Eat Thy Neighbour (16 page)

With nothing much to do, Henry Lee fell under the increasing influence of Bernie the pimp, who showed him how to torture animals and have sex with them – either before or after he killed them. Extending this fledgling interest in sex, by the time he reached his early teens Henry had begun raping his half-brother
to while away the hours. Henry Lee’s problems only got worse after No Legs crawled out of the cabin into a snowdrift and froze to death. Having no one and nothing to keep him at home, Henry Lee began terrorising the surrounding towns. According to his own account, he beat, strangled and raped a teenage girl in Lynchburg when he was fifteen, burying her body in a nearby wood. The disappearance of seventeen-year-old Laura Burnley would not be solved until Henry Lee’s confession in 1983.

A string of crimes, arrests, time at juvenile detention facilities and the loss of one eye did little to improve Henry Lee’s attitude or looks. By late 1959 the 23-year-old Henry Lee was living in Michigan with his sister when his loving mother turned up demanding that her boy come back to Virginia to take care of her. After a few hours of serious drinking and shouting, things got ugly. When Viola hit Henry with a broom handle he pulled a knife and stabbed her, taking time to rape her 74-year-old body before going on the run. Five days later he was arrested in Toledo, Ohio, and confessed to the whole thing.

After being sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison for the murder of his mother, Henry Lee began telling his guards that he was hearing the ‘voices in his head’ again. This time it was his mother’s voice telling him to kill himself in retribution for what he had done to her. After two unsuccessful attempts at suicide he was transferred to Iona State Mental Hospital where he was diagnosed as a ‘suicidal psychopath’, a ‘sadist’ and a ‘sexual deviant’. The four-and-a-half years of drugs and electroshock treatment that followed only served to make him crazier than before. In April 1970 Henry Lee came up for parole and, as is usual in such cases, was sent to plead his case before the parole board. According to Henry’s recollections, when a member of the parole board asked him, ‘Now, Mr Lucas, I must ask you, if we grant you parole, will you kill again?’ he answered, ‘Yes, sir! If you release me now, I will kill again.’ Three months later, Henry was out on the streets.

As a parting shot, Henry claims to have told the guards, ‘I’ll leave you a present on the doorstep.’ He later insisted that he murdered two women that same day, leaving one of their bodies within sight of the prison walls, but no evidence of the crime has ever been discovered. True or not, once free Henry began robbing, raping, killing and doing the occasional stretch in the pen until late in 1975 when he wandered into Jacksonville, Florida, where he would eventually meet Ottis Toole.

Jacksonville was Ottis’ hometown and a far cry from most tourists’ conception of sunny Florida. When Ottis was born in 1949 Jacksonville, like much of Florida, was still rural and poor. The flood of tourists and money had not yet filtered much beyond the limits of Miami, St Petersburg and Fort Lauderdale. Like so many poor, southern backwater towns, Jacksonville was permeated by a hardcore, hyper-fundamentalist version of the Christian religion. This was the ‘hell-fire and brimstone’ Christianity that relies more on being ‘God fearing’ than on love and forgiveness. Like so many people attracted to this simplistic religion, Ottis Toole’s family were dirt-poor, underfed and only semi-literate. Add to this mix the fact that, like Henry Lee’s family, Ottis’ parents were alcoholic, and the makings of disaster were close at hand.

The combination of poverty, malnutrition and an alcoholic mother ensured that Ottis Toole had little chance to make the most of whatever potential he might have possessed. Eventually, testing would show that he had an IQ between 54 and 75, which teeters on the edge of retardation. Later examinations would also show that Ottis suffered from ‘frontal and limbic brain damage’ resulting in periodic seizures and occasional blackouts. Ottis was sent to special education classes, but he gave up and dropped out in the eighth grade.

If anything more could have been added to this mix to guarantee Ottis would turn out bad, it would seem that at least some members of his family had a peculiarly bizarre take on
their religion. In Toole’s own words, ‘If you believe in God, you believe in the devil. If you believe in the devil, you believe in God.’ To some in Ottis’ family it would seem that it mattered little to which of these powers they gave their allegiance. According to some sources, Toole’s grandmother was a Satanist who liked to take little Ottis along while she dug up bodies to use in her cult’s worship services. Along with desecrating the bodies of the deceased, the group allegedly partook in the eating of human flesh and sex orgies.

