OTTIS TOOLE AND HENRY LEE LUCAS: AMORE DEMONIAC

Article BY Nicholas Peacock

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Joint enterprise of creatures in the pursuit of their prey is nature in play; a primal command insensate. It is in the hunting beasts in the broiling farrago of the savage African veldt working their synergies of potential the greater for survival; the domestic canines loose in the larder of cattle, antic, conniving in their seemingly pointless massacre; the serial killer partnership, whose fell minds gain the fell rewards commensurate with the capacity of man. Man is unique: in the pursuit of transcendental advancement through knowledge, understanding, spirituality - divinely so as the Good Book lays it out. But man is as talented at evil as good. In extremis, man is an animal; there is something truly shocking about the rearing of those base traits that belie the flummery of costume and etiquette in society. When people then willingly submit to their crudest desires - the sadistic, rapine, murderous - the fabric of the winsome creed the West clings to so wilfully, is gravely rent. The average person cannot fathom the motives or source of such depraved inclinations; so they abstract them in the faith that no such dire reality will touch their lives. If there is a god, then Satan has his watch here too, and when his agency triumphs, the faithful are all at sea.

 

Evil vs Madness

Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas were two serial killers who shared in their murderous wont. They became notorious, and it seems they revelled in and sought the attendant celebrity too; whatever their dim, sordid ideas of that fancy were, they are certainly in the canon of the very worst. It was evinced in their eagerness to fuel the fervid media attention via their candid confessions that suggests a mutual interest in attaining some kind of deranged kudos. This was perhaps a form of mockery as of the caged and condemned - a baleful luxuriance in irredeemable circumstances. Such sordid form may have been aroused by the cognisance that they were not alone in their hideous enterprise, and not jointly so either; so it may have been that Ottis and Henry saw in serial murder a competitive affair; that they should try and eclipse other agents of wanton cruelty, if merely to excel at something in their lives - as humans do.

Irrespective of the banal, helter-skelter nature of many serial killers, there is a whole body of professionals engaged in the study of such monstrous people, and it is in the pursuit of the tool of criminal profiling. They are from myriad disciplines, but it is those allied primarily with psychiatry and psychology, many of them medical practitioners, who are the repository of the captured psyche – or their rendition of it – who pique the imagination of those who would baulk at the task of investigation and inveiglement of, and within, the mentally unhygienic. Their work on the formulation of profiles for candidates of murders is to some extent employed by law enforcement agencies as authoritative material with which to frame their investigations. It has been derided by many, who see such exercises as nebulous, the inferences impressionistic, applicable to a hopelessly broad range of people, so impossibly misleading. But of more concern is that there is spun a profile, so contrived, that it poses deceptive possibilities – as of the psychics and mediums – and therefore otiose; though in fact, following wild goose trails could give a loose serial killer some latitude to perpetuate further. And the realities of apprehension are often very much at odds with those lofty pronouncements; it may be by luck alone that serial killers are apprehended. So, with that, one wonders whether Behavioural Scientists could have envisaged that a pair of homosexual “rednecks” would be responsible for such a reign of terror as Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas unleashed.

It is hard to understand how normative people could contemplate the dark origins and inclinations of the deranged. Those who are tasked with it – and what sort of person wants to be so associated? - have the option of divorcement from their loathsome subjects, as soon as they are out of the securitised doors, and off they go, way back to their comely abodes. How do they remain uncontaminated by those unhinged mental emanations and stay sane? Perhaps they have their own tenebrous fixations, which lend them to interact, identify with the like, for better or for worse.

There is perhaps potential value in eliciting the confessions of serial killers if their confidence could be gained though. And so it seemed with Ottis and Henry, who revealed all - and it was a waterfall of confessions. But the proviso is always that such people are likely wholly deceitful; for serial murderers are surely the apogee of immorality and the immoral are deceitful beings – and here were two specimens who were the epitome of that! They confessed to anything put their way by their credulous captors, who offered them crimes which fitted into their MO and whereabouts; as if they should have done it, it being of sufficiently depraved form. But had they been fed contrivances, their unreliability would have been detected early on and the perpetrators of crimes they fallaciously admitted to, rightly pursued.

