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At one point, Lucas claimed he was responsible for killing 600 people. Almost as soon as he confessed to killing 100 people, the number blossomed to 150, then 200, then to more than 300. The number of people Lucas claimed to have killed was constantly in flux. “It was a circus that would not leave town.” “It was a nightmare,” Ryan says in the series. Suddenly, detectives across the country had a lead for cases that previously had no conclusions. committed in the 1970s and early 1980s, which spurred action in numerous police departments. Lucas claimed responsibility for a spree of murders across the U.S. At his arraignment for Rich’s murder, Lucas shot to national attention after he asked the judge, “What are we going to do about these other 100 women I killed?” Lucas admitted to killing Powell and Rich, recounting the details of their deaths to officers. It was at this point that Lucas began talking - and the stories never really stopped.
#THE REAL ICEMAN KILLER SERIES#
Phil Ryan, the now-retired Texas Ranger who questioned him, says in an interview for the Netflix series that during his questioning, Lucas let slip that there was a warrant out for his arrest. In 1983, years after his release, Lucas was questioned in the deaths of two women: his teenage girlfriend Becky Powell and his 82-year-old landlord Kate Rich.
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In 1960, Lucas killed his mother, for which he served 15 years in prison.
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His father was a double amputee and his mother was a prostitute who was said to have physically abused him as a child, according to claims by Lucas included in The Confession Killer and other reports documenting his life. Lucas was born to an impoverished family in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 1936. While the truth of Henry Lee Lucas’ life is marred by countless lies and inconsistencies, it’s clear that violence and abuse followed him from the beginning. Henry Lee Lucas had a difficult upbringing Here’s what to know about the true story of Henry Lee Lucas and the compromised system in which he operated. Lucas’ story is a testament to the disaster that can follow when police seek easy answers, in this case taking the claims of a conman as a quick way out of stalled detective work. 6, is yet another examination of the hazardous effects of police misconduct. The Confession Killer, which joins Netflix’s robust arsenal of true-crime stories on Dec. Then, the revelation that he’d made up so many of the claims erased any relief they’d found. Of the hundreds of murders Lucas claimed to be responsible for, at least three can still be pinned to him-that of his mother, a girlfriend and his former landlord.Īt first, Lucas’ confessions brought closure to the families of murder victims across the United States. Decades later, DNA testing showed he’d lied about killing at least 20 people. Law enforcement officials across the country, looking for a way to close the many open murder cases on their hands, were happy to accept his claims. Lucas’ confessions, which first emerged in 1983, poured out before the rise of DNA testing that would become invaluable in solving criminal cases.