Perhaps as a result of his early indoctrination into this twisted cult, or possibly due to a chemical imbalance related to his brain damage, Ottis was always fascinated by fires – a bent which he nurtured until he became a fully-fledged pyromaniac: ‘The bigger the fires, the more I get excited.’ As though to make Ottis even more unacceptable to society at large, he was a homosexual and an occasional transvestite. Once, talking about his feelings towards women, he simply said, ‘Tried ’em. Don’t like ’em.’ It was probably not an attitude that went down well in the fundamentalist atmosphere around Jacksonville.

Trapped with a mentality that went entirely against the grain of the world at large, Ottis tried to drown himself in a tidal wave of cheap booze and drugs. He started by stealing his mother’s barbiturates and steadily worked his way up to anything he could find or steal. ‘Oh, shoot, I would take it all. Whatever I could get my hands on, is what I would take. Something to get me real high, you know.’

By the time he was in his early teens, Ottis Toole spent his time in a self-imposed altered state of reality, setting fires and paying for his drug and booze habit by dressing in women’s clothes and prostituting himself on the streets. At six feet in height, snaggle toothed and jug eared, how Ottis got any takers is a mystery, but he must have done so because in 1963, a travelling salesman picked up the fourteen-year-old Ottis. Bored, drugged out, or just plain crazy, Ottis changed his mind and
proceeded to run the man over with his own car. Fleeing the scene, by the time he crawled back to Jacksonville some years later, he was a leading suspect in four other murder cases.

Late in 1976, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were both living in Jacksonville, on the edge of existence. Without funds to support their drinking habits, without employment and evidently not in the mood to steal or kill anybody, they were reduced to taking their meals at homeless shelters. One day, they wound up in the same line at the same soup kitchen where, by pure chance, they struck up a conversation and were amazed at how much they had in common.

Because Henry Lee was living rough or at homeless shelters, Ottis invited him to come home with him to Springfield, a rundown suburb of Jacksonville where he lived with his mother, her husband of the moment, his nephew and niece, Frank and Becky Powell, and his own wife, Novella. It is unlikely that anyone seemed surprised when Ottis turned up with Henry Lee; he was always bringing home a man to have sex with – sometimes for pay, sometimes not. Everyone seemed to get on well. Novella was sent to live with neighbours, Henry Lee moved into Ottis’ bed and spent his spare time making friends with the mildly retarded Becky Powell. But even the good life can get boring and before long Henry Lee and Ottis hit the road looking for adventure.

From state to state they stole cars, killed people and robbed anywhere that looked easy – mostly convenience stores, but occasionally they would ‘knock off ’ a bank just for the thrill of it. Sometimes they killed to steal a car, sometimes for sex and sometimes just for the fun of killing. They both swore that when they were in too much of a hurry to stop and murder a hitchhiker they would simply run them down and keep driving. Anything for a laugh.

On one occasion, after terrorising the clerk at a convenience store, Henry Lee killed her and waited while Ottis raped the
corpse. But Henry Lee said it was the woman’s own fault for being killed; she just wouldn’t be quiet and lie still like he told her to do. Ottis, on the other hand, never bothered with the niceties of a few threats before he shot someone. According to Henry Lee, ‘Now, see, that’s the difference between me and Ottis. He just kills ’em when he feels like it. At least I warn ’em first. He’s the worstest killer in the world.’

No matter how much fun it was robbing shops, the homicidal pair’s greatest joy was wreaking mayhem out on the open road. Sometimes they would pick up hitchhikers, other times they would pretend to be hitchhikers. Sometimes Ottis would be in drag, sometimes not. They did whatever it took to lure some poor, unsuspecting soul close enough for one of the lethal pair to kill them. Toole later explained, ‘We picked up lots of hitchhikers, you know, and Lucas killed most of the women hisself, and some of them would be shot in the head and the chest, and some of them would be choked to death and some of them would be beat in the head with a tire tool.’ Henry Lee was a little more blasé about it all: ‘Just about everyone I pick up, I kill ’em.’ The reason Henry Lee killed his victims – beyond preventing them from identifying him and Ottis – was that he liked a lot of sex and preferred to have it with dead people: ‘. . . to me a live woman ain’t nothing. I enjoy dead sex more than I do live sex.’

