ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 15, 1996 TAG: 9601150071
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
FOR A TIME, MONTGOMERY COUNTY NATIVE Henry Lee Lucas led police to believe he was America's worst serial killer. Now, facing execution in Texas, he says he killed no one. Why has he changed his story? And why did he confess to so many murders in the first place? Lucas in 1983
For two years, Henry Lee Lucas held court in Texas with lawmen from across the country, confessing to hundreds of murders and grabbing the spotlight as America's most notorious serial killer.
But since 1985, the native of Montgomery County has told reporters, lawyers and judges that the confessions were bogus - products of his imagination that were spurred on by overzealous officers eager to close unsolved cases.
More recently, he has said that he killed no one - not even his mother in 1960, a murder he had steadfastly admitted to committing years before dead bodies began turning up between Florida and Texas as Lucas drifted across the country.
Now Lucas is fighting for his life, trying to void the only death sentence he received.
Lucas believes a federal court hearing in San Angelo, Texas, last week will prove he didn't kill an unidentified hitchhiker, the crime for which he faces the death penalty.
He also believes there is evidence to prove he is innocent of the other 10 murders he has been convicted of, or the hundreds of others to which he once confessed.
"I have evidence to show that I did not commit any crime whatsoever," Lucas said during one of several recent telephone interviews from the San Angelo County Jail. "If the judge sees it as I see it, there's nothing there. ... Everybody's going to hear the truth, that's one thing."
Should he ever convince authorities that he did not commit any of the murders he confessed to, Lucas says, he'd like to return to Virginia and rebuild his family's old homeplace on Brush Mountain.
"I'd be back in Virginia. ... That's where I want to be for the rest of my life is in Virginia."
Perpetually described in news accounts as a "one-eyed drifter," Lucas left Virginia in 1959 after getting out of prison in Richmond "for breaking and entering and stealing stuff."
That he would dream of one day returning here seems incongruous, given the years of abuse he suffered as a child.
In "Serial Killers: The Growing Menace," Joel Norris writes that Lucas' domineering mother killed his pet mule for spite, and that she had sex with men in front of Lucas and his handicapped father, who had lost both legs in a train accident.
The attention that swirled around Lucas when he began his string of confessions in 1983 was in stark contrast to his troubled, impoverished childhood in Montgomery County.
In 1988, N.L. Bishop, a former Christiansburg police investigator, interviewed a dozen people who knew Lucas as a child. They remembered him as "Little Henry," a homely, pitiful child who had a glass left eye, a replacement for the one he lost during horseplay with his brother. They said Lucas sometimes stole things but showed few signs of violence.
After Lucas left Virginia, his mother was stabbed to death in Michigan. He was convicted of her murder and spent 10 years in prison, more than half of that in a psychiatric hospital. He returned to prison in 1971, according to "An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers," by Michael Newton, after being convicted of kidnapping two teen-age girls. After his release in 1975, he entered a short-lived marriage that ended when his wife accused him of molesting her children from a previous marriage, according to Newton's book.
Lucas then began drifting, working in Florida before moving to Texas.
Lucas, 59, has been up for execution four times - most recently in October - for the 1979 slaying of the hitchhiker.
Never identified, the woman was dubbed "Orange Socks," after the only piece of clothing she was wearing when she was found by the side of Interstate 35 about 30 miles from Austin.
Lucas' scheduled October execution was canceled by U.S. District Judge Samuel Cummings, who presided over Lucas' federal appeal last week.
Cummings finished hearing the evidence Wednesday afternoon. Lucas said the judge will rule in February.
"He said he knew the cases were all false ... but he had to go by the law," Lucas said. He said Cummings told him that even if he reversed the Orange Socks decision, Lucas would have to file petitions to have the other convictions overturned.
Danny Burns, a Fort Worth lawyer in charge of Lucas' case, declined to be interviewed, citing a gag order from the judge.
But last August, Burns told the Austin American-Statesman that the evidence is "pretty compelling that he is probably telling the truth" in the Orange Socks case. ''That's the problem. Henry has made so many false confessions, and people are just tired of him.''
In the same newspaper story, Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson said he didn't believe Lucas would win the reversal he seeks.
''These claims have been disproved, and the legal issues have been rejected by many judges. ... He was convicted of a heinous murder. Ultimately, justice will have to be carried out in this case."
Few in law enforcement circles now believe Lucas could have committed all of the murders he confessed to. But they don't believe he's an innocent man, either.
