The woman Henry Lee Lucas was sentenced to die for was found in a culvert beside Interstate 35 north of Georgetown, Texas, on Halloween 1979, naked except for a pair of orange socks, strangled a few hours earlier. For forty years that was her name. Lucas confessed to her in 1983, was convicted in 1984 on the confession and almost nothing else, and in 1998 had the sentence commuted by Governor George W. Bush, the only time in six years and 152 executions that Bush spared anyone, because the state's own records put Lucas in Jacksonville, Florida, cashing a paycheck, on the day she died. In August 2019 the Williamson County sheriff announced that DNA from a sister had identified Orange Socks as Debra Louise Jackson, twenty-three, from Abilene, who had left home in 1977 and worked at a Ramada Inn in Amarillo and a nursing home in Azle and whose family had never filed a missing-person report because they assumed she was doing all right. The sheriff said it was too early to name a suspect. The man convicted of killing her had been dead eighteen years.
That is the case in miniature. Lucas confessed to something like six hundred murders between 1983 and 1985, and the Texas Rangers and police officers from more than thirty states used his confessions to close 213 of them. The Texas Attorney General's office concluded in 1986 that he could not have committed the great majority and had probably committed three. Those three have names: his mother, Viola; a fifteen-year-old named Frieda Powell, whom he called Becky; and an eighty-two-year-old widow named Kate Rich, who had given him work.
He was born on August 23, 1936, in a one-room log cabin in the hills outside Blacksburg, Virginia, the youngest son of Nellie Viola Lucas, an alcoholic who made moonshine and took men into the house for money, and Anderson Lucas, a double amputee who had lost his legs to a freight train and sold pencils. Accounts give her seven children or nine, and whether Anderson fathered all of them is doubtful. The accounts of his childhood, most of them his own, describe being sent to school in a dress with his hair in curls, being beaten with a board, and losing his left eye to an infected cut when he was ten. In 1954 he got four years in Virginia for burglary and escaped. In late 1959 he was living in Tecumseh, Michigan, with his half-sister, Opal Jennings, and was engaged to a pen pal named Stella Curtis, whom he had written to from prison. His mother came north for Christmas, disliked the fiancée, and demanded that he come back to Blacksburg to look after her. On January 11, 1960, after days of arguing and, by his own account, a good deal of drinking, she hit him over the head with a broom and he stabbed her in the neck and ran. Opal came home to find her on the bedroom floor, still alive in a pool of blood; she died before the ambulance arrived, and the police report gave the cause as a heart attack brought on by the assault. He was picked up in Ohio on the Michigan warrant and said he had acted in self-defense. He was convicted of second-degree murder and given twenty to forty years, tried to hang himself in prison, spent time in the state hospital at Ionia, and was paroled in June 1970 over his own objection that he was not fit to be released. He said later that he told the parole board he would kill again, and that he killed a woman within sight of the prison gate on the day he walked out. That claim has never been matched to any body.
He was back in prison in 1971 for the attempted kidnapping of two teenage girls in Michigan and out again in 1975. In 1976 he drifted to Jacksonville, Florida, and met Ottis Toole, a drifter and arsonist who worked at a roofing company and lived in his mother's house with a collection of relatives that included his niece and nephew, Frieda and Frank Powell, both of them in and out of juvenile facilities. Frieda, whom everyone called Becky, was eleven when Lucas moved in. By the time she was fourteen she was his girlfriend and traveling with him, in Toole's company or without it, through Florida, Georgia, Texas and California, living in his car, stealing what they ate. The stories Lucas and Toole later told about those years, of hundreds of killings on the road for a cannibal cult called the Hand of Death, were the material of a thousand headlines and are not believed by anyone who has checked them.
In May 1982 Lucas and Becky arrived in Ringgold, Texas, a few dozen houses in Montague County near the Oklahoma line, and were taken up by a religious commune called the House of Prayer, whose founder found them a room and put them to work. Kate Rich, eighty-two, a widow living alone in Ringgold, hired them to do repairs and clean, until her family noticed money and checks going missing and put them out. In August, Becky told Lucas she wanted to go back to Florida, and they hitchhiked as far as a field near Denton, where they argued in their bedrolls and, by his account, she slapped him and he stabbed her in the chest with a carving knife. He said he had sex with the body, cut it into pieces and scattered them in the field, and that he did not come back to it for a year. He told the commune she had run off with a truck driver. On September 16, 1982, he picked up Kate Rich on the pretext of driving her to church, stabbed her in the car, raped the body, and burned it in the wood stove behind the House of Prayer over two nights. Her family reported her missing that night.
Sheriff Bill Conway of Montague County and Texas Ranger Phil Ryan suspected him from the first and could not hold him. When he left the county they lost him; when he came back in June 1983 they arrested him for possession of a pistol, a felony for a man with his record, and put him in the county jail. Lucas later said he was kept naked in a cold cell without cigarettes for four days. On June 15 he asked for the sheriff and wrote a note saying he had done some bad things, and over the next days he confessed to Rich and Powell, led officers to the stove, where a fragment of bone and a piece of Kate Rich's glasses were recovered from the ash, and to the Denton field, where most of a skeleton the right size for a fifteen-year-old girl was recovered in pieces. Those two cases are the ones supported by anything but his word. At his arraignment for Kate Rich's murder, he asked the judge what they were going to do about the other hundred women he had killed.
