Sheriff Jim Boutwell felt like he was touching the sky with his hands. Every time the skinny, scruffy little man with his left eyelid drooping over his blind eye opened his mouth of rotten teeth, he confessed to a new murder. It was enough for him to sit Henry Lee Lucas in his office, offer him a new bundle of Pall Mall, get him a strawberry smoothie and ask him about a case so that he would say yes, that dead man was also his, one more.
For Boutwell, Lucas had become a passport to fame and the promise of a bright future. When the little man was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm in June 1983, the sheriff of the Texas Rangers in Georgetown was in charge of the interrogation. One more case, for a misdemeanor. Perhaps by mere routine she asked the detainee about two unsolved cases: the disappearances of the elderly woman Kate Rich and the teenager Becky Powell. Lucas did not hesitate to answer: “Yes, I killed them and dismembered them.”
He said that Becky, aged 15, was his girlfriend and that together they had worked for some months for Kate, whom they helped in the house where she lived alone; that she had killed Becky because she wanted to leave him and that later he also killed “the old woman”; that he dismembered them and buried them in different places, in pieces. Lucas indicated the places and Boutwell found the remains. There was no doubt that the little man was a murderer.
By then, the Georgetown ranger knew that Henry Lee Lucas, 47, had also murdered his own mother in 1960, when he was 24 years old, and had served his sentence. He also accumulated brief but repeated steps through different prisons to serve sentences for minor offenses. He had three deaths: he had a serial killer on his hands.
The trial was swift, and the two life sentences were a simple procedure for the jury. The only surprise of the process appeared at the end. After hearing the grief, Lucas looked at the judge and said, “Well, your honor, what are we going to do with the other hundred women I killed? ”.
La task force “Henry Lee Lucas”
After that confession, Henry Lee Lucas did not end up in State Prison - his part to serve his sentence - but was housed in a cell at the headquarters of the Rangers in Georgetown, where the “Henry Lee Lucas” Task Force was created to investigate those hundred crimes. Sheriff Jim Boutwell was in charge.
According to his own confessions, Lucas had claimed victims — men, women and children — for eight years in virtually every state in the country. He had started killing in 1975 and had not stopped until 1983, when he was arrested.
Every morning, Boutwell took the prisoner out of the cell and took him to his office, gave him cigarettes and whatever drink he wanted before presenting him with a new crime. Lucas, almost without exception, admitted it.
Goergetwon thus became a mecca for almost every police force in the United States, who sent detectives who had unsolved cases to find out if Lucas was the perpetrator of those crimes. Faced with his questions, the little man with the drooping eyelid and rotting teeth confessed and, in addition, gave details that only the police and the perpetrator of the crime could know.
In a few months of interrogation, he confessed to 197 crimes that were presented to him, while he went up without anyone asking him for the sum of his deaths: first 200, then 350 and finally more than six hundred.
Sheriff Boutwell coordinated the interrogations of police envoys, who had to make an appointment and sometimes wait weeks before they could interview the prisoner. He also took advantage of the situation: he gave press conferences, invited journalists to interview him briefly, had himself photographed with Lucas and even starred alongside his star killer in a short documentary for Japanese television.
I was at the center of the scene. Lucas was the biggest serial killer in the history of the United States.
“By his side, Charles Mason looks like Tom Sawyer,” he was defined by a chronicler with ingenuity.
A suspicious journalist
In a sense, Lucas's confessions were a relief for everyone: the cops solved cases that seemed impossible, the victims' relatives could close a painful chapter by learning the identity of the murderer, the media had a real leaflet in installments to catch the public and citizens felt that society had taken a danger out of themselves.
Perhaps because of all that, no one questioned the confessions of the little man. Or almost no one.
In the 1980s, Hugh Aynesworth had a well-deserved reputation as a police chronicler. He did research on his own, had good sources, was among the first to get information and had published a book with good success.
Sheriff Jim Boutwell thought that Aynesworth could write a very good book about his success with the greatest serial killer in the United States and gave him almost unrestricted access to the investigation. Not only did he allow him to meet Lucas alone - with the other journalists it was always in his presence - but it allowed him to watch the recordings of the interrogations and even attend his informal conversations with the criminal.
Thanks to that privilege, Aynesworth also witnessed Lucas' interviews with the Japanese team that was filming the documentary and the reconstruction of a case on the ground, that of the naked woman in orange stockings, a totally naked victim except for that garment. In front of the cameras, Lucas recounted how he had committed the crime while Boutwell strutted beside him. At the end, the prisoner was only a few moments left and Aynesworth approached him. Lucas smiled at him and said quietly, “I didn't do it.”
That one phrase - because the little man would not say more to him - was a trigger for the journalist's mistrust. In the following days he made a chronological list of the crimes confessed by Lucas, obtained a large map of the United States where he marked the places and established the distances.
There were things that didn't close: murders thousands of miles away with a difference of 24 hours. Not in one, but in several cases.
He wrote an article on the subject. Boutwell didn't like it.
More inconsistencies
Aynesworth decided to investigate further. After following the alleged trail of the crimes and the routes Lucas had taken to commit them, he discovered more disturbing information. It was not only that some distances made it impossible for the same person to be in two places with such a short time difference, but that he found concrete data that denied confessions.
He found that Lucas had a traffic ticket in a city thousands of miles from the confessed crime on a certain date; that he had cashed a check at a job when, according to his claims, he was killing a person elsewhere; one of the crimes coincided with Lucas' date of marriage in another state (corroborated by his ex woman) and even a fine for not collecting the faeces of her dog on the other side of the country on the day of another crime. At the time of two of the crimes he was in prison for misdemeanors.
