Continuing the Serial Killer Trail
Henry Lee Lucas - The Deadly Drifter
Though Lucas was only convicted of 11 murders, he confessed to over 100 killings. But many of those murders were called into question, and Lucas was labeled a "pathological liar". Even with the disputes over his confessions that later arose, Lucas was indicted on murder charges in Bossier Parish in 1984.
Henry Lee Lucas was born in a one-room log cabin in Virginia. He lost an eye at age 10, after it became infected subsequent to a fight with his brother. A friend later described Lucas as a child who would often get attention by displaying frighteningly strange behavior. His mother, Viola, was a prostitute who would force her son to watch her engaging in sex with clients, and who would make him cross dress in public, purportedly so she could later pimp him out to men and women alike. Eventually, Lucas' schoolteachers complained about the cross-dressing, and a court order put an end to it.
In December 1949, Lucas' alcoholic father, Anderson Lucas, died of hypothermia after going home drunk and collapsing outside during a blizzard. Shortly thereafter, while in the sixth grade, Lucas dropped out of school and ran away from home, drifting around Virginia. He claimed to have committed his first murder in 1951, when he said he strangled 17-year-old Laura Burnsley after she refused his sexual advances. As with most of his confessions, Lucas later retracted this claim.