But even Henry Lee was adaptable. On one occasion, while the pair was cruising along Texas interstate I-35, they approached a young couple thumbing a ride after having run out of gas. Stopping the car, Ottis jumped out, shot the man nine times in the head and chest, rolled his body into a ditch and dragged the terrified girl into the back seat of their car where Henry Lee proceeded to rape her. Not liking Henry Lee to have sex with living people other than himself, Ottis jammed on the brakes, hauled the girl out of the car and shot her six times. They left her body where it fell and continued on their way.

However their victims were killed, whatever sexual indignities were committed before, or after, death, it was nothing compared to Ottis’ favourite means of disposing of the corpse. Although neither of the pair was ever formally charged with cannibalism, Ottis never made a secret of the pleasure he took in barbecued human flesh. Sometimes Henry Lee would join in at one of these obscene feasts, but normally he abstained. His problem lay not in the concept of eating people, but in his partner’s cooking methods. In Henry Lee’s own words, ‘I don’t like barbecue sauce.’

Shortly before his death in 1996, Ottis Toole granted an interview to freelance journalist Billy Bob Barton. During the conversation, the subject of Ottis’ dietary preferences came up. When Barton said he understood that Ottis liked to eat young boys, Toole expounded: ‘I’ve eaten my share. First I go out and catch me a little boy . . . grab him, tie him up, use a gag, put him in the trunk of my car and drive him out to my place.’ After detailing the sexual depravities he would visit on the child, Ottis went on to explain his favourite method of preparing and cooking the victim: ‘. . . you strip them naked and hang them upside down by the ankles; then you slit their throat with a knife, slit the belly and take out the guts, the liver, the heart. Cut off the head. Let the blood drain. [I use] a pit. A barbecue pit. Charcoal so there ain’t much smoke. Take down the body, put the metal spit through them. Put it into the asshole, through the body and out the neck . . . [and] put it on the spit-holder over the coals. Damn tasty.’

When asked to comment on the taste of a child’s flesh, Toole waxed loquacious. ‘[It tastes] same as a roasted piglet. Boys and girls taste about the same when you roast them eight to ten years old. The flavour is a shade different when they’re teenagers. The boys are gamier than the girls. Give me the roasted meat of a boy age fourteen and a girl age fourteen and I can tell the difference . . . Teenagers make a nice roast; I do favour a rump
roast from a teen. Younger ones I think I prefer ribs. Juicy. Tasty. You ought to try some . . . People eat pigs, cows, horses. I like to eat people. It’s good meat, too. You ain’t tried it, don’t you be saying it ain’t tasty. You might like it.’

When Barton asked Ottis how many people he had killed and eaten, he replied, ‘Just me killing them alone or the ones I killed and ate with Henry?’ Unaware that Lucas had been in on this particular aspect of their partnership, Barton enquired what their combined number might have been. Toole’s reply was, ‘Oh, about one hundred and fifty or so.’

During a recorded conversation between Lucas and Toole, the subject of their cannibalism again came up when Ottis commented, ‘And you know one time, you filleted some of them bodies, and I did too . . . tasted like real meat when it got barbecue sauce on it, don’t it?’ In response, Henry confirmed his dislike for barbecue sauce in general and Ottis’ in particular.

If Henry Lee and Ottis’ adventures in social and culinary abominations while roaming the highways of America were not strange enough, once the pair met a man by the name of Don Meteric they became even stranger. According to Toole and Lucas, Meteric was involved with a Satanic cult calling itself the Hand of Death. They claim that Meteric and Ottis had already known each other for some time when Henry became involved, bringing up the question as to Meteric’s possible involvement with the devil worshippers from Toole’s youth. According to Toole and Lucas, Meteric asked them if they might be interested in carrying out executions for the mysterious cult – the pay would be $10,000 per job. Since they already did similar work for the pure joy of it, they were more than happy to agree. As with all such societies, the Hand of Death required initiates to undergo a secret ritual.

In the best tradition of grade ‘B’ horror movies, Toole and Lucas were taken deep into the Florida Everglades where a group had gathered to celebrate a black mass. After they had been
introduced, one of the celebrants was pointed out to Henry Lee and Ottis as the man whom they would be required to kill before they would be fully accepted into the cult. Luring their victim towards the beach with a bottle of whiskey, when the man tipped his head back to take a swig, Lucas slit his throat from ear to ear so cleanly that, according to Lucas, ‘The liquor just spilled out the bottom of his throat.’