Serial Killer. Born the youngest of nine children in a two-room, dirt floor, cabin outside the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, his father, Anderson Lucas, was an often drunken moon shiner who lost his legs after falling asleep in a drunken stupor on a set of railroad tracks. His father died early, of pneumonia. His mother, Viola Wall Lucas, was a prostitute. From the moment of his birth, she hated Henry, and made his life a virtual Hell on earth. When he started school in 1943, she sent him to school dressed like a girl. Any pet he adopted was quickly killed. Often beaten by his mother, he lost an eye when she gashed it with a knife during one of her many rages. One of Viola's live-in lovers, Bernie, taught him bestiality, to rape and torture animals before killing them. Thus, Henry's first human victim, 17 year-old Laura Burnley, was raped and strangled in March 1951 (Laura's "rape and murder is unproven, as no body has ever been found). In June 1954, he was convicted of a series of burglaries around Richmond, VA, and given 6 years in prison. Released in 1959, he moved to Tecumseh, Michigan, when his mother showed up to demand his return to Virginia. Several days later, he killed her and raped the corpse. Convicted of her murder, he was given 20 to 40 years in prison, but in May 1960, he was transferred to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he was released in 1970. In 1971 he was convicted of molesting girls and sentenced to ten years, but was paroled in 1975. The next year, he met and teamed up with Ottis Elwood Toole, another serial killer, and they became close friends and partners, robbing, raping and murdering as they moved from state to state to avoid the police. In a Texas jail in 1983 over a minor weapons charge, Lucas confessed to the sheriff of a murder. Subsequent interrogations led him to confess to having participated in over 500 murders, but police eventually reduced this to 90 confirmed murders that he committed and 108 murders in which he assisted Toole. He would claim that he and Toole joined a satanic cult, The Hand of Death, that instructed him in murder, human sacrifice and cannibalism; however, no proof of the cult's existence has been found. Convicted of ten murders in Texas, he was sentenced to death, but on June 26, 1998, Governor George W. Bush commuted his death sentence to life in prison. He died in prison on March 15, 2001 of undisclosed causes. Ottis Toole was picked up, tried and sentenced to death, but his sentence was also commuted to life in prison, and he would die in a Florida prison of cirrhosis of the liver in 1996.