Dale M. Brumfield

Special to The News Leader

In 1983 Henry Lee Lucas confessed to committing hundreds of murders. While every biography states his life of crime began with a series of burglaries in Richmond, it was actually his May 13, 1954 theft of a 1948 Pontiac from Waynesboro’s Keiser Motors on West Main Street that earned him a sentence in Richmond’s State Penitentiary and jump-started his role as either America’s most notorious serial killer or most outrageous liar.

Lucas was living with his step-brother Harry Waugh near Lyndhurst when the 17-year-old was stopped on a traffic violation in Waynesboro by Officer R. L. Stover. A check of his car revealed money, a coat and keys, all believed to be stolen. The May 14 Waynesboro News-Virginian reported that the unnamed “Augusta County youth” claimed the car belonged to Waugh.

Lucas had made his way to Lyndhurst from Montgomery County, where he grew up enduring monstrous verbal and physical abuse from his mother, an alcoholic prostitute named Viola Waugh Lucas. His father Anderson Lucas – nicknamed “no legs” because he lost both in a train accident – made bootleg whiskey and sold pencils on Blacksburg street corners while Viola turned tricks in their single-bedroom cabin. By age ten Henry was an alcoholic and had developed unnatural sexual obsessions.

Lucas’ claim that the stolen car was his brother’s was found to be false, leading to a litany of charges, including breaking and entering and car theft. At a preliminary hearing under Juvenile Relations Court Judge Louis Jordan, it was revealed that the youth also faced burglary charges in Staunton and Augusta County, which were waived. According to the June 28, 1954 State Penitentiary admittance ledger, Lucas was found guilty of statutory burglary and sentenced to two years as prisoner no. 65971. Two unsuccessful escape attempts from a road crew in 1957 extended his sentence and he was finally released in September, 1959.

After release Lucas went to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with a step-sister. Confronted there by his enraged mother, Lucas stabbed her to death in a fight. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 – 40 years in the Michigan penitentiary, but was released in 1971 due to overcrowding. He was promptly arrested again for attempted kidnapping and served four years.

After his release in 1975, he met a deranged drifter in Florida named Ottis Toole and Toole’s mentally disabled teenage niece, Freida Powell. They spent about six years bumming across 38 states, working odd jobs. In 1982 Lucas killed Powell in a fit of jealousy, then killed a former employer named Kate Rich in Ringgold, Texas.

After being arrested on an illegal weapons charge in Texas, Lucas suddenly began confessing to hundreds of murders. Most were dismissed as lies, yet he was flown from state to state, where detectives and police used his dubious and coached confessions to prematurely close the books on dozens of inactive cases. Lucas even claimed he kept confessing because if he stopped he feared he would go to death row.

Lucas later withdrew a confession that in 1951 he killed and buried near Harrisonburg a Lynchburg girl named Laura Burnsley.

Lucas was eventually convicted in Texas of 11 murders and sentenced to death for killing a woman known only as “orange socks,” as that was all she was wearing when found. Today even that conviction is suspect.

Lucas’ death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor George W. Bush in 1998. He died of heart failure March 12, 2001.

Lucas’ former partner Ottis Toole died in 1996 at age 49 and was buried in the Florida prison cemetery when no one claimed his body. In a shocking postscript, he was posthumously determined in 2008 to be the killer of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, son of “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh, in 1981.

Lucas and Toole’s bizarre lives inspired the 1986 John McNaughton movie, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.”

Dale Brumfield is an author, English professor and digital archaeologist. He can be reached at dalebrumfield@protonmail.com.