Eat Thy Neighbour (17 page)

After the victim had been used in whatever ceremony the Hand of Death preferred, his carcass was cooked and eaten by the congregation. Later, Ottis described one of his favourite parts of the flesh-eating ritual as practised by the Hand of Death. ‘Cut off the peter, cut off the balls [and] it’s put in like a little stew pot. The guy who cooks it makes it like a soup or stew. It’s a secret recipe from about a thousand years ago . . . The balls are damned good when fried. Use a little batter and a fryer and it’s a real treat. Crispy. Like crispy chestnuts. Fresh fried balls is one of my favourites . . . I prefer to eat ribs, actually, but I go along with what’s being served at the ceremonies.’

Evidently, there was no sexual discrimination among the Hand of Death and, as one might assume, virgin sacrifice played a central part in their rituals. Again, the best explanation of what took place comes from Ottis himself. ‘We were working for that cult and we’d grab little kids for the human sacrifices . . . I liked working for the Hand of Death. They’d let me have the corpses when they were done . . . and I could take a prime cut.’

When asked where all this bizarre activity took place, Ottis insisted the cult had a ranch in Mexico which was used for the enactment of rituals and it was from here that he and Henry Lee would venture to Texas where they would kidnap girls and women at the behest of Meteric. Curiously, although no official proof of its existence has ever been disclosed, the Hand of Death has also been mentioned by those other noted maniacs, Charles Manson and David ‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz in connection with their own reigns of terror.

The exact dates of Toole and Lucas’ connection with the Hand of Death remain vague, but it would seem that they severed relations with Meteric and his group in 1981 when Ottis’ mother and sister died. Particularly distressing to Toole was the fact that with no one left to take care of them, his nephew and niece, Frank and Becky Powell, had been placed in a juvenile home. Travelling back to Florida, Ottis and Henry Lee sprang the kids from the children’s home and started hauling them along on their continuing travels. It was not long before Henry Lee and slow-witted Becky – who was then just twelve years old – developed a close relationship, which Lucas insisted was purely platonic. Whether this was because he actually respected the child or simply because he had no interest in sex with a living person is unclear. Whatever the case, Henry Lee and Becky’s relationship put too much strain on Henry and Ottis’ love life and the pair split up, Henry Lee and Becky heading west towards California.

Convinced that he had been betrayed by his best friend and his niece, Ottis went on a rampage of killing and burning. In 1983 he found himself under arrest and awaiting trial on charges of arson and murder in his native Florida. While behind bars, Ottis was finally given a thorough psychiatric examination. The report, released in 1985, described Ottis as:

a creature of impulse that seems incapable of premeditation. He has always acted instantly on impulse without the slightest sense of right or wrong at the time. Life itself, to him, is so unmeaning, and the distinction between living and dead people so blurred, that killing to him is no more than swatting an annoying fly is to normal people. He trivializes the distinction between living and dead, believing himself to be dead. Retarded and illiterate, he has been out of control since early childhood. A severely drug dependent individual, he is unsafe under
any conditions outside of a secure prison, and perhaps unsafe there. He is neurologically damaged, definitely in the frontal area, and the psychological evaluation indicates other neurological defects. He is a classic case of severely diminished capacity to control his impulses.

Because of his diminished capacity, Ottis could not be given the death penalty. He was, however, sentenced to six consecutive life terms for arson and murder. Under close scrutiny, and placed on a regular diet that included the antipsychotics Thorazine and Dilantin, Ottis regained enough equilibrium to remain under control without the use of physical restraints. Meanwhile, Henry Lee and Becky were exploring the great American West.

Eventually, although Becky never seemed to mind Henry Lee’s habit of killing people, she began to develop an understanding of Christianity through the good graces of a religious community that had, unwittingly, taken them in. Immediately feeling threatened, Henry Lee took her to a field where he stabbed her to death. Before chopping the corpse into small pieces he finally had sex with her – something he insisted he had never done while she was alive. When Becky’s disappearance was noticed by one of the elderly women who had given the pair shelter, Henry gave her the same medicine he had administered to Becky, incinerating the dismembered corpse in a wood-burning stove.

