You're Wrong About - Henry Lee Lucas with Rachel Monroe

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

This week we’re taking the back roads with Rachel Monroe, who tells us how the most prolific serial killer in American history may have been something much more ordinary—and why we keep trying to make violent men seem much more powerful than they are. Digressions include Ann Rule, career burnout, and tires for serial killers.Here's where to find Rachel:WebsiteTwitterSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBonus Episodes on Apple PodcastsDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:http://www.rachel-monroe.com/https://twitter.com/rachmonroehttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttp://apple.co/ywahttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

There should have been an ad for like tires for serial killers and the commercial is like I'm a serial killer, so I know good tires and that's why I buy Goodyear Let me ask you first if you remember how many murders have you confessed to? Over 3,000 Henry Lee Lucas was convincing the world that he was America's most prolific serial killer It was a true sociopath the emotional Reaction on his part to what was going on around it was always negligible the more I confess the more more they wanted Why do you think they did it? Well, they wanted to make it look like I was the greatest monster and ever lived

After years of searching for her killer you got a phone call one day and they said Henry Lucas had confessed to her murder How did you feel? We were ecstatic We were excited that this Could finally be over Welcome to you're wrong about I'm Sarah Marshall Today, we are learning about serial killers with our friend Rachel Monroe specifically about Henry Lee Lucas the most

quote prolific serial killer in American history or was he I am recording this intro for you in the parking lot of an in-and-out burger and when I'm done with this I'm gonna go get a strawberry milkshake Which won't be funny to you now, but when you're done with the episode it will be I think Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer for the New Yorker where she covers Texas She has been on this show before talking about various topics and true crime and she's also the author of savage appetites Which is one of my favorite books as we talk about in this episode and I'm so excited to have her back because I love her work

I love the way her brain works and I love working with her on the project of Taking scary men who have been inflated to be somehow bigger than human because they committed violence often largely against women and puncturing them with our little pins and hopefully revealing them as sad little tiny lumps If you want to hear bonus episodes you can go to patreon.com slash you're wrong about or you can subscribe on Apple podcasts and get bonus content that way as well this episode is about a serial killer or at least someone who claimed to be and

So we are to some extent going to talk about those alleged crimes But in this episode we really are trying to talk about the concept of murder without getting murdery as My producer Carolyn has put it and our project here is not exactly to study the crimes but to study the way that we as the public reacted to them and what that tells us about ourselves and That's all you need to know. Let's climb into our giant American-made gas-guzzling car and drive on down the highway to the episode Welcome to your wrong about we're every so often we just need to talk about serial killers and with me today is Rachel Monroe Rachel. Hello. Hi

Rachel Monroe Not a serial killer famously not yet a serial killer You are someone who I met because you had written something on the all about the Columbine fandom community on tumblr primarily at the time and that material later showed up in a Chapter of your book savage appetites, which is one of my favorite nonfiction books And you were also one of the original guests on the show and the show is like but a teeny tiny little amoeba first stretching It's little amoeba arms out of the water. Yes. I'll be the number one fan. I'll claim that spot Yeah, and the first time you visited us you talked to us about the Jonestown massacre and

You're now coming back to talk about Henry Lee Lucas who in my opinion is Most famous for or his legacy is that he claimed to have murdered like Kind of an unbelievable number of people and perhaps in a way that helped start this sort of serial killer arms race We seem to be in the middle of where we're obsessed with finding out which serial killer was the most prolific and was he American? Yeah, totally, like I mean even just the word prolific I always makes me feel a little Squicky with serial killers. Yeah, it's like what are they in a box off? You I was just gonna ask I mean I take it that you are a person who probably knows a lot about Henry Lee Lucas Yeah, so why don't I tell you my understanding of him as a subject and then you can tell me the reality of the situation

And I'll also talk about why we chose him so I Was interested in talking about Henry Lee Lucas because one of the larger subjects I want to talk about and continue talking about on the show is sort of how America Became obsessed with the serial killer one of the things that really irritates me and I presume that it irritates you I feel like we probably talked about this at some point in the past is when people are like true crime is having a moment true crime was invented in 1994 by court TV and it's like No, it's like yes, it has proliferated across platforms and media and genre in the past

25 years in a really interesting way that has a lot to do with technology and the number of platforms humans can consume Media across and therefore the number of different little subgenres true crime can exist in But also, what do you call the fact that people used to go to witness executions for fun? or the fact that the Bible starts off with a Blame a woman's story and then a murder story like the moment is just like all of human Civilization as far as I can tell like if we can find sort of Magically the first media moment. I bet it was like some guy doing a cave painting about how odd killed Nog and that everybody wanted to look at the cave painting Rachel thoughts

I mean like as soon as they have the ability to print things cheaply like what they're what are they printing like oh, you know Condemned murders confession stories or whatever I mean, it's just I and I say the same thing too about like are what they call the true crime boom happening right now I'd like this is actually more just like a it's like a podcast and Streaming series boom. Yeah, you know every time you have a new form of media one of the first things that pops up in That new form of media is going to be like these crime stories and often like we see right now It's like old familiar crime stories just being told in a new way because they're just They compel us on a very visceral way and they have a narrative arc that hooks into you and

Podcasts especially there are many ways that they're useful that we could both You know have insight into like you can make a podcast very cheaply that somehow reaches millions of people and there's like a Fairly high limit to the floor of cheapness at which you can make TV or like the number of people who have to say yes to you And when you make a podcast no one has to say yes to you and there was I think a real land rush in terms of like you know It ten years ago You could be like nobody's really made like a big Manson podcast yet but do you feel like among normal people if such a thing exists out there in the world is Henry Lee Lucas as

