A lot of people here have likely heard of
Henry Lee Lucas, the so-called "confession killer". After he was arrested for murders in Texas that he likely
did commit (the murder of elderly woman Kate Rich and the murder of his underage girlfriend Becky Powell), he began confessing to hundreds of other murders around the country. Many of these purported killings were done with his friend
Ottis Toole. The Texas Rangers paraded him around like a celebrity and he was used to clear out all sorts of unsolved cases. Eventually, when some people in Texas media and law enforcement got wise to what was going on, the narrative flipped and Henry's purported murder spree was labeled a hoax. Henry followed suit by recanting his confessions, to the point where he even ended up denying the Rich and Powell murders that he most certainly
did commit. Texas attorney general Jim Mattox lobbied Governor George W. Bush to commute Lucas's death sentence for the "Orange Socks" (Debra Jackson) murder due to apparent exculpatory evidence against Lucas. And Bush, who rubberstamped every other execution that crossed his desk, indeed ordered the Board of Pardons to review the case, then ended up commuting Lucas's death sentence.
Lucas also confessed that many of his murders were done on behalf of a satanic cult known as the
Hand of Death. This story he told was covered by author Max Call in the 1985 book
Hand of Death, based on dozens of hours of taped interviews with Lucas. According to Lucas, he and Toole were members of this satanic cult that performed ritual ceremonies (including human sacrifice), kidnapped people for human trafficking rings, distributed drugs, and carried out contract murders. Some of the murders Lucas committed were, he claimed, for specific purposes contracted out to the cult, and were mixed in with others that he did for his own personal pleasure. This should raise some eyebrows, because it sounds a lot like the Process cult behind the Son of Sam murders as well as the Thomas Creech case from a decade earlier, neither of which Lucas was likely to have been aware of. One of Terry's informants even (p.759) mentions this same phenomenon of mixing "target crimes" into a larger series of unrelated crimes.
It is the circumstances surrounding the Hand of Death and various other aspects of the Lucas case that make me feel like the mainstream narrative of him as nothing more than a serial false confessor is a cover-up. Yes, many of his confessions were false, but he was still probably a mass killer, and I believe the Hand of Death was a real organization too. I wanted to share the work I've done in that regard since it ties to many of the cases we discuss here.
One aspect of Lucas's story was the satanic cult's reach into Mexico. Lucas said that he and Toole would kidnap children and take them to a ranch in Mexico to be used for cult ceremonies. In 1989, with the exposure of
Adolfo Constanzo's "narcosatanist" cult in Matamoros, Mexico, this aspect of Lucas's cult story was given some more credence. And apparently, his information was so good that authorities were able to
verify Lucas really was involved in cult activities (p.17 of
Painted Black by Carl Raschke):
Indeed, it seems Lucas knew years in advance that a cult operated in the Brownsville TX area right across the border from Matamoros (
Texas Monthly, "The Work of The Devil" by Gary Cartwright, 1989/06):
That, combined with the aforementioned uncanny similarity that the Hand of Death story has to other known cases, is an indicator that Lucas wasn't totally full of it in his confessions.
There are also some rarely highlighted reasons to doubt the narrative that Lucas's confessions were all lies. Author Michael Newton in
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers brings up some ways in which the debunking of Lucas was underhanded (emphases added):
That Lucas even claimed to have been drugged and forced to recant suggests something deeper was going on.
Another excellent book that touches on the Hand of Death story is
The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Book Two: Finding the Victim by Arthur Jay Harris. Harris was a journalist who dug up evidence that serial killer
Jeffrey Dahmer was likely the killer of
Adam Walsh. Ottis Toole gave several apparent false confessions to the crime, and the Hollywood FL police closed the case in 2008 saying that Toole did it, but Harris held firm to his conclusion. Then Harris was contacted in 2009 by a man claiming to
be Adam Walsh, alive in the flesh. This man, dubbed A.W. by Harris, said that Dahmer abducted him and took him to an apartment used by a gang of human traffickers and sexual sadists. A.W. was tortured for weeks but subsequently rescued and was taken in by a family who raised him under a new identity. Harris was skeptical, but another Dahmer victim Billy Capshaw confirmed that A.W. knew little tics of Dahmer that only someone who met him would know, and one of Adam's childhood friends found that A.W. knew certain intricate details from their shared experiences.
