Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Henry’s mother, Viola Dison Wall Lucas, was a prostitute who had been previously married. She dumped her first four children in foster homes prior to marrying Anderson. At the age of 35, she bore a son, Andrew, and five years later, during the early hours of 23 August 1938, Henry Lee entered this world.

  Viola was of mixed race; somewhere in her genes was part Chippewa Indian, and those who knew her claimed that she could be as mean as an overheated rattlesnake. ‘She was a dirty old woman you would not want to be around,’ was how her granddaughter described her.

  Henry described his mother as having just two teeth. She was prone to outbursts of extreme violence and she chewed tobacco. ‘Some people say they gonna give a whipping with a switch or something,’ Lucas said to me. ‘When she went and got a switch, she done went and got a broomstick, an’ she’d wear it out.’

  Henry was born in a four-roomed, run-down cabin, nine miles from the hick town of Blacksburg, Montgomery County, Virginia. The place, with no plumbing or electricity, was tucked into a steep cleft between the rolling slopes of the Get and Brushy Mountains, which form part of the Appalachian Mountain system of East North America, extending from Quebec province in Canada to central Alabama. The cabin is still in existence today and, several miles from the nearest neighbour, the Lucas smallholding was fit only for raising a scrubby cereal crop and equally lean livestock, which included a few scrawny chickens and a cow. The outbuildings, of which there were two, were in the same state of disrepair as the cabin, and everything, including the family, looked like something that had been sucked out of an earlier century by a twister and dumped unceremoniously into nowhere land. Through neglect, the house has been left to the ravages of time and weather. Most of the windows were broken, or simply non-existent, their sun-bleached, peeling frames, hanging limply from rusty hinges, and primed for firewood and nothing else. The roof was rotten, as was the stoop, where Anderson Lucas washed away his days.

  The Lucases inhabited the property with Viola’s pimp, Bernie, who was a scrawny low-life and always on the make. Henry, Andrew, Anderson, Viola and Bernie all shared the same filthy bedroom, and Lucas says that he was forced to watch his mother and Bernie, or her many clients, have sex.

  In the tradition of the local people, the Lucases distilled a particularly volatile moonshine. With the kick of a southern mule, the making of this spirit was a profitable venture for Anderson who was, in every sense of the word, continually legless and literally out of his mind on drink. Any surplus hooch was sold, to supplement the family income. Therefore, it is not surprising to learn that, by the age of ten, Henry, who tended his father’s still, was hooked on the illegal corn liquor. For this work, Henry and his brother were paid the occasional nickel, a quarter on a good day, as wages. With a few cents in their pockets, they would scoot into Blacksburg and watch a movie. The Lucases usually ate food that was stolen, or scavenged from trash dumpsters. It was eaten off the dirty floor because Viola wouldn’t wash the plates. She cooked only for herself and Bernie, while the rest of the family were left to their own devices.

  Forced to wear a girl’s dress by his mother on his first day at school, Henry turned up as a scrawny, undernourished child with long, blonde hair. His teacher took pity on him. Annie Hall found him a pair of trousers and, before the day was out, she had even cut his hair. In return for this act of Christian goodwill, Ms Hall was severely reprimanded by Viola Lucas. Henry had fond memories of his teacher, who bought him his first pair of new shoes. She also made him sandwiches, and occasionally took him home with her for a decent, hot meal.

  Brutal physical abuse was a common enough event in the Lucas home; more so was the psychological battering Henry received on an almost daily basis. On one occasion, Viola took him into town where she pointed out a strange man. ‘That’s your real pa,’ she sneered. ‘He’s your natural pa.’ The seven-year-old was devastated and, when he arrived home in floods of tears, he asked Anderson if this were true. It was.

  The same year, Viola smashed Henry over the back of the head with a wooden board. He lay where he fell for three days before Bernie, fearing that he would never get up again, took the lad to hospital. In the admission room, Bernie claimed that Henry had fallen from a pick-up truck. After his discharge, Henry suffered from dizzy spells and black-outs – and they continued until the day he died. He described the sensations as ‘like floating on air’.

