Henry Lee Lucas was born in Virginia in 1932. An unwanted child, he was beaten regularly by his mother, who also beat his crippled alcoholic father. He was often dressed as a girl, and forced to watch his mother's activities as a prostitute. Malnourished and uneducated, he never developed an ability to assign value to life. As a teenager he reported having sex with his half-brother and with animals whose throats they slit first. Lucas became a career criminal and a drifter, claiming to have first killed and raped a girl at the age of 15. He was in and out of correctional institutes until 1960, when he stabbed his mother to death in an argument. He was then sentenced to prison and later to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as a suicidal psychopath, sadist, and sexual deviant. Despite this, he was paroled in 1970, and went back to drifting. He acquired a friend and partner in Ottis Toole, a dim-witted violent homosexual who claimed many lives on his own, and a common-law wife in Toole's niece, pre-teen Becky Powell. Together, Toole and Lucas claim to have killed hundreds of people, of both sexes and various ages. In 1983. Lucas was arrested for carrying a gun and a religious conversion led him to confess to multiple murders. He was convicted of two killings, those of Becky Powell, whom he stabbed after an argument, and an elderly widow whom they had been hired to care for. Lucas then led officers to grave sites in several states, volunteering details that allowed many homicides and missing persons cases to be closed. Some speculate. however, that Lucas has concocted these confessions to delay his death sentence.

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