Serial killing duo Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole murdered dozens in a cross-country killing spree over the 1970s-early 1980s. They also claimed credit for scores of murders it was believed would have been impossible to commit. Lucas was born in Blacksburg, Virginia on August 23, 1936, one of seven children of Nellie and Anderson Lucas. Nellie was a registered Chippewa Indian and an alcoholic. Anderson had lost both legs in a railroad accident and was unable to do manual labor; he made bootleg alcohol and sold pencils. The family's income mostly came from Nellie working as a prostitute with Anderson supposedly her pimp. Her children were mostly fathered by johns, although it was claimed that two of them, including Henry, were Anderson's. Nellie was born back in the previous century and was over a decade older than her husband; she was nearly 50 when Henry arrived.Sometimes Nellie would force Anderson and her sons to watch her servicing johns. Lucas claimed one of his earliest childhood memories was being forced to watch one such session, but he couldn't bring himself to and had to go outside whereupon his mother beat him for refusing to watch. When he was 8 years old she beat him with a wooden board so hard that he was knocked unconscious for three days. At age 10, one of his brothers cut him with a knife and he developed an infection in his left eye. Nellie ignored the injury for a week. Finally, while he was in school the teacher swatted him on the head with a ruler for nodding off in class, causing the eyeball to burst and it had to be surgically removed and replaced with a glass eye. Later medical examinations of Lucas tended to support the idea that he had brain damage from these injuries.
Nellie also forced her son to cross dress, supposedly so she could pimp him out. After being forced to go to school in a dress, his teachers complained and a court order finally put an end to it. But Nellie continued to bully him relentlessly; once an uncle gave him a mule as a birthday present and she immediately shot and killed it and then beat Henry for forcing her to pay to have the carcass disposed of. He was unpopular with other children and often bullied. Another time a teacher gave Lucas a pair of shoes since he would come to school barefoot. Nellie berated him for accepting charity, beat him, and threw away the shoes.Anderson Lucas died in October 1951 when he got drunk one evening and passed out outside during a cold fall rain, a result of which he developed pneumonia which subsequently killed him. Henry meanwhile dropped out of school when he was 12 and ran away from home, drifting around Virginia. As he entered his teen years, he began a homosexual relationship with his half brother and also engaged in bestiality.Lucas committed his first murder at the age of 14. On March 12, 1951, he encountered 17 year old Laura Burnley outside a bus stop in Lynchburg. Burnley was supposedly willing to hang out with him but refused when Lucas proposed sex. He then tried to rape her but she fought back. Lucas strangled the girl and buried her in some woods near Harrisburg. Her disappearance remained unsolved until Lucas confessed to murdering her in 1984, but the body was never found.
Lucas was convicted in 1954 of several burglaries and sentenced to six years in prison. In September 1959, he escaped and was quickly captured. He was paroled two months later and went to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with his half sister Opal Jennings. Around the same time Lucas was engaged to Stella Curtis, a pen pal he'd met in prison. Nellie went to visit Henry for Christmas but disliked his fiancee and instead insisted he must go back home to Blacksburg as she was now in her 70s and wanted a caretaker as she aged. Henry wouldn't do it and had a number of violent arguments with his mother. These arguments escalated until January 11, 1960 when Nellie smacked him with a broom. Henry retaliated by stabbing her in the neck; he recalled that he was drunk and said he didn't want to have anything to do with his mother anymore. After seeing what he did, he fled the house. Opal came back and found Nellie on the floor in a pool of blood, barely alive. She called an ambulance but her mother died. Lucas was arrested across the state line in Ohio and insisted he did it in self-defense and that his mother had abused him since childhood.This defense did not win sympathy from a jury and he was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Lucas made several suicide attempts and was transferred from Jackson State Penitentiary to Ionia State Hospital where he was given a full round of electroshock therapy, behavior therapy, and antidepressants. After four years at the hospital, Lucas was sent back to the prison. He was released June 3, 1970 due to prison overcrowding.