Famous a serial killer as Charles Manson or Ted Bundy or Whoever else I mean my impression like when I was telling people that I was working on this is a lot of people sort of had the vague sense of like Oh, he's got three names. He kind of sounds like a serial killer That's that vaguely his name scans like a serial killer, right? Most of them didn't know who he was You know what I think is that most people know him without knowing they know him because I think he willingly Provided the basis for an archetype that has come up like in every season of criminal minds for example

Because I think in a lot of serial killer media and like fictional stuff Or even like in true crime accounts that kind of use our serial killer archetypes as ways to organize their storytelling We often have the dichotomy of like the smart calculating serial killer versus the serial killer Who just can't help killing and who's often like folksy and southern so Henry Lee Lucas Yeah, I feel like he is not like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson who sort of like Became so influential to mainstream society and so known by everybody They just became mainstream cultural figures in a way that continues to annoy me like I was Talking to Alex the other day Alex steed who co-host you are good with me

Charles Manson was like this tiny stupid tiny tiny man Like I had this little cup of orange juice or something and I was like Charles Manson could have used this as a bathtub He was that tiny of a man and now like because of the legend. He's become he gets to be this like Looming giant over the entire late 20th century. It's infuriating Truly and just not an interesting person. Thank you, and that's all we're gonna say on the matter So anyway, so yeah, Henry Lee Lucas what I know about him is that he was a Texan or at least he ended up there Because he got his death sentence commuted by George W. Bush At one point which was fascinating because George W. Bush refused to commute the death sentence of Carla Faye Tucker

Right, so I think there was the presumption based on that that he had a lot of useful information to share I don't know if he did really but I think this happened in the 90s and I feel like the 80s and 90s were also like the golden time of The idea that like serial killers had all this knowledge and insight and we could like mind-hunt them and Figure out what they thought and it would be really useful and I think it's been like Fairly useful to understand how a serial killer might think but I think there's like this pervasive cultural myth that serial killers are somehow like Superhuman and they like share a collective brain or something because they're like more evolved into pure killers like this is something I've come across in media about this for my whole life and

I think that's Weird that's a weird thing to think and I don't think that that theory has been really supported By these interviews that we've done but so Henry Lee Lucas He's the basis for the movie Henry Portrait of a serial killer which I think is very loosely based on his life and where he's played by Michael Rooker of Guardians of the Galaxy The theory in that is like something is broken inside of him and he just Sort of calmly walks around killing people all day every day

Yeah, let's talk about that movie later because I think we should definitely I watched it for you Ah, oh proof of my love. No, it really is. Yeah, so I'm interested in getting back to that But I think he's depicted as sort of like Jason Voorhees with a mask off basically. He goes calmly and expressionlessly Walks around killing people and my impression of the real Henry Lee Lucas is that he was probably relatively far off from that I feel like I might have read that he had was tested as having a low IQ and that He at least confessed to the murders of I think a lot of like teen runaways and sex workers And that his crimes were primarily if not entirely against women

And that this was also what we meant by the term serial killer around this time that we were really talking about white men Who sexually assaulted and murdered? Their victims who were white women typically He created this mythology and then he confessed to I want to say like 600 murders Like so many murders that I truly wonder if he even had time for all those murders and How big of a myth do you think he spawned and what connection did his life have to that mythology if really any at all Yeah, I think you're really right in some ways like even if his

Name is not as well known as some of these other more Celebrity ish serial killers He did have this huge role in creating a mythology that we still live with Even though a lot of what he said has like since been extremely discredited I think in some ways the reason that we don't hear about him too much is because This story ends up being embarrassing for a lot of people And then we still kind of live inside this mythological world that he helped like reinforce and create

So probably the best place to start is maybe like the moment at which the myth kind of starts to spin out, which is June 1983 Hello, 1983 Henry Lee Lucas is arrested For a case for a murder that is you know, it's awful But it's like kind of awful in a pretty normal sort of awful murder way He had been traveling with a girl and They had moved in with an older woman to you know, help her out around the house

After a couple days the older woman her name is Kate rich her family Figures out that Henry Lee Lucas and I feel bad calling her his girlfriend because she's 15 And this is a manipulative relationship, but everybody calls her his girlfriend. So Henry and Frida who's this girl they've been stealing from this older woman So they they get kicked out and then Shortly afterwards the older woman is found missing Henry Lee Lucas is suspected of her murder. So, you know, all of this is like pretty standard, right? Like this kind of Yeah

Drifter figure Moves in with a rich older lady steals from her and then she goes missing like probably the drifter guy would be a prime suspect So June 21st 1983. There's like a pretty standard court proceeding He's being arraigned for this murder, which he has confessed to this is happening in a tiny town in texas I just looked it up. It's like population 400. Oh, what region is it? What's it like out there? It's in it's like the nearest city is wichita falls Dallat maybe an hour ish outside of dallas So one of these towns with like a big imposing courthouse texas has like the most beautiful

Extravagant courthouses in these towns with like no people your town has a beautiful courthouse. We do. Thank you very much So a big courthouse like, you know Couple reporters there, you know, whoever's on like the the regular crime beat the judge is like reading the indictment asks henry lee lucas if he you know, he understands it and this guy henry lee lucas who nobody has heard of before says like Yes, sir. I have about a hundred of them. Oh boy. And everybody in the courtroom is like, what do you have a hundred murders? Notable at this point that he has not been appointed an attorney

