Law: Master Of Cant and Recant

Serial killers are the folklore monsters of the media age. And to hear him tell it, Henry Lee Lucas was the most monstrous of them all. After his arrest in 1983 on a weapons charge, the one-eyed drifter startled Texas police by confessing to scores of aimless murders in 27 states. Soon lawmen from around the country were converging on Texas to see if Lucas might lay claim to unsolved killings in their jurisdictions. He was jetted to murder locations, and as he spoke impassively of stranglings and dismemberments, police gave him meals, gifts and national notoriety.

When his 18-month talkfest stopped, there were estimates that Lucas had committed as many as 600 killings. He was convicted in ten. Then suddenly, in early 1985, he started to take it all back. No doubt to his delight, that has created a monumental legal quagmire, which got deeper and stickier last week. The murder charge was dropped in the first Lucas case to be prosecuted since he changed his tune: the 1983 ax slaying of a 72-year-old El Paso woman, Librada Apodaca. Judge Brunson Moore found his confession involuntary and | ruled Lucas had not knowingly waived his right to a lawyer. “Good treatment and perks” motivated the confession, Judge Moore concluded after his ruling. “You can catch as many flies with honey as with a fly swatter.”

The collapse of the Apodaca case, following a prolonged pretrial hearing, “puts in doubt the prosecution of Lucas on any case based on a confession,” contends his co-counsel Rod Ponton. That could include not only previous convictions, which Lucas now wants to fight, but also some 20 pending charges. The Apodaca case was considered one of the strongest remaining against Lucas. Besides his written confession, investigators say he led them to the scene of the killing. His attorneys, however, produced witnesses supporting his new claim that he was 600 miles away on the night of the crime. Further, blood and semen samples found at the scene do not match Lucas’, and there has been another confession to the murder.

The chief controversy in the case, however, concerned the methods of the fabled Texas Rangers. The defense presented lawmen from around the country who testified that the Rangers ignored contrary evidence and who suggested there was undue Ranger pressure to keep Lucas confessing. Ridiculous, says Ranger Captain Bob Prince, who denies that milk shakes had been offered for every new murder Lucas cleared or that he had been threatened with a return to death row if he clammed up. “Lucas did the leading, he wasn’t led,” Prince insists. “He is guilty — unquestionably — of a great number of murders.” But an investigation for the Texas attorney general indicated that Lucas could be linked to only three.

Because of one of the earlier convictions, Lucas, 50, is currently on death row in Texas; he is also under nine life or near-life sentences. “I’m no mass murderer,” the master of cant and recant now says.”I killed one person.” That was his mother, in 1961, for which, conveniently, he has already served a 14-year term. His string of false admissions was made out of anger at the law, he claims. “I got fed up and tried to commit legal suicide.” In the end, the courts may never be able to determine whether Lucas is the most remorseless killer since Bluebeard or a fabricator of ghoulish fictions to rival Stephen King. Judge Moore summed up the feelings of many: “We’re all entering a big black hole of the law that we may never get out of.”