Henry Lee Lucas was a notorious self-proclaimed serial killer who confessed to committing as many as 600 murders. But as detailed by the new Netflix documentary series The Confession Killer, most of these claims were lies. Through archival footage from news channels and police confessional videos, and interviews with law enforcement officials and the families of victims, directors Robert Kenner and Taki Oldham offer a compelling look at the fallout wrought by Lucas’ false confessions—and the police officers who were more than willing to go along with them.
Lucas’ confessions, which first emerged in 1983, poured out before the rise of DNA testing that would become invaluable in solving criminal cases. Law enforcement officials across the country, looking for a way to close the many open murder cases on their hands, were happy to accept his claims. Decades later, DNA testing showed he’d lied about killing at least 20 people. Of the hundreds of murders Lucas claimed to be responsible for, at least three can still be pinned to him—that of his mother, a girlfriend and his former landlord.
At first, Lucas’ confessions brought closure to the families of murder victims across the United States. Then, the revelation that he’d made up so many of the claims erased any relief they’d found.
The Confession Killer, which joins Netflix’s robust arsenal of true-crime stories on Dec. 6, is yet another examination of the hazardous effects of police misconduct. Lucas’ story is a testament to the disaster that can follow when police seek easy answers, in this case taking the claims of a conman as a quick way out of stalled detective work. Here’s what to know about the true story of Henry Lee Lucas and the compromised system in which he operated.
Henry Lee Lucas had a difficult upbringing
While the truth of Henry Lee Lucas’ life is marred by countless lies and inconsistencies, it’s clear that violence and abuse followed him from the beginning. Lucas was born to an impoverished family in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 1936. His father was a double amputee and his mother was a prostitute who was said to have physically abused him as a child, according to claims by Lucas included in The Confession Killer and other reports documenting his life.
In 1960, Lucas killed his mother, for which he served 15 years in prison. In 1983, years after his release, Lucas was questioned in the deaths of two women: his teenage girlfriend Becky Powell and his 82-year-old landlord Kate Rich. Phil Ryan, the now-retired Texas Ranger who questioned him, says in an interview for the Netflix series that during his questioning, Lucas let slip that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Ryan arrested Lucas shortly thereafter. It was at this point that Lucas began talking — and the stories never really stopped.
The murder claims began to pile up
Lucas admitted to killing Powell and Rich, recounting the details of their deaths to officers. At his arraignment for Rich’s murder, Lucas shot to national attention after he asked the judge, “What are we going to do about these other 100 women I killed?”
Lucas claimed responsibility for a spree of murders across the U.S. committed in the 1970s and early 1980s, which spurred action in numerous police departments. Suddenly, detectives across the country had a lead for cases that previously had no conclusions.
“It was a nightmare,” Ryan says in the series. “It was a circus that would not leave town.”
The number of people Lucas claimed to have killed was constantly in flux. Almost as soon as he confessed to killing 100 people, the number blossomed to 150, then 200, then to more than 300. At one point, Lucas claimed he was responsible for killing 600 people. According to Lucas, he killed people across age range, sex and race all over the United States, using a variety of violent methods, from running people over to stabbing them, and sometimes decapitating victims after they were dead.