There is a dearth of critical thinking concerned with the psychology of serial killers when compared to that of the normal. While the merit of psychology is derided, the writings of philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud are good examples of an intellectual pursuit that is quite hard to refute of its trenchant insights unto the logic of the mind, beguiling as it can be. The examination of the fundament of the mind has been wrenched from the hegemony of religious mysticism, and now has some currency as science, but madness remains the negative, or entropy of sanity, and defies both science and definition.

Within the psyche of the “mad”, are the root-commands of the sane and these are signal irrespective of all the inexplicable blethering representations and enactments which constitute insanity. Insanity then requires something more than the broad categorisation in which the myriad presentations are labelled in a baggage of diagnoses, which fails to discriminate the nuances of those so encompassed; and crucially, the risk they pose to the sufferer, and more importantly, the public.

Unfortunately, the expansion of the categories of mental illness has come to include many states of mind which are mere extravagances of commonplace emotions (tending towards the self-indulgent), some of which may be relevant here; though, the poor and unsavoury characters of low social caste have not historically been humoured of their foibles and peccadillos, rather binned; that, unlike that sumptuous character the Marquis de Sade, whose immense social status rendered his depraved, debauched, behaviour eccentricity, whereas a peasant pretender might have been burnt at the stake. There is though no faking of authentic madness, certainly not when displayed in all its glory, be it in an institution, or for the unwonted benefit of the shrinking public, for its pure torment is laid bare.

Paranoid schizophrenia is the condition that shouts out loudest when considered in respect of the perpetration of unseemly crimes. It is a disorder that strikes a sense of terror amongst the ordinary, which associate it with random, untrammelled violence, to strangers, like themselves – people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a candidate for many a serial killer; it betokens fractured sanity of a wholly malevolent nature (whereas, many paranoid and other schizophrenics, are meek, terrified, or doped out people). What is pertinent here is that it is far easier to believe that the agents of horrific crimes are afflicted with some cognisable disease of the mind, as this, rather than the designation of being plain evil, is an easier conclusion – for the belief in evil opens up the possibility that it may afflict the believer of it; but then could not madness strike at will! The pathology of madness is then, a compelling operant, which offers a sort of escape route for the convicted, by virtue of being designated as of Diminished Responsibility. (No one has ever been accorded mitigation for being evil!)

Here is a rare condition that has cropped up in the psychiatric enquiries, which might just fit in a little with the above two protagonists, though it is somewhat spurious in this author’s estimation:

 

Folie à deux

It is officially recognised as the consummated madness of two. It was notably cited in respect of the case of the teenaged killer companions Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 wantonly bludgeoned a fourteen year old child to death. They displayed an allied-blithe behaviour in court, which hinted at an intimacy of purpose which had born the fruits of their madness, and the sequelae resulting in murder, that was ostensibly inconceivable of each alone. It was of interest to the authorities because both were unlikely suspects for the crime; each were painfully intelligent, erudite, and from respectable backgrounds. (They were also reputedly very fine looking – a factor which never fails to sway!) And their conspiracy was thus seen in an abstruse, somewhat sympathetic light; these two darling boys, whose homosexuality (a crime and mental illness at the time), although not exposed, might well have been suspected though was not intimated. It seemed they shared in a sick in-joke, smiling their recounted evil deed before the jury and audience, who must have been baffled by their mien. Of course the media and public were fascinated; the defendants had appeared indifferent to their plight (the death penalty was quite probable!). They did escape the gallows on account of their youth (19 and 18, respectively), and who knows what the judge saw fit for clemency in them. (Their strange relationship persisted in Stateville Penitentiary - the bond they had formed was ineluctable.)
Folie à deux is thus distinguished:

• Folie imposée is where a dominant person (known as the 'primary', 'inducer' or 'principal') initially forms a delusional belief during a psychotic episode and imposes it on another person or persons (known as the 'secondary', 'acceptor' or 'associate') with the assumption that the secondary person might not have become deluded if left to his or her own devices. (Perhaps this is true of Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore.)
•
• Folie simultanée describes either the situation where two people considered to suffer independently from psychosis, influence the content of each other's delusions so they become identical or strikingly similar, or one in which two people "morbidly predisposed" to delusional psychosis mutually trigger symptoms in each other. (This is surely exemplified by the case of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - the Columbine killers.)

