Sometimes, when you're driving late at night on the Interstate, you come upon cars inexplicably parked on the shoulder. For a moment, the car's chrome and license-plate flashes and, perhaps, you glimpse someone standing near the vehicle, but it's raining or cold and you have miles to go before you sleep and so your car carries you on to some place else far away. If you can believe some of the material in the Netflix documentary The Confession Killer (2019), the vehicle has stopped to deposit a freshly murdered corpse in the nearby drainage ditch or near the field's fence-line. The major highways coursing across the country are all body-dump zones, sectors where murder victims are thrown away to rot in the snowbanks or corn rows. There's a local connection: in 1980, the body of woman who had been tortured and, then, strangled was found near Blue Earth in a shallow pocket in the ground undercut by a stream. The woman could not be identified. After Henry Lee Lucas, the so-called Confession Killer claimed that he had murdered her, the woman, known at that time as the Blue Earth Jane Doe, was buried in a local cemetery. Lucas' confession cleared the case. In fact, Lucas had, at that time, confessed to over 300 killings and allowing the investigating authorities to clear 210 cases. There was only one problem: Lucas was a compulsive liar and almost none of his confessions were true.
The Confession Killer tells a story of human folly so astonishing that it would be inadmissible as the plot of a novel -- the writer would be accused of unduly straining the credulity of the reader. But this bizarre and grotesque series of events actually occurred. A one-eyed pathological liar somehow convinced law enforcement that he had killed as many as 600 people (men, women, and children) in a spree that extended from Seattle to Florida and all points in between. (In one month, according to the implications of Lucas' story, the murderer traveled over 11,000 miles averaging 360 miles daily to kill about 25 people -- this absurd chronicle was regarded as gospel truth by law enforcement authorities in rural Texas, the folks who had the celebrity serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas in custody. Of course, it was all made-up -- in the end, Lucas can probably be accurately accused of three murders, bad enough particularly when you learn that one of them was his mother (beat to death with a mop stick), but not 200 or 360 or 600 killings as he claimed. The Netflix true crime show is manipulative in the extreme -- the show creates suspense by withholding information: the first episode intimates that Lucas was, indeed, a vicious mass murder, but ends with a tease that not all is as one might expect. The second episode unmasks most of Lucas' lies but concludes with another cliff-hanger tease -- the real bad guys in the story, the Texas Rangers, are poised to revenge themselves against those who have challenged their ludicrous cooperation with every po-dunk cop in the nation trying to clear cold cases in his county. The revenge of the Rangers is appalling -- they set up a crusading local DA who has denounced Lucas as a liar for indictment and, then, prosecution as a corrupt official. The DA's travails, which are melodramatic in the extreme, occupies the third program in the series. In the end the DA, who is like a young hillbilly Bill Clinton, ends up vindicated, with a 58 million dollar libel verdict against the local news media that set him up for the criminal charges. In the fourth program, Lucas is sentenced to death, but for a killing that he obviously couldn't have committed -- he was a thousand miles away, when the victim, known as "the girl with the orange socks" was killed. Lucas' lawyer, now the crusading DA who has switched sides to revenge himself on the Rangers, tries to clear Lucas on one of the murders for which he has been convicted. But the idiot former DA, now flush with his 58 million dollar verdict, chooses the wrong case for his defense -- this turns out to be one of the very, very few cases where it is obvious Lucas did kill the victim. The former DA turned defense lawyer produces the alleged victim alive and well -- but she turns out to be a psychotic liar who has fallen in love with Lucas as his pen-pal after being spurned by her other romantic interests, the imprisoned Charley Manson (too sane to want anything to do with her), Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy. The DA turned defense lawyer is disgraced. But George Bush, then governor of the Great State of Texas, grants executive clemency to Lucas since it is obvious that the case on which he is going to be executed was a miscarriage of justice. (Bush actually comes across as one of the few reasonable people in the show.) Lucas dies peacefully of old age in the Huntsville penitentiary. He's buried and, at his funeral, his jailhouse pastor, Sister Clemmie, hears a hundred-thousand angels singing -- presumably there is great rejoicing in Heaven when a sinner is saved. The last episode of the program is the least interesting and, probably, superfluous. Various next-of-kin who had been part of the lynch-mob braying for Lucas' execution are chastened to discover that DNA evidence clears him of all of the crimes in which any DNA proof could be analyzed. As we have known all along, Lucas was a liar from boot to brow and everything he said was untrue. The lynch-mob previously amassed to demand Lucas' death now cries havoc against the Texas Rangers and the good ole boy cops who used Lucas to clear just about every unsolved cold case crime in the nation. And, so, a good time is had by all.
