and asked if it had been a liquor store at one time. The detectives looked at one another. It had, and it had been run by Harry and Molly Schlesinger, who had been robbed and murdered on October 23, 1979. Lucas admitted that he had been responsible, and described the killings with a wealth of detail that only the killer could have known. He then led the deputies to a field where, on October 8, 1979, the mutilated body of a young woman named Sandra Dubbs had been found. He was also able to point out where her car had been left. There could be no possible doubt that Lucas had killed three people in Travis County in two weeks.

When asked if Ottis Toole had committed any murders on his own, Lucas mentioned a man who had died in a fire set by Toole in Jacksonville. Toole had poured gasoline on the man’s mattress and set it alight. Then they hid and watched the fire fighters; a sixty-five-year-old man was finally carried out, badly burned. He died a week later. Police assumed he had accidentally set the mattress on fire with a cigarette.

Lucas’s description led the police to identify the victim as George Sonenberg, who had been fatally burned in a fire on January 4, 1982. Police drove out to Raiford Penitentiary to interview Toole. He admitted it cheerfully. When asked why he did it, he grinned broadly. “I love fires. Reckon I started a hundred of them over the past several years.”

There could be no possible doubt about it: Toole and Lucas had committed an astronomical number of murders between them. At one point, Lucas insisted that the total was about 360—he went on to detail 175 he committed alone, and 65 with Ottis Toole.

In prison after his original convictions, Lucas seemed a well-satisfied man. Now much plumper, with his rotten teeth replaced or filled, he had ceased to look so sinister. He had a special cell all to himself in Sheriff Boutwell’s jail—other prisoners had treated him very roughly during the brief period he had been among them, and he had to be moved for his own safety. And he was now a national celebrity. Magazines and newspapers begged for interviews, television cameras recorded every public appearance. Police officers turned up by the dozen to ask about unsolved murder cases, and were all warned beforehand to treat Lucas with respect, in case he ceased to cooperate. Now, at least, he was receiving the attention he had always craved, and he reveled in it. And some visitors, like the psychiatrist Joel Norris, the journalist Mike Cox, and the crime writer Max Call, came to interview him in order to learn about his life, and to write books about it. Lucas cooperated fully with Call, who was the first to reach print—as early as 1985—with a strange work called Hand of Death.

Here, for the first time, the American public had an opportunity to satisfy its morbid curiosity about Lucas’s rampage of crime. The story that emerged lacked the detail of later studies, but it was horrific enough.

Lucas, Call revealed, had spent most of his life from 1960 (when he was twenty-six years old) to 1975 in jail. After his release he had an unsuccessful marriage—which broke up when his wife realized he was having sex with her two small daughters—and lived for a while with his sister Wanda, leaving when she accused him of sexually abusing her young daughter. He seems to have met Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1978. Ottis had a long prison record for stealing cars and petty theft, and he invited Lucas back home, where he was soon regarded as a member of the family.

According to Lucas, he had already committed a number of casual murders as he wandered around. These were mostly crimes of opportunity—as when he offered a lift to a young woman called Tina Williams, near Oklahoma City, after her car had broken down. He shot her twice and had intercourse with the body. Police later confirmed Lucas’s confession.

Even so, the meeting with Toole seems to have been a turning point. Now, according to both of them, they began killing “for fun.” According to Toole’s confession, they saw a teenaged couple walking along the road in November 1978, their car having run out of fuel. Lucas forced the girl into the car, while Toole shot the boy in the head and chest. Then, as Toole drove, Lucas repeatedly raped the girl in the back of the car. Finally, Toole began to feel jealous about his lover, and when they pulled up, shot her six times, and left her body by the road. The police were also able to confirm this case: the youth was called Kevin Key, the young woman Rita Salazar.

The case was the first of more than a score of similar murders along Interstate 35 that kept Sheriff Boutwell, now chief investigator, busy for the next five years. The victims included teenaged hitchhikers, elderly women abducted from their homes, tramps, and men who were killed for robbery. Lucas was later to confess to most of these crimes.

Lucas and Toole began robbing convenience stores, forcing the proprietor or store clerk into the back. Lucas described how, on one occasion, they tied up a young female clerk, but she continued to try to get free. So he shot her through the head, and Toole had intercourse with her body.

On October 31, 1979, the naked body of a young woman was found in a culvert on Interstate 35, her clothes missing, except for a pair of orange socks laying by the body. After his arrest, Lucas described how he and Toole had picked up “Orange Socks,” who was hitchhiking, and when she had refused to let Lucas have sex with her, he strangled her. Lucas would eventually receive the death sentence for the murder of the still unidentified young woman.

