Henry Lee Lucas

This page contains too many unsourced statements and needs to be improved. Henry Lee Lucas could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

RationalWiki's Chilling Tales of True Crime

Articles on illegal behaviour

Nation of Yahweh Ĵakvo la Buĉisto Ignaz Trebitsch Lincoln Blue Lives Matter Pancasila Youth 2021 U.S. coup attempt

Busted

James O'Keefe Jack Abramoff Otis T. Carr Tommy Robinson J. Edgar Hoover Mohammad Hosseini v - t - e

Henry Lee Lucas (1936–2001) was, or perhaps wasn't, a serial killer (although he was a known wife beater, child molester, and possible necrophiliac, according to A&E's Biography) and was walking proof of just how idiotic the justice system can be when you push it. In 1960, Lucas was arrested and convicted of murdering his mother. In 1983, on trial for murder for the second time in the state of Texas and realizing that he had no chance of a fair trial, Lucas decided to symbolically protest his fate by confessing to the murder in question and 600 additional murders. Amazingly, not only was his confession accepted, he began being treated like a celebrity by the police.

This began a period of Lucas touring around the country, going to police precincts in various locations where murders had been committed, even when he couldn't possibly have been there at the time, just to confess and get the crime off the books. By the end, he had confessed to committing 3,000 murders, generally being allowed to read the files on them first to make sure his information would check out.

While he was on death row for a while, the then-governor of Texas, George W. Bush, made one of his few good decisions and ended the whole travesty by commuting his sentence to life (the only death row inmate he ever commuted). He died of heart failure in 2001 at the age of 64.

While most of his confessions were ludicrous, he was convicted of two murders, he was a known "companion" of serial killer Ottis Toole, and during a few of his confessions, he seemed to have information he had not been given ahead of time, so whether or not he was actually a serial killer depends on who you ask.

External links

• Henry Lee Lucas: Portrait of a Serial Killer
• Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas — a movie based on the killer. At 4.0 out of 10 from IMDB, you know it's good!
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer — a much better movie about the case.
• The Confession Killer

This crime-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.