Huh, right. If I were his lawyer, I'd be like henry xnay on the undead murders hay And so immediately, you know, the next day this is like front page news There are helicopters like circling this courthouse in this tiny town One detail that I really liked was that there was a lady in town called the sheriff To report that one of these helicopters had kicked up a bunch of dust and soiled her laundry Which she had just put out on the line. Yeah, she did just put that laundry out. How dare Exactly. So that's the kind of like crime situation or you know, non-crime But the sheriffs out there were used to dealing with right like dust on my laundry

I would also add that as far as I can tell this is a time when people Could not stop speculating about how many serial killers there were And I remember finding this article that was like an opinion piece in the aniston alabama star gazette or something That was like by my estimations as some guy in aniston alabama There are this many serial killers and as you can see it's a lot and it's like, well, thank you Some guy who thinks they're this many serial killers for some reason But it felt like there was this idea that like there were people like him out there But we weren't finding them yet, but we would I mean, this is not just some guy writing about this in the newspaper

Like this is part of the What's going on in the air around then? Yeah, this is the post bundy era This is like the period of like the slasher movie, you know Yeah, this idea that like these guys are out there and I think it's really important too that it's also the time of like Reagan presidency we have like a lot of task forces on like violent crime and task forces on Victim hood and this is like where a lot of our modern language of like crime and fear and

Victimization is being shaped This guy sort of coming out and saying I've killed hundreds of people or I think at this point just a hundred merely a hundred Merely, you know, this is what it's the air it's being released into right So it's like the world was waiting for some guy to step forward and say this Yeah, and actually it's like a month after or even just like a few weeks after Henry Lee Lucas is you know starts to immediately become a media sensation The senate has a hearing on serial murder Wow, an ann rule testified before the senate. Oh, and of course you did that's great

Can I send you the part of her testimony? Yes to read This is a great turn my day has taken for people who don't know for people who somehow don't know Ann rule effectively remade true crime She made it into a genre that wasn't about how sexy it was to think about women being murdered, I would say And she made it into one that was about empathizing or at least sympathizing With the murder victim and talking about what a nice young lady she was which has its limitations But was a great step forward Okay

The serial killer is a man who travels continually He is a troller who encounters his victims in a random and senseless manner Killing those he perceives to be vulnerable simply because he is obsessed with killing for its own sake The serial killer seldom knows his victims before he seizes them. They are strangers targets for his tremendous inner rage He is ruthless Consciousness and invariably cunning I love how she said he's a troller that really shows that she's a northwesterner What does that mean in the northwest? Oh, just like as a means of fishing. Oh

Like he's just putting his net out there and yeah Scooping up whoever he's just walking around with his net out. Yeah She also says in her testimony that some serial killers travel as much as 200,000 miles a year Which if you actually like average it out would be like over 500 miles a day every day Yeah, that's a lot of miles and you were basically at that point you're only driving and killing This is a really serious problem And it's really scary for us as a society to suddenly be noticing something That has probably been around for much longer as with when we discovered child abuse in the 70s 60s and 70s

And I feel like this is a really prime ingredient and something I'm fascinated by Which is the need to sort of inflate the serial killer Into a figure who's like stronger smarter More fundamentally intimidating than I think in real life. He is and I feel like it's important to like deflate the grandeur Of these ideas and think of these men is like some fucking guy who the police didn't suspect for way too long Because they're not that great at detecting a lot of stuff Right not catching them

means the police need to Inflate them into something bigger or more scary or more brilliant or yeah more nefarious Because if it's just some dude, they didn't catch then Reflects badly on them then that would be embarrassing. Yeah Shortly after the senate hearings on serial murder. There's a big department of justice press conference on serial killers and they're like This is an epidemic And around this time there are around 20,000 murders a year in the country

And in this press conference the doj officials they point out that the murder clearance rate has been declining This is actually really scary. They're they're freaking out because the murder clearance rate is 72 percent Which is like way higher than it is now It's like close to 50. Wow, which like back then there were a lot more murders Probably I would guess fewer police and definitely like not as good technology And they still cleared a lot more of their murders So my assumption is that if I'm ever suspected of murder And I'm guilty the police will be like, well

Here's your phone and everything so time to lock you up, babe I assume they call you babe But you just have to kill somebody who the police don't care about and then you're probably fine. That's the secret Yeah, but so anyway, so like there are 20,000 murders a year 72 of them get solved So like people start doing immediately start doing this like funny math and are like Oh, all of the murders that are unsolved must be serial killer murders quite a leap 4,000 deaths a year are you know attributed to serial killers and this number

Starts to circulate wildly and is like still circulating today, which is like So this is like the figure we ended up with for missing children Where every instance of a child who is missing even for 24 hours even as a runaway even When taken from one parent by another in a custodial dispute Every one of those numbers was lumped into Snatched by a stranger at the carnival. It's a real number, but it's describing something else But we just assigned it all to the most scary possible reason for that to have happened

Right, or there are certain things that we like to be scared of and certain things that are too scary than Stranger danger or henry lee lucas, you know drifter serial killer Yeah, and do you think that that's because like if you look at the actual numbers It's like who's gonna kidnap your kid your spouse or your previous spouse Who's gonna kill you your spouse or your previous spouse? It's like is that just too? Because I've always thought for one thing that the patriarchy Which is the most succinct name I have for that whole apparatus loves serial killers because it's like, oh my god, you know, who's killing women? Not their husbands not us