In December 1971, Lucas tried to kidnap a 15 year old girl at gunpoint. He was caught and convicted of that offense as well as unlawful possession of a firearm. While incarcerated, Lucas established a relationship with a family friend and the widow of a cousin, Betty Crawford, who'd written to him. Lucas was paroled in August 1975, moved to Port Deposit, Maryland, and married Crawford and moved in with her and her two daughters in Pennsylvania at year's end and took a job at a mushroom farm. They divorced in a year when Crawford accused Lucas of molesting their daughters. He moved to Jacksonville, Florida where he met Otis Toole.Toole, a Jacksonville native, was born March 5, 1947, eleven years younger than Lucas. His alcoholic father abandoned him and his mother made him wear girls' dresses and call him "Susan." Toole was molested many times by relatives and family friends, including his older sister. His brothers beat him and his maternal grandmother was supposedly into occult rituals and introduced him to Satanism in his childhood, including practices like grave robbing. He was diagonosed as being borderline retarded with an IQ of about 75 and was plagued by epileptic seizures. Toole ran away from home often and would sleep in abandoned houses. He also enjoyed starting fires and found them erotic.He claimed a friend of his father's sodomized him when he was 5 and that he knew he was gay by the age of 10. Toole had his first consenting sexual relationship when he was 12, with a neighbor boy. He dropped out of school at 13 and began frequenting gay clubs. Toole worked as a male prostitute in his teens and developed a pornography addiction. Like Henry Lucas, Toole also committed his first murder at 14 when a traveling salesman propositioned him for sex and he ran the man over with his own car. His first arrest came in August 1965, for loitering.
It is not clear what Toole was doing for much of the next eight years, but apparently he lived in the Southwest as a drifter who made a living through prostitution and panhandling. He was suspected in the murder of a 24 year old woman named Patricia Webb in Nebraska in 1974, which state he was then residing in. Toole left the state shortly afterwards and moved to Boulder, Colorado. A 31 year old woman named Ellen Holman was murdered there October 14 and Toole was suspected, so he quickly left Colorado. He hitchhiked his way back to Jacksonville and on January 14, 1976, he married a woman 25 years older than him, but she left him in a few days after finding out that he was gay. Toole met Henry Lucas at a soup kitchen and they began a homosexual relationship.Lucas began living with Toole and his mother in Springfield, Florida and befriended Toole's 11 year old niece Frieda "Becky" Powell, who was mildly retarded and had escaped juvenile detention. For three years Lucas and Toole were gainfully employed at a roofing company in Jacksonville. The two also began a cross-country murder spree that lasted several years and mainly targeted hitchhikers, prostitutes, and transients. Powell sometimes accompanied them on these sortees and may have helped them lure victims.
Confirmed victims of Lucas's based on his confessions (not including his mother and Laura Burnley) include:*Linda Phillips, 26, a schoolteacher who vanished from Richardson, Texas on August 8, 1970. She was found dead two days later, stabbed 26 times and sodomized. Lucas claimed he forced her car off-road at gunpoint, forced her to undress, and stabbed her.*Huntington, WV police officer Clemmie Curtis, age 30, who was found August 3, 1976 handcuffed to a tree near his patrol car outside of town, dead of a single gunshot wound to the chest--Curtis's death had been ruled a suicide until Lucas confessed to shooting him. The officer's widow was awarded a life insurance payment that had been previously denied to her until the truth around his death came out.*Lillie Darty, 18, who thumbed a ride with Lucas in Harrison County, Texas on November 11, 1977. She was raped and shot in the head; her remains found three weeks later in some woods near Marshall.*Debra Jackson, 23, murdered about October 30, 1979 in Georgetown, Texas. She was strangled and believed to have died only hours before her body was found. Jackson was known only as "Orange Socks" for decades as they were the only article of clothing found on her body and not until 2019 was she identified through DNA.*Dianna Bryant, 17, murdered April 26, 1981 when Lucas broke into her Brownfield, Texas apartment with the intent of robbing it. He strangled Bryant with an electrical cord.*Glenna Biggers, 65, found dead December 20, 1982 near Plainview, Texas. Her stomach had a butcher knife stuck in it and a fork stuck in her throat. Lucas had broken into her home with the intent of robbing it, killed her, and stole $180 in cash.*Laura Donez, 16, skipped school in Houston on April 16, 1983 and vanished. Two days later an oil worker saw a forest fire burning in Montgomery County. In the woods Donez's body was discovered strangled, raped, and beaten before the fire was set.
