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Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001), also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson. An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper showed that many of the murders Lucas confessed to were impossible for him to have committed. While the Rangers defended their work, a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas concluded Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed. Lucas' death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. Lucas later recanted his confessions as a hoax with the exception of his confession to murdering his mother. He died of congestive heart failure in 2001. Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Ranger Division, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the apparently trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confessions" to crimes of extreme seriousness might encourage prisoners such as Lucas, who had little to lose, to make false confessions. Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know. The police also did not record their interviews, making it impossible to know for sure how much information interviewers gave Lucas unprompted. Early life and criminal history Background Henry Lucas was born the youngest of nine children on August 23, 1936, in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia, to parents Nellie Viola Lucas (1888–1960) and Anderson Lucas (1901–1951), a double amputee. Lucas' father earned the nickname "No Legs" after losing both of his legs in a freight train accident. "My daddy didn't do anything," Lucas later said. "He just sold pencils." When Lucas was eight, he was beaten by his mother about the head with a wooden plank which caused him to spend three days in a coma. Lucas developed an infection in his left eye at age ten, when one of his brothers struck him with a knife. His mother ignored the injury for several days until a teacher swiped him over his eye with a steel-tipped ruler and the eyeball burst; it had to be surgically removed and it was replaced with a glass prosthetic. Lucas' mother was a prostitute who would force her son to watch her engaging in sex with clients. "First thing I can remember was when my mom was in bed with another man in the house, and she made me watch it," Lucas said. "I just couldn't stand there and watch. I had to turn my back and walk out of the house, and after I did that, she beat me, 'cause I didn't watch it." Nellie would also 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. Despite this, Nellie continued to abuse and torment Lucas by shooting and killing a mule given to him by an uncle and proceeding to beat him because she had to pay to have the animal carcass removed. Lucas was frequently ridiculed as a child and later cited the mass rejection by his peers as a cause for his misanthropy. Commenting on his childhood, Lucas stated: I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by my mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein' would want to do. On October 24, 1951, Lucas' alcoholic father died of hypothermia after drinking to intoxication 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. As an adolescent, Lucas began an incestuous sexual relationship with his half-brother and started engaging in bestiality, often capturing small animals and performing sexual acts on them before killing them. On June 10, 1954, Lucas was convicted on over a dozen counts of burglary in and around Richmond, Virginia, and was sentenced to four years in prison. He escaped in 1957, was recaptured three days later, and was subsequently released on September 2, 1959. First murder Lucas claimed to have committed his first homicide in 1951, when he strangled 17-year-old Laura Everlean Burnsley. Burnsley disappeared from a bus stop in Lynchburg, Virginia, in March 1951; Lucas confessed to her murder on February 15, 1984. According to Lucas, he picked her up near Lynchburg, Virginia, and after she refused his sexual advances and resisted an unsuccessful rape attempt, he killed her and buried her body in a secluded wooded area near Harrisburg, Virginia. "It scared me quite a bit," Lucas said. "Because the first girl I killed was when I was 14-years-old. I wanted to try the sex I'd been watching." "I got to playing too rough with her," he said. "The pressure of seeing my mom hit me — and my emotions more or less took over, and I couldn't quite handle it." As with most of his confessions, Lucas later retracted this claim. Burnsley has never been found. Matricide In late-1959, Lucas traveled to Tecumseh, Michigan, to live with his half-sister, Opal Retta Jennings. Around this time, he was engaged to marry a pen pal, Stella Curtis, with whom he had corresponded while incarcerated. When Lucas' mother, 71-year-old Nellie Viola Lucas, visited him for Christmas, she disapproved of her son's fiancée and insisted he move back to Blacksburg, Virginia, to take care of her as she grew older. When he refused, they argued repeatedly. These arguments escalated until January 11, 1960, when she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he stabbed her in the neck. Lucas then fled the scene. "I was pretty well drunk when she started arguing with me, wanting me to go back to live with her to Virginia, but I told her I didn’t want nothing to do with her," Lucas remembered. He elaborated: All I remember was slapping her alongside the neck, but after I did that I saw her fall and decided to grab her. But she fell to the floor and when I went back to pick her up, I realized she was dead. Then I noticed that I had my knife in my hand and she had been cut. Opal returned later and discovered their mother alive on the bedroom floor, but in a pool of her own blood. She called an amb.... Discover the Henry Lee popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Henry Lee books.