N.B. Mass hysteria is allied to this syndrome; it is well represented by Jim Jones and his ill-fated congregation.

 

The Devil in The Midst

It is an interesting notion that two serial killers, henceforth strangers, meet and interact; how would they identify as alike and relate their behaviours, knowing they are both utterly anathema to society? Perhaps they would be intractable beings, their worlds unaccommodating of one another (like some writers - the vain and self-obsessed). With Ottis and Henry it was two rotten peas in a rotten pod, and on their encountering each other…imagine it as a grounding of pent-up cachexia, predicated on their respective perverted determinations. And so they embraced, and a demonic compact was sealed; a platform for the synergy of sin, to each heart’s content. Their affection was consummated, and so commenced the enactment of their murderous desires.

The prodigious serial killer must possess some extraordinary dissimulation to have such a free reign; the free-killing, in the midst of society, where many of the victims are valued and soon missed. Human instincts are attuned to the detection of such people, and it comes from the annals of the mind as old as society itself. How such serial murderers can casually strike down so many and elude apprehension must be testament to the complacency of the authorities, perhaps as much as it is the measure of the energumen-talents of the perpetrators. Of the society of the crimes of Ottis and Henry, it might appear that America was then experiencing some social mobility that facilitated their cause; that there was a great preponderance of relatively well-off kids, who could travel beyond the confines of their neighbourhoods, to escape the fetters of family life, and indulge in adventures of quite a libertine abandon – and thereby many such minded people were apt prey. That is not conclusive, but it is true that the freedoms accorded to youths now are somewhat honed with a knowledge of the dangers of society (admittedly it is safer now); and this by the wisdom passed down by antecedents, who learnt of the ways of characters likely to engage in rapine and murderous behaviour – the modern gallivant is then, much more sensible about whom they trust and tryst with. A corollary of that (although admittedly other factors are relevant) is that hitchhiking is a much diminished and dying practice – for who would pick up a stranger, or be liable to be picked up? It was of that more carefree culture of narcotic, sexual, musical exuberance – as espoused by Kerouac, the Merry Pranksters et al – that created a medium where young vulnerables were on offer to serial killers, particularly the peregrinatory kind. The naïve and idealistic abounded; life was cheaper, cheap prostitutes a function of that!

There must be some serial killers undiscovered out there, from that era; and how they deal with the legacy of their crimes is something unfathomable to those invested of conscience. Some of them likely did commit suicide, when their wherewithal crumbled under the weight of guilt. (Imagine some all-consuming, harrying madness emerges from the sediment of sin, like an ignis fatuus, and bang goes their sanctity). With Ottis and Henry, there was no guilt, no more than of a crocodile - for they were true devils.

 

Religion and Sin

Mainstay religion in America is an institution that permeates society; from the rabid snake-handling Pentecostals (whose sincerity it is hard to doubt), to the oleaginous politician that speaks lip service to the institution, while defying the precepts out of sight. The power of religion in America is quite surprising to a foreigner, from a land (Britain) where Christianity is in decline (the churches emptying – some deconsecrated and in some cases, turned into venues of libation and cavorting). That source of strictures is surprisingly prevalent in poorer, less salubrious rural areas; and it must have touched the lives of Ottis and Henry from early on. Both did putatively belong to a cult called “The Hands of Death”, whose religious values are unknown here (but should be assumed to be nugatory), and each may have sought religion when their fates were sealed; and that is something else of a last-ditch attempt at expiation that anyone condemned can summon.

The Catholic Church has a peculiar line in sin. It offers now – and exactly how it has done, who really knows? – a strange prescription of morality, of which the crux is the confessional, a practice that offers hope to all comers – perhaps even these two. It may seem facetious to point out the sordid history of the institution; but therein lieth the license to debauch and be saved. (The Marquis de Sade hailed from such an order, and based much of his cynicism of religion on his experiences, his uncle a devout Catholic, with a weakness for much fornication, as well as flagellation.)

