Henry Lee Lucas
American serial killer
Died when: 64 years 202 days (774 months)Star Sign: Virgo
Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001) was an American convicted serial killer.Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983.
He rose to infamy while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately 600 other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials.
Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and officially attributed the murders to Lucas, and he was considered the most prolific serial killer in history.
Lucas was convicted of murdering 11 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 flatly 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 himself later recanted everything, with the exception of his confession to murdering his mother, as a hoax.
He died of congestive heart failure in 2001.Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Rangers, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions.
Investigators did not consider that the ostensibly trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confession" 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 accidentally gave Lucas unprompted.
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