Other victims Lucas and Toole are believed to have killed include:*Marie Heiser, 50, found dead in some woods near Townsend, Delaware on June 27, 1977. She had been beaten on the head and had self-defense wounds, indicating she'd fought back. Lucas was residing in Elkton, Maryland at the time.*Stella McLean, 45, disappered from a Scottsbluff, Nebraska restaurant February 7, 1978. Two months later her decapitated body was found off I-25 in Platte County, Wyoming. McLean was raped and strangled, but her head was never found.*Janet Callies, 40, disappeared from the Sandbar, a bar near I-80 in Grand Island, Nebraska November 15, 1978. Lucas admitted that they strangled Callies and buried her body near the South Dakota state line. He remembered some personal details such as how she was a mother of three.*Cheryl Scherer, 19, disappeared from a service station she worked at in Scott City, Missouri April 17, 1979. Lucas claimed only to having killed a young woman around that time and although he, Toole, and some of Toole's relatives were in the area at the time, there was insufficient evidence to pin the murder on them.*An unidentified female was found in Iola, Texas October 29, 1981, dead of blunt force head injuries and wrapped in a plastic bag. Lucas said the girl was from Durham, North Carolina and that they drove her to Texas. He believed her name was Cheryl and said he and Toole strangled and beat her with a tire iron.Lucas claimed he and Toole crucified some of the victims and ate part of their remains. He said they killed their victims every possible way outside burning or poisoning--some were strangled, some beaten, some shot, some stabbed, some run over with vehicles. He felt no emotions while doing it and that it became an "out of body experience."
On July 27, 1981, Toole abducted and murdered Adam Walsh. Walsh, age 6, was at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida that day with his mother Reve Drew on a shopping trip. They went into a Sears and Reve went off to look at table lamps while Adam went to an Atari video game display that had a crowd of children lined up in front of it. Reve came back a short time later to find the video game display deserted. A store employee told her that the children had gotten into an argument about whose turn it was to play the store demo game console and that a security guard told them they would have to stand outside if they couldn't behave themselves. Some of the boys were older than Adam; they had been asked if their parents were in the mall, to which they said no. It was thought that Adam was too shy to say his mom was shopping for lamps nearby and that the security guard presumed he was with the older boys and made him go outside with them.Reve then checked out the toy department but her son was not there either. She got the store employees to call for Adam over the PA system and ran into her mother-in-law Jean Walsh, who helped look for him. After searching all over the Sears and finding no sign of Adam anywhere, they finally called police.On August 10, a child's severed head was found in a drainage ditch along the Florida Turnpike near Vero Beach, about 130 miles from Hollywood, by Detective Ralph Latimer and an Indian River County deputy. Divers searched the canal and Reve and her husband John Walsh appeared on national TV saying they hoped their son was still alive. A $100,000 reward was offered for his safe return. The head was subsequently identified as Adam's. Autopsy determined the cause of death as asphyxiation and it was believed that he'd been dead for several days. The rest of Adam's remains were never found and the head was kept in a freezer at the morgue until the case was declared closed in 2008.
Otis Toole eventually confessed to murdering Walsh. He said that he came across the 1st grader outside the mall after the security guard kicked him out and pulled up to him in his '71 Cadillac. Toole offered Walsh toys and candy to lure him into the car, then began driving down I-95 towards Jacksonsville. He said Walsh, initially friendly, became increasingly panicky as they drove and started crying and demanding to see his mom. Toole punched him in the face, but this just made him cry harder, so he beat the boy unconscious. He drove to a deserted service road north of Radebaugh Road overpass in St. Lucie County. Seeing that Walsh was still alive, Toole strangled him with the car's seat belt, pulled the body outside, and beheaded him with a machete. He burned the body in an old refrigerator and tossed the head in the drainage ditch where it was found. Toole claimed he kidnapped Walsh with the intent of making him his adopted son, but "it didn't work out." His Cadillac was found to have dried blood on its carpet. The source of the blood was not determined and Hollywood police eventually lost the car, carpet, and machete.John Walsh went on to become an anti-crime advocate and host of the TV show America's Most Wanted. In 2008, Florida authorities declared that they were satisified that Toole killed Adam Walsh and that they were closing the case after 27 years despite a lack of any new physical evidence. John Walsh accepted their claim and said he believed Toole killed his son.Toole also confessed to murdering David Schallart, an 18 year old hitchhiker, found February 6, 1980 off I-10 in northwest Florida, shot five times in the head, and Ada Johnson, 20, whom he shot in the head outside Fort Walton Beach after abducting her from a Tallahassee nightclub.
