Henry Lee Lucas was born in Blacksburg, Virginia on August 23, 1936, into extreme poverty and violence, lost an eye in childhood, and served ten years for killing his mother in 1960. He was released in 1970 over his own protest that he was not fit to be out. He drifted through the South with Ottis Toole and Toole's young niece Frieda Powell, whom Lucas called Becky.
He was arrested in Montague County, Texas in June 1983 on a weapons charge, and began to confess. He confessed to killing Becky Powell and an elderly woman he had worked for, and then he kept going.
Over the following two years he confessed to some six hundred murders. A Texas Ranger task force was built around him. He was given a private cell, coffee, cigarettes and milkshakes, and police forces from across the United States came to Georgetown to put their unsolved cases to him. He cleared 213.
It was almost entirely false. In 1985 the Dallas Times Herald published payroll and cheque records placing Lucas in Florida, Virginia and Delaware on days he had confessed to murders in other states. The Texas Attorney General's own report the following year found he could not have committed the great majority.
How it worked is the whole of the case. Investigators showed him case files, drove him to the scenes and asked leading questions, and he obliged. He was not deceiving them against their will. He was giving thirty different agencies the answer each of them had come to Texas hoping for, and being fed and housed and taken seriously for it.
He said afterwards that he had confessed to everything to prove how easily it could be done. He is known in the literature as the Confession Killer.
He was convicted of eleven murders. He was sentenced to death for the killing of an unidentified woman known as Orange Socks, and in 1998 Governor George W. Bush commuted that sentence to life, the only commutation he granted in six years, on the ground that Lucas had been in Florida at the time.
He died of heart failure in prison on March 12, 2001. The credible figure is around three.
The 213 cleared cases were mostly returned to the unsolved pile. Some were never reinvestigated at all, and by then the trails were years cold and the witnesses dispersed. Whatever Lucas did, the clearances did more damage than the killings, and they were the work of the people investigating him.