The more he searched, the more impossibilities he found. No one had ever crossed that data.
He also came into contact with families of victims who did not believe in Lucas's confessions and who believed that the Rangers were manipulating him to close cases. He knew that they wanted to question Boutwell and that Boutwell had not wanted to receive them or had threatened them in a veiled manner.
Lucas didn't fit the typical profiles of serial killers either. According to his confessions, he had killed with firearms, knives, by running over with his car, by strangulation, by blows of a fist, by beating and dozens of other ways. It did not have a typical modus operandi, it was not systematic and its victims were very varied.
Faced with all that evidence, the journalist thought: “Either they found the greatest serial killer or it's the worst hoax in American criminal history.”
While Aynesworth was conducting his own investigation, Prosecutor Vic Feazell, from McLennan County, Texas, tried to balance some unsolved cases with Lucas' confessions, especially the murder of Rita Salazar and her boyfriend, whose bodies were found dozens of miles away the same day.
But Lucas' confession about those two deaths didn't quite close and Feazell told the Rangers. The next day, when he wanted to access the digital files about the killer in the state and national databases, he found a phrase on his computer screen: “Access denied.” It was clear that they didn't want me to investigate.
The Waco police were also unsure of the veracity of Lucas's three confessions and distrusted the Rangers in general and Boutwell in particular. Before the little man confessed, they had given the sheriff the files of the three cases and during the interrogations the alleged murderer had repeated almost everything they had given to Boutwell, without adding a single piece of information.
In the greatest of secrets - with the consent of the chief of the local police - two detectives devised a maneuver: they would give the sheriff the file of a fabricated case. The result revealed a maneuver as simple as it was monumental.
The Rangers Conspiracy
Henry Lee Lucas's confessions were credible because they described the victims' clothing, locations, and other details or circumstances that only the killer or the investigators in the case could know.
When questioned by Waco detectives, the alleged serial killer confessed to the crime and gave exactly all the details contained in the file with fictitious data sent to Sheriff Boutwell.
This is how Boutwell's modus operandi and at least some of his closest men became evident: he gave Lucas the files to read and they showed him the photographs so that he could familiarize himself with the places. That's why his confessions were credible. Later, he was not the one who indicated the place where he had buried the victims, but they took him there and he recognized them from the photographs.
Lucas did all that to please Boutwell and maintain the comfortable living regime he had at the Rangers headquarters in Georgetown, much better than that of the state prison.
On the other hand, a fortuitous finding worsened the situation of the task force commanded by the sheriff. By chance, a fisherman found at the bottom of a lake a car inside which was the body of Carolyn Cervenka, one of Lucas' alleged victims. In his confession, the alleged murderer said that he had dismembered her and scattered the remains along a route, but the body was complete inside the car. The autopsy revealed that he had suffered a seizure of epilepsy while driving and they had ended up in the lake, where he drowned.
Investigation and reprisals
Prosecutor Vic Feazell ordered the task force to be investigated, but the Rangers, led by the head of the Texas Department of Security, former FBI deputy chief Jim Adams, managed to get them allowed to conduct an internal investigation.
Since he could not hide the falsity of the confessions obtained through Boutwell, the ruling was that mistakes were made, but that the sheriff and his men always acted by the rules and with good intentions. Case closed.
It could look like this, but the Rangers wanted to prove their accusers. Faezell was accused of receiving bribes, had to leave the prosecution and stand trial. The jury found him innocent, but scandalous media coverage of the trial ended his political career and he had to resign from office. Years later he won the State a trial for $58 million, but he could never run for anything again.
Hugh Aynesworth suffered a very strange robbery in his house. They came in one night and didn't take any valuables. When he checked, he found that all he lacked were the tapes and the notes of his research on Lucas. A couple of days after the robbery, he happened to cross paths with Boutwell, who hadn't spoken to him in months. The sheriff greeted him and said, “I'm so sorry you were robbed, Hugh.”
Aynesworth froze: he hadn't reported the robbery, he hadn't even discussed it with anyone. Boutwell had given him a message.
The trials against Lucas went ahead. He was convicted of eleven murders and sentenced to death for one of them and to life for the rest. “I said everything they made me say,” he told the jury and repeated from death row.
Brokers on the loose
The case was so scandalous that the alleged greatest serial killer in history achieved something that no one condemned to death had ever obtained or would get from the then governor of Texas, George W. Bush. During his term, the future president of the United States rejected all requests for commutation or postponement of executions by lethal injection. They totaled more than a hundred cases.
The only exception was Lucas, as the evidence showed that he had been in a different state at the time of the murder for which he was sentenced to death. “I know he committed other crimes, but not this one,” Bush said when he announced it.
Henry Lee Lucas died in prison on March 12, 2001 from congestive heart failure.
Since then, the Texas Rangers have consistently refused to reopen the investigation of their dubious confessions. For them they are closed cases. However, the consequences of Sheriff Boutwell's maneuvers continue to come to light even today.
Several state police officers and the Cold Case Foundation — with which relatives of Lucas' alleged victims collaborate — continued to investigate the cases and demanded DNA evidence.
In this way, they managed to identify twenty of the true perpetrators of the 197 confessed - and supposedly proven - crimes of the little man with a drooping eyelid and rotten teeth.
The rest of the killers are still on the streets thanks to the conspiracy of the Texas Rangers task force.
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