  Those who have met Henry Lucas, or have seen his photograph, will also notice that his left eye is artificial and made of glass. This came about as he and his brother, Andrew, were attempting to make a swing in a maple tree. While Henry was holding a vine, Andrew slashed to cut it with a knife, but the blade slipped and slashed across the bridge of Henry’s nose and into his eye. During the following six months of hospitalisation, his mother only visited him once. On the day he arrived home, she shot his pet mule in a fit of rage, then whipped him for costing her the few bucks to have the carcass hauled away.

  Although the injury caused Henry great discomfort, gradually the wound began to heal. Nevertheless, for a long time afterwards, he tended to see only shadows and because his peripheral vision was damaged, he tended to walk sideways like a crab.

  It seems that the only love and attention Henry received, during his formative years, came not from a rare, helping hand at home, but from his teachers at school. Due to his long periods of absence from class, he fell a grade behind his contemporaries. Annie Hall, in the true American school-ma’am tradition, not only kept him well fed, but she went to other lengths to help him overcome his new problems with reading. With a weak eye, he had trouble with small print, so she bought him books with large type so that he continued to learn. Then, ironically, it was at school that his problems surfaced again, when he walked into the hand of a teacher called Mrs Glover, who was about to strike another pupil. His eye injury opened up, and this time it was beyond repair. The glass eye was fitted a year later.

  Sadly, Henry Lee Lucas had considerably less than an ideal childhood. Out of the 13 ‘family background characteristics’ the FBI have found to adversely affect a child’s later behaviour, amongst their study group of serial killers, Lucas experienced ten of them. A staggering 77 per cent, which, by FBI calculations, would have placed him at the top of their ‘At High Risk Register’. Lucas would have tick-boxed alcohol abuse, psychiatric history, criminal history, sexual problems, physical abuse, psychological abuse, dominant mother parent, negative relationship with male caretaker figures, negative relationship with mother and he had been treated unfairly.

  There is no way of knowing when Lucas’s criminal career started, but he says it was when he stole a battery-powered television, because he liked to watch The Lone Ranger, and Sky King. He is quoted as saying, ‘I just started stealing, I guess, as soon as I was old enough to run fast, ’cos I didn’t want to stay at home, I figured if I could steal, I could get away from home.’

  Henry’s sexual history also goes way back through the calendar of time. He claims that he was encouraged into bestiality by his half-brother, cutting the throats of the animals and then having sex with them. He told a psychiatrist, that he had sex with his half-brother’s wife when he was 13-years-old. ‘I just went along with it … I didn’t feel it was right,’ he said. Then Henry graduated to attempted rape and murder, or so he claims in his unverified account of a crime he says he committed at the age of 15.

  In March 1951, Henry spotted a 17-year-old girl at a bus stop. He cornered her on an embankment, where he attempted to rape her before strangling her. In his interview with me, he recalled the event:

  ‘I had no intention of killing her. I don’t know whether it was me or what. That was my first, my worst, and the hardest to get over. I just couldn’t see what happened. I would go out sometimes for days, and I’d be looking behind me and watching for police and be afraid that they were going to stop me and pick me up. But they never did bother me.’

  Years later, when Lucas was finally brought to justice for the last
time, law enforcement officers from all over the United States descended upon him in their efforts to clear up unsolved murders. During these lengthy interviews, Henry never mentioned this first murder and, despite more recent, careful research into this case, police officers now believe that it never took place.

  In March 1952, Henry’s brother joined the US Navy, and then his father left home, in a simple wooden coffin. ‘He went out and lay in the snow to get away from his wife having sex with another man,’ Henry said. ‘That’s what made him die. He laid down in the snow and caught pneumonia and he was drunk and he just died.’

  That very same month, the law caught up with Henry Lucas, who was now an accomplished thief. He was charged with petty larceny and sent to the Beaumont Training School for Boys. He claims to have liked the place because this was the first time he ate regularly, and he was able to enjoy hot water and electricity. But, this statement contradicts his behaviour, as school records show that he was continually trying to abscond. Henry was released from Beaumont, in September 1953, and he periodically worked as a general hand on a farm. In October, he raped his 12-year-old niece.

