On November 9, 1983, Henry Lee Lucas, an American, was found guilty of murdering his teenage common-law wife.
Although Lucas claimed the killing was accidental, the jury disagreed and found him guilty.
Despite maintaining his innocence in this particular case, Lucas shocked the nation in the 1980s by confessing to a staggering number of murders, claiming he had killed up to 600 people.
Lucas’s confessions led many to consider him one of the most prolific serial killers in history, as he admitted to murdering hundreds of women across the United States.
During that era, detectives often employed various strategies to extract confessions from suspects.
They would frequently provide food, drinks, and certain privileges in prison as incentives for cooperation during interrogations.
Texas Rangers would take Lucas to cafes and restaurants where he would talk about his murder spree.
And for many investigators in the Texas Ranger Division, it did not occur to them that Lucas was lying about crimes he didn’t commit in exchange for a strawberry milkshake or access to television.
Police departments from all over the country would send their cold case files to the Texas Rangers to see if Lucas committed them.
Lucas would look at the files, learn details he had read from them, and confess to an oblivious investigator the next day.
And police were all too happy to pin the blame on this serial killer and close the case.
It was reporters from the Dallas Times Herald who did the calculations on Lucas’ murder spree.
In order to commit all the killings he had confessed to, he would have needed to drive 17,000km in a month.
All the while, he would have needed to find time to find and kill the random victims he had supposedly targeted.
Lucas would eventually be convicted of 11 murders, including his own mother.
But DNA evidence has later ruled him out as a suspect.
Lucas’ lawyer, Ron Ponton, was able to clear him of 80 cases simply by proving he wasn’t there at the time of the murders.
“He talked about killing Jimmy Hoffa, ludicrous stuff, to see if anybody would choke when he told some big lie ââ and nobody would choke,” Ponton said.
Most of his confessions have since been shown to be false, and most of the cases were reopened.
In some instances, other suspects have since been charged.
Because so many of his crimes were shrouded in doubt, Governor George W Bush commuted his death sentence to life in jail.
It was the only death sentence Bush commuted while governor.
Lucas died of heart failure in prison in 2001, when he was 64.
Only three of his supposed murders were confirmed.
Ponton would later find internet fame during a Zoom court hearing in 2021 due to an amusing mistake.
Ponton had accidentally signed into the court procedure with a filter that turned him into a talking cat.