Three things are required of a penitent in order to receive the sacrament worthily, thus be renounced of sin:

• One must be contrite—or, in other words, sorry for his sins.
• One must confess those sins fully, in kind and in number.
• One must be willing to do penance and make amends for his sins.
•
It begs the question: who is not permitted such absolution? What crimes are beyond the pale: rape and murder of Catholic nuns?

 

Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas – Foul Ore

There are many seminal depictions of America in its throes of the tectonic social upheaval of its birth into a nation: from the chilling witch trials of Salem, MA, as rendered by Arthur Miller in The Crucible; the pioneer days of Fennimore Cooper’s Last of The Mohicans; the numerous accounts of hideous Civil War, the sadistic likes of Bloody Bill Anderson and the bushwhackers – whose cruel actions are entombed in history, but must have some vestigial echo in those areas and descendants of those party to it. Then there were the winsome depictions in the like of The Waltons, and Little House on the Prairie, where America was raw but wondrous; and God was on America’s side. That God-blessed trope is prominent in many American productions, sometimes to a fulsome degree – when it is clear that society is not at all well. And so the Nation evolves and tries to forget the horror of the forge.

But that film Deliverance – a truly lurid account of the theme of boondocks baseness – is a pertinent insight into the milieu, that had produced such greatness in the form of Abraham Lincoln (a Kentucky woodsman); and such cretinous inhabitants, that resemble Bram Stoker’s Carpathian spooks. The rude mores of yore punctured the metropolis and vied with other troubled elements therein and the result was piecemeal terror within a quite extraordinary potage of race and class.

Ottis and Henry were not people of any learned mystic creed, not true adherents to the cult; they were simply “white trash” people, born of poverty into it, whose banal sport was cruelty without mercy. (Such behaviour is as old as the hills; it is something many troubled children will resort to, often beginning with animals, and if uncorrected – or encouraged by similarly errant people – will metastasise into cruelty perpetuated upon humans.) In those parts, alcohol has always been a serious problem; more recently other drugs, such as crystal meth wreak such havoc amongst those folk. That charming tale, Huckleberry Finn, dances around the true horrors of the rural poverty, the murder and mayhem, the drunkenness and sexual abuse. It is almost romantic. In reality, a “Huck” back then might well have been a beaten and molested urchin that an Albert Fish character would do well to find.

Society improved in many ways up to the inception of Toole and Lucas; but there was form in the heads of many all that perverted culture, and with the new generation, many were going to be emancipated of their parents’ unpleasant experiences, but some would merely have them reprised, while some were going to pay for the misery foisted upon their forebears back in the bad tapestry.

Ottis

Ottis Elwood Toole, (March 5, 1947 – September 15, 1996) was born and raised in a present day social worker’s idea of hell, in Jacksonville Florida. Needless to say, it was into abject poverty. His mother was fanatically religious (of the unhinged variety), his father fanatically drunk, and he abandoned them. Ottis claimed many things (and his claims must be suspicioned, and scrutinised for truth – though none is in fact implausible given his demeanour and deeds). He claimed that his mother abused him as a child, dressed him up as a little girl and called him Susan. His allegations of sexual abuse within his family include the attentions of his older sister, acquaintances - such as his father’s friend, who he claimed engaged in sexual contact with him aged five. (Sadly, such things continue to this day, as is attested by the prison population of sex offenders.)

It is this sort of background that spawns some of the most disastrous people who beat a path into society, and find some dire niche therein. They become the drug-addicted rentboys, transvestites, and these die young as self-hating victims; the flipside of this appalling rearing is the rapist monsters, who implacably rage at their heinous mistreatment with a deadly brio, and they seek victims to avenge their victimhood – and should ever the twain meet, the outcome is likely cruel.