Drifters who drive 200,000 miles a year. Do I do that sweetie? No, I do not and that these figures are these sort of like There's a handful of these exceptional figures out there who are like responsible for most of this and and they're evil Right, there are these like devils out there in the world and what we need to do is capture these devils And then we've got it under control and other men can keep doing what they're doing exactly that it has nothing to do with them So How are people taking this when henry lee lucas is like, you know says at first, you know, I killed 100 or more than 100 people If you're trying to like tribute 4 000 murders a year to serial killers like they need to be having really high body counts So in a weird way, you know, this starts to seem if not probable then then possible

It's also true that when henry lee lucas starts confessing to this stuff the police in this area Have been noticing that there have been like a lot of deaths along i-35 And since the like mid late 70s, they've even formed a task force about you know, like This is a lot of women whose cars had broken down or hitchhikers and then their bodies would be found along the highway So you have henry lee lucas sort of starting to confess to this problem that people are already aware of So he and also, you know, what's interesting is that we love the idea that murders that happen Any geographic area are the responsibility of one murderer and our minds seem to even naturally go to that as opposed to What to me is the more obvious solution, which is like several murderers

Right. Okay. So there was a freeway killer an i-5 killer an interstate killer Oh, no, actually there were three different people dubbed the freeway killer So it both goes to like our desire to you know, give give them like a name and a brand And to recognize that the freeway is in a sense part of the problem Right because america had greater connectivity and you could like swoop into a town and swoop on out And also everybody used it. So it's like where people, you know, everybody ends up there So there's a sense of vulnerability about it. That was one of the things that was interesting to me and researching this is like remembering how

Relatively new the highway system is like i'm so used to it. It's such a Backbone of my life. I spend so much time, you know cruising along various highways. Just like a serial killer, you know and just remembering like a lot of these like weren't finished a lot of these systems that were like so used to and that seems such a Just like a fundamental part of the way that we travel like weren't completed until the 70s and 80s It's amazing this mode of traveling like that you can move quickly And kind of anonymously and invisibly across the whole country That was really new and so I think that's probably why you have Ann rule in the senate saying like associating

Serial killer nests with like mobility, which is not, you know, we should say true There should have been an ad for like tires for serial killers and the commercial is like I'm a serial killer. So I know good tires and that's why I buy good year Yeah, the whole time I was watching Henry in that movie like the movie character of Henry just he's got this enormous car and He's just like a shark Yeah, and that you're just sort of like who's gonna sort of pass in front of him at the wrong moment

and it does start to seem like this Kind of unhuman Malevolent force that can just be anywhere at any time. Yeah The other thing I love about that movie which goes against what we're talking about is that nobody's looking for him There's never a thing of like anybody noticing like boy There are all these like people in the chicago land area being murdered in a fairly similar way although he does talk About altering his mo which I suspect the real henry lee lucas did not mention Well, oh

So henry lee lucas has confessed to the murder of this woman kate rich this elderly woman And he also confesses to the murder of frida or becky powell Who is the girl who people called his girlfriend who he had been traveling with So we know that there are like these two murders But then what are these hundreds of others that he's like suddenly confessing to So you have like cops in texas who are you know already thinking about these unsolved murders along i35 You know come and talk to him and he starts Confessing to those and saying details that you know according to the police

Only the murderer would have known right like that thing that you always hear The story that he starts to kind of spin out is that he And his buddy this guy odis tool. I assume you say it odis. It's o t t i s so Yeah, it's like the least of these guys problems is the spelling of this thing So odis tool so the the story that sort of emerges Is that henry and odis would drive around the entire country and they would kill people You know like the serial killer of in rules testimony They they drove all around they drove around the whole country

And they killed all sorts of people by every Mechanism they claimed murders in like dozens of states They killed people you know according to these confessions with they strangled people Four different kinds of guns. They would stab them They would strangle them. They would like bludgeon them You know, they would chop them up with axes like really like every kind of murder possible some some people they decapitated Some people they cut their hands off some people They mutilated some they did not you know, whatever this idea that we have of the serial killer having like a signature

This is the opposite of that. They were like fuck you fbi. Fuck you douglas people of all races Of all genders, you know young people young women old women boys Girls elderly men. I feel like they were doing like a local ad for them like they're like will kill anybody One of the famous Henry Lee Lucas quotes is like I told him, you know, this way this way this way everything except poison Good for him poison does seem especially cruel in a way. Yeah, he later kind of goes back on that But who knows if we can bully them about that. Oh Yeah, fair enough and people like really are kind of gobbling up these stories

law enforcement for sure also the media because like this is like this is a murderer who is willing to talk is this like The lake can't look away through crime story people are immersed in at this moment. Yeah, like 100% It's just it's just huge and then also, you know, first it's like just cops all around Texas But then it starts widening out and police are coming from Georgia and coming from colorado and being like, hey, you know We also have these crimes unsolved crimes that seem really Mysterious like and because there's no method to his madness, right? It could it could be like literally Any crime you could be like, well, maybe it was Henry Lee Lucas and he like cops to them all

during this time He is getting like pretty good treatment in jail. I was gonna ask yeah, what's his living situation? He's hanging out in this jail He gets as much coffee and as many cigarettes as he wants and apparently he drinks like 20 cups of coffee a day Oh, Henry, that's too much coffee. It is too much coffee as many cigarettes as he I mean I think that like as many cigarettes as he want is honestly Reason enough to confess to hundreds of murders when you're in jail Particularly like once you stop confessing you're gonna get sent, you know

To prison and like probably death row where you do not get as many cigarettes as you want At a certain point it starts to feel a little like shaharazade You know like oh, I thought of another one like oh, I thought of another one and he's very fond of like strawberry milkshakes They will like take him out to lunch. Yeah, no strawberry milkshakes on death row. Yeah, no And once you're dead, there's absolutely none of any of this None of your serial murderer probably but I hope in heaven to have Many strawberry milkshakes. You well. Yeah He befriends a nun. He becomes like bffs with this nun sister clemmy

