Serial Killer Investigations (30 page)

None of the officers who knew him closely believed that for a moment. Too many of his confessions had turned out to be accurate.

For example, on 2 August 1983, when he was being arraigned for the murder of a hitchhiker known simply as ‘Orange Socks’, Lucas was taken to Austin for questioning about another murder. On the way there, seated between two deputies, Lucas pointed to a building they passed and asked if it had been a liquor store at one time. The detectives looked at one another. It had, and it had been run by Harry and Molly Schlesinger, who had been robbed and murdered on 23 October 1979. Lucas admitted that he had been responsible, and described the killings with a wealth of detail that only the killer could have known. He then led the deputies to a field where, on 8 October 1979, the mutilated body of a young woman named Sandra Dubbs had been found. He was also able to point out where her car had been left. There could be no possible doubt that Lucas had killed three people in Travis County in two weeks.

When asked if Ottis Toole had committed any murders on his own, Lucas mentioned a man who had died in a fire set by Toole in Jacksonville. Toole had poured gasoline on the man’s mattress and set it alight. Then they had hidden and watched the fire engines; a 65-year-old man was finally carried out, badly burned. He had died a week later. Police assumed he had accidentally set the mattress on fire with a cigarette.

Lucas’s description led the police to identify the victim as George Sonenberg, who had been fatally burned in a fire on 4 January 1982. Police drove out to Raiford Penitentiary to interview Toole. He admitted it cheerfully. When asked why he did it, he grinned broadly. ‘I love fires. Reckon I started a hundred of them over the past several years.’

There could be no possible doubt about it: Toole and Lucas had committed a astronomical number of murders between them. At one point, Lucas insisted that the total was about 360—he went on to detail 175 he committed alone, and 65 with Ottis Toole.

In prison after his original convictions, Lucas seemed a well-satisfied man. Now much plumper, with his rotten teeth replaced or filled, he had ceased to look so sinister. He had a special cell all to himself in Sheriff Boutwell’s jail—other prisoners had treated him very roughly during the brief period he had been among them, and he had to be moved for his own safety. And he was now a national celebrity. Magazines and newspapers begged for interviews, television cameras recorded every public appearance. Police officers turned up by the dozen to ask about unsolved murder cases, and were all warned beforehand to treat Lucas with respect, in case he ceased to cooperate. Now, at least, he was receiving the attention he had always craved, and he revelled in it. And some visitors, like the psychiatrist Joel Norris, the journalist Mike Cox, and the crime writer Max Call, came to interview him in order to learn about his life, and to write books about it. Lucas cooperated fully with Call, who was the first to reach print—as early as 1985—with a strange work called
Hand of Death.

Here, for the first time, the American public had an opportunity to satisfy its morbid curiosity about Lucas’s rampage of crime. The story that emerged lacked the detail of later studies, but it was horrific enough.

Lucas, Call revealed, had spent most of his life from 1960 (when he was 26) to 1975 in jail. After his release he had an unsuccessful marriage—which broke up when his wife realised he was having sex with her two small daughters—and lived for a while with his sister Wanda, leaving when she accused him of sexually abusing her young daughter. He seems to have met Ottis Toole in a soup kitchen in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1978. Ottis had a long prison record for stealing cars and petty theft, and he invited Lucas back home, where he was soon regarded as a member of the family.

According to Lucas, he had already committed a number of casual murders as he wandered around. These were mostly crimes of opportunity—as when he offered a lift to a young woman called Tina Williams, near Oklahoma City, after her car had broken down. He shot her twice and had intercourse with the body. Police later confirmed Lucas’s confession.

Even so, the meeting with Toole seems to have been a turning point. Now, according to both of them, they began killing ‘for fun’. According to Toole’s confession, they saw a teenage couple walking along the road in November 1978, their car having run out of fuel. Lucas forced the girl into the car, while Toole shot the boy in the head and chest. Then, as Toole drove, Lucas raped the girl repeatedly in the back of the car. Finally, Toole began to feel jealous about his lover, and when they pulled up, shot her six times, and left her body by the road. The police were also able to confirm this case: the youth was called Kevin Key, the young woman Rita Salazar.