Prima facie, it would appear that no one of that provenance could succeed in society enough to evade suspicion from the beginning, have the wherewithal to engage in such audacious career. Early intervention and rehabilitation aside – not that any of that was forthcoming – Ottis looked like some hopeless product from the very start, which was not surprising given his dire imprimaturs.

Ottis was a soi-disant homosexual at the age of ten, in a society that abominated this (something his family could hardly have had any moral grounds of objection), although his sexual orientation is not really important here, since he was so devoid of conviction in any normal sense; he would become an anythingophile – anything that appealed to his sick, spontaneous lust. He found young boys to toy with, and it is likely they were victims - but who knows.

Toole claimed to have begun his abominable career, as an arsonist, beginning with the burning of abandoned homes, while still a child. And he claimed to have first murdered aged 14: a travelling salesman, who had propositioned him for sex – he ran over him with his own car after they had trysted in the woods. That murder has never been verified.

Ottis soon gravitated to the adult world of the taboo he’d come to engross, and became addicted to gay pornography; then it was onto underground venues, where he could revel freely in. Here was an amnion for the rentboy-lifestyle he would adopt with inevitable alacrity. The law would soon catch up with him though: he was arrested for “loitering” aged seventeen - hence was the pattern of his youth.

His shambolic and aimless adult life saw him ramble about the Southwest, as a risible figure, panhandling and selling his sex about the surreptitious spots, avoiding the law of the locals. They, upon descrying his perverted form, would see something to ruthlessly mock and beat upon; but the pitiful, drunken sexual jester he was then was something of a spectacle of such entertainment value, that he was spared the ultimate fate of unfortunates whose aberrant form invites summary mob justice; or maybe he was fearsome enough to fend off bigoted tormentors. He found venues that catered for the peculiar audience; places and people out of mind of the mainstream, but undoubtedly some patrons were family men, church going men, with respectable careers, whose wives could never begin to imagine the betrayal of the marital contract.

This dissolute episode lasted for seven years from 1966. It was a period of stasis, or maybe meditation on the perpetration of the murders to come. As with all careers, that rentboy was compelled to advance; from the spectacle of the ruffhouses, taking so much abuse, to a new role - where he learnt to dispense it.

Ottis moved north. In 1974 he was a suspect in the murder of 24 year old Patricia Webb, in Nebraska. Although the law failed to bag him, he was sent fleeing. So he moved on to Boulder Colorado; a month on, he was suspected of killing 31 year old Ellen Holman, and again fled from the suspicious and hostile. Becoming more repulsive with age, the progress of his perversions, and of his alcoholism, he would have found little room in any inn, his dark bizarreness perhaps a novelty, before people soon realised what a baleful presence he was, their instinctive aversion warding them off him.

So it was back to Jacksonville for Ottis. But so far, there was an extraordinary development somewhere in the timeline: his marriage to an older woman, who promptly left him, on discovering his true sexual orientation, and surely, she must have come to see something of a threat in his presence, despite her earlier misjudgement. It should be assumed that she was of low mental capacity; not in any way charmed by her suitor’s malignant designs.

In 1978, having reached the nadir of his ordinary fortunes, Ottis ended up the soup kitchen in Jacksonville Florida, where he met his lover and serial-killer-accomplice – a manifestly unromantic venue for sure, but love and murder blossomed hereon.

 

Henry

Henry Lee Lucas, (August 23, 1936 – March 13, 2001) was born in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia, the youngest of nine children to Viola Dixon Waugh, a prostitute, and Anderson Lucas, another alcoholic father. He and his brother were regularly beaten by their mother; him with a wooden plank, so much so on one occasion, that he spent three days in a coma. His mother would make Henry watch her employment activities, and Like Ottis, he was made to dress in girls clothes - something, which although spurious sounding in the context of Ottis’s claims, was backed up by his sister. Again we are in a setting from Deliverance. One really has to wonder what community spirit existed for poor Henry, whether people shunned this problem family, and just how dejected people could become without intervention. One presumes that the Lucas family were not alone in their plight.