When Lucas and Toole abducted Becky and her brother, Frank, in January 1982, they took the kids with them when they robbed convenience stores; Becky looked so innocent that the proprietor took little notice of the two smelly vagrants who accompanied her—until one of them produced a gun and demanded the money from the till. And, according to Lucas, Becky and Frank often became witnesses to murder—in fact, in one confession he even claimed that they had taken part in the killings.

Eventually, Frank and Toole returned home to Florida, while Becky and Lucas continued “on the road.” In January 1982, a couple named Smart, who ran an antiques store in Hemet, California, picked them up, and for five months Lucas worked for them. When the Smarts asked Lucas if he would like to go back to Texas to look after Mrs. Smart’s mother, Kate Rich, he accepted their offer. Yet after only a few weeks, the Smarts received a telephone call from another sister in Texas, telling them that the new handyman was spending Mrs. Rich’s money on large quantities of beer and cigarettes in the local grocery store. Another sister who went to investigate found Mrs. Rich’s house filthy, and Lucas and Becky drunk in bed.

Lucas was politely fired. But his luck held. Only a few miles away, he was offered a lift by the Reverend Reuben Moore, who had started his own religious community in nearby Stoneburg. Moore also took pity on the couple, and they moved into the House of Prayer. There everyone liked Becky, and she seemed happy. She badly needed a home and security. Both she and Henry became “converts.”

Becky nonetheless began to feel homesick, and begged Henry to take her back to Florida. A few days later, pieces of her dismembered body were scattered around a field near Denton. And Lucas’s nightmare odyssey of murder was drawing to a close.

The American public, which at first followed Lucas’s confessions with horrified attention, soon began to lose interest. After all, he was already sentenced. So was Ottis Toole (who would also be later condemned to death for the arson murder of George Sonenberg). And as newspapers ran stories declaring that Lucas had withdrawn his confessions yet again, or that some police officer had proved he was lying, there was a growing feeling that Lucas was not, after all, the worst mass murderer in American history.

It was a couple named Bob and Joyce Lemons who first placed this conviction on a solid foundation. An intruder had murdered their daughter, Barbara Sue Williamson, in Lubbock, Texas, in August 1975. Lucas confessed to this murder when asked about it by Lubbock lawmen. When the Lemons heard the confession they felt sure it was a hoax. Lucas said he recalled the house as being white, that he had entered by the screen door, and killed the newly married woman in her bedroom. It was a green house, the screen door had been sealed shut at the time, and Barbara had been killed outside.

The Lemons went and talked to Lucas’s relatives, and soon came up with a list of the periods when he had stayed in Florida, which contradicted dozens of his “confessions.” But when they confronted Texas Ranger Bob Prince with these discoveries, he became hostile and ordered them out of his office.

Unsurprisingly, Ressler’s own attitude toward Lucas is skeptical. In Whoever Fights Monsters, he writes:

By the time I interviewed Lucas, years after the controversy had died down, the dust had settled and Lucas said that he had actually committed none of the murders to which he had previously confessed. Under closer questioning, he did admit that since 1975 he had “killed a few,” fewer than ten, perhaps five. He just wasn’t sure. He had told all those lies in order to have fun, and to show up what he termed the stupidity of the police.

This figure, however, is obviously as much an underestimate as Lucas’s original claim of 350 (or even, at one stage, 650) was an exaggeration. As noted above, many of Lucas’s claims were confirmed on investigation. It seems, on the whole, that he was probably telling something like the truth in his first statement that he had killed “about a hundred.”

Ressler adds:

It took several years for the Lucas fiasco to be resolved. The task-force member had been right, though: If we had had VICAP up and running at the time Lucas made his first startling admission, it would have been easy to see what was truth and what was falsehood in his confession. First, we would have asked the police departments to fill out VICAP forms on their unsolved murders and enter them into the computer system. Then we would have analyzed them by date, location, and MO, and would quickly have been able to show that several of them had been committed on the same date in widely separated locations, thus eliminating the possibility that they were committed by the same man. By such processes of elimination, we would have narrowed the field very quickly and allowed investigators to concentrate on the real possibilities.

Lucas, sentenced to several life terms as well as to death in the 1980s, began the usual process of appeal, then spent thirteen years on death row. By June 1998, when it seemed that he could no longer delay the death sentence, then Governor George Bush commuted it to life imprisonment.

Ottis Toole died in September 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver.