Henry Lee Lucas

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Warning icon orange.svg 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
Crime icon.png
Articles on illegal behaviour
Busted

Henry Lee Lucas 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[edit]