Lucas then, was reared in a similarly abject homestead to his murder-buddy, but perhaps worse so with the extreme violence on top of madness, alcoholism, and likely sexual interference. He was stabbed in the left eye by his brother aged 10 (accidentally, he recounted) and received a glass replacement, and this anomaly contributed to his bullying, leading him to become intensely antisocial, which was a natural outcome. It can only be imagined how he fitted in with the locals; quite likely, the Lucas’s were at the very bottom of the heap, thus he was subject much special derision accordingly.

Shortly after his father died outside of the hut from hypothermia while drunk, Henry dropped out of school and into full-time delinquency, drifting around Virginia; a no account with miniscule prospects, someone who at best would be taken for coming from the wrong end of the tracks and a bum through accident of birth and upbringing. Perhaps people of such misfortune of class can find redemption and inveigle themselves into a better class of society, but not Henry, he, like Ottis, was moulded repulsive and irredeemable, and despite the stupidity of the victims of these two, very few would accord Henry any place in their proximity for long, hence he was virtually unemployable.

Henry claimed to have committed his first murder in 1951, of 17-year-old Laura Burnsley, (who refused his sexual advances – as if anyone might accede!), although he later withdrew this confession – but Henry, like Ottis, was a consummate liar and braggart; though the truth should be assumed to be every bit as horrible as the import of his confabulations!

Unlike Ottis, Henry engaged in burglary as a primary means of living (his homosexuality was perhaps latent) and this soon led to his incarceration, his receiving a four year sentence in 1954. In 1957 he escaped prison, was recaptured, was released in 1959 and went off to Tecumseh Michigan, to live with his half-sister, Opal. He too had a sort of romance, engaged to a pen pal he corresponded with from prison, and it must be assumed that this poor woman was also mentally deficient. His mother had come to join him and Opal in Tecumseh and here were quarrels between mother and son about his ambitions of marriage and how his duties to care for her in her dotage would be arranged - as if he owed her anything given the upbringing she had given him! This raged - on and off - until Henry took the decisive step of killing her in 1960. He claimed as follows:

“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”.

If that isn’t a purely disingenuous account of events, it is the rendition of a wholly deranged individual abroad from reality.

In fact, he left her bleeding for Opal to discover, having again fled. Viola actually died of a heart attack – perhaps from the realisation of the appalling reality of the nature of her offspring! Henry went back to Virginia, but decided to return to Michigan, and was arrested in Ohio. He was charged with second-degree murder, his plea of self-defence rejected – he was sentenced to between 20 and 40 years in Michigan.

Henry was released after ten years. He drifted about the South until he met Ottis, along with his 12 year old niece Becky Powell, in that Jacksonville soup kitchen. It was fait accompli from here on.

 

Ménage à Trois

The peculiar relationship between Henry and Ottis as lovers and murderers is foremost in many readers’ imaginations, and there is too much mystery regarding their dynamic to adduce much here, but that of Henry and Frieda Powell is important, in the calamitous path of this travelling, murderous troupe.

It is unsurprising that Ottis abrogated any moral responsibility for his juvenile relation and let the debauched arrangement flourish; that paedophilia was natural. The pair conspired to rename Frieda as Becky, in part to conceal her identity, in part because they preferred the moniker. Unfortunately, also, there is scant account of the quotidian affairs of the triumvirate. She was not considered active in the extensive murderous affairs, so could be considered oblivious; alternately, she may have been a passive witness; possibly complicit – it is unknown here. But likely, there was a cabal, in which much drunken, debauched activity amounted.

The three left Florida, for more drifting, scrounging subsistence on the road, living in cheap motels – it can only be imagined how they funded their journey! Again, murderous sorties were part of their life on the road – but the timeline is unclear. Eventually, they found stable settlement in Stoneburg, Texas, at a religious commune called "The House of Prayer." This it can be imagined was a spurious or deluded outfit that capitalised on the flotsam and jetsam that were abundant back then – akin to the incipient Waco sect. Here, the minister, and commune owner, Ruben Moore, accepted these lambs of god. He found Lucas a job as a roofer and allowed him and Powell to live in a small apartment on the commune. Ottis’s means of keep is not recorded, although it was unlikely to have been in keeping with the past, for he must have been a hideous thing, his countenance a grotesque betokening his alcoholism and sordid crimes.