The case was the first of more than a score of similar murders along Interstate 35 that kept Sheriff Boutwell, now chief investigator, busy for the next five years. The victims included teenage hitchhikers, elderly women abducted from their homes, tramps, and men who were killed for robbery. Lucas was later to confess to most of these crimes.

Lucas and Toole began robbing ‘convenience stores’, forcing the proprietor or store clerk into the back. Lucas described how, on one occasion, they tied up a young female clerk, but she continued to try to get free. So he shot her through the head, and Toole had intercourse with her body.

On 31 October 1979, the naked body of a young woman was found in a culvert on Interstate 35, her clothes missing, except for a pair of orange socks by the body. After his arrest, Lucas described how he and Toole had picked up ‘Orange Socks’, who was hitchhiking, and when she had refused to let Lucas have sex with her, he strangled her. Lucas would eventually receive the death sentence for the murder of the still unidentified young woman.

When Lucas and Toole abducted Becky and her brother, Frank, in January 1982, they took the kids with them when they robbed convenience stores; Becky looked so innocent that the proprietor took little notice of the two smelly vagrants who accompanied her—until one of them produced a gun and demanded the money from the till. And, according to Lucas, Becky and Frank often became witnesses to murder—in fact, in one confession he even claimed they had taken part in the killings.

Eventually, Frank and Ottis Toole returned home to Florida, while Becky and Lucas continued ‘on the road’. In January 1982, a couple named Smart, who ran an antiques store in Hemet, California, picked them up, and for five months Lucas worked for them. Then the Smarts asked Lucas if he would like to go back to Texas to look after Mrs Smart’s mother, Kate Rich. He accepted their offer. But after only a few weeks, the Smarts received a telephone call from another sister in Texas, telling them that the new handyman was spending Mrs Rich’s money on large quantities of beer and cigarettes in the local grocery store. Another sister who went to investigate found Mrs Rich’s house filthy, and Lucas and Becky Powell drunk in bed.

Lucas was politely fired. But his luck held. Only a few miles away, he was offered a lift by the Reverend Reuben Moore, who had started his own religious community in nearby Stoneburg. Moore also took pity on the couple, and they moved into the House of Prayer. There everyone liked Becky, and she seemed happy. She badly needed a home and security. Both she and Henry became ‘converts’.

But Becky began to feel homesick, and begged Henry to take her back to Florida. And a few days later, pieces of her dismembered body were scattered around a field near Denton. And Lucas’s nightmare odyssey of murder was beginning to draw to a close.

The American public, which at first followed Lucas’s confessions with horrified attention, soon began to lose interest. After all, he was already sentenced. So was Ottis Toole (who would also be later condemned to death for the arson murder of George Sonenburg). And as newspapers ran stories declaring that Lucas had withdrawn his confessions yet again, or that some police officer had proved he was lying, there was a growing feeling that Lucas was not, after all, the worst mass murderer in American history.

It was a couple named Bob and Joyce Lemons who first placed this conviction on a solid foundation. An intruder had murdered their daughter, Barbara Sue Williamson, in Lubbock, Texas, in August 1975. Lucas confessed to this murder when asked about it by Lubbock lawmen. When the Lemons heard the confession they felt it was a hoax. Lucas said he recalled the house as being white, that he had entered by the screen door, and killed the newly married woman in her bedroom. It was a green house, the screen door had been sealed shut at the time, and Barbara had been killed outside.

The Lemons went and talked to Lucas’s relatives, and soon came up with a list of the periods when he had stayed in Florida, which contradicted dozens of his ‘confessions’. But when they confronted Texas Ranger Bob Prince with these discoveries, he became hostile and ordered them out of his office.

Unsurprisingly, Ressler’s own attitude to Lucas is sceptical. In
Whoever Fights Monsters,
he writes:

By the time I interviewed Lucas, years after the controversy had died down, the dust had settled and Lucas said that he had actually committed none of the murders to which he had previously confessed. Under closer questioning, he did admit that since 1975 he had ‘killed a few’, fewer than ten, perhaps five. He just wasn’t sure. He had told all those lies in order to have fun, and to show up what he termed the stupidity of the police.

This figure, however, is obviously as much an underestimate as Lucas’s original claim of 350 (or even, at one stage, 650) was an exaggeration. As noted above, many of Lucas’s claims were confirmed on investigation. It seems, on the whole, that he was probably telling something like the truth in his first statement that he had killed ‘about a hundred’.

