THE CONFESSION KILLER: HENRY LEE LUCAS. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
THE CONFESSION KILLER. (2019) DIRECTED BY ROBERT KEENER AND TAKI OLDHAM. ‘STARRING’ HENRY LEE LUCAS.
REVIEW BY
SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This is another terrific true crime Netflix documentary, but your
mind will probably boggle, like mine did, at some of the events contained therein. Henry
Lee Lucas (1936-2001) was a convicted American murderer, born in Virginia to a
prostitute mother and an alcoholic father. Not exactly a promising beginning.
His mother, in particular, seems to have abused him
physically, forced him to watch her having sex with clients and made him dress
as a girl during his childhood. When he was ten, he lost an eye after a fight
with his brother. His childhood seems to have been a really bad one. In 1960,
Lucas went to jail for killing his mother. Shades of Norman Bates and Ed Gein,
methinks.
Lucas was released after only ten years due to prison overcrowding. In 1983, he confessed to the murders of an elderly woman for whom he’d been doing some work, and a teenage girl with whom he’d had a sexual relationship. He even led police to what looked like their bodily remains. But, while Lucas was in Georgetown Jail in the custody of the famous Texas Rangers, the iconic law-men with the big white ten-gallon hats, something incredible started happening.
Lucas started confessing to various unsolved murders, and America
has a lot of those. And, the more he would confess, the better the cops would
treat him. He’d be given endless coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners and his
favourite strawberry milkshakes the more he confessed. He had television in his
cell. He became great pals with the Rangers and the police who came in and out
of the jail.
The jailhouse minister, an extremely gullible-seeming woman
called Sister Clemmie, was his biggest fan and held his hand lovingly during their Bible study sessions.
Lucas was allowed to wander around this local jail- not to be confused with the
much tougher state penitentiary, or prison- at will, and was even given access to some of the
alarm codes. When he went to crime scenes with his pals, the Rangers, he wasn’t
even always in handcuffs.
This is what I meant earlier by saying that there are some
positively mind-boggling aspects to this horrible case. The more unsolved
murders Lucas confessed to, the happier the cops would be, and that made Lucas
happy too. In some ways, he was apparently a people-pleaser, who would
generally tell folks what they wanted to hear.
If those big old law-men wanted to clear up the murders on
their case-books, Lucas said he ‘done ‘em.’ Everybody was happy, and Lucas
continued to live the kind of nice, pampered sheltered comfy life he’d never experienced
before. Henry said that good old Sheriff Boutwell was like a father to him. And,
if you wanted access to Lucas, his kindly old Texas Ranger bodyguards had the
last say.
Has ever a more ridiculous situation been allowed to evolve in
the world of law enforcement? Sure, we’ll all admit that the police are human
too. You only have to see them wolfing down a Subway sandwich in the squad car between call-outs to
realise that, lol. But Henry Lee Lucas, an odious-looking character who
admitted to necrophilia and decapitation, and to not liking sex with a body
that had the head still attached, made a fool of the Texas Rangers.
Incredibly, the police
crossed the murders to which Lucas had confessed off their lists of unsolved
crimes, often without any more evidence than just the confession of a
self-admitted pathological liar. This meant, also, that they stopped looking
for the real killer or killers.
The victims’ families were, of course, informed. They would
be delighted to have this closure, and they would concentrate all their
resources on hating Lucas and wanting him to die by lethal injection, and not a
minute too soon, either.
We meet some of the murder victims’ families in this
five-part series, and their testimony is heart-breaking. For years and years,
they were allowed to believe that Lucas was their man. They were devastated,
therefore, when it started to get out that Henry Lee Lucas could no more have
murdered some of the victims than the man in the moon, frequently due to geographical reasons, as in, he was more than a thousand miles across the country at the time they happened.
Lucas confessed to having killed over six hundred people,
sometimes in conjunction with his buddy, the equally repulsive Ottis Toole. The
Texas Rangers were able to cross well over two hundred cases off their lists
thanks to Lucas’s generosity in obligingly confessing to nearly every unsolved
murder they had on their books.
It’s true he often demonstrated intimate knowledge of the
murders, the victims and the crime scenes, but then the cops were permitting
him to look at crime scene photos and case-files, in order to ‘refresh his memory,’
so we can’t set too much store by that fact.
Journalist Hugh Aynesworth
and American lawyer and former District Attorney of McLennan County, Vic Feazell, are two of
the people featured in the documentary who are quite clear that Henry Lee Lucas
couldn’t have murdered most of the people he said he did. Twenty of Lucas’s ‘confessions’
have since been laid at other peoples’ doors, thanks to the development of DNA
testing, for crying out loud!
All of the victims’ families seen here would break your heart
with their stories, but I found the story of the ‘Orange Socks’ lady by far the
most poignant. Debra Louise Jackson was found murdered and dumped in a dreary Texan
culvert in 1979, naked except for the socks which gave the case its name.
She was photographed from all angles as she lay alone in the
dirt, such a sad and lonely ending of the kind that no-one deserves. Her dignity, God love her, was in shreds, and that's even before Lucas comes into the picture. Lucas ‘confessed’
to her killing, but, then again, show me a case he hasn’t confessed to carrying
out, the big gobshite.
So, did Henry Lee Lucas actually kill anyone at all, apart
from his mother, and he said he’s not even sure he did that, God bless his
lying tongue. Well, you’ll have to watch this documentary to find out the
facts, and it’s as bizarre and warped a story as you’ll hear in many a long
day, if you want my opinion.
The reputation of the Texas Rangers was greatly tarnished
from their strange association with Henry Lee Lucas, but those are big strong
men who can take care of themselves, and, anyway, it was kind of their own
fault what happened to them. Fool me once...
The people you’d really have compassion and empathy for are the families of the murder victims, whose anguish was made all the more unbearable for having had Henry Lee Lucas raise their hopes by making them think their loved one’s killer had been found and would eventually be brought to a kind of justice…
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
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