He's like getting a ton of attention, right giving a lot of interviews. Everybody's hanging on his word The texas rangers and the local law enforcement who are sort of like controlling him or you know They have almost like a proprietary interest in him and are like letting other people see him or not see him They start to be you know, like kind of friendly in a way One reporter says that you know, it's coming in and trying to get an interview and henry is like no I won't grant you an interview. I read what you wrote about the texas rangers and it was critical and like those are my colleagues And like anybody who's critical of my colleagues, you know, it doesn't get to talk to me

So you're just like, oh, okay. Like this is so he's like we're all working together here Yes, and they're and they're treating him like that, you know, like henry we need your help Wow He's managed to elevate himself into like a prize witness really in a sense. Wow And he's wrapping stuff up for everybody. So I mean this reminds me obviously of When ted bundy was like a couple days away from execution. He finally finally was like, all right I'll confess I'll confess to stuff Because he was hoping to live for a little bit longer

So then of course everyone from every place he had ever been was like hi Did you kill anyone in pennsylvania by chance because it just was like A way to ideally get some answers But maybe it's okay if they're not the right answers because you just want to have Closure whatever that is right closure becomes more important than truth or something like yeah You do see that the kind of perverse incentives for law enforcement to attribute something to him because Here's a guy. He's already locked up By 1984 he's been convicted and sentenced to death for one of these crimes

So it's like, okay, we don't need to put up the money for a trial We don't need to kind of marshal evidence for a trial like he says that he did it so we can sort of have all the benefits of Crossing this off the list without any of the the kind of burden of having to prove it It never has to be like held to that standard. You don't have to have like the police sort of up there publicly You know making this claim and having it, you know in this You know picked apart in an adversarial public proceeding, you know, it's just sort of It gets to be done in this more sort of backdoor kind of way

Right, which makes sense because the law really wasn't made for closure and media was Right totally. Oh and so another thing that he gets to do is he's like traveling All around the country though, they're like flying him, you know, sometimes on a private plane To these other jurisdictions so he can sort of come like point out the crime scene actually Well, I've never been on a private plane Well, this is one way to do it would not maybe recommend not great in the long run, but I'm curious like is there ever really persuasive stuff where it's like, wow, like how could he have known that or is it more

Like does it tend to be that they're like, hey Do you remember murdering a woman wearing these things outside Fargo? And he's like, yeah I did know that you mentioned that the vast majority of these conversations weren't recorded. So we don't yeah We don't know and everything gets is about to get really muddy Yeah, but it's also kind of at this time That the story of of his life and like what what happened kind of like before he's arrested for these crimes comes out And this is you know, again, he's like granting a ton of interviews like this guy is like happy to talk and so We start to kind of get this story of his early life

Which I I don't want to get too much into it But he is like he's from kind of like the rural rural western virginia like the mountains of virginia And the media characterizations of him like, you know, kind of hillbilly Stereotyping and he had like a really terrible childhood And it's hard to sort out I don't know by the end of like reading about him. I was like, I don't this guy Really always tells everybody what they want to hear right in some ways like all of these stories of his like extremely poor

extremely violent childhood Are probably true at least in like broad brushes, but there are also these like upsetting kind of gothic Touches that I don't know. I mean they totally could have happened And if they did happen like that's a good way to like Make a child into a serial killer But then you know, you start to wonder Is he just kind of like filling in the backstory that's like exactly the backstory that people want to hear Makes me not want to go too much into his childhood because for a lot of it the only source is is him, right?

The broad brushstrokes that are true his father Had lost both of his legs in a railroad accident And he was kind of like sold pencils along the roadside. His mother was an alcoholic And also like slept with men for money I think his dad was also an alcoholic a violent home Henry lost one of his eyes like due to kind of multiple violent Accidents when he was young and and had a glass eye in 1960 He's 23 years old and he's drunk and he gets in a fight with his mother who you know

According to him and probably accurately was like very abusive During this fight. He stabs her and she dies. He's caught for that crime like pretty quickly You know, he's like immediately the suspect. He's immediately caught. He immediately confesses Sent to prison is released in 1970 Pretty soon after he's released He tries to like entice these girls on their way to school to get into his car Like multiple girls. It's very creepy stories at different times It's like the same day I think

And is promptly arrested for that Locked up again immediately from 1971 to 1975 So the period in which he's like confessing to these hundreds of murders is after he gets out From that those sort of attempted kidnapping Crime so 1975 to 1983 Yeah, and how many murders is he confessing to like is it's hundreds and hundreds, right? So he is questioned about I believe 3000 He confesses to around 600

That's great restraint, Henry The various law enforcement departments end up clearing 213 cases Thanks to his confessions and he ends up being formally convicted of nine And sentenced to death for one So if he's confessed to 600 and we're talking about an eight-year period that breaks down to like 75 murders a year So that's like a murder every four or five days, I guess Yeah, which is not an unsustainable pace. I guess as these things go, but like

You would think that you would get caught at some point Between your first and your 600th. I would think yeah, well and particularly because okay He kills his mother and then pretty soon after he gets out. He tries to kidnap these girls In both of those cases. He's caught immediately like within a day Like he doesn't seem like a very sneaky person other people start to have similar questions, right? Like how does this make any sense and and some of the police officers who are interviewing him and and trying to pin Cases on him like a couple of them, you know, we'll like test him out and invent a fake case And he'll totally confess to it, you know, which you would think would be a big red flag