How did Lucas manage to persuade everyone that he was history's most vicious serial killer? Several reasons are obvious, if unflattering to rural Texas law enforcement. First, there is peculiar. affinity between small town criminals and cops -- in fact, the cops usually represent the more dimwitted and cowardly cohort. Therefore, Lucas was, in some strange way, kin to the police who were supposed to supervise him -- he seems to have got along better with the sheriff of the rural county where he was confined and the loutish Texas Rangers than with anyone else in his life. There's not much daylight between crooks and cops in small-towns and it's obvious that Lucas and the local good ole boy cops were profoundly simpatico. Second, rural Texas is a nest of idiots -- most folks are poorly educated and stupid in the boondocks of the Lone Star State. I recall living in Dallas in the late sixties, and, even, as a kid, being appalled by the ignorance and bad education of most Texans. Texas Rangers, in particular, seemed to be astonishingly stupid and inept. For generations, the Rangers had specialized in hunting down and murdering Hispanic people, Mexicans as they were called, and wearing ridiculous white Stetson hats and double leather belts heavy with the Seal of the Great State, this paramilitary group always looked great but, generally, acted like murderous fools. Finally,the cunning and vicious serial killer is a figure with great cachet in our culture -- not just among the buffoons in Texas -- and there seems to have been a great deal of prestige associated with doing errands for the majestically efficient murderer, Henry Lucas. Lucas can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of the dolts surrounding him -- they seem to have plied him with strawberry milk shakes and Pall Mall cigarettes in exchange for the dubious blessings of his "cooperation." In some scenes, the relationship between the County Sheriff and Lucas seems to similar to the way that Sheriff Andy Griffith treats the town-drunk Otis on The Andy Griffith Show -- the self-proclaimed mass murderer struts around the rural jail like Otis, without handcuffs, swilling coffee and, apparently,trusted so much that it's surprising that he was not given a key to his cell (as on the TV show) so that he could let himself in and out at his leisure. Lucas' life was horrific, a nightmare of poverty and abuse, and prison seems the best thing that ever happened to him. He would have confessed to ten-thousand murders if the cops had kept feeding him crime scene photos and police reports and, then, asking if they refreshed him memory, while supplying the pathetic outcast with a bottomless cup of strawberry milkshake. What is remarkable is the obstinate, willful blindness on the part of the sheriff and the Rangers as to Lucas' guile: it wasn't too hard to figure out that Lucas was simply confabulating these confessions -- at one point, he tells bemused members of a Japanese film crew on hand to make a documentary about him that he had "done some murders in (their) country too." The Japanese are polite and shrug their shoulders and, when someone asks him how he got to Japan, he grins toothlessly and says: "Well, I drove." This should have been a tip off that there was something a wee bit wrong with Lucas' enthusiastic penitential confessions.
The show is baroque with plot twists and turns, all of them breathlessly announced. The surviving member of the Texas Rangers task force assigned to Lucas refuses to admit any fault in their investigative techniques. The heirs and next-of-kin of victims wail and howl for revenge. Even the hero, the crusading DA in Waco, seems corrupt and probably compromised. Every locations is established by a portentous drone shot, the camera gliding over some squalid city or neighborhood like a slow-speed Cruise missile. Some aspects of the show are, more or less, beyond description. During part of his crime spree, Lucas, who was intermittently homosexual, had a boyfriend named Ottis Toole -- Toole is unbelievably stupid and obtuse. When Lucas claims ten murders, Toole claims 20 -- but no one believes him. Why? Because he seems too stupid to be able to kill anything. Lucas talks about his sexual technique of killing a dog or cat before "having sex with the dead animal" -- this was a sexual deviation that he and Toole seem to have performed competitively. One woman who Lucas was reputed to have murdered, appears alive as can be and says: "If he says he cut me up and scattered my body parts all over the place, well, you'll see that I'm right here." It would be all be fantastically funny except for one aspect -- every case cleared by one of Lucas lies, left a murderer still among us, uncaptured and, even, unsought. In 2001, a religious fanatic named Robert LeRoy Johnson admitted that when he was a member of the Minnesota State Highway Patrol, he picked up a female hitchhiker at the Bricelyn exit on I-90 in Faribault County. Johnson said he used his handcuffs to restrain the woman while he tortured and raped her, pulling out for fingernails, for instance, to amuse himself. Johnson said that he drove his squad car to an isolated field near the freeway at Blue Earth and stuck the mutilated corpse in a shallow grave near a creek. This was the crime attributed to Henry Lee Lucas in the early 1980's and confirmed as his handiwork by his confession. DNA-testing revealed that the dead woman was named Michelle Yvette Busha -- but this wasn't discovered until 2015.
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