Post by marionumber1 on Oct 25, 2020 1:13:36 GMT -6
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.
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):
Finally, the Texas attorney general's office decided to take a second look at earlier statements by convicted mass killer Henry Lee Lucas, waiting on death row, that he had been connected with a satanic cult operating along the border of Texas and Mexico. Lucas had called the cult the "Hand of Death." Lucas's credibility had been in serious doubt because he had first "confessed" to the murder of 600 persons all around the United States, then withdrew his statements and said he was responsible for the deaths of only three victims, including his own mother. Three years earlier Lucas had drawn a map of cult killing sites for a Catholic lay worker from Georgetown named "Sister" Clemmie Schroeder, who had served as his spiritual advisor. Jim Boutwell, the sheriff of Texas' Williamson County who aided in a Texas Rangers task force that gathered the Lucas confessions, told a valley newspaper that investigators had verified Lucas was involved in cult activities. He also noted that he had seen a map similar to the one supplied by Sister Clemmie.
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):
When lawmen finally began to sort things out, the ritual killings seemed almost predestined. A map drawn two years ago by confessed mass-killer Henry Lee Lucas had predicted with inexplicable accuracy that the bodies of victims of satanic rituals would be found about where Kilroy and others were found.
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):
Lucas was barely home from that trip when the storm broke, on April 15. Writing for the Dallas Times-Herald, journalist Hugh Aynesworth prepared a series of headline articles, blasting the "massive hoax" that Lucas had perpetrated, misleading homicide investigators and the public, sometimes with connivance from the officers themselves. According to Aynesworth, over-zealous detectives had prompted Lucas with vital bits of information, coaching him through his confessions, deliberately ignoring evidence that placed him miles away from various murder scenes at the crucial moment. From jail, Lucas joined in by recanting his statements across the board. Aside from his mother, he claimed to have slain only two victims -Powell and Rich - in his life. By April 23, he was denying those crimes, despite the fact that he led police to Becky's grave, while Rich's bones had been recovered from his stove, at Stoneburg.
From the beginning, officers had been aware of Henry's penchant for exaggeration. One of his first alleged victims, a Virginia schoolteacher, was found alive and well by police. Some of his statements were clearly absurd, including confessions to murders in Spain and Japan, plus delivery of poison to the People's Temple cultists in Guyana. On the other hand, there were also problems with Henry's retraction. Soon after the Aynesworth story broke, Lucas smuggled a letter to authors Jerry Potter and Joel Norris, claiming that he had been drugged and forced to recant. A local minister, close to Lucas since his 1983 "conversion," produced a tape recording of Henry's voice, warning listeners not to believe the new stories emerging from prison.
The most curious part about Henry's new tale was the role of Hugh Aynesworth, himself. In his newspaper series, Aynesworth claimed to have known of the "hoax" - hearing the scheme from Henry's own lips since October 1983. A month later, on November 9, Aynesworth signed a contract to write Henry's biography. In September 1984, he appeared on the CBS-TV Nightwatch program, offering no objections as videotapes of the Lucas confessions were aired. As late as February 1985, Aynesworth published a Lucas interview in Penthouse magazine, prompting Henry with leading remarks about Lucas "killing furiously" and claiming victims "all over the country" in the 1970s. Through it all, the Times-Herald maintained stony silence, allowing the "hoax" to proceed, while dozens (or hundreds) of killers remained free on the basis of Henry's "false" confessions.
In retrospect, the Aynesworth series smells strongly of sour grapes. A clue to the author's motive is found in his first article, with a passing reference to the fact that Lucas had signed an exclusive publishing contract with a Waco used-car dealer -- shortly after his June 1983 arrest. The prior existence of that contract scuttled Aynesworth's deal, concocted five months later, and prevented him from winning fame as Lucas's biographer. The next best thing, perhaps, would be to foul the waters and prevent competitors from publishing a book about the case. (It is worth noting that Aynesworth omits all mention of his own contract with Lucas, while listing various authors who tried to "cash in" on the "hoax.")
Aynesworth produced an elaborate time-line to support his "fraud" story, comparing Henry's "known movements" with various crimes to discredit police, but the final product is riddled with flaws. Aynesworth rules out numerous murders by placing the Lucas-Toole meeting in 1979, while both killers and numerous independent witnesses describe an earlier meeting, in late 1976. (In fact, Lucas was living with Toole's family in 1978, a year before Aynesworth's acknowledged "first meeting.") The reporter cites pay records from Southeast Color Coat to prove that the killers seldom left Jacksonville, but office manager Eileen Knight recalls that they would often "come and go." (At the same time, Aynesworth places Lucas in West Virginia while he was working in Florida, the same error of which he accuses police.) According to Aynesworth, Lucas spent "all the time" between January and March 1978 with girlfriend Rhonda Knuckles, never leaving her side, but his version ignores the testimony of a surviving witness, tailed by Lucas across 200 miles of Colorado and New Mexico in February of that year. The woman remembers Henry's face - and she recorded his license number for police -- but her story is lost in Aynesworth's account. At one point, Aynesworth is so anxious to clear Henry's name that he lists one victim twice on the time-line, murdered on two occasions, four days apart, in July 1981.
