Catching a New Breed of Killer

By Alessandra Stanley

Two drifters confess to committing hundreds of "serial murders "

They met on a rescue mission soup line in Jacksonville in 1976 and hit it off immediately. But Drifters Henry Lee Lucas, 47, and Ottis Elwood Toole, 36, were drawn together by more than mere loneliness or poverty. According to Lucas, they roamed from coast to coast on a seven-year spree of rape, mutilation and murder that is unequaled in American police records. The two convicts have allegedly confessed to committing, separately and together, hundreds of murders. Though their claims may ultimately prove to be exaggerated, law-enforcement officials say that one or both are prime suspects in 97 cases in 13 states. Their grisly story, says one Florida police official, "makes Charles Manson sound like Tom Sawyer."

If their confessions are even partially true, Lucas and Toole could be textbook examples of a new breed of killer: the serial murderer, whose victims are numerous and whose crimes are geographically far-flung and committed over a period of many years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that serial murderers are behind some 35 death sprees currently under investigation. Alfred Regnery, administrator of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, estimates that of the 21,000 murders committed in the U.S. last year, several thousand can be attributed to this kind of psychopath. "The serial murderer doesn't simply go back to pumping gas," he says. "A senseless murder is not just committed once." The Justice Department has plans to create a national center for analysis of such violent crime. The goal: to help local police departments identify the types of known criminals who might turn into serial murderers and compare evidence on missing-persons files and unsolved homicides.

Until he was arrested in Texas last June, Henry Lee Lucas looked harmless. "He just seemed like an ordinary person, real polite and real nice," recalls Faye Moore, wife of a Pentecostal preacher in Stoneburg, Texas. "I never knew him to take a drink, and he never used foul language." One humid May morning last year, Moore's husband Reuben, 52, gave Lucas and his companion Freida ("Becky") Powell, Toole's 15-year-old niece, a lift in Montague County, Texas. He offered the couple room and board in exchange for chores around his makeshift church. Thirteen months later, following Lucas' confessions, the remains of Powell and one of Moore's neighbors, Katherine Pearl Rich, 80, were found.

Lucas, who is scheduled to be tried in Texas this week for Freida Powell's murder, has already been sentenced to 75 years, after pleading guilty Sept. 30 to the slaying of Katherine Rich. He has been officially charged with twelve other murders during the past eight years. His lawyer plans to plead in the Powell case that his client is not guilty by reason of insanity.

Born poor in rural Virginia to a prostitute and a double amputee, Lucas was convicted in 1960 for stabbing his mother to death. He was sent to prison in Jackson, Mich., on a 20-to-40-year sentence. Paroled in 1970, he returned to prison within the year for an attempted abduction and served a five-year sentence. He was released in 1975.

According to his own creepily cool account, before he teamed up with Toole in 1976 Lucas traveled from state to state, living out of his car, surviving on odd jobs or thefts, and randomly picking up victims. Sometimes he killed alone, sometimes with casual companions. The victims were often hitchhikers of either sex and any age or race. Some were shot, others strangled, still others stabbed. Many were mutilated.

"It was difficult to believe at first," recalls Texas Investigator Paul Smith, "but then we corroborated some of his statements." Lucas cooperated fully, drawing detailed pencil sketches of his victims and, in a few cases, leading investigators on walking tours of murder sites.

Lucas fingered Toole, currently serving a 20-year sentence in Raiford, Fla., for arson, as his most frequent accomplice. During subsequent interviews with police, Toole, Lucas' occasional lover, claimed more than 50 murders of his own, mostly of young men. Like Lucas, Toole was chillingly matter of fact in the telling. "It's as though he were discussing the weather," reported one detective.

Toole's composure collapsed only once, while explaining how he kidnaped and beheaded six-year-old Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Fla., in the summer of 1981. Adam Walsh's disappearance from a shopping mall became a national cause celebre two years ago. It led to the passage last year of the federal Missing Children Act, giving the FBI more authority to investigate disappearances of children, as well as the filming this fall of a made-for-TV movie, Adam. By coincidence, the show aired a week before Toole's prison confession, which he later recanted. But police still consider him the case's prime suspect. "He knows things only the murderer could know," says one Florida policeman.

So many investigators sought information about the two men as possible suspects that last month a three-day conference was held in Monroe, La., to pool the facts. Eighty investigators from 21 states gathered to watch videotapes of the confessions, swap notes on missing-persons files and unsolved homicides, and compare crime lab evidence. And this week 150 detectives from all over Michigan will convene in Lansing to attempt to determine whether Lucas, and possibly Toole, is linked to as many as eleven unsolved murders in the state.

Unlike the serial murderer, the mass murderer, as criminologists define him, confines his spree to one general area and strikes over a relatively short period of time. A prime alleged example: Angelo Buono Jr., the so-called Hillside Strangler, who stands accused in the deaths of ten young women during the Los Angeles winter of 1977-78. Last week he was found innocent of one murder but guilty of two others. The second guilty verdict, returned on Saturday, could subject Buono to California's death penalty. --By Alessandra Stanley. Reported by David S. Jackson/Houston, with other bureaus

With reporting by David S. Jackson This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.