Killing somebody, to me, was just like walking outdoors." Please add relevant source/s to your information. She was a 40-year-old homemaker who had spent her entire life in Cape Girardeau, working at menial jobs, married for 19 years. So physically draining was his murderous odyssey, he once told a New York journalist, that "to regain my strength I'd sometimes cut out [the victim's] heart and hold it in my hand." No sooner had word leaked that Attorney General Jim Maddox's report was going to be highly critical of the Lucas task force, Feazell found himself in more trouble than he ever bargained for. One thing led to another." It even said I had been with him and helped him bury bodies. Why did he check into a mental hospital? Cases closed. In time, she began longing to return to Jacksonville. Baker City, Oregon (97814) Today. "The guy is like a circus that won't leave town.". Terms, They gave us some money, put us on a bus, and off we went." "I was tired of being broke and hungry," she said. Still, she looked remarkably good for someone who had been officially dead since age 15, remembered only as one of the hundreds of victims Lucas had originally claimed. That was Lucas' story, and he stuck to it.

Better Go Back to Henry Lee Lucas Story. she asked. "I've asked him why he said all those things," she noted in a voice that sang with childlike innocence, "and he explained that he did it to protect me.".

The bogus confessions, he explained, were his way of seeking revenge and committing a strange form of slow suicide. Replies analysing and speculating over the mystery and possible explanations are encouraged. "It was all pretty strange," Feazell said, "but that kind of thing had always swirled around Lucas. Or Lucas. Both men had routinely told authorities that Becky and Frank Powell had accompanied them on their travels. Though raised by her grandparents, she recalled a time when she and her brother briefly lived with her mother and stepfather. He said he had no idea who murdered Rich, and the last time he'd seen Becky, the love of his life, she was being driven away by a long-haul trucker. "As I read it, I couldn't believe it was saying that Henry had done all these terrible murders. Go figure. Lucas pondered the question briefly, then held up three fingers. Phylis Wilcox, it turned out, wasn't born in 1967, wasn't 27. Join the Observer community and help support independent local journalism in Dallas. Frieda Powell was Toole's niece and Lucas' lover. All her belongings, she remembers, had been stuffed into a grocery sack. A special task force, manned by the late Williamson County Sheriff Jim Boutwell and members of the Texas Rangers, was formed to help other agencies sort out the stream of horrors that Lucas couldn't confess to fast enough. Frank Powell was Frieda's brother and Toole's nephew. Make a financial contribution or sign up for a newsletter, and help us keep telling Dallas's stories with no paywalls. Yet it had been only after months of gentle persuasion from investigators that he'd finally agreed to admit to that particular murder. I had, in fact, tagged along with Aynesworth on one of his many visits to the Georgetown jail and listened as the reporter asked Lucas about how many people he had actually murdered. In his Georgetown, Texas, jail cell--where the task force watched over him and scheduled his interviews with parading law officers--there was carpeting, a color television with a cable hookup, midnight milk shakes on demand, art lessons and home-cooked meals served by a friendly lay sister named Clemmie Schroeder. Becky was used as a scantily clad lure for truckers, for instance. Meanwhile, police in other parts of the country used later Lucas confessions to clear eight murders that had occurred during that same time period. And why not? The once-popular prosecutor suddenly was the target of a months-long investigation by the FBI, IRS, Texas Department of Public Safety and Waco police. Lucas' initial version of Becky's demise not only had a rare ring of truth to it, but there had actually been some physical evidence to substantiate his story that while hitchhiking back to Florida they had quarreled while sleeping in a field near a Denton truck stop. It's known that Henry Lee Lucas murdered Frieda 'Becky' Powell, the girl who is always referred to as having been Lucas' 'common-law wife' even though he apparently 'fell in love' with her when she was like 10. CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS: California Privacy Policy | California Collection Notice | Do Not Sell My Info. Why? FREE Background Report & Reputation Score (3.50) for Phyllis Wilcox in Waldron, AR - View Criminal & Court Records | Photos | Address, Emails & Phone Number | Personal Review | $60 - … The Dallas Observer may earn a portion of sales from products & services purchased through links on our site from our affiliate partners. For starters, the fact that she was alive would automatically eliminate one of the 13 murders for which he had been dealt life prison sentences. "She came to see Kate and said that we weren't taking care of her. I guess it's pretty nosy on my part, but I always wonder this kind of thing about kids who were involved in crime situations like this. He'd initially admitted that he stabbed her, dismembered her body and buried it in several shallow graves he'd dug with the murder weapon. Bad enough, but far shy of the hundreds he'd once claimed. "My stepfather raped me," she remembered, "and I was put in a girls' school. Now, however, this woman swearing to be Frieda "Becky" Powell was explaining that it had been in '79 when she met Lucas after her uncle Ottis Elwood Toole had brought him to the Jacksonville, Florida, home of her grandmother. She knowed things we'd done together, things nobody else could have knowed." He gave all who came what they wanted, confessing to homicides in 26 states and Canada. She was going to pay a visit to the man who long ago had confessed to killing her.

Circulation, and work for years as a cashier in a Texaco station eight miles down the road in Jackson. They described the crimes, showed him photos, left reports lying around for him to read, then he simply told them what they wanted to hear. She played piano inside the church. Curious, she made some phone calls, located the prison in which Lucas was being held and began to write him, always signing her married name. You always want to hope that they somehow managed to pull through and come out the other side. He said he killed former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa; he delivered the poison to James Jones for his infamous religious cult's mass suicide in Guyana; and, oh yeah, he was a member of a Louisiana-based satanic cult that called itself the Hand of Death and delivered babies into slavery in Mexico. The story she had told me as a tape recorder played, the physical resemblance (she even had a tiny scar on her upper lip, much like the one I'd seen in a photo of a younger Becky), the videotaped deposition from Curtis Wilcox, the results of the polygraph test fit together like a child's puzzle. '", The stunned lawyer spent hours listening to her story, mentally matching it to facts he knew about his client's wandering life. "Hey, that's just the way Lucas is," he said. With his date in the Huntsville death house fast approaching, Lucas finally confided to Feazell that there was someone who might know where Becky was hiding.