Lucas was convicted of Viola’s murder and sentenced to twenty to forty years in prison in Michigan. After serving a couple of years, he tried to commit suicide twice, reported hearing voices, and was sent to the Ionia State Mental Hospital, where he spent the next four and a half years. There he was heavily medicated and subjected to electroshock treatments. He felt so brutalized by his experiences at the hospital and so frustrated by his doctors’ refusal to understand his promises that if he ever got out he would kill again, that by the time he did get out he was even more vicious, ready to torture others to make up for the torture he had undergone.
Lucas spent four more years in prison after his release from the hospital and then was paroled in 1970, despite his insistence that he would kill again. He claims that to punish those who released him, he killed two women the day he got out and dumped one of the bodies within walking distance of the prison. This, like many other claims he has made, was never proven.
Lucas was in and out of Michigan prisons two more times in the next few years, but then came the period of his life that was subject to the most scrutiny—and, conversely, to the most uncertainty, because no one tells the same story, and even Lucas rarely told it the same way twice.
What’s known is that he lived with various relatives for a while and eventually found himself in Jacksonville, Florida. There, at a mission, he met a man named Ottis Toole, who seemed to be his soul mate. Toole invited Lucas home, where he lived with his extended family, including his eleven-year-old niece, Frieda Powell, who went by the name of Becky. A female friend said that Toole liked to pick up men at the mission and bring them home for sex and that he also liked to watch the men he brought home have sex with her and with young Becky. Henry Lee Lucas fit right in.
In the next several years, Lucas and Toole drifted from state to state together. Sometimes they worked, and other times they robbed. If anyone gave them trouble, they killed. If they saw a woman they liked, they would murder her and have sex with her corpse. Sometimes they would rape her first, then kill her, and then have sex with her corpse. Many of their victims were horribly mutilated. Toole had a taste for human flesh, but although Lucas might have tried some, that was one habit he never shared with his friend and lover.
During some of these escapades, little Becky and her brother Frank accompanied the men. Finally, Becky and Frank were put into a juvenile home for their own protection. Lucas and Toole broke them out, but Frank didn’t want to go with the men, so they left him behind and took Becky. They headed west, where they killed and beheaded a woman in Texas and then dumped the head in the Arizona desert. Toole wanted to return to Florida, but Lucas didn’t. By now, Becky was Lucas’s common-law wife, and she stuck with her man. Toole and Lucas split up.
Lucas and Becky wound up in California, where Lucas did some odd jobs for the Smarts, a couple who owned an antique store. They took Lucas and Becky to Texas with them so the pair could care for Kate Rich, Mrs. Smart’s eighty-year-old mother. Kate liked them, but the rest of the family didn’t, and after a while those family members demanded that Lucas and Becky leave Kate’s house. On the road again, Lucas and Becky met Ruben Moore, a preacher whose small fundamentalist group, the House of Prayer, took them in. In exchange for room and board, Lucas agreed to do roofing work and day labor at the sect’s little farm.
Becky took to the religious life and eventually decided that she wanted to return to Florida. Lucas didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t want to lose her, either. On August 24, 1982, he relented, and the two set off, hitchhiking across Texas. They had made it only as far as Denton when they argued; Becky slapped Lucas, and he stabbed her to death. That done, he had sex with her corpse, then dismembered it. He cut her into enough pieces, he said, to fill three pillows from which he had torn the stuffing. Two weeks later he went back and buried one of the pillows.
Lucas claimed to feel remorse over this murder because he had truly cared about Becky. She was a quarter century younger than he was, but they had been together a long time, during which she had grown from a little girl into a young woman.
He returned to the House of Prayer and told Ruben Moore that Becky had accepted a ride from a trucker and left him behind. While he was there, Kate Rich heard about Becky’s departure and called Lucas to tell him how sorry she was. The two agreed to go to a church service together. Lucas picked her up, but along the way they argued about Becky, and Lucas killed Kate. Following his usual routine, he had sex with her corpse, then cut her into pieces. He carried the pieces back to the House of Prayer and spent the night burning them in a stove.
Lucas realized that he was the last person known to have seen Kate alive. He fled, heading back to California, back to the antique store owned by Kate’s daughter and son-in-law. The Smarts had been alerted by relatives that Kate was missing and to be on the lookout for Lucas. They contacted Sheriff Bill “Hound Dog” Conway in Texas, who asked them to keep Lucas there. California state troopers picked Lucas up and questioned him, but even though there was blood in the car he was driving, they couldn’t prove that it wasn’t his. They had to let him go. He returned to the House of Prayer, where Ruben Moore turned him in for possessing a firearm—a crime for a paroled felon.
In June 1983, Lucas was picked up on the weapons charge. After a couple of weeks in jail, he claimed to have experienced a religious conversion. He started confessing to his crimes, and he just wouldn’t stop.