When Becky became ‘homesick’ for Florida - perhaps because she had seen the true nature of her companions, enough of what she must have suspected they were up to, and had forced herself to leave, or was forced - Lucas elected to take her to a truckstop in Bowie of that state, and say farewell. But she disappeared. Now Ottis and Henry were unencumbered by her presence, and so maybe it was at this point they were freer to conduct in their abysmal wont, and maybe this is when the majority of their spurious claims of 108 murders took place.

People would go missing in extraordinary numbers back then, without the means of location that the mobile phone offers now. There were too many people abroad for the police to take much notice. Their assumptions may have been cynical and complacent, of delinquent youths and no-accounts; people not worth their poorly paid time, even if the worst had occurred. With such an abundance of candidates for serial killer prey, it is unsurprising that many serial killers were active, and it now seems that some of their confessed killings were by other unspeakably awful people – and how did they feel when their conquests were attributed to this pair? The rural police had little understanding or belief in the phenomenon of those whose pathology is so bent towards the sport of killing innocents. Many prostitutes – male and female, young and not so young - would turn up dead; as would people whose lifestyle was commensurate with their demise, and perhaps justly so, and no one cared much of them. So, as with Ted Bundy’s incredible murder campaign – though admittedly, his victims were more highly valued members of society – there was a dearth of interest and inquiry.

 

Capture

Toole was arrested in April 1983 on an arson charge in Jacksonville. Two months later Lucas was arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan. Lucas was later charged with killing 82-year-old Kate Rich in Ringgold, Texas, and was also charged with Powell's murder. It was then that he began boasting about the pair’s murderous rampage and attention was focused on crimes that fitted the claims. Toole, when first confronted with Lucas’s confessions, denied involvement but later began substantiating them. Now their game was up; this was the time to reveal all, and get that attention - a small, but sole reward, given their sealed fate.

Both freely admitted to their legacy and detailed in it to extraordinary depths, boasting wanton depravity, with banal alacrity. (It is unnecessary to expatiate on the purported methods of torture and murder employed by these two, but it should be assumed – from their confessions, their likely uninhibited, sadistic nature – that people who fell to them suffered immense cruelty, that no perfunctory account can render it realistically horrible enough to do justice to the victims.)

Of course, the authorities wanted to hear this from them, since they seemed such plausibly despicable characters. It must have been a bonanza to the interested, dynamite to their ears – for now, they were in possession of sensationalized characters; now their backlog of bodies could be accounted for; and this was about as exciting as things could get in those nowherevilles. It was the turn of the captors to get some of the fame, and they wasted no opportunity in exploiting this.

It was a real problem though. Since these two were genuine monsters, whose real crimes were so awful that they caused considerable perturbation to society; that such people could exist and have perpetrated such unwonted cruelty, challenged the conscience of America; on the other hand – and this as much an element of their cruelty – could they really have committed all that they claimed, or were they lying for whatever deranged motive inconceivable to the police?

And so the litany of horrors came out, and soon enough, crimes were being solved far and wide, anywhere the duo had possibly roamed. So important was this edification that, Lucas became the subject of a whole eponymous task force, under the scrutiny of Sheriffs Jim Boutwell and Bob Prince of the Texas Rangers, in Williamson County. This was described as "a veritable clearinghouse of unsolved murder." Lucas then, was quite in demand, his confessions a salve to the accumulated atrocities; and this bought him privileges unimaginable to the average caged maniac - he was frequently taken to restaurants and cafés, given access to restricted areas, generally pampered within reason. It was later learned that Boutwell and other task force agents purposely fed Lucas information about other unsolved murders so that he would make "credible" confessions. Perhaps Lucas did earn some of his privileges: on one occasion, in Huntington, West Virginia, Lucas confessed to killing a man whose death had originally been ruled a suicide; the man's widow received a large life insurance settlement that had been denied after the initial suicide verdict.