Hugh G. Aynesworth, a reporter now with The Washington Times, investigated Lucas' claims while working for the Dallas Times-Herald in the mid-1980s.
He discovered that Lucas wasn't even in the same state when some of the murders he confessed to were committed.
"If he did what he said he did, he had to get in his car - and they were all bad clunkers, he never had a new car in his life - and drive 1,300 miles in a few hours to kill several people," Aynesworth told The Washington Post last year.
According to Texas newspaper accounts of last week's hearing, a report by the Texas attorney general's office puts Lucas in Florida on the day he allegedly killed Orange Socks In Texas.
The report made no conclusion about whether Lucas actually killed the woman, former attorney general investigator Michael Feary said during the hearing. But he said that nothing besides Lucas' confession disproves evidence he was in Florida.
Lucas and his attorneys say time sheets prove he was working as a roofer in Florida when Orange Socks was killed.
So why did Lucas confess to the murder of Orange Socks and so many others?
Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent and an expert on serial killers, writes in his book, "Whoever Fights Monsters," that Lucas enjoyed being able to leave his Texas prison cell and travel as a celebrity to several states where he claimed to have killed.
That's true, Lucas said last week.
"I enjoyed going to places," he said. "It not only helped me, but I wanted to prove what law enforcement was doing [by] accepting any confession. ... But I drug down a whole lot of law enforcement, which I'm sorry for. Some of them were probably good people."
Lucas said he gave 3,571 confessions in 21/2 years. Out of those, Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agencies cleared 650 cases.
According to The Associated Press, Lucas has been convicted of 11 killings, most of them in Texas. He got the death penalty in the Orange Socks case. His sentences in the others ranged from 60 years to life.
"I want the truth out," Lucas said. "All those lies, all they did was hurt the families of the victims."
And while once he seemed determined to confess his way to execution, Lucas now says, "I just made up my mind that I'm going to live. ... Every time I go to court, I tell them I didn't do it."
Lucas says he confessed for two reasons.
Becky Powell, his common-law wife, had left him, and "I was just fed up with life itself. I didn't care. When you lose someone special to you ... you just don't care."
So, Lucas said, he decided he would just "let the state kill me."
Until that time came, he wanted to have his fun with law enforcement. He said overeager officers gave him more than enough information from their files so he could appear to have a killer's knowledge of the murders.
"Ones that didn't help you didn't get the confession." he said. But "the ones that wanted just to clear a case" got what they were looking for.
Wise County, Texas, Sheriff Phil Ryan, who as a Texas Ranger first arrested Lucas in 1983, told the Dallas Morning News last year that he believes Lucas probably killed 20 to 30 people, including Powell and Kate Rich, an elderly woman the couple once did chores for.
According to several books and other writings about Lucas, people who knew him while they stayed at a religious commune say Lucas killed Powell in August 1982 because she wanted to leave him and return to Florida.
Rich disappeared soon after.
Lucas recalls his last day of freedom as being in June 1983 - when, he says, he was picked up on a trumped-up weapon charge.
Shortly after that, Lucas confessed to killing Rich and Powell.
With law enforcement's rapt attention, Lucas began his fantastic tales of other murders.
Lucas' story took another incredible twist in 1994 when a woman claimed to be the long-lost Powell. Lucas says he believed her.
"She looked exactly, I mean, identical, to her," Lucas said.
Lucas was upset when she was exposed as a fake, a serial killer groupie. Lucas, normally pleasant and accommodating during an interview, lashed out at reporters who gathered at the the prison to get his reaction.
"The press came down there and jumped on me about it. Man, I blew up. I went haywire. I think every word I said was beep," he recalled.
Becky meant the world to Lucas.
"I raised her from 9 years old," he said.
Powell was once sent to a reform school, but "she ran away and came back to me," Lucas said.
Lucas says that when he last saw Powell, she was alive. "She left with a truck driver. She left on my birthday" in August 1982.
"I have an idea where's she's at," Lucas said. He claims he heard from her after the fake-Becky fiasco.
"She wants to [come forward]. I told her no."
Meanwhile, Lucas waits in prison in Texas while the judge ponders whether he should die by lethal injection for the Orange Socks murder.
He is the oldest person on death row in Texas, which has executed more people than any other state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
"They're determined they're going to kill everybody on death row," Lucas said. "They don't care if the person's guilty or not guilty."
LENGTH: Long : 185 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Lucas in 1983. KEYWORDS: PROFILEby CNB