Essay: When Texas Rangers hid facts in Baytown homicide, a killer walked free

around three in the morning on June 23, 1981, someone walked right into a 7-Eleven in Baytown, at McKinney road and Alexander pressure, and shot the clerk â€" a younger lady â€" in the face at shut latitude. Diana Lynn Underwood, 23, fell to the floor at the back of the counter and died. This become no robbery. “The cash register turned into not opened,” a police investigator advised the Baytown solar. “We don’t know of one single thing that was touched in the keep.” Police had no motive, no suspects and no breaks within the case until 1984, when none aside from Henry Lee Lucas admitted to the crime. Lucas become at that factor establishing his recognition because the most suitable serial killer in American background. in the custody of the Texas Rangers, he confessed to slaughtering a whole lot of guys and women in random and brutal fashion across the USA. As we now understand, it was a grand hoax â€" one perpetrated with the unwitting, if eager, suggestions of dozens of police agencies. however the fraud went far deeper, and was much more scandalous, than any person admitted on the time. Diana Lynn Underwood’s case, and a few facts stored deep within the state archives, finally proved that. A fifth-grade dropout with an IQ of 87, Lucas drifted into North Texas within the Eighties together with his reside-in accomplice, Frieda “Becky” Powell. He turned into forty five. She had simply became 15. Lucas had grown up in a grimy shack near Blacksburg, Va. His father, a legless illiterate, discovered occasional work promoting moonshine. His mom, a snuff-dipping prostitute, became tricks at domestic whereas he watched. young Lucas lost a watch in a childhood accident. Youthful burglaries put him in a Virginia state penitentiary. As an grownup, he did a seven-12 months penitentiary stretch for killing his mom. jail docs clinically determined him as a severe schizophrenic. After arriving in Texas, Lucas did unusual jobs for an eighty two-year-old girl, who soon disappeared. younger Becky Powell vanished, too. Arrested for his or her murders, Lucas then claimed he had killed 77 people in 13 states. This acquired the consideration of Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell, who introduced Lucas to Georgetown. There, Lucas confessed to killing a girl customary to police simplest as Orange Socks after the few shreds of clothing she wore when her body had been present in 1979 alongside I-35. “that's the one I killed,” Lucas mentioned when he noticed a photograph of her corpse, “and there ain’t little doubt about it.” He begun to admit to much more murders, and in so doing, Lucas discovered himself on the highway to criminal superstardom. He emerged as a specter from the American heart of darkness who roamed from state to state, deciding upon his victims accidentally and dispatching them with gleeful ease. This become Jack the Ripper with vehicle keys and a highway atlas. Worse, there have been two of these grasp fiends. for a lot of of those crimes, Lucas observed, he had a sidekick and touring companion, a hulking bi-sexual pyromaniac named Ottis Elwood Toole. The pair operated, in Lucas’ telling, as homicidal Renaissance guys. “We reduce ’em up,” he noted. “We ran ’em down in vehicles. We stabbed ’em. We beat ’em. We drowned ’em. There’s crucification. There’s people we filleted like fish. There’s individuals we burnt. We strangled ’em. We even stabbed them once we strangled them.” Naturally, police from across the nation desired to communicate with Lucas, in hopes of clearing unsolved murders. Sheriff Boutwell, who had been a Texas Ranger within the Fifties, sought aid from Col. Jim Adams, the director of the Texas branch of Public safeguard. Adams gave him the whole-time functions of two Rangers to function the Henry Lee Lucas murder assignment force. Investigators from across the country traveled to Georgetown to consult with Lucas. The Rangers also flew with him to California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and different jurisdictions. Police were struck incidentally Lucas might, even years after an incident, summon minute details: the colour of a sufferer’s hair, for instance, and the costume she wore, or the appear on her face, and the manner he killed her. In 1982 on my own, he observed, he murdered 35 americans. And whereas committing one savage, random homicide after another, he one way or the other under no circumstances left a single piece of proof â€" no longer a hair nor a fiber, fingerprint or drop of blood. He drove to crime scenes, commonly in faraway wooded areas, however police in no way discovered a tire tune to healthy. No weapon had been recovered. No witnesses had considered him leaving the websites of his butcheries. He based no pattern. Admitting to an enormous catalog of unsolved murders had its advantages. Lucas occupied his own particular person phone on the county jail with carpet on the ground. He wore civilian clothes. He watched cable suggests on his deepest color television, comprehensive with remote handle. His supply of milk shakes and Pall shops by no means ran low. All Lucas had to do became retain the confessions coming. The grand Lucas excursions additionally meant celeb popularity for the Rangers who traveled with him. They were welcomed as legislations enforcement royalty, and were showered with gifts and proclamations. eventually, with the task drive’s coordination, police corporations in 26 states closed the books on 229 murders. virtually none of them superior to the trial stage, although the Orange Socks case did go to court docket. On the electricity of his confession, Lucas changed into discovered responsible and sentenced to die. * * * Then it all collapsed. In April 1985, the Dallas times Herald noted Lucas “may well be the perpetrator of the biggest hoax in legislations enforcement annals.” by meticulously pass-checking Lucas’s confessions along with his court docket files, work papers, rental receipts, penitentiary rosters and other records, reporters discovered that Lucas doubtless did not commit more than three murders â€" that of his mom, his general-legislation wife and the historic woman for whom he had worked. As for the hundreds of others to which he admitted, Lucas with ease couldn't have been the place they passed off once they have been dedicated. concerning the equal time, District legal professional Vic Feazell of Waco determined to examine the Lucas task drive. Feazell introduced Lucas earlier than the grand jury, which heard some alarming testimony in regards to the Rangers’ techniques. Lucas testified he was allowed to evaluate case data before he confessed. “I go through them,” he spoke of. “I read this one. I