Drifter's drive to confess was murder on the truth - includes related article on Henry Lee Lucas

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 31, 1994 | by Hugh Aynesworth

Adecade ago, in a conflagration of mass hysteria and malfeasance, a once-vaunted law-enforcement agency, the Texas Rangers, showed police files to a suspect, Henry Lee Lucas, to help him "confess" to killing hundreds of people in an alleged cross-country murder spree that many now think never occurred. Though Lucas, 58, has been convicted on 10 counts of murder and awaits execution in a Texas prison, most investigators connected to the affair have come of believe it was a hoax. But at least one prosector is trying to tack on another conviction in a trial this fall, even as Lucas's attorney, Vic Feazell, calls the situation "the biggest blemish ever on law enforcement."

"There is more at stake here than the reputations of a few Rangers," says Feazell, a former Waco, Texas, district attorney whose grand jury was the first in the nation to refuse Rangersponsored confessions by Lucas. Clearing scores of murder cases around the nation by blaming them on Lucas was "a shame -- not only on the families of the victims, who thought they had found some closure on the deaths of their loved ones, but for what happened to Henry, our system of justice and the citizens who used to have confidence in it."

The case, one of the most bizarre in the annals of American crime, took another strange twist recently when a Missouri woman claimed to be one of Lucas's alleged victims -- alive and well. But during an Oct. 4 interrogation by Feazell, 41-year-old Phyllis Wilcox admitted that she wasn't Frieda "Becky" Powell, a 14-year-old runaway who had traveled with the murderer. Wilcox said Lucas had fed her information about Powell during several years of correspondence.

"I was just trying to help Henry," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what I was getting into. I didn't mean to hurt anybody. Henry thought it would save his life -- and I love him."

Lucas was given a life sentence for the 1982 slaying of Powell after leading the police to her bones at a site in Denton County, north of Dallas. The bones did not match completely the teenager's physical description, but Lucas's confession and the fact that he led them to the site proved enough evidence for a conviction. Wilcox's recantation not only undermines any grounds for appeal, it compromises Lucas's alibi in a second murder conviction, for which he faces lethal injection.

The Lucas case has been controversial since the saga began in the summer of 1983. The one-eyed drifter shocked the nation when he stood up in a tiny Texas courtroom near the Oklahoma border and claimed he had killed an 80-year-old woman in Montague County. "And I've got 100 more out there somewhere," he said softly.

Almost immediately, the grotesque circus took to the road. At each stop, the uneducated but street-smart Lucas was met by a cadre of homicide detectives, lawyers and assorted cult and serial-killer experts, not to mention the usual smattering of politicians, writers and preachers. At the height of the pandemonium -- as investigators from more than 40 states fought to get an audience with Lucas at a special taskforce headquarters in central Texas--his list had grown to 600. The Rangers had pinned a shocking 214 of these slayings to Lucas already. Nevertheless, the FBI's famed psychological profiling unit in Quantico, Va., which was implementing its highly successful studies of serial killers, refused to get entangled in the Lucas affair; its leaders said privately that they feared the Rangers' techniques were "not ones designed to help our study."

Except for a few detectives who gave Lucas fictional cases only to see him happily confess, most everyone seemed to think they had uncovered the real thing. Then, as quickly as the fireworks had ignited, they fizzled out. "I guess the jig is up," Lucas said in April 1985, when the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald published a series of stories indicating that Lucas could not have committed at least 100 of the slayings; in some cases, he had been hundreds of miles from the scenes of the crimes at the times the killings occurred.

"It took them long enough, didn't it?" mused Lucas, a chain-smoking underachiever born and raised in Blacksburg, Va. "I gave 'em 100 and they seemed so pleased, and so I gave 'em 240, then 600 -- then I said I had over 1,200. Isn't any of them honest?" He said he boasted that "I strangled 'em, shot 'em, ran over 'em and filleted some of 'em like fish, [just] to show that law enforcement doesn't do its business." Asked by a reporter if it was fair that he confused the cops by making up murders, Lucas snapped, "Do you think the way they treated me all my life was fair?"

Lucas in fact had been in and out of jails a good deal of his life on minor charges and had served most of a 15-year term for killing his prostitute mother in a drunken brawl. Part of that time was spent in a Michigan mental hospital. "I ain't never been an angel," he told Insight, "but I always swore someday I'd get even for all those cops who cuffed me around and lied on me. I finally did, but it cost me a lot."