So A.W.'s story had some credence, and the curious thing about it is that he implicated this larger network of serial killers (sound familiar?) Dahmer was part of, one of whose members was Ottis Toole (p.56 of Harris):
This made Harris look seriously into whether Toole's activities could have overlapped with Dahmer's, and in the process, he found some indications that the pair were genuine serial killers. For instance, Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) documents confirmed several killings by them in Florida, such as the northwest Florida murders of gas station attendant John P. McDaniel (the father of the Jackson County FL sheriff...perhaps a targeted hit?), Jerilyn Murphy Peoples, Brenda Jo Burton, and Mary Ruby McCray (p.266-267 of Harris):
Plus Harris quoted Phil Ryan, the Texas Ranger who warned law enforcement agencies about the many false confessions that Lucas gave, as saying that he did still believe Lucas was a prolific killer (p.218 of Harris):
The most provocative information that Harris came across was the possibility that Dahmer and Toole knew each other through the Hand of Death cult. Dahmer was known to be interested in satanism, and james1983 on this forum even discovered that Dahmer was linked to John Paul Ranieri from the Process scene. Shortly after getting out of the Army he settled in Miami, reported by Lucas as a major Hand of Death cult center home to its training camp and other meeting places. And Max Call's book mentions Ottis Toole having an "effeminate friend" at a cult hangout bar in Miami whose "pale blue eyes were cold as ice", a good fit for Dahmer's description. Also, Harris was contacted by another witness named Charlie Sutera who claims to have seen Toole and Dahmer together at the Hollywood Mall on the day of Adam's kidnapping.
But the biggest indication that the Hand of Death was real is how closely Lucas's story of how he was inducted into the cult parallels the story of
Thomas Creech. Creech is a serial killer on death row in Idaho right now, and the way his case unfolded was similar to Lucas. Initially arrested on suspicion for a double murder, he soon began confessing to a lot more killings around the country, and claiming that he did many of them while in a satanic cult and/or as murder-for-hire. His confessions actually allowed police to find several bodies, with about 9 of his reported killings being officially confirmed by law enforcement. And I have to find the original source, but I have come across a claim that Maury Terry once said on a radio broadcast that he linked Creech to the same Process cult network behind Son of Sam.
What is most significant in the linked
Oui article about Creech is his story of how he first got recruited into this web of performing deeds for organized crime:
By the way, this heroin operation went to the very top according to Creech, with Colorado Senator Gary Hart as well as Colorado Governor John Love and Ohio Governor John Gilligan being
three big names implicated in it. Creech even claimed he was on his way to Denver to fulfill a contract on Hart's life when he got arrested in Idaho, and this is backed up by
initial reports saying that an informant had told authorities Creech was coming to Denver to kill Hart. Hart's campaign for Senate was managed by Hal Haddon, a political kingmaker in the state of Colorado whose firm's clients have included JonBenet Ramsey's parents, Rockwell International Corporation (in the case against them for environmental violations at Rocky Flats nuclear plant), Hunter Thompson, Hamburg cell associate and Saudi elite Homaidan al-Turki, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Now compare that to Lucas's version (in Max Call's book) of how he first got recruited into the Hand of Death:
imgur.com/a/za3afkI
The similarity is striking. Both claim to have initially been approached by a well-to-do businessman in the auto transport industry (perhaps even the same one? We don't yet know either's identity, as "Don Meteric" is a fake name) and offered a job transporting contraband in these cars, which later led them into satanic worship and contract killings. And there is very little chance that Lucas, or anyone hypothetically feeding him lines, would have known this relatively obscure aspect of the Creech story. To me, this common detail between Creech's and Lucas's stories a decade apart is among the strongest support for the Hand of Death being a real organization.
So what do people think? As much muck as the Lucas case is mired in, I think there is some genuine truth in Lucas's story of being a mass killer and being part of a satanic cult during that time. It feels to me like the pendulum swung too far in the other direction after realizing that Lucas's kill counts were massively inflated. And in doing so, a true story with major parallels to the Son of Sam murders and other cases has been cast aside.