He asked for a pencil and paper and started drawing pictures of his victims—although he had never drawn before—adding pertinent notes about their dress or behavior and the details of his crimes. He remembered the most obscure facts, in many cases, and some of them were found to be true. In court, when a judge asked Lucas if he understood that by confessing to the murders of Kate Rich and Becky Powell he would probably ensure himself a lifetime behind bars, Lucas said that he did and that he had about a hundred other murders he wanted to confess to, as well.
Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials from all over the country flocked to Lucas’s cell. Before he was done, Lucas had confessed to—according to various reports—between 360 and 600 murders in twenty-six to thirty-six states. Some of these crimes were extremely unlikely; for instance, Lucas probably did not, as he claimed, kill Jimmy Hoffa. Nor did he deliver poison to Jim Jones in Jonestown (he said he drove to Guyana). Some of these confessions were clearly hoaxes, but they earned Lucas trips to other states on comfortable airplanes, stays in hotel rooms, and delays in his eventual and certain long stretch in prison. For a time, he claimed to have been part of a satanic cult called the Hand of Death, and he said that many of his murders were done for them; no doubt this was just another delaying tactic.
Other confessions were more convincing, however, and he was eventually convicted of eleven murders. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a young hitchhiker known as Orange Socks because that’s what she was wearing when her body was found.
Yet another religious conversion led Lucas to recant all of his previous confessions except for three: the murders of his mother, Becky Powell, and Kate Rich. Now he claimed that these were the only murders he had committed and that the rest of his confessions had been false. He had been supplied details by law enforcement and had used those details in his confessions. Still later, he recanted his recantations, claiming that he had been forced to make them and that he really had killed the 360 to 600 victims he’d originally claimed. He went back and forth so often that no one knew what to believe.
Even if Lucas did murder only three people, he’s still, according to the standard definition, a serial killer. The term is generally applied to those who kill at least three people, with a cooling-off period between the murders. In 2005, the BAU set a new definition of serial murder as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”
Some experts on Lucas’s case believe that he killed between forty and sixty people—still enough to put him in the top ranks of overachiev
ing U.S. serial killers. But others credit him with only the three that he’s never denied.
After his sentencing, it was proven that he was out of the state when Orange Socks was murdered. George W. Bush, the governor of Texas at the time, commuted Lucas’s death sentence to life in prison. This is the only death sentence that Bush ever commuted during his years in that office.
The One-Eyed Drifter died of natural causes in prison on March 13, 2001. The full extent of his crimes will never be known. Many of the hundreds or thousands of murders that he and others tried to pin on him will probably never be solved.
Lucas—at least, the Lucas who might have killed forty or so people—is a textbook lust killer. “Sex is one of my downfalls,” he said. “I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. If I don’t, I don’t. I rape them; I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them and I’ve had sex while they’re alive.”
What he said about animals also held true for people. With very few exceptions, people to him were simply objects who might provide sex. He killed because he didn’t value human beings, and either it was easier to get sex after they were dead or he had raped them and didn’t want them to say anything about it.
Lust-based serial murder doesn’t necessarily run in families, but a distant cousin of Lucas’s, Bobby Joe Long, was convicted in Florida of fifty rapes and the murders of ten women (although there might have been more of both). Long was born with an extra X chromosome, which caused him to grow breasts at puberty and created the fear that he was turning into a woman. After a motorcycle accident, he became hypersexualized, needing sexual release seven or eight times a day. He turned to rape, and then rape and murder, as a way to get what he wanted. He’s currently on death row in Florida, serving twenty-eight life sentences, four ninety-nine-year sentences, one five-year sentence, and one death sentence.
IF IT HADN’T BEEN for George Metesky, there might never have been a BAU and thus never a Criminal Minds.
When Metesky, who earns a mention in “Extreme Aggressor” (101) when special Agent Derek Morgan explains that the BAU “cover[s] a whole spectrum of psychos,” terrorized New York during the 1940s and 1950s, he was known as the Mad Bomber or as F.P. in the letters he sent. The Mad Bomber’s first successful bomb exploded on March 29, 1951, inside Grand Central Terminal, near the Oyster Bar on the lower level. No one was hurt, but the commuters obviously were startled. Throughout the rest of that year, F.P. planted twenty-two more bombs. The man who had seemed like a harmless crank was beginning to look dangerous, after all. And mad he might have been, but he was an organized, mission-motivated offender all the way.
The world first heard from F.P. in 1940, when a pipe bomb was found inside a building owned by utility giant Consolidated Edison, which supplies most of New York’s electricity. Wrapped around it was a note that said simply, “Con Edison crooks—this is for you.” Police wondered why someone would wrap a note around a bomb; had the bomb exploded, the note would have been destroyed. They did a perfunctory check of recently dismissed employees, but since no real harm had been done, they dropped the case.
Almost a year passed before another pipe bomb was found, this time on a street not far from another Con Ed building. Three months later, after the United States had entered World War II, a letter arrived at Manhattan police headquarters that said, “I will make no more bomb units for the duration of the war—my patriotic feelings have made me decide this—later I will bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds. F.P.”