study that one.” Armed with foreknowledge, Lucas could direct police to the scenes of murders with the aid of without difficulty picking out up cues. It wasn’t all that difficult when detectives drove him past a residence a couple of instances, slowed the vehicle and asked, “Henry, does anything appear prevalent?” On one case, he noted, police flew him over the crime locale in a helicopter. “So I noted, ‘Yeah, down there is the scene the place the…case changed into,’ and so I could be pointing a mile away, and it wouldn’t make no difference.” A 1986 file with the aid of Texas attorney conventional Jim Mattox discovered “numerous discrepancies between Lucas’ confessions and obtainable proof related to his whereabouts,” and great proof that officials had cleared cases without difficulty to take them off the books. With that, the Rangers quietly folded their assignment drive and shipped Lucas to death row, the place he could await execution for the homicide of Orange Socks. however in 1998, Gov. George W. Bush commuted the sentence to existence in penal complex. Lucas died of natural explanations in 2001 at the age of sixty four. No members of the family claimed the body, so his white coffin changed into borne by using six inmate pallbearers to the cemetery for indigent prisoners. He may had been lots greater than a no person buried in a state potters’ box, if handiest the data had now not intervened. “Henry once observed, ‘i used to be as noted as Elvis,’” Vic Feazell remembered. “He said, ‘in the event that they had simply let me retain confessing, i would’ve had more murders than Hitler.’” a couple of pending court situations towards Lucas had been dropped in the ensuing years. Police quietly re-opened one of the vital investigations â€" notwithstanding no longer all. In Chambers County, the 1980 murder of Betty Choate continues to be attributed to Lucas, even though the legal professional customary’s record determined he became in Florida at the time. * * * in the mid-Nineteen Eighties, when the Lucas extravaganza in the beginning fractured, the Rangers brushed aside any criticism of them as unfair. It became no longer their job, they pointed out, to document Lucas’ specific whereabouts when the crimes in question befell. “We didn’t feel like that turned into our accountability,” stated Ranger Bob Prince, head of the project drive. they had served as a mere conduit of assistance, he stated, a clearinghouse. but to accept that, one must ignore the hidden data. In 2008 DPS shipped a few of its inactive inner information to the state archives. amongst them have been Lucas case papers. at the Texas State Library, no one however archivists touched these Lucas documents for many of a decade. I examined the facts while doing research for a background of the Rangers published this month. They show that contrary to what the Rangers had spoke of, they did indeed are trying to music Lucas’ itinerary. four black binders contain an eight-12 months, day-through-day log of Lucas’ whereabouts, and the murders to which he confessed. it is a catalog of untamed time-house impossibilities, echoing the findings of newspaper experiences and the lawyer general’s file. The Rangers in no way stated this publicly. The true bombshell, besides the fact that children, may also be found in the Underwood case papers. Lucas never stood trial for the Baytown homicide, but the branch closed the case. The legal professional common’s report referred to that Lucas turned into believed to be in Florida at the time of the killing, but Baytown police had been no longer swayed. “Our case towards Lucas is closed and should remain closed,” Baytown police chief W.A. Henscey spoke of in 1986. “We believe that he did it.” Henscey, now 86 and retired, said final month he had nothing so as to add. “i'd rather no longer touch upon this ancient case,” he wrote in an electronic mail. To his credit score, Henscey couldn't have favourite on the time in 1986 that the Rangers had been sitting on evidence proving truly that Lucas didn't kill Underwood. The info within the state archives consist of statistics from an organization known as business Metals in Jacksonville, Fla. They show that Lucas offered the company scrap steel, and was paid $19.eighty money, on the equal day that he changed into pointed out to be in Baytown capturing the 7-Eleven clerk. Baytown is 850 miles west of Jacksonville. The Rangers had an evidence. They believed Lucas’ scrawled signature on the industrial Metals receipt turned into a forgery. To show this, a DPS handwriting analyst examined the document in 1986. The analyst, besides the fact that children, determined the signature from June 23, 1981, become certainly Lucas’, as changed into the signature on a receipt from day after today. He could not probably have been in Baytown. Baytown police say now the Rangers in no way suggested them of this handwriting evaluation. in accordance with this new suggestions, which I supplied to the Baytown branch, investigators have re-opened the Underwood case. They also have re-opened the investigation of an extra 1981 murder â€" that of a women Lucas confessed to killing in her home. Baytown police asked that her name be withheld because her household has now not yet been notified. “He become now not even right here,” Baytown police Lt. Steve Dorris mentioned last month of Lucas. “we can’t attribute those circumstances to him.” Re-investigating two 39-yr-historical murders gifts an outstanding challenge for a small branch that does not have a separate cold-case unit. “My homicide detectives work on these bloodless situations between their lively instances,” Dorris referred to. “And with these old cases, individuals who had been witnesses may have passed away by means of now.” One investigator introduced: “We’re starting from scratch.” Why did the Rangers under no circumstances turn over the evidence to Baytown investigators? Prince, the head of the Lucas project force, mentioned remaining 12 months he became now not aware of the handwriting evaluation. Adams, head of DPS when the project drive turned into in operation, rebuffed my attempts to interview him earlier than he died this year. whatever thing the cause, the consequence is clear. When Lucas confessed, the police investigations stopped. That was many years ago. meanwhile, the real killer of 23-12 months-historical Diana Underwood walked free. This the Rangers knew. Swanson turned into for many years an investigative reporter and editor on the Dallas Morning information. This piece was adapted from his latest ebook, “Cult of Glory: The daring and Brutal background of the Texas Rangers” posted via Viking. Swanson teaches at the college of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at dougjswanson@gmail.com.