The Confession Killer: Henry Lee Lucas and 600 Lies

Henry Lee Lucas, born August 23, 1936, became known as "The Confession Killer" after confessing to approximately 600 murders between 1983 and 1985—claims that would eventually unravel as a combination of fabrication, police complicity, and psychological manipulation.

Lucas's documented criminal history began with the 1960 murder of his mother, whom he stabbed in the neck, causing a fatal heart attack. He served time for this conviction and was paroled in 1970, only to be arrested again in 1975 for the attempted kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint. After his release in 1975, he traveled with Ottis Toole, a petty thief with whom he shared violent interests.

The cases that would define Lucas's criminal legacy emerged in 1982. On September 16, 1982, near Ringgold, Texas, Lucas murdered Becky Powell, a intellectually disabled niece of his traveling companion Ottis Toole. He lured her under false pretenses, stabbed her in the chest, carved an inverted cross on her body, and placed her corpse in a drainage pipe. Later that month, he murdered Kate Rich (Katharine Rich), an elderly Texas woman, stabbing her with a butcher's knife while she drove, then burning her body and stuffing it in a drainage pipe.

Lucas pleaded guilty to both murders in June 1983 and was convicted of first-degree murder. For one of these crimes, he received a death sentence, which Texas Governor George W. Bush later commuted to life imprisonment in 1998.

What followed, however, revealed a troubling chapter in American criminal investigation. After his June 1983 arrest for possession of a deadly weapon, Lucas began confessing to murders at an astonishing rate. Over the next two years, he claimed responsibility for approximately 600 killings—figures that ranged in some accounts from 250 to 3,000.