Amazingly, with an ever-lengthening trail of blood spewing out behind him, even when Henry Lee was captured and taken in for questioning in relation to two murders in October 1982, he was released for lack of evidence. Finally, in June 1983, he was arrested on a minor weapons charge but once behind bars he got the confession bug and started telling everything he knew, everything he thought he knew and everything he could imagine. His first confessions were in relation to the deaths of Becky Powell and Kate Rich, the woman who had sheltered the fugitive pair. After being convicted of Becky’s murder, Henry
even took a minute to congratulate the prosecuting attorney for presenting such a good case.

Now safely locked up in Monroe, Louisiana, Henry continued to confess to one unspeakable deed after another. ‘I’ve killed by strangulation. I’ve killed by hit-and-run, by shootings, by robberies, by hangings. Every type of crime, I’ve done it.’ For a while, nobody was quite sure if Henry Lee Lucas was the biggest mass murderer in history or just confession happy. Still, no police officer worth his salt can afford to leave any stone unturned so, from all over the USA they began to descend on Henry Lee’s jail cell. By October 1983 investigators were convinced that Lucas – and by extension, Toole – was responsible for at least 69 murders. By the following January Henry had convinced them of his culpability in a dozen more. By spring 1985 Henry’s confessions had apparently solved 90 murders. When his own foul deeds were added to those committed in the company of Ottis Toole, the number jumped to 198. Although formally charged with thirty murders in addition to those of Becky and Kate Rich, the one for which he was sentenced to death was the case of a woman known only as ‘Orange Socks’ – a pseudonym given to the unidentified victim based on the only articles of clothing found with the body.

During the years he was incarcerated while awaiting execution, Henry Lee whiled away his time leading police and FBI agents all over the country in search of the endless stream of corpses he happily admitted to creating. With the list now nearing 600 it was a full-time job. When a name came up in which Ottis was allegedly involved, half-way across the country in Florida, Toole would do his best to corroborate Henry’s story with such details as he could remember.

But according to Henry Lee, the entire thing was a ruse. ‘I’d go through files. I’d look through pictures, everything that concerned that murder. And when the detective come from that state, or that town, I’d tell them all about that murder.’
But Henry suddenly stopped confessing and began insisting his confessions were lies. Inevitably he was shifted back to death row. So why did he recant? According to Henry himself, he found religion. ‘I’m not some kind of saint, but I do believe I’ll go to heaven.’

Down in Florida, Ottis Toole had another explanation for Henry Lee’s change of heart. ‘Henry wants to deny everything now because he’s trying to avoid being executed. I’m too crazy for execution so I can tell you how it really was. Henry killed a lot of people, I know, I was there. I helped him do the murders. I have everything I want in prison. Except I miss the freedom to drive down the highway robbing and killing from town to town. That’s excitement at its best. And I miss being able to barbecue a boy when I get the urge. I do like to barbecue . . . anyone who wants to write me and get a recipe for my homemade sauce, I’ll send it free. Just send a few stamps for the reply letter.’

On 15 September 1996, Ottis Toole died in prison from cirrhosis of the liver. He was forty-seven years of age.

Still imprisoned in Texas, Henry Lee Lucas was scheduled to be executed on 30 June 1998 for the murder of ‘Orange Socks’. Curiously, on 27 June, Governor George W. Bush commuted the sentence. It was not a temporary stay of execution while the evidence was re-examined, but a permanent reprieve which, Bush insisted, was based on new evidence that Henry Lee had been hundreds of miles away at the time of the murder. Given the number of murders Henry Lee had committed, and the fact that (then) Governor Bush had pulled the switch on 152 other convicted killers during his tenancy in the governor’s chair, it seems too odd not to ponder. Henry Lee Lucas died on 11 March 2001 at the age of sixty-four. We have no idea how many deaths he and Ottis Toole were actually responsible for, or how many children Ottis may have barbecued.

