The Confession Killer (2019)

I thought this Netflix miniseries was a pretty good primer on Henry Lee Lucas, who emerged in the '80s as pretender to the throne of King of the Serial Killers, the most prolific, rampant, and eclectic of all time. The legend was printed in the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although now we know it is mostly fiction and Lucas should be up for some posthumous credit along with screenwriters Richard Fire and director John McNaughton, plus Michael Rooker in possibly his greatest performance. It may be the single greatest serial killer movie of all time. Please don't talk to me about The Silence of the Lambs or M. The Texas Rangers, according to this documentary, still have Lucas down for some 200 murders—hitchhikers and housewives stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, strangled, stomped, throats cut, necks broken. After he killed them he had sex with them. Sometimes he didn't like their look so he cut off their heads first. He was thus set up as the Monster Truck Rally of serial killers. The worst any human could imagine. Pure E - V - I - L. It turns out—and it took awhile to really get to it, well into the 2010s, because the Texas Rangers resist the truth to this day (according to the doc)—Lucas probably killed three people: his mother (an abusive prostitute), his 15-year-old girlfriend (when Lucas was in his 40s), and a landlady. All the rest were more or less a matter of Lucas amiably going along with Texas law enforcement when they found this easy and fun way of clearing cases: Get Lucas to confess to it. He'll do it! Ironically, people-pleasing is in the nature of Lucas's pathology and his skills for reading people were prodigious. When others looked harder they started seeing 1) a crazy thing, and 2) something that should have signaled we're done here. The crazy thing was how much driving Lucas would have had to do to commit these crimes. There were periods of days and weeks on the timeline where literally, physically, the only way he could have done it was with constant driving, killing, and no sleep. The "case closed" thing was irrefutable documentary evidence in dozens of the murders that Lucas was elsewhere—a matter of timeclock stamps, receipts, and witnesses. He could not have been in New Mexico killing a housewife when he was buying gas and a hot dog that day in Florida. However, again by the slant of this miniseries, which is compelling, law enforcement by then was flocking in from 20-odd states with their cold case files, and Lucas was clearing them left and right. He'd grin, suck on a milkshake, and admit to every single one, offering up the lurid details, including his favorite about the having sex with the corpses. Uncovering the fraud of all this is basically the arc of this miniseries, a twisting complicated story that is there to be discovered. Lucas died in prison in 2001 awaiting execution for a murder he could not have committed. Required viewing for anyone like me who thought Lucas might be the ultimate boogeyman. He's still pretty creepy.