Henry: An American Monster

Henry Lee Lucas was born in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia, the youngest of nine children to Viola Dixon Waugh and Anderson Lucas. His alcoholic prostitute mother often beat him and dressed him up in girl’s clothing and made him watch her service her johns while his crippled father watched on helplessly. Ottis Toole, born at the bottom of the gene pool, retarded and illiterate, had been out of control since early childhood. A severely drug-dependent individual as well as an arsonist and cannibal, he was unsafe under any conditions outside of a secure prison, and perhaps unsafe there. To him, life itself was so unmeaning, and the distinction between living and dead people so blurred, that killing another human being was no more than swatting an annoying fly. Alone and with Lucas, this killer drag queen restlessly roved all over this country robbing, raping, burning and killing, attacking America more like an epidemic plague than a human being.