He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately 600 other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials.

He was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.

While the Rangers defended their work, a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas concluded Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed.

[2] Lucas's case damaged the reputation of the Texas Ranger Division, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions.

Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know.

[4] His mother ignored the injury for several days until a teacher swiped him over his eye with a steel-tipped ruler and the eyeball burst; it had to be surgically removed and it was replaced with a glass prosthetic.

[7] Despite this, Nellie continued to abuse and torment Lucas by shooting and killing a mule given to him by an uncle and proceeding to beat him because she had to pay to have the animal carcass removed.

On June 10, 1954, Lucas was convicted on over a dozen counts of burglary in and around Richmond, Virginia, and was sentenced to four years in prison.

The official police report stated that Lucas's mother died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault.

But his claim was rejected and he was sentenced to up to 40 years imprisonment in Jackson State Penitentiary in southern Michigan for second-degree murder.

Henry was then transferred to the Ionia State Hospital where he was subjected to electric shocks, behavior therapy, and heavy doses of anti-depressants.

Henry spent four years at Ionia State Hospital before returning to prison in 1966, where a social worker met Lucas while he was incarcerated and described him as "a very inadequate individual with feelings of insecurity and inferiority."

While serving his sentence for the crime, he established a relationship with a family friend and the widow of a cousin, Betty Crawford, who had written to him.

[3] Lucas then went to Jacksonville, Florida in 1976 and ended up at a soup kitchen where he met Ottis Elwood Toole, a part-time transvestite, and struck up a friendship with him.

According to Lucas, during this time they engaged in a multi-state killing spree in which they targeted hitchhikers, sex workers, and migrants.

[11]On January 20, 1982, Lucas convinced Powell to run away with him to avoid child welfare authorities and they lived on the road, eventually traveling to California, where an employer's wife asked them to work for her infirm mother, 82-year-old Katie Pearl "Kate" Rich.

Apparently, her relatives had called him out for not holding up his end of the bargain, accusing them of failing to do their jobs and writing checks on Rich's bank account.

While hitchhiking, Lucas and Powell were picked up by the minister of a Pentecostal[16] religious commune called The House of Prayer, located in Stoneburg, Texas.

[18] However, Powell became argumentative and homesick for Florida; when she turned up absent, Lucas claimed that she left at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.

Later, he confessed to the murders of Powell and Rich, and led the police to their purported remains, although forensic evidence alone was inconclusive and the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either of them.

Lucas claimed he had lured Powell to an isolated field in Denton, Texas on August 23, 1982, stabbed her in the chest, engaged in necrophilia with her corpse before he dismembered and decapitated her post-mortem, and scattered her body pieces.

He reported that he attempted suicide after receiving rough treatment by the inmates, and claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, mutilated his genitalia, and did not allow him to contact an attorney.

He was frequently taken to restaurants and cafés, rarely handcuffed, allowed to wander police stations and jails, and he even knew codes for security doors.

[21][22][23][24] Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated the veracity of Lucas's claims for articles that appeared in The Dallas Times Herald.

They calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometres) in one month to have committed the crimes police attributed to him.

[5] After the story appeared in April 1985 and revealed the flawed methods of the task force, law enforcement opinion began to turn against their claims that crimes had been solved.

"[17] Lucas's case damaged the reputation of the Texas Ranger Division, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions.

Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know.

He had been sentenced to death for one, a then-unidentified woman dubbed as "Orange Socks", whose body was found in Williamson County on Halloween 1979, despite a time sheet recording his presence at work in Jacksonville, Florida on that day.

Criminologist Eric Hickey cites an unnamed "investigator" who interviewed Lucas several times and concluded that he had probably killed about forty people.