serial killer: henry lee lucas
...ith his prostitute mother and double-amputee father. b. Henry Lee Lucas was uneducated, unhealthy, and beaten by his mother– He dropped out of fifth grade but he managed to stay somewhat educated. c. According to a 1995 entry from the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Constance McKenzie points out that alcoholic family dysfunction stifles the emotional and the physical growth of its members: Henry’s mother would lash out and beat him. d. According to a 2004 edition of The Psychoanalytic Review, Demetria DeLia explains that Henry Lee Lucas’ eye was severely injured when he was six and it never healed properly. Because his mother didn’t take care of him, the eye remained unattended and the socket would drain constantly. 2. Lucas suffered harsh treatment from his mother Viola Lucas. a. According to Jeremy Wright and Christopher Hensley in a 2003 entry from the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, when Henry started school, his mother forced him to go to school in a dress, with ringlets in his hair, and shoeless: she dressed him like this until he was seven years old. b. Being a prostitute, Viola would bring her buyers to the house and would make not only Henry, but she would also make her husband watch as she had sex with the strangers. c. Henry’s mother beat him so severely that he was in a semi-unconscious state for three days. 3. Henry Lee Lucas did some morbid things that normal people would question. a. According to Mark Seltzer’s (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, Lucas, as an early teen, Henry would have sex with his half-brother and with animals whose throats they had slit first. b. Wright and Hensley (2003) reported that, although Henry originally killed animals solely for sex, he began to enjoy the act of killing just as much. c. He began to catch animals and skin them, while they were alive, just for fun. Transition: Now that I have discussed some of the events that occurred in Henry Lee Lucas’ childhood and teenage years, I will go on to discuss the times the murders were committed and what he did. B. Don’t get on Henry Lee Lucas’s bad side. 1. The 1960 stabbing of his 74-year-old mother Viola Lucas. a. Henry fled to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with his sister, away from his mother: his mother tracked him down. b. According to Patrick Bellamy (2005) in the Court TV’s internet site Henry Lee Lucas: Deadly Drifter, Henry and his mother went to a bar, in Michigan, had a few drinks, and then went back to his sister’s house where the fighting began. c. Viola struck Henry with a broom and Henry stuck a knife in his mother’s back, killed her, and raped her dead corpse. 2. The August 1982 killing of his girlfriend Becky Powell. a. Becky Powell, the mildly retarded girlfriend of Henry, got mad at him one day and smacked him in the face. b. Henry stabbed her in the heart with a carving knife, killing her instantly. c. Bellamy (2005) said that after raping her corpse, he dismembered her body, stuffed her in pillowcases and left her remains strewn over a field. 3. The September 1982 killing of 82-year-old Kate Rich. a. Bellamy (2005) said that, instead of driving Kate Rich to church, he got a sudden urge to kill her and have sex with her corpse. b. Henry drove to an oil field, stabbed her to death and then dragged her down to an embankment and raped her corpse. c. After leaving her body in a sewer, he returned to the oil field, and bro...