But there are a lot of like other more Credulous people in law enforcement who are like He killed so many people like how can he be expected to remember each one Which is so silly because it's like if it's weird that the default is like well, if he can't really remember He can still be right when he says yes, he did do that thing He doesn't really remember but he remembers enough to Confess to it. It's like oh Okay, exactly

They'll ask him to draw pictures of the victims And he's just drawing these sort of like identical pictures of like cartoonish women with big eyes and like big breasts Why do we always think serial killers are going to be good at drawing? I don't know The longer this goes on the more it starts to kind of fall apart So one of the cases that he confesses to is the murder of this woman Debra Sue Williamson Who in the summer of 1975 she's Stabbed to death outside her home in Lubbock

She's like a young woman. She had just gotten married. She worked at mcdonald's And the sort of details of the crime made the police think initially like oh, she must have known her killer This you know seems personal Then henry lee lucas confesses to it The police tell her parents like look we've solved it this guy confessed And initially her her parents are relieved But then they kind of look into it a little further and it just like Immediately falls apart and these are just you know, these are just like grieving parents

These are not detectives or anything if you just look at the facts henry lee lucas is released from prison two days later Allegedly he stabs this woman debbie sue, you know on her doorstep in in Lubbock, texas But if you look at the paperwork like as soon as he got out of prison He he flies to baltimore and then takes the bus to maryland to like stay with his half sister So it's just like the geography doesn't make any sense Yeah, like is it is there even time for any human being to physically do it let alone like would he really do that? Why if you were if you were kind of like a roving force of ambient evil

You don't need to drive to Lubbock to do that like just do that in maryland where you are Is there was there literally not time for him to have gotten to Lubbock or does it just make no sense for him to have done it? Well, I mean in a lot of these cases. I don't know about this one specifically but in a lot of the cases that start being looked at more closely Technically the police will be like well, it's technically Feasible, you know if he like, you know didn't sleep at all got in the car drove did this immediately drove back like you know It's right in some cases it's like that But in some the more it starts the more they start looking at it not even technically feasible at all So right there's a there's a newspaper reporter Hugh Ainsworth. Have you heard of him? He wrote a book about ted bundy

Yes, yeah, he did he co-wrote. Was it the deliberate stranger? Is it a good book? Yeah, it's one it's one of the better ones Hugh Ainsworth seems really interesting and he's still he's still alive. He also apparently This seems insane to me But he witnessed jfk's assassination. He was like there in dallas that day. I think he lives in dallas What and he also was there when jack ruby killed lee harvey oswald, you know a couple days later Wow Which is just like what are the odds did he want to see oswald getting released?

Yeah, he was like a reporter. So he was just like around remarkable Also, do you know who else was at the jfk assassination who bill paxton wait, really? Yeah, he was like five that's wild a lot of history happens in texas. I think is the moral here. Yeah So he has this experience like interviewing ted bundy. So I guess he's you know, he's he's coming to this with like some Expertise, I don't know but he's been to the serial killer rodeo before Yeah, and so something is like kind of like rubbing him wrong about about these confessions like One of the things that the details that he mentions later is that he hears that Henry lee lukas is like talking to these journalists in japan and he's like, oh, yeah

I killed some people there too. No, you did not as far as we know you have never left the country Like no, sir. You didn't and then also like once you start poking around things get really Much weirder and there are all of these sort of Sketchy things about Henry lee lukas and his confessions that are just like not really being widely reported like He claims that he killed jimmy hoffa He claims that he was the source for the poison that for jones town for the jones town suicides He was dealing in cyanide along with everything else

Which is I thought that henry your whole thing was that you've never poisoned anybody But apparently now you're saying you poisoned hundreds of people He will like also start particularly after he becomes like a born-again Christian because of this this nun who he's hanging out with all the time He starts talking about a murderous satanic group called the hands of death Oh Yes And the hands of death, you know, allegedly would pay for him an odysse to drive around the country and kidnap babies and you know deliver babies to satanic ceremonies and

kill So I love that henry lee lukas has taken the initiative to answer one of my eternal questions about the satanic panic Which is what are the supply chains? In this how are you getting all these babies? And henry lee lukas has the answer And it's it's me. I did it. I was the freelance baby snatcher You would need a lot more people on that but like yeah, I think this speaks to his particular genius for

Figuring out what people need to hear and being like oh, and you know what what other cultural mystery I can solve for you The satanic panic good job me He is like reflecting The anxieties and the fears of the moment and like channeling them and like spinning out a story Yeah, so in 1985 so like a couple years after Henry lee lukas is arrested and starts confessing Hugh ainsworth publishes a new sort of explosive newspaper story that's casting doubt on all of this

And then the next year the texas attorney general's office commissions a report This is called it's called the lukas report to really kind of dig into this and be like what's what's really true and false and so this report meticulously kind of goes through henry lee lukas's life and odysse tools life and like Figures out all the paperwork and everything they can find and just kind of maps out like these are the crimes that he's confessed to These are the crimes that he you know have been cleared And this is you know our best guess to as to like where he actually was When you sort of see it laid out like that it just really starts to seem the like legend of this guy as this Roving omnivorous murder like really starts to seem absurd like there's a killer on the road

His brain is squirming like a toad It's just like okay, so like in 1979 October 1979 so allegedly he and odysse tool they like stab a woman outside austin on the second On the fourth they're in georgia. They shoot somebody on the fifth. They're in nebraska They kill somebody with a machete on the eighth They're back in georgia. They shoot somebody else but with like a different caliber gun On the sixteenth they're in north carolina. They kill somebody with a shotgun on the 20th They're back in georgia and kill somebody on the 23rd