  Nine months later, he was back in custody for the second time and the 18-year-old Lucas was sentenced to four years in the tough Virginia State Penitentiary, for burglary. He became an accomplished carpenter in the prison chair factory, learning skills that would serve him well when he was released. The tailor shop taught him a little about sewing, the chain gang showed him how to break sweat.

  On 28 May 1956, with the very real chance of being brought down by dogs, or a bullet in the back, Lucas and a fellow convict escaped from an outside road repair detail. They stole a car and sped off for Ohio. When they ran out of gas, they stole another vehicle and crossed the state line into Michigan. Interstate flight and auto theft across a State line are federal offences, and State Troopers arrested them in Toledo in July, after which, Henry started a 13-month term at the Ohio Federal State Reformatory at Chillicothe. After his federal term had expired, he was returned in shackles to the Virginia State Penitentiary to complete his original sentence. He was back on the streets in September 1959.

  After his release, he moved to Tecumseh, Michigan, to live with his half-sister Opal. While there, he met a woman called Stella, and after dating her for a short time, he asked her to marry him. She agreed and they announced their engagement. During the evening of 12 January 1960, he was boozing the evening away with Stella. ‘She was my first true love,’ he said. ‘She just understood me, an’ we had plans to marry, an’ stuff.’ However, there was another visitor in town that night in the form of his irate mother who had got wind of where he was staying. Viola tracked Henry down to the bar where he was drinking, and she demanded that he get rid of Stella, and that he return to Virginia forthwith. This outburst reduced Stella to tears.

  It was an inappropriate moment for the ‘Mother from Hell’ to force her way back into Henry’s life, for that night he and Stella were making plans for the wedding, and he was as drunk as a skunk. In a telephone conversation with me, Stella remembered, ‘When Henry was drunk, he got as mean as mean can be. He drank Jack Daniel’s like it was water in the desert. That night, the old girl really upset me. I threatened to break off the marriage and I walked out and went home. He truly hated his mom, and what she got, she deserved.’

  Lucas now risked losing the only women he loved, and 20 minutes later he was hammering on Opal’s apartment door where his mother was staying. Viola, who was also drunk, started cursing him, and wrongly accused him of being intimate with Opal. She berated him for leaving her all alone in Virginia, for by now Bernie had found pastures new. What happened next is best taken up Lucas himself.

  ‘I’d gone back to where she was staying to calm her down, and she done picked up a broom handle and smacked me with it. I guess it was about 12 o’clock that night when she finally made me so mad that I hit her. All I remember was slapping her alongside the neck, but after I did that, I saw her start to fall, and went to grab her. But she fell to the floor, and when I went to pick her up I done realised she was dead. Then I noticed I had my knife in my hand, and she had been cut.

  ‘I got scared and turned out the lights and went outside and drove back to Virginia. I only stayed there one day, and I started to worry about my mother and wondering if she had been found. I left Virginia and started back to Tecumseh to give myself up. I was picked up by the police in Toledo, Ohio, and later returned to Tecumseh. It was a terrible thing to do, and I know that I have lost the respect of my family and people who know me, but it was one of those things. I think it had to happen.’

  As it turned out, Viola hadn’t died immediately after the attack. She was still alive 48 hours later, when Opal returned to the apartment and found her lying in a pool of blood. An ambulance was called but, because of the length of time she had been bleeding and the resulting shock, they were unable to save her and she died a short time later. The official police report stated that she had died of a heart-attack, precipitated by the assault.

  Henry was picked up in Toledo, Ohio, and returned to Michigan where he was charged with second-degree murder. Despite assuring police that he had acted in self-defence, he later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20–40 years in the State Prison of Southern Michigan. Far from losing the respect of members of his family – along with the multitudes of relations, distant or otherwise – the Lucas clan, and the citizens of Blacksburg, were overjoyed to hear of Viola’s demise. She had been a nuisance for as long as they cared to remember, and everyone was delighted to see her disappear under 6ft of dirt.

