Henry Lee Lucas, American murderer (d. 2001)
Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001) was an American convicted serial killer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and the murder of two others in 1983. He rose to infamy after he confessed to around 600 other murders after his conviction while in prison to the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and officially attributed the murders to Lucas; he was considered the most prolific serial killer in history. Lucas was convicted of murdering 11 people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson. An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper showed that many of the murders Lucas confessed to were flatly impossible for him to have committed; while the Rangers defended their work, a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas concluded Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed. Lucas' death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. Lucas himself recanted the confessions as a hoax, except that of his mother. He died of congestive heart failure in 2001.Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Rangers and caused a re-evaluation in police techniques and greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the ostensibly trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confession" to crimes of extreme seriousness might encourage prisoners such as Lucas, who had little to lose, to make false confessions. Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator should know. The police also did not record their interviews, making it impossible to know for sure how much information interviewers accidentally gave Lucas unprompted.