I've been going through "INTERVIEW WITH MAX CALL: AUTHOR OF THE HAND OF DEATH" Transcribed BY SKYE ANDREWS, on the Serial Killer Calendar site
www.serialkillercalendar.com/INTERVIEW-WITH-MAX-CALL-AUTHOR-OF-THE-HAND-OF-DEATH.phpcomparing what Max Call said there, with the Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole FBI documents cited above, and noting some curiosities;
To begin with, the interviewer asks: "Do you think that the particular people apprehended in connection with the Madam Morris cult were more than just marginally related to the Hand of Death?", it should be "Matamoros cult". You can see the easily misinterpreted phonetic similarity?
["(Max Call) Yeah, there is also a big thing about how did he commit all these murders at various places, these people talked to him about that, there is a lot of interchange of information you know about I did this, you know while you were doing this I did this in that drugged frame of mind a lot of those things stayed in that poor brain of Henrys yet they say he couldn’t possibly go from here to here and there to there in the time that was allowed. I know that Henry because at the Hand of Death camp in the Everglades they trained him to rob banks trained him to rob stores to rape houses for whatever was needed to serve Satan, money was no problem, he could get money whenever he needed it, just rob a store and they told him don’t leave a witness alive, don’t leave anyone who can testify against you. So when he robbed the store he killed the clerk and whoever else was in the store who possibly witnessed it. And he took great pride in the fact that he killed them all. Now here’s a man with a fourth grade education who has never been in a church service, a formal church service in his life except at that religious camp and he couldn’t stay in those services he had to get up and leave
(Interviewer) In Stoneburg?
(Max Call) In Stoneburg, that’s the only time he had ever gone he only went there three times. But here is a man with a fourth grade education, can hardly read and write and when he described the Hand of Satan religious ceremonies took place in the Everglades he described in perfect detail all of the elements of a traditional satanic black mass which follows basically except everything is reversed which follows basically the typical Roman Catholic or Anglican mass in the Christian religion. This for a man with Henrys education he couldn’t possibly have done it, to do it so accurately and explain it so well and describe it in such detail. When they prepared the host in a black mass particularly when human sacrifices are used, Henry described when they put that 5 year old boy on the alter and The Hand the high priest took the dagger and held it above the boy’s body the boy was alive, drugged but alive, brought the dagger down and cut the boys heart out then held the heart up, the beating heart, still beating, held it up in this hands and the blood run down his arms and held it up and says the body of our Lord Satan the same as an Anglican or Catholic priest elevates the host and says the body of our Lord, now a fourth grade education doesn’t provide him with that kind of information. I am firmly convinced that what he described going on in the Everglades is the truth, it actually happened, it existed and it probably exists someplace else now today and that there are people like Henry walking the streets as Henry said there was over 2000 of them, walking the streets, killing but you don’t look for those victims in the murder list. The victims of The Hand if you wanna find the names you look in the missing list because the bodies are generally destroyed they are not left laying around unless the man is travelling and he wants the news to get back to The Hand, The Master, The High Priest that one of his servants is serving him, their Lord and Master. That’s the way they continue to advise that they are still active."]
Here, Max Call claims that Lucas; "described in perfect detail all of the elements of a traditional satanic black mass which follows basically except everything is reversed which follows basically the typical Roman Catholic or Anglican mass in the Christian religion. This for a man with Henrys education he couldn’t possibly have done it, to do it so accurately and explain it so well and describe it in such detail. When they prepared the host in a black mass particularly when human sacrifices are used, Henry described when they put that 5 year old boy on the alter and The Hand the high priest took the dagger and held it above the boy’s body the boy was alive, drugged but alive, brought the dagger down and cut the boys heart out then held the heart up, the beating heart, still beating, held it up in this hands and the blood run down his arms and held it up and says the body of our Lord Satan the same as an Anglican or Catholic priest elevates the host and says the body of our Lord".
I might have missed something, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but in the FBI documents I can't find Lucas describing "in perfect detail all of the elements of a traditional satanic black mass", as Max Call explains it there. In those documents, Toole and Lucas do talk about watching a woman or a man being murdered, people having sex with the corpse, then cutting up the bodies, cooking them and eating them. But I don't see where either of them describe a 5 year old boy (or anyone else) being murdered by having his heart cut out of him and then "a high priest" holding up the still beating heart and saying; "the body of our Lord Satan!"
If Max Call is saying that a man with a fourth grade education can't have any awareness of things that traditional and pop culture mythologies depict or suggest that "satanic cultists" do, that's just wrong. Such a man can still watch trashy horror movies on late night tv, or read Jack Chick comics & tracts wherein the same gruesome fantasies are depicted in graphic detail, etc.
But this "in perfect detail all of the elements of a traditional satanic black mass which follows basically except everything is reversed which follows basically the typical Roman Catholic or Anglican mass" and "do it so accurately and explain it so well and describe it in such detail", doesn't seem to be in the 1984 FBI documents. And Max Call clearly didn't learn this very detailed idea about "what satanists do" from talking to and recording Lucas, he obviously had such a mental image before ever meeting Lucas, otherwise he couldn't compare what he claims Lucas told him against what "a more educated person" might know. Don't you think?
So if there is a scene as described by Max Call, in his 1985 book but not in the 1984 FBI documents - that suggests to me it didn't come from Lucas at all. It came from Max Call, filling in/ coloring in details "as they ought to be" in his own mind. Of course, once the book was published and both Lucas and Toole have a copy, they can refer to it and see in Call's words what "real satanic cultists" do, believe, profess,etc.
It seems likely to me, that the same holds with ALL such details of their alleged Hand of Death cult involvement and supposed serial murder spree, which appears in the book but not in FBI documents. Because, if I'm not wrong, Max Call states in the interview that HE "made up an excuse" (alibi) for one of Lucas alleged murders and put that in his book. Again, am I wrong?
["(Max Call) And so Henry says yeah that’s what I think I did tell them and I said all right that what we will put in the book. Now when Maddox told Henry to recant and that we would walk on everything, Maddox got him a new attorney and everything else to defend him and to carry this out and then this attorney then informed him that they had found the truck driver that Becky left with to go to Florida and that Becky was still alive and this truck driver would come into court and testify that he took Becky away and that way you couldn’t of killed Becky, that will remove that conviction. So I ask Henry, I said hold on a minute do you mean after the entire world knows you killed Becky she couldn’t pick up a phone some place and phone and say to the District Attorney, Hey I’m Becky, Henry didn’t kill me, why wouldn’t she do that Henry? I don’t know, I said yes you do, you know why because you murdered her and her uncle cut her up and scattered the parts in that field, that’s why. And he looked down at the floor and he wouldn’t look at me after that, he wouldn’t look at me again from that point on.
(Interviewer) And you think it’s like he’s been quotes as saying that that was the death the bothered him the most was Becky
(Max Call) Yeah, that was the only one that he loved that he killed. You see I sent a copy of this book as a gift to Jim Maddox when things started to boil, Maddox read the book, he saw the excuse Henry used with Becky, not knowing it was something I had made up for him to use as an excuse and then he went to Henry and said we found the truck driver but she never left with the truck drive".