Eleven

Psycho Killer qu’est-ce que c’est? Ed Gein (1954–7)

W
isconsin in the 1950s was about as quintessentially small-town America as any place could be. People still farmed the land, went to church, watched
I Love Lucy
on television, voted, helped their neighbours when they could and sympathised with them when they could not. All that changed for one Wisconsin town and, by extension, for the nation in 1957, when the Ed Gein case broke into the national news. In a very real sense, America, and the way we look at it, has never been the same since.

Edward Gein was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1906, the second child of George and Augusta. A brother, Henry, had been born seven years earlier. Like most people at the time, the Geins were God-fearing people who largely kept themselves to themselves. But in the Geins’ case, it was not just a matter of respectful privacy. Augusta, a harshly strait-laced woman, was unquestionably the head of the family and it was her firm belief that most of their neighbours, like most people everywhere, were irredeemable sinners and to be avoided at all costs.

In a more balanced family Augusta’s husband might have been able to keep her religious excesses in check, but George Gein was a weak-spirited man who chose to hide in a bottle of whiskey rather than face the wrath of his hard-edged wife. Consequently, Augusta was left to bring up her sons as she saw fit. To keep the boys pure and safe, she alternated severe and nearly constant scolding with hefty doses of biblical scripture,
concentrating on those passages which promised hell-fire and damnation for transgressors. She also saw to it that the boys had as little contact with the sinful, outside world as possible. But no matter what she did, she could not entirely blot out what she saw as the ‘sinkhole of filth’ that was La Crosse.

In 1914 Augusta sold the small, family-owned grocery store in La Crosse and moved the family to an isolated 160-acre farm seven miles outside the town of Plainfield. With the nearest neighbours more than a quarter of a mile away, Henry and Eddie should be safe. Unfortunately, even in Plainfield they had to go to school, so Augusta’s browbeatings and threats of damnation only increased. To keep the boys on the straight and narrow, she pounded into them the evils of loose women, the sins of the flesh and the dire consequences awaiting fornicators on the day they faced their final judgement.

Henry, who was the more outgoing of the two, seemed able to cope with his mother’s tirades, but for small, awkward Eddie, life was nearly intolerable. The kids at school shunned him and teased him for being a ‘Mama’s boy’ and a ‘sissy’. Where other children with socialisation problems might have found solace at home, Eddie – desperate for love – only found Augusta’s wrath and his father’s alcohol-dulled indifference. The only one he could really talk to was brother Henry.

Neither of the boys ever really integrated into society, remaining distant, lonely bachelors all their lives. But shy little Eddie had the worst of it. Despite her terrible temper, Augusta had convinced him that only she could love him and take care of him, constantly drawing him close while simultaneously driving him away.

Henry did his best to provide some stability for Eddie, particularly after their father died in 1940 and managing the farm became almost too much to deal with. To earn extra money, Henry took the occasional odd job in Plainfield and when he went into town he took his little brother along, hoping
that seeing how normal people lived and interacted might help balance out the worst aspects of life at home. He even got Eddie his own small jobs mowing lawns and babysitting. Eddie liked babysitting best. He could relate to children better than he could to adults, and children didn’t frighten him the way adults did.

But at home, the situation was deteriorating. As Henry grew towards adulthood he became more open in his criticism of his mother. He told her to leave Eddie alone and let him grow up. The rows were awful and they confused Eddie more and more as time went on. How could brother Henry talk like that to their mother who loved them? But, of course, he loved Henry, too.

Ed’s life took a wrenching turn on 16 May 1944, when Henry discovered a grass fire not far from the family barn. Calling Eddie to help him put it out before it spread to the outbuildings, the two soon became separated in the choking, swirling smoke. That evening, when Eddie returned to the house, Henry was nowhere to be found. Augusta contacted the police who arrived with a search party to scour the charred field. Curiously, although he insisted he did not know what happened to Henry, Eddie took them right to the spot where his brother’s body lay. The grass beneath him had not been touched by the blaze and there were bruises on his head, but no one seemed to question the circumstances. The coroner ruled death by asphyxiation, and poor little Eddie was left alone to the tender mercies of his tyrannical mother – but not for long.