The Mad Bomber lived up to his word, and in 1951 he started planting bombs again. His technique had improved; although there were still some duds, many bombs went off. He planted them in very public spots: the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s, Penn Station, the New York Public Library, and more. To plant bombs in theaters, he cut into the underside of a seat and placed the device in the stuffing. Between 1951 and 1956, he planted at least thirty bombs.
His last successful bomb exploded on December 2, 1956, in the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn during a screening of War and Peace. Stephen P. Kennedy, New York’s police commissioner, declared the “greatest manhunt in the history of the police department” to bring the Mad Bomber to justice.
For all those years and all those bombs, law enforcement had made little real progress. Because F.P. referred so often to Con Ed in his messages, the police believed that he was a disgruntled employee, past or present. There were many of those, however, and the employee records weren’t always so orderly. The bombs themselves carried few helpful clues. Finally, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney of New York’s crime lab asked a friend in the Missing Persons Bureau for help.
That friend knew a criminal psychologist, Dr. James Brussel, who had done counterespionage work for the FBI and the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division during the Korean War. Criminal profiling was in its infancy; noted profiler John Douglas has written that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s legendary director, considered it voodoo and wouldn’t allow anything like the Behavioral Sciences Unit (later to become the Behavioral Analysis Unit) to exist under his regime.
But Dr. Brussel seemed to know his stuff. After reviewing the case file, he told Finney that the Mad Bomber was a male and a textbook paranoiac. Because paranoia peaks around age thirty-five, and the Mad Bomber had first been heard from in 1940, he was probably now in his fifties. Based on his neatly if oddly written notes, he was an orderly man with an exemplary work history. He had some education and was foreign-born. He was probably a former employee who believed that the company and the general public had done him harm. Most of his notes were written in block capital letters, but his W’s were oddly rounded, suggesting a pair of breasts. That, his slitting the undersides of theater seats with a knife (which suggested sexual penetration), and the phallic shape of his pipe bombs led Brussel to believe F.P. suffered from an unresolved Oedipal complex. He probably had lost his mother when he was young, was unmarried, and lived with a female relative.
When the cops thought Brussel was done, they gathered their materials and prepared to leave. But Brussel, a man with more than a touch of the theatrical about him, wasn’t finished. “One more thing,” he said. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.” He paused, for dramatic effect. “And it will be buttoned,” Brussel finished.
He suggested to the detectives that they publicize the profile and make the hunt for the bomber front-page news. With some reluctance, they did so. The expected onslaught of cranks and bad tips followed.
In response, the Mad Bomber sent more letters. Somehow he got his hands on Brussel’s unlisted phone number and called him. “This is F.P. speaking,” he said. “Keep out of this or you’ll be sorry.”
The New York Journal American published an open letter to the Mad Bomber, pleading with him to give up. He responded by mail, and the paper printed his response. In further correspondence, he went into more detail about his gripe against Con Ed.
Finally, a Con Ed employee named Alice Kelly found a file from a smaller company that had merged into the giant utility company. In 1931, an employee named George Metesky had inhaled gushing gas, which he blamed for the tuberculosis he later developed. He hadn’t been able to prove his claim, and the company had refused to compensate him.
Metesky fit the profile, and the specifics of his case matched what F.P. had written to the Journal American. Kelly took the file to her superiors, who referred it to the police. On January 21, 1957, the police knocked on the door of Metesky’s residence in Waterbury, Connecticut, where the fifty-four-year-old man lived with two older sisters. After he had been asked a few questions, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.”
They did indeed, and he admitted it right away. They asked what F.P. stood for, and he told them it meant Fair Play. Metesky was in his pajamas and robe when the police came to the door at almost midnight
, so he asked if he could get dressed before they took him in. They allowed him that, and he went upstairs. When he came back down, his hair was combed and he was wearing a double-breasted jacket—buttoned.
Metesky was ruled insane in April 1957 and sentenced to New York’s Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a mentally ill defendant could not be committed to a state hospital within the correctional system unless a jury had found him dangerous. Since Metesky had been committed without a jury trial, he was transferred in September 1973 to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, a state hospital outside the correctional system. Here the doctors determined that Metesky was harmless, and because he had already served two-thirds of the twenty-five-year maximum sentence that he would have received at a trial, he was released in December 1973 on the condition that he make regular visits to a mental hygiene clinic near his home. He returned home to Waterbury, where he died in 1994.
Brussel’s profile wasn’t right in every respect. He put the bomber in White Plains, not Waterbury. He suggested that the man would have a facial scar and work nights. Metesky had no scar and didn’t work at all. Brussel thought the target had been born and educated in Germany, but Metesky was a Slav. Brussel predicted that the bomber had heart disease, but Metesky had tuberculosis. Had it not been for Alice Kelly’s careful detective work, Metesky might never have been found. Kelly turned down the twenty-six-thousand-dollar reward she was offered for the Mad Bomber’s capture, saying she had just been doing her job.
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