On January 20, 1982, Lucas talked Becky Powell into running away with him to avoid child welfare officials. The pair drifted across the country and made their way to California where an employer's wife asked them to work for her ailing 82 year old mother Katie Rich. Rich, Lucas, and Powell all disappeared in three weeks. Her relatives had complained that the two did their jobs poorly and had also written checks on Rich's bank account. While hitchhiking, Lucas and Powell were picked up by the minister of a Pentecostal religious commune called The House of Prayer in Stoneburg, Texas. Convinced that Lucas and the 15 year old Powell were married, he offered Lucas a job as a roofer while letting them stay in an apartment at the commune where they attended religious services. Powell eventually became unhappy with the situation and complained that she wanted to go back to Florida. After she disappeared, Lucas claimed she left him and got a ride with a trucker at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.On June 10, 1983, Lucas was arrested by a Texas Ranger for possessing an illegal firearm. While in jail, he wrote a letter to the sheriff saying "I have killed for the past 10 years and no one will believe me. I cannot go on doing this. I also killed the only girl I ever loved." He subsequently confesssed to murdering Powell and Katie Rich. Lucas said he lured Powell to a field on the outskirts of Denton, Texas on August 23, 1982, stabbed her in the chest, had sex with the corpse, dismembered it, and scattered the remains. In the town of Ringgold on September 16, he lured Katie Rich into helping him look for Becky on a campground. He then stabbed the old woman in the chest, carved an upside down cross on her chest, and had sex with the body before stuffing it in a drainage pipe. Lucas showed police to the bodies but they were in poor condition and could not be positively identified.
Five months after his arrest, Lucas was transferred to a Williamson County jail where he was unpopular with other inmates and smacked around and threatened by them. He attempted suicide and claimed police stripped him naked, wouldn't let him have cigarettes or bedding, held him in an unheated jail cell, mutilated his genitals, and wouldn't let him speak to an attorney. After four days, Lucas pled guilty to murdering Powell and Rich and also claimed to have killed more than 100 persons. It was believed that about 28 of the murders were creditable confessions. Although he claimed jail staff abused him, in fact he was given preferential treatment and feted in exchange for his confessions, even being allowed to go out to dinner at restaurants, able to walk around jails and police stations freely, and not having to wear handcuffs much of the time.Lucas was ultimately convicted of ten homicides as well as his mother's murder back in 1960 but was sentenced to death only for the murder of Debra Jackson although work records from his employer in Jacksonville indicated that he'd been working the day she disappeared. It is now generally believed Lucas did not kill Jackson. He remained on death row until 1998 when Texas governor George W. Bush commuted his sentence to life in prison. Lucas passed away from congestive heart failure in his cell on March 12, 2001.
Otis Toole meanwhile would later claim he and Lucas were part of a cult called "The Hands of Death" but this was dismissed for lack of any evidence that such an outfit existed. On January 4, 1982, Toole barricaded a 65 year old neighbor named George Sonnenberg in a boarding house in Jacksonville he was living in and set the place on fire. Sonnenberg succumbed to burn injuries a week later. Toole was arrested in April 1983 for a different arson incident in Jacksonville and confessed to setting Sonnenberg's residence on fire. He said the two had a homosexual relationship and later argued with each other, which led to him deciding to kill Sonnenberg. He was found guilty of murdering Sonnenberg in April 1984 and sentenced to death. Toole was convicted a few months of strangling a 19 year old woman in Tallahassee and received a second death sentence, but both sentences were later appealed and commuted to life in prison.Toole died of liver cirrhosis at Florida State Prison on September 15, 1996.
>>18057594>>18057601>>18057621Is there any serial killer who had a normal childhood?