Lucas's claims were eventually decried as outlandish, but that didn’t stop him exposing. His claims that he was part of the cannibalistic, satanic cult "The Hand of Death", of having taken part in snuff films, of having killed the gangster Jimmy Hoffa, and to have delivered poison to cult leader Jim Jones in Jonestown, were a Klondike of media interest. In response to these claims, and to reports of the Lucas Task Force's questionable investigative methodology, the Texas Attorney General's office issued a study ("The Lucas Report") in 1986. The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas's claimed murders. The report compared Lucas's 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.”

One such case was “Orange Socks”... It was proposed that Lucas had picked up a hitchhiker, raped her multiple times, and her remains were identified by her orange socks. He was convicted for this.

Dan Morales, Mattox's successor as Texas Attorney General, concluded that it was "highly unlikely" that Lucas was guilty in the "Orange Socks" case. Though initially sceptical of the Lucas Report, he came generally to support its findings.

Adding to the confusion, however, was Lucas's habit of making confessions, recanting them, then offering more confessions, and again recanting them. Mattox, wary of Lucas's many false confessions, suggested in 1999 that, in the case of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, "I hope they don't start pinning on him every crime that happens near a railroad track”.

All the while, as Lucas revelled in his absurd celebrity, Toole was stewing in his cell, perhaps aware that he was missing out on his partner’s perverted glory. He was by now suffering from his alcoholic excess, liver cirrhosis a painful but deserved punishment for his sins; but a mere trifle compared to the extent and extremity of them.

By October 1983, police were sure that Toole and Lucas had committed at least 69 killings, and announced so at a press conference. The number was increased to 81 at a January 1984 press conference, and by March 1985, 90 murders had been attributed to Lucas in 20 states, and he and Toole were credited with a further 108. Police would eventually claim over 200 murders were solved due to Lucas’s confessions, as Lucas was taken to various states and had his memory prodded about unsolved killings.

 

Adam Walsh

On October 21, 1983, Toole confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, creator of America’s Most Wanted - a terrible irony! He claimed to have kidnapped and killed the boy, and then fed the body to alligators in a nearby swamp. A few weeks after Toole made the confession, police investigating the case announced that they no longer considered him a suspect. John Walsh, Adam's father, had said repeatedly that he believed Toole to be guilty.  (It was not until December 2008, that police announced definitively that Toole as responsible or that crime.)

The evidence mounted as Toole festered in custody; not so proud now, now his crimes were mostly digested he was facing a death sentence. In April 1984 he was convicted of setting a fire that killed 64-year-old George Sonnenberg. Sentenced to death for that crime, he was indicted one month later for the murder of 19-year-old Ada Johnson and received a second death sentence, on appeal however, both sentences were commuted to life in prison. In 1991, he pled guilty to four more slayings in Florida. In mitigation, Ottis was designated as mentally retarded, with an I.Q. of 75, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He died in September 1996 in prison from his liver cirrhosis.

Ultimately, Lucas was convicted of 11 homicides. He was sentenced to death for the murder of “Orange Socks”. In 1998, the Texas Board of Pardon and Parole voted to commute Lucas's death sentence to life imprisonment, in accordance with Governor George W. Bush's request. It was one of only two successful commutations of a death sentence in Texas since the restoration of the death penalty after Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, the other being Kenneth Foster in 2007 who was controversially convicted under Texas' law of parties statute. On March 13, 2001, Lucas died in prison from heart failure at age 64.

 

Epilogue

And so the agents of such abomination upon a better society came to an end, but their crimes remain raw in the psyches of those whose loved ones were taken, their cruel losses undoubtedly debilitating, in some cases to the point of utter mental ruin and perhaps precipitous of suicide or early death (who that has not experienced the heinous murder of friend or loved one at the hands of purely evil people for sick enjoyment can contemplate such a predicament!). The legacy of Ottis and Henry is alive and well; it must resonate in the minds of prospective and active serial killers, who admire them and aspire to their abysmal prospects. Let us hope that no good person is subject of the wonts of such people, that, if there is a God, he has cast both unto the fiery pits of hell and now keeps a better watch over the innocent.