Eat Thy Neighbour Page 12
I characterized his personality as introverted and extremely infantilistic . . . which I diagnosed as paranoid psychosis. Because Fish suffered from delusions and particularly was so mixed up about questions of punishment, sin, atonement, religion, torture [and] self-punishment, he had a perverted, a distorted – if you want, an insane – knowledge of right and wrong.
Charged with the first-degree murder of Gracie Budd, Albert Fish was brought to trial on Monday 11 March 1935 in White Plains, New York. Appearing for the defence was James Dempsey; the prosecution was presented by Assistant District Attorney Elbert Gallagher.
Dempsey’s strategy was simple. He would not refute the charges against his client, but would try to prevent his execution by pleading insanity. To accomplish this he would rely on the findings of Dr Wertham and two additional defence psychiatrists and, in the process, discredit the testimony of the four psychiatrists the prosecution was planning to call to the stand.
Dr Fredric Wertham recounted his findings, closing with, ‘However you define the medical and legal borders of sanity, this is certainly beyond that border.’ The other defence psychiatrists, as expected, gave similar opinions.
The prosecution psychiatrists were harder for Dempsey to deal with, particularly Dr Charles Lambert from Belleview Hospital who had declared Fish ‘both harmless and sane’ after a stay there in 1930. With his reputation on the line, Lambert was not about to give Dempsey anything to work with. In a masterstroke of obfuscation Lambert declared Fish to be a ‘psychopathic personality without a psychosis’.
In his cross-examination of Lambert, Dempsey asked, ‘Assume that this man not only killed this girl but took her flesh to eat it. Will you not state that that man could, for nine days, eat that flesh and still not have a psychosis?’ As though he had been asked to comment on the colour of Fish’s necktie, Lambert flippantly answered, ‘There is no accounting for taste, Mr Dempsey.’
Dempsey also put several of Fish’s children on the stand to testify to his kindness towards them even while exhibiting perverse forms of personal torture and religious delusions. Although they all agreed he had been kind and gentle in his treatment of them, they refused to visit their father in prison.
Dempsey also introduced evidence to indicate that his client could be suffering from ‘lead colic’, a term then used for the nerve and brain cell destroying lead poisoning that sometimes afflicted painters in the days of lead-based paint. In his closing remarks, Dempsey reminded the jury that the question was not whether or not Albert Fish had murdered and defiled Gracie Budd, but whether a man could chop up and eat children and still be considered sane.
After ten days of testimony, cross-examination and exhibits that included the shattered skull of little Gracie Budd, the judge gave the jury their instructions and sent them to ponder their verdict. Less than one hour later they returned. In a clear voice, the foreman announced, ‘We find the defendant guilty as charged.’ The insanity plea had been rejected; Albert Fish, aged sixty-four, would be put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Penitentiary.
Amazingly, Fish thanked the judge profusely for the sentence. Later, he admitted to Dr Wertham, ‘What a thrill it will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven’t tried.’ On 16 January 1936, Albert Fish experienced the supreme thrill. He was so excited that he even helped the guards fasten the straps to his legs. His children did not step forward to claim the body and Albert Fish was buried in the prison cemetery at Sing Sing.
As an odd footnote to this story, and a comment on the public’s perception of the psychiatric system in general, several of the jurors later stated that they believed Fish to have been insane. Because he had been institutionalised and released on more than one occasion, however, they felt it their duty to do the only thing they could to guarantee that the monstrous Grey Man would never be let loose on society again.
Ten
The Shallow End of the Gene Pool: Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas (1951–83)
When 29-year-old Ottis Toole and his future associate, Henry Lee Lucas, forty-two, first met in the soup kitchen of a Jacksonville, Florida, homeless shelter, it was a marriage made in hell. As alike as two peas in a very rotten pod, they took to each other like bluebottles to a dung-heap. Not only were they kindred spirits in a greater variety of depravity than can be imagined but they had already carved out individual careers as killers. As is so often the case in life, their combined talents would produce far more gruesome results than the sum of their individual parts. The politically correct might have described Ottis and Henry Lee as ‘economically deprived practitioners of an alternative lifestyle’. Everyone else in America would have been more likely to describe them as ‘white trash’.
What makes Ottis and Henry Lee unique among their ilk is the question: how many of the crimes they claim to have committed are real, and how many are either completely fictitious or a case of their taking credit for someone else’s handiwork? It is a question which has never been satisfactorily answered. Consequently, at least some of what you will find in the following tale is open to question and controversy; it is, however, no less than what Henry Lee and Ottis claimed to be the truth, at least some of the time.
Henry Lee Lucas was born at the end of the Great Depression in the backwater village of Blacksburgh, Virginia. The year 1936 was not a good one anywhere, but in Blacksburgh no year was good. The Lucas clan lived in a dirt-floored shanty beyond the edge of town – beyond the point where electricity, telephone and running water stopped. Sharing the shack with the infant Henry Lee was his vicious prostitute mother Viola, his moonshine-making father Anderson, generally known as ‘No Legs’ ever since he stumbled, dead drunk, under a freight train, Viola’s pimp Bernie and Henry’s eight brothers and sisters, at least some of whom were Anderson’s.
While Viola terrorised both her children and husband with an endless string of invective and savage beatings, she seemed to take a particular delight in abusing Henry Lee. While No Legs hid from Viola, drinking as much of his homemade whiskey as possible, Henry Lee was forced to watch his mother entertain an endless string of paying customers. If he turned away, she beat him. On at least one occasion she beat him so severely that he lay semi-conscious for three days before Bernie the pimp took him to the hospital. Thanks to the constant abuse Henry Lee began hearing ‘voices’ and noises in his head. His papa tried to shelter the child from Viola by making him the full-time guardian of the family still. Consequently, by the time he was ten years old Henry Lee was already an alcoholic. Once Henry was old enough to attend school his mother delighted in sending him off in a dress just to see what the reaction would be. Years later, a former teacher would recall him as being dirty, malnourished and seriously disturbed. Not surprisingly Henry dropped out of school after the fifth grade.
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, t
aking 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 hard-core, 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 run-down 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.’
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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.’