The Texas Rangers built a task force around him. He was moved to the Williamson County jail in Georgetown, where Sheriff Jim Boutwell gave him a cell with a television, all the cigarettes he wanted, strawberry milkshakes, and a steady stream of visitors: detectives from Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, California, Washington, Illinois and two dozen other states, each with a file of unsolved killings and a hope. Lucas learned to read the files upside down across the table, to listen for the details in the question, and to give them back. He was driven to scenes and shown photographs. Where he got it wrong he was corrected and got it right the next time. By the end of 1984 the task force had a list of 213 cleared cases in twenty-six states, Lucas had confessed to roughly six hundred, and he had been convicted of nine murders in Texas and one in West Virginia, which with his mother made eleven, and sentenced to death for Orange Socks. Ranger Bob Prince, who ran the task force, said the confessions were being checked. Investigators who doubted them were told they had not read the file.
The reporter who broke it was Hugh Aynesworth of the Dallas Times Herald, who had covered the Kennedy assassination and Ted Bundy and had begun by believing Lucas. In April 1985 the paper published records assembled by Aynesworth and Jim Henderson, payroll stubs, cashed checks, jail bookings, a dental appointment, that put Lucas in Jacksonville while he was supposedly killing in Texas, in Virginia while he was killing in Washington state, and in a Delaware jail on the day of a murder he had confessed to elsewhere. In several cases he would have had to drive a thousand miles overnight in a car that barely ran. Lucas, interviewed, said he had done it to show how easily it could be done and because he was being fed and treated better than at any other time in his life. In 1986 Attorney General Jim Mattox's office issued a report finding that the task force had shown Lucas case files and crime scene photographs before taking his statements, that many confessions had been taken with no attempt to check them, and that he had probably killed three people. Vic Feazell, the McLennan County district attorney who had challenged the task force from inside Texas and empaneled a grand jury on the Lucas confessions, was indicted on federal bribery charges he said were retaliation, acquitted on every count, and later won a defamation judgment against the television station that had promoted the charges. He spent the 1990s as Lucas's lawyer.
Apart from his mother, Becky Powell and Kate Rich, the eleven convictions rest on eight other people. Linda Jane Phillips, twenty-six, a schoolteacher, disappeared driving home from a party in Richardson, outside Dallas, on August 8, 1970, two months after he left prison in Michigan, and was found two days later, sexually abused and stabbed twenty-six times. Clemmie Everett Curtis, thirty, a patrolman, was found on August 3, 1976, handcuffed and shot once through the chest near his patrol car just outside Huntington, West Virginia; Lucas said he and Toole had done it together. Lillie Pearl Darty, eighteen, accepted a ride at a gas station in Harrison County, Texas, on November 11, 1977, and was found raped and shot in the head in woods north of Marshall three weeks later. Debra Jackson was the woman in the orange socks. Dianna Lynn Bryant, seventeen, was strangled with a vacuum-cleaner cord in her apartment in Brownfield on April 26, 1981; her father accepted the confession and the case was closed. Glenna Fay Biggers, sixty-five, was found by a neighbor in Hale County on December 20, 1982, with a butcher knife in her stomach and a fork in her throat; Lucas said he broke in and took $180. Laura Marie Purchase, twenty-six, reported missing from Houston on March 5, 1983, was found raped and strangled in a burning stretch of woods off League Line Road in Montgomery County on March 17. Laura Jean Donez, sixteen, skipped school in Houston on April 16, 1983, and two days later an oilfield worker saw smoke near a logging road in the same county; she had been raped, beaten and strangled and her body burned, and Lucas led officers to the place. In 2008 DNA testing excluded him in the Purchase case, and in 2021 another man was charged with her murder.
None of the convictions was overturned in his lifetime. Lucas recanted everything except Powell, Rich and his mother, then recanted those too, then affirmed them again. The families of the 213 were left with cases that had been closed on the word of a man who was somewhere else, many of them never reopened, the evidence dispersed and the witnesses gone. He was found dead of congestive heart failure in the Ellis Unit at Huntsville at eleven at night on March 12, 2001, aged sixty-four, and is buried in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, the prison graveyard in Huntsville. Ottis Toole, who had confessed alongside him and been convicted of two murders in Florida, died in prison in 1996. Debra Jackson is buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Georgetown under a stone that now carries her name, and the sheriff's office that put it there says her murder is open.
Becky Powell was fifteen when she died in a field near Denton. Kate Rich was eighty-two and had gone out to church. Viola Lucas was in her seventies, seventy-one or seventy-four depending on the record. Those are the three. Everything else attached to Henry Lee Lucas is a measure of what a jail cell, a milkshake and thirty police departments wanting the same answer can produce.