They're in austin again. They killed two people again with a different gun And then on the 31st they're elsewhere in texas and strangle somebody like anyone who does anything knows that this is too much No one would choose this for themselves Right and even if you had like very high executive function, right? It's just like not Possible like the only way to find this believable is if you buy into this some version of the like serial killer as ubermench thing, which is very weird and wrong I think you know and and it's funny how that idea of you know, the serial killer as this

Superhuman figure factors into the police account or at least the police account that that believes in these confessions Like where they're like, oh, henry lee lucas was like a master mechanic and he could just Fix up these cars so they could just drive and drive and drive But in reality, he's just constantly like stealing his relatives cars You know his relatives always like file a police report because they're like fucking henry And then like abandons them because he's like driven the car It's like a shitty car and he drives it to the ground and like never changes the oil So he's like thorough

He's like being supported by like all the all his relatives the whole time But he's like a legendary lone wolf right well That's the thing is like the the people who put together the lucas report Find that you actually really can kind of map out where he was during a lot of this time Like he doesn't actually travel that much and when he does he's usually moving between like relatives house to relatives house There is a paper trail right you can see like when he when he kind of moves Through the world. He's like selling his blood for money and applying for food stamps and stealing somebody's car And getting a ticket for like letting dogs run loose and you know cashing his paycheck

To sort of believe that he's keeping up the schedule You know, you not only have to believe that he's like this superhuman driving figure But also that he's like forging all of these documents and involved in like a very complex scheme like filing Fake timesheets or is it more likely that he's just like some dude, you know crashing on his sister-in-law's couch No, it never turns out to be some dude. It's Always a superhuman answer. I mean, what's funny is that like this is the kind of debunking that to me is obviously 100 Percent persuasive, but I feel like the whole QAnon apparatus is based on being presented with this kind of thing and being like, uh-huh well, it is a grand conspiracy and they did forge all that documentation and

Way fair We're no longer if we ever were speaking the same language in terms of like what facts are admissible In this kind of a thing. I mean and just looking at the schedule He's keeping what also occurs to me is just budget How much gas is this man affording and like it makes sense if he's like a transient worker who's like drifting around like working for the carnival or something but like He's not working. Well, he but the thing is like for a lot of this he is working Oh, and his job is in he's got these jobs mostly like kind of along the east coast and so part of the

You know fundamental to the police The law enforcement case for a lot of this is this idea that he's involved in this like complex, you know timesheet forging scam Which you know is very convenient for them But there's like really no evidence that that happened at all right in one Murder that he confessed to you know, and the police were like, uh He described this woman and he described, you know the convenience store where he picked her up where she was last seen and he described, you know, precisely her jewelry and her possessions

And like a few months later There's a drought and the creek in this town drops and like oh There's her car and her body is in the car and it's like Pretty obvious that she had a seizure and she drove off the road and she drowned, you know It's like not a homicide at all. And in other ones that he confessed to, you know, like Later the woman's husband like confessed and like turns out the husband did it, you know So they're just multiple cases that are clearly not attributed to him, right? I think the really heartbreaking thing about reading this report

These deaths that are attributed to him. These are people who really did die, right? So If he didn't do it then someone or something did and then they do kind of piece together like what seems to me a much more realistic version of you know, what he is doing between 75 and 83 when he's arrested he gets out of prison He marries a woman who's like his nephew's widow or something like kind of a in-law folk marion Exactly and then like immediately starts molesting her daughters

He's not this Genius devious drifter. He's like this much much more common thing who's like This creep who is like praying on vulnerable people in his proximity in his own family And those are things that he like he denies You know, even when he's out there like confessing to being a member of the The satanic cult that's like kidnapping babies. He's just sort of like, oh, no, I never I definitely did not like molest all these Girls That's somehow the thing that you can't admit to even though there's like a lot of evidence that he did

I mean he like definitely did well and it makes total sense to me that the stuff that he clearly did Is the stuff that he's going to deny because of course it's easy to confess to a crime you didn't Commit in this logic, you know, yeah, exactly Do we think that he killed anyone aside from these People in his life that he knew like is there persuasive evidence of that? Is it just a gray area? So, you know once once these reports come out that call his confessions into question You have sort of like the opposite kind of media frenzy than you did the first time around so he's like Yeah, there's like this other big other rush of of interviews with him and and now he starts saying like I only killed three people

I called my mom and Becky or Frida. That's the girl, you know, who is Otis tools? niece You know this other girl that he molested and traveled with And Kate rich the older woman like I only killed those three people And then sometimes he says like, oh no, I only killed my mother like she's the only one I killed Which like that seems very clearly a lot. He definitely Pretty clearly killed those three You know, this is also like an appealing story and this is where it starts to feel really tangled, right?

