A Mass Murderer Reconsidered

Since he was arrested almost two years ago for murdering an 80-year-old woman, wiry, one-eyed Henry Lee Lucas, 48, has confessed to committing as many as 600 slayings between 1975 and 1983. On the basis of Lucas' confessions, police closed some 210 previously unsolved homicide cases in 26 states. But the Dallas Times Herald last week published a copyrighted story by Reporters Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson contending that Lucas' claims of serial murders were a perverse hoax. Lucas told Aynesworth in 1983 that he had killed only three people and was claiming more murders in an effort to ridicule the police. Lucas knew that his ongoing confessions would delay a transfer to the Texas death row at Huntsville.

The reporters discovered gaping holes in several of the murder cases. Lucas, for example, was charged with a string of six killings and an attempted abduction between Oct. 2 and Nov. 2, 1978. To have committed those crimes, Lucas would have had to travel 1 1,000 miles in his 13-year-old Ford station wagon; in the last four days alone he would have covered 4,100 miles, which averages out to more than 40 m.p.h., 24 hours a day. The reporters say a task force headed by Texas Rangers was so eager to close unsolved cases that it failed to double-check Lucas' stories.