Henry Lee Lucas

Henry Lee Lucas was a murderer best known for allegedly killing hundreds of people in the 1960s and '70, though only three (including his mother) were confirmed. He was born on August 23, 1936, in Blacksburg, Virginia to alcoholic parents. His mother ruled the household with an iron fist and prostituted herself in their backwoods community to make money. Lucas's sexual deviancy formed in his teen years. He reported having sex with his half-brother and with dead animals. In 1960, he was sentenced to 10 years for the murder of his mother.

Paroled in 1970, Lucas went back to jail for the attempted kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint. Released again in 1975, he traveled to Michigan and teamed up with a petty thief named Ottis Toole. They shared an unhealthy interest in rape and death. In 1979, Lucas traveled the country with Ottis and his young niece, Becky Powell, who was intellectually disabled. Lucas and Powell became romantically involved, filling one another's lifelong need for love and respect. However, he eventually killed Powell along with Katharine Rich, an elderly woman with whom they had been staying. Lucas was arrested in 1983 for the possession of a deadly weapon. In his cell, Lucas confessed to murdering hundreds of people, though no proof existed beyond three known victims. Lucas sat on Death Row, later changed to life in prison by Texas Governor George W. Bush. While on Death Row, Lucas became a born again Christian and spent the last 18 years of his life as a model prisoner. He died in a Texas prison from natural causes at the age of 64 on March 12, 2001.

Reflecting what we learned from the Good or Evil documentary, Henry Lee Lucas did have a great tendency towards sociopathy. He had no compunction about killing and had been caught lying repeatedly. When tests were done, small abnormalities were found in the frontal lobes, temporal lobes and in the parts of the brain that are related to emotional control. Lucas's brain damage was the direct result of a head injury that occurred between the ages of five and ten and was consistent with Lucas's claim that his mother smashed a 2x4 across the back of his head when he was seven. The next year, his older brother cut Lucas's face and eye with a knife. Lucas eventually lost the left eye after another blow to the face.

In accordance with the criminologists' theories on nutritional habits affecting antisocial behavior, Lucas' diet during 1970 to 1982, the years during which he claims to have killed hundreds of people, included almost daily consumption of alcohol, a variety of drugs, pots of coffee, five packs of cigarettes, peanut butter and cheese. According to a chemist, Dr. Walsh, Lucas's cadmium concentration was more than 30 times the population median value, and was the highest level ever observed in a human being out of thousands tested. Walsh also suggested that Lucas had extreme personality deterioration after alcohol ingestion.

Lucas's childhood trauma trained him to compensate for his dyscontrol by focusing all of his energy on the survival of each moment and maintaining the semblance of a healthy, integrated identity. Lucas constantly scrambled for acceptance and sanity.

Referring to the Good or Evil documentary, I agreed with Jim Fallon's theory: that while an individual's biological background may increase their changes of being a violent psychopath, their environment decides whether they will actually become one. It is difficult to tell whether Lucas could have lived a better life if he didn't grow up in a bad environment or if he would've still acted on his sociopathic tendencies despite outside factors. I believe that there are factors that individuals can control though. If Lucas' parents were not alcoholic and cared more for Lucas, maybe things would be different. One thing I noticed is that there was not one person he interacted who thought to get help for Lucas or for themselves. We'd all like to think that if we were in that situation, we'd do something differently. Maybe one would, but it's not likely.