  When interviewed in Ellis Unit, Texas, Henry, a slightly-built man, with his weeping false eye, which he constantly wipes on the sleeve of his shirt, had changed his mind about the murder of his mother. After having first admitted to murdering his mother, he contradicted himself. ‘My half-sister, Opal, done the killing, an’ now she’s dead,’ he argued pathetically.

  Understandably, Henry says that his incarceration in the State Prison of Southern Michigan was not a happy time in his already distorted life. He claims he was plagued by the voice of his dead mother, who haunted him in his cell. ‘She kept tellin’ me to do bad things,’ he recalled. ‘She told me I had a destiny with death behind them walls.’ He slashed his wrist with a razor and slashed open his stomach with a knife in two suicide attempts, and none of this behaviour went unnoticed by the prison guards.

  In his own interests, the doctors decided that he would be better off being admitted to the Ionia State Mental Hospital where he underwent electro-convulsive shock treatment and was placed under close observation. He stayed there for almost five years before being returned to prison, in 1966, after a psychiatrist concluded, ‘Lucas is making good progress. I am impressed with his growth.’ However, another psychiatrist disagreed. ‘Lucas is totally lacking in self-confidence, self-reliance, willpower and general stamina,’ he reported. ‘He does not have the courage to take responsibility for his behaviour, but blames others for his mistakes and misfortunes, and he is inclined to engage in aggressive social behaviour, aimed at alleviating some of his discomfort.’

  Lucas had been prescribed Prozac, an anti-psychotic with sedative side effects, and this more-or-less kept a lid on his boiling emotions, but it is known that he had warned the authorities not to release him from prison because he knew that his murderous tendencies would flare up again. He even told the doctors, ‘Let me out, an’ I’ll leave a body on your doorstep. I guarantee you that.’

  During that period of imprisonment, the Michigan Department of Corrections housed around 37,000 inmates and ran at 125.5 per cent of capacity; each facility was bursting at the seams with prisoners. For his part in the scheme of things, Lucas had simply been reduced to a prison number and, despite his protestations and murderous threats, anxious to make more cell space for the 9,000 new inmates that are admitted every year, on 3 June 1970, correctional staff literally dragged him to the gates and threw him out.

  That after
noon, a young woman was murdered in Jackson, just a few miles from the grim prison walls. Another girl’s body turned up, a few blocks away from where the first corpse was found, on the following day. Officially, neither of these murders has been attributed to Lucas, although the cases are still classed as ‘open’.

  For his part, Lucas claims responsibility, adding, ‘They [the prison authorities] know I meant what I said. I hated everything. I was as bitter as bitter can be. I was madder than hell.’

  Unofficially, the story is somewhat different. A senior law officer, who cannot be named, exclusively told the author, ‘Sure, everyone knew it was Henry who killed those girls. The decision not to arrest him went right to the top, and I mean the top. But those assholes didn’t want the shit that would come their way if the press knew that he had threatened to kill somebody on the day he was released. If they had, the rinky-dinks and the governor would have been thrown out of the gates with him.’

  * * *

  Many of the incidents in Henry’s chequered history, sandwiched between his release from prison in Michigan to his final arrest in Montague County, Texas, 13 years later, are shrouded in mystery. Initially, he was paroled to live with Almeda, another half-sister, who lived in Maryland and, for almost a year, he kept out of trouble with the police. In August 1971, his supply of Prozac ran out, and he failed to renew the prescription. Lucas said that this lack of medication made him restless and very angry.

  In October 1971, he approached a 15-year-old girl, walking to school. He ordered her to get into his car or he would shoot her. An approaching school bus came into view, and he raced off in a cloud of dust, leaving the terrified girl by the roadside. A few days later, he tried to abduct another schoolgirl and she escaped without harm. However, both potential victims had made a note of his licence plate number and they reported it to the police.