From the beginning, officers had been aware of Henry's penchant for exaggeration. One of his first alleged victims, a Virginia schoolteacher, was found alive and well by police. Some of his statements were clearly absurd, including confessions to murders in Spain and Japan, plus delivery of poison to the People's Temple cultists in Guyana. On the other hand, there were also problems with Henry's retraction. Soon after the Aynesworth story broke, Lucas smuggled a letter to authors Jerry Potter and Joel Norris, claiming that he had been drugged and forced to recant. A local minister, close to Lucas since his 1983 "conversion," produced a tape recording of Henry's voice, warning listeners not to believe the new stories emerging from prison.
The most curious part about Henry's new tale was the role of Hugh Aynesworth, himself. In his newspaper series, Aynesworth claimed to have known of the "hoax" - hearing the scheme from Henry's own lips since October 1983. A month later, on November 9, Aynesworth signed a contract to write Henry's biography. In September 1984, he appeared on the CBS-TV Nightwatch program, offering no objections as videotapes of the Lucas confessions were aired. As late as February 1985, Aynesworth published a Lucas interview in Penthouse magazine, prompting Henry with leading remarks about Lucas "killing furiously" and claiming victims "all over the country" in the 1970s. Through it all, the Times-Herald maintained stony silence, allowing the "hoax" to proceed, while dozens (or hundreds) of killers remained free on the basis of Henry's "false" confessions.
In retrospect, the Aynesworth series smells strongly of sour grapes. A clue to the author's motive is found in his first article, with a passing reference to the fact that Lucas had signed an exclusive publishing contract with a Waco used-car dealer -- shortly after his June 1983 arrest. The prior existence of that contract scuttled Aynesworth's deal, concocted five months later, and prevented him from winning fame as Lucas's biographer. The next best thing, perhaps, would be to foul the waters and prevent competitors from publishing a book about the case. (It is worth noting that Aynesworth omits all mention of his own contract with Lucas, while listing various authors who tried to "cash in" on the "hoax.")
Aynesworth produced an elaborate time-line to support his "fraud" story, comparing Henry's "known movements" with various crimes to discredit police, but the final product is riddled with flaws. Aynesworth rules out numerous murders by placing the Lucas-Toole meeting in 1979, while both killers and numerous independent witnesses describe an earlier meeting, in late 1976. (In fact, Lucas was living with Toole's family in 1978, a year before Aynesworth's acknowledged "first meeting.") The reporter cites pay records from Southeast Color Coat to prove that the killers seldom left Jacksonville, but office manager Eileen Knight recalls that they would often "come and go." (At the same time, Aynesworth places Lucas in West Virginia while he was working in Florida, the same error of which he accuses police.) According to Aynesworth, Lucas spent "all the time" between January and March 1978 with girlfriend Rhonda Knuckles, never leaving her side, but his version ignores the testimony of a surviving witness, tailed by Lucas across 200 miles of Colorado and New Mexico in February of that year. The woman remembers Henry's face - and she recorded his license number for police -- but her story is lost in Aynesworth's account. At one point, Aynesworth is so anxious to clear Henry's name that he lists one victim twice on the time-line, murdered on two occasions, four days apart, in July 1981.
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):
Within an hour of their arrival, A. W. said he saw Ottis Toole. And later, Ted Bundy. I quickly found that Bundy, who had abducted young women in Miami, had been in custody since 1978. Black mark. Toole and Dahmer, simpatico? Because Mary Hagan had said she'd seen Toole at Sears, Willis and I had joked, what were the odds that two famous killers coincidentally had gone to Hollywood Mall at the same time? Who got to Adam first? We'd never considered they could have been in league together. (Like Broward State Attorney investigator Phil Mundy, we simply dismissed William Mistler. Willis thought Hagan actually saw Dahmer but when she watched America's Most Wanted show video of Toole she overwrote her memory and put Toole's face and movements on Dahmer—just like what we believed happened to Bowen.) A. W. said he didn't see Toole at the mall, but couldn't say he wasn't there.
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):
But a few years later the game was back afoot. In FDLE's investigative summary reports of the northwest Florida murders, Toole's information was specific. Further, despite what Lucas told the press in 1989, a year before he had confessed to them as well, and his information matched Toole's. Even further, it matched what FDLE had gotten from Frank Powell, as well as evidence from the crime scenes.