>>18057660Ha ha boy I hope that mall cop got fired for that blunder.
murdering people was so easy in the 70s, they practically let you do it
>>18057601>>18057594>>18057613this dude's mom was a dick tbqh
>>18057594seriously if you had to watch your mom fucking random dudes how could you ever be normal? you'd be a completely broken human being.
You think the fact that his mom also had him when she was almost 50 could have...
>>18057594>>18057601>>18057621Why were Silent Generation Americans so fucked in the head ? This isn't the kind of stories you heard earlier or later
>>18057601>the kid who comes to school in a dress and is the son of a known prostitute is friendless and avoided by other childrenshock?
>>18057807that was when leaded gas started coming into use, so Silent Generation and boomers had scrambled eggs for brains
>>18057807>This isn't the kind of stories you heard earlier or laterUnless it was Albert Fish.
tf was wrong with boomers anyway?
there was a boomer who left a comment on Youtube saying he did time in FSP in the 80s and he brought food to death row inmates including Ted Bundy and Otis Toole. said Toole was creepy as fuck. later when he got his sentence commuted and went to general pop dude said he avoided contact with him, he was that unnerving.
>>18057670>all evidence including the car lostgod these cops were retarded
>>18057621>>18057601>>18057594Just white people things.
>>18057621>Toole, a Jacksonville native, was born March 5, 1947, eleven years younger than Lucas. His alcoholic father abandoned him and his mother made him wear girls' dresses and call him "Susan." Toole was molested many times by relatives and family friends, including his older sister. His brothers beat him and his maternal grandmother was supposedly into occult rituals and introduced him to Satanism in his childhood, including practices like grave robbing. He was diagonosed as being borderline retarded with an IQ of about 75 and was plagued by epileptic seizures. Toole ran away from home often and would sleep in abandoned houses. He also enjoyed starting fires and found them erotic.>He claimed a friend of his father's sodomized him when he was 5 and that he knew he was gay by the age of 10. Toole had his first consenting sexual relationship when he was 12, with a neighbor boy. He dropped out of school at 13 and began frequenting gay clubs. Toole worked as a male prostitute in his teens and developed a pornography addiction. Like Henry Lucas, Toole also committed his first murder at 14 when a traveling salesman propositioned him for sex and he ran the man over with his own car. His first arrest came in August 1965, for loitering.heckin based wholesomearino 1950s childhood just like my based Coke ads
>>18057601>Lucas committed his first murder at the age of 14. On March 12, 1951, he encountered 17 year old Laura Burnley outside a bus stop in Lynchburg. Burnley was supposedly willing to hang out with him but refused when Lucas proposed sex. He then tried to rape her but she fought backThe friendzone means exactly what it means, dammit.
>>18057621>a friend of his father's sodomized him when he was 5 and that he knew he was gay by the age of 10many such cases
>>18057594>Believing Lucas and the 15-year-old Powell were a married couple, the minister found Lucas a job as a roofer while allowing the couple to stay in a small apartment on the commune where they attended church services>Lucas lured Powell to an isolated field in stabbed her in the chest, engaged in necrophilia with her corpse before he dismembered and decapitated her and scattered her body pieces.Christcucks strike again
>>18057601>Nellie also forced her son to cross dress, supposedly so she could pimp him out. I wish that was me
>>18058269>>>/lgbt/
Imagine what they smelled like.. they were basically showerless drifters most of the time and halfway/totally retarded. Yet they stilled pulled! I think all the people associated with were also huffing fumes..
>>18058205SAAR
>>18057882It doesn't but okay
>>18057874the Florida Panhandle was historically the Mecca of inbred methbillies
>>18057670man Walsh had a good grift going for years, he made a lot of money off his son's horrific death
>>18057691>He said the two had a homosexual relationship and later argued with each other, which led to him deciding to kill Sonnenberg.Imagine the smell.
>>18057594I know it was the backwoods of Virginia but these dudes must have been desperate to tap an old woman who'd had a bunch of kids. Guess alcohol can make all things possible.
>>18058973it does indeed
>>18057594they were innocent
Wish runaway teenage boy sluts were still a thing.Boomers had it so easy.