And he's like, oh, you know, I just did all those confessions because You know, I wanted to expose the incompetence of the police Sure, you did, you know, right exactly like it was all just like elaborate You know manipulation game that I was doing, right? Isn't it so funny that like popular media law enforcement? government like everyone Who was steering in america is like really behind And like conservative people I think a lot of the time are really behind this idea of like he was playing five dimensional chess the entire time and it's like really

Don't you think that this was like primarily just about strawberry milkshakes And this is again, right gets really hard to know what really happened I mean, you don't want to take henry lee lucas's word for it, right? Like notorious multiply proven liar like just such a liar and so willing to tell us what we want to hear right and so What he's saying is like, oh The police fed me the answers. They showed me case files. They told me what to say. They coached me and

You know, like I could totally believe that that's true I could also totally believe that he made that up I could believe that maybe something in between right where people aren't Necessarily feeding him the answers but kind of asking. I mean, we see this a lot, right? Like police asking leading questions whether they realize they're doing it or not Yeah to me this feels like a story that shows that The system we use for solving crimes

Is and always has been pretty fragile and subject to human bias And that's just an important thing to keep in mind as we move through the world this kind of mythologized serial killer figure is such a Co-creation of you know, this man this like very Regular in many ways and in bad ways very regular man named Henry Lee Lucas and law enforcement like they Created this mythological figure because it served them both. Yeah and so, you know as this starts to fall apart a lot of the cases against him kind of

Flounder there are a number of cases where he was, you know, going to be tried and the grand jury doesn't indict him Like you said the one case where he had been given the death penalty for George W. Bush later Commutes that sentence in 1998 because of these irregularities In his confession spree interesting criteria, George. I mean not that I'm against it. I'm just against a lot of your other choices Justice for all but you know, don't give the death penalty to anyone you guys If you're listening to this and you have the power to give the death penalty Don't do it. That's my advice

So it just ends up in this like very confusing situation where A lot of these cases like are still considered cleared Even though all of these questions have been raised Nobody in law enforcement like lost their job because of this a lot of them got like promotions or you know We loved what you did with the fake serial killer and other words. Yeah, exactly a lot of them still kind of hold To this mythology

Like they're these kind of two competing Narratives where it's like oh either he killed a lot of people or he killed three people To me I like don't feel like there's been a satisfying answer of like did he kill more than those three people and subsequent DNA testing that has been done which hasn't been done for most of these cases but The ones that it has been like has not none of that has tied him to these cases But it still seems to me like strange that he would confess to killing a lot of people, you know kind of out of nowhere To me it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that like

This is a situation almost like in the satanic panic, you know where somebody somebody sort of confesses to something And there's a kernel of truth in it. Even if their story is sort of bigger or more dramatic or they're like improbable elements Of the story and then instead of focusing on that like kernel of truth and trying to drill down to that We get distracted by the all of the things kind of swirling around it and like Follow those and then whatever could have been the kernel of truth just gets like Completely lost and buried and is like unrecoverable

Well, what seems interesting to me that had never occurred to me before is like maybe henry lee lucas Was a serial killer as we are, you know, rn were defining that on some scale Or also maybe he wasn't maybe he just killed a few essentially women who he knew And so when we were getting so excited about serial killers, he failed to meet the criteria. So he was like Whatever i'll just pretend to be the kind of criminal that people are super interested in right now And then that'll be how i get ahead right we were like we don't give a shit about you murdering Your female relatives like who cares everyone does that killed a stranger

The more that these stories come out the more that we kind of we as a as a public Almost need the stories to be more Horrific yeah for them to like move us at all. Oh, yeah So like henry lee lucas gave everybody What they wanted, you know, he gave the police this idea of this like killer who was everywhere and did everything For reporters, he gave them, you know this big johnny cash of serial killers, right exactly like and for reporters he was like this Figure with this like really horrific back story who like all he wanted to do is like tell you about his Awful life and all the terrible things that he'd done

Everybody wanted those things and in some ways i think that's why he's Less known now because it like reflects really badly kind of fun on everybody Yeah And it's funny this makes me think Again of copycat which is a masterpiece that movie is also about the danger of serial killers Like becoming infactuated with the idea of being written about and studied and obsessed over And I used to think that was dumb too and now I don't now I think that's a very reasonable thing to be concerned about and we're certainly continuing

To feed into it, you know, I know I repeat myself a lot, but I am so frustrated by the idea that people who hurt other people are somehow because they do that that means they're smart Or they're logistically gifted or they're like able to do More difficult things or have like greater executive function than the average human And that's why all these stories make sense and my answer to that Is that the people who cause the most harm are Doing it because they are little and shrunken and stunted And to make them into these giant exciting

Legends and to make them these incredibly Influential figures and our culture is dangerous It makes us believe that violence makes us bigger and it doesn't it makes us smaller until we're ground down to sand And then we blow away and it makes us less likely to actually see it when it's happening Like you were saying, you know this if we could recognize You know that what was actually happening here was like, you know, like a small and diminished person who is abusing The vulnerable people in his own life Like if we were able to sort of see that and recognize that and care about that

Without needing it to be this kind of epic globe trotting saga of Incredibly ornate evil if that's what we're looking for we won't see it when it's happening Where it really does tend to happen, which is just like The guy down the street. Yeah, and so yeah in that way I mean it's like Henry Lee Lucas kind of like for a little while he was the boogeyman And the boogeyman like Serves a function. Like every culture needs needs a boogeyman and I think it's like

The thing to be scared of so you're not scared of like what's really scary because that's like too scary Right like how in the 80s we had freddy kruger to distract from ronald reagan. Truly the biggest monster of them all Rachel you Are one of my favorite writers you write about all kinds of interesting stuff What have you been doing lately that people should read I I'm just right now writing a thing like a different kind of scary story, which is about like water in arizona truly bone-chilling And yeah, lots of other stuff over at the new yorker writing about texas and the southwest

Thank you so much for coming on today. Hopefully we have blown some cobwebs out of the attic and From this episode forward our nation will become more sensible. Great. I can't wait I believe in you guys And that is our episode I hope you enjoyed it and by the time you listen to this I will be enjoying a strawberry milkshake Somewhere out on america's highways Thank you so much to rachel munroe for being our guest for this episode Thank you to chase potter for editing and thank you as always to caroline kendrick our producer

See you in two weeks