Forgetting their uninspiring conclusions and Lucas's remarks to the contrary, these cases looked real. Including Haack and Karbin, Lucas and Toole were spree killers like they'd said. As for the rest of their maddening confessions, who knows?
Forgetting their uninspiring conclusions and Lucas's remarks to the contrary, these cases looked real. Including Haack and Karbin, Lucas and Toole were spree killers like they'd said. As for the rest of their maddening confessions, who knows?
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):
Often Lucas's information was very specific, and he drew surprisingly talented pencil drawings of who he said were his victims. Some of the women were nudes. But other times he and Toole were vague in terms of time, place, and circumstance. Ryan, who early in the investigation was dubious that Lucas had killed more than once, told me he now thinks Lucas actually committed about fifty murders—not the six hundred he claimed, but still enough to make him one of the worst criminals in modern history.
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:
Creech hitched back to San Francisco and stayed with a girlfriend of Thomasine's. Two days later, the fence called. He said that Thomasine was in Garberville, a few hundred miles north of San Francisco; Creech went to get her and together they headed east. Near Detroit, Creech took a job at a service station, lifted $300 from the till and left. He and Thomasine scored a driveaway car destined for Salt Lake City, a car that was to be the hookup for Creech's first connection with the big time.
The man to whom the car was delivered held a financial interest in the national auto driveaway company from which Creech had contracted in Detroit. He was also the head of a finance-and-loan company in Salt Lake City. (Years earlier, this businessman had run a profitable porn-publishing house in Monaco, which, according to a former employee, was suspected of being a front for transporting more profitable commodities from Monaco to locations in France.) When he met Creech the businessman offered him additional driveaway jobs handling special types of cars. Creech accepted.
Auto transport companies, as they are formally called, are located in every major city in America. During semester breaks, they are eagerly jockeyed for by vehicleless students bent on getting back to, or away from, home. Deliveries are made to repossessing finance companies, relocating two-car families and to people who would rather fly across country than drive their cars. If one is looking for an inexpensive way to travel, the driveaways have a lot going for them. They are also convenient, as Tom Creech was to learn. for the transportation of heroin.
The operation goes like this: A few hundred kilos of pure smack arrives from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle at a port somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles; 20 keys are fitted into the door panels of a repossessed Buick; it is a driveaway—destination, Denver. The name and address given to the unsuspecting driver may not be the final destination. He delivers the car and splits; the car is taken to another location and the heroin is removed.
Sometimes, however, the place when the car is delivered is the final drop. And sometimes the driver is not unwitting. Then all expenses are paid, including motels, with a bonus on completion of the run.
According to Creech, his first run was made in October 1972, from Seattle to Denver. Prior to this he had married Thomasine, and the newlyweds supported their nomadic existence by contracting driveaway smackmobiles to points as distant as Miami, Cincinnati and South Carolina. Between trips, Creech and his wife spent most of their time in Nevada and Arizona.
The man to whom the car was delivered held a financial interest in the national auto driveaway company from which Creech had contracted in Detroit. He was also the head of a finance-and-loan company in Salt Lake City. (Years earlier, this businessman had run a profitable porn-publishing house in Monaco, which, according to a former employee, was suspected of being a front for transporting more profitable commodities from Monaco to locations in France.) When he met Creech the businessman offered him additional driveaway jobs handling special types of cars. Creech accepted.
Auto transport companies, as they are formally called, are located in every major city in America. During semester breaks, they are eagerly jockeyed for by vehicleless students bent on getting back to, or away from, home. Deliveries are made to repossessing finance companies, relocating two-car families and to people who would rather fly across country than drive their cars. If one is looking for an inexpensive way to travel, the driveaways have a lot going for them. They are also convenient, as Tom Creech was to learn. for the transportation of heroin.
The operation goes like this: A few hundred kilos of pure smack arrives from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle at a port somewhere between Seattle and Los Angeles; 20 keys are fitted into the door panels of a repossessed Buick; it is a driveaway—destination, Denver. The name and address given to the unsuspecting driver may not be the final destination. He delivers the car and splits; the car is taken to another location and the heroin is removed.
Sometimes, however, the place when the car is delivered is the final drop. And sometimes the driver is not unwitting. Then all expenses are paid, including motels, with a bonus on completion of the run.
According to Creech, his first run was made in October 1972, from Seattle to Denver. Prior to this he had married Thomasine, and the newlyweds supported their nomadic existence by contracting driveaway smackmobiles to points as distant as Miami, Cincinnati and South Carolina. Between trips, Creech and his wife spent most of their time in Nevada and Arizona.
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.