Henry Lee Lucas

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.