Ressler adds:

It took several years for the Lucas fiasco to be resolved. The task-force member had been right, though: If we had had VICAP up and running at the time Lucas made his first startling admission, it would have been easy to see what was truth and what was falsehood in his confession. First, we would have asked the police departments to fill out VICAP forms on their unsolved murders and enter them into the computer system. Then we would have analyzed them by date, location, and modus operandi, and would quickly have been able to show that several of them had been committed on the same date in widely separated locations, thus eliminating the possibility that they were committed by the same man. By such processes of elimination, we would have narrowed the field very quickly and allowed investigators to concentrate on the real possibilities.

Lucas, sentenced to several life terms as well as to death in the 1980s, began the usual process of appeal, then spent 13 years on death row. By June 1998, when it seemed that he could no longer delay the death sentence, then Governor George Bush commuted it to life imprisonment.

Ottis Toole died in September 1996 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Chapter Twelve

Sadism, the enjoyment of another person’s suffering, is a relatively rare perversion. However, as Roy Hazelwood told Stephen Michaud: ‘... those who harbour it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime.’

He was referring to Mike DeBardeleben, whose criminal career spanned 18 years. When he was arrested on 25 May 1983 it was not for murder or rape—although in both these fields he was a repeat offender—but passing counterfeit bills.

The Secret Service had been trying to find him for three years. By 1980, one of its serious headaches was a counterfeiter they called the ‘Mall Passer’, who unloaded fake $20 bills in shopping malls all over the country by handing them over in exchange for small items like cigarettes and men’s socks, and taking the change. He obviously drove far and wide; in one year, he travelled to 38 states and unloaded as much as $30,000 in fake bills. It was the task of the hunters, led by Secret Service agents Greg Mertz, Dennis Foos and Mike Stephens, to try and discern some kind of pattern in his crimes and lay a trap. The number of fake bills passed in the Washington DC and northern Virginia area suggested that this might be where he lived.

Police artist drew up sketches of the Mall Passer based on the descriptions of store clerks who had seen him, and these were passed to every mall he had ever visited. In the late afternoon of Thursday 25 April 1983, staff of the Eastridge Mall in Gastonia, North Carolina,

were on the lookout for the Mall Passer, since a local FBI agent had worked out that this might well be his target that month. And when he offered a $20 bill in payment for a paperback book, the clerk thought he recognised the wanted man, and noted that the $20 bill did not seem genuine. At the first opportunity he called the security guard, only to discover that his cell phone was out of order. But the Mall Passer had now moved on to other stores, where he continued to pass counterfeit bills. Finally, the Mall Passer—a thin, dark-haired man with a tight, straight mouth—was followed to his car. Some sixth sense must have told the fugitive that he was being observed, for one clerk noticed that he was so nervous that he was shaking. The police arrived shortly after he had driven away.

A month later, on 25 May the Passer was recognised by a bookstore clerk in West Knoxville, Tennessee, who dialled the police. The man had realised he was being tailed, and broke into a run, with two agents after him, when he found himself confronted by two policemen who had been summoned by radio.

But the thin, tight-lipped man was totally uncooperative with the police, even though he knew they had found more counterfeit bills and stolen license plates in his car, as well as a large quantity of pornography.

His wallet identified him as Roger Collin Blanchard, but his car was registered to a James R. Jones of Alexandria, Virginia. Fingerprint identification, however, revealed to be James Mitchell DeBardeleben II, known as ‘Mike’, and that in 1976 he had spent two yeas in jail for passing dud $100 bills.

In his apartment investigators discovered a Yellow Pages directory with a tiny slip of paper in the pages listing storage facilities. And a visit to the one nearest his home uncovered a storeroom full of the kind of items that indicated a car thief, and someone who posed as a policeman—a police badge, bubble lights, handcuffs, and a siren. And together with more pornography, they found dozens of photographs of women in various stages of undress, many looking terrified and battered. There could be little doubt that these latter were not posed by models—a bag containing bloodied panties, a chain, handcuffs, a dildo, and a lubricant suggested why the women looked so terrified. There were also tapes that made it clear that DeBardeleben enjoyed having women at his mercy—and forcing them to say that they were enjoying the rapes and tortures he was inflicting on them.