Police Use Fake Murder to Prove Killer’s Innocence

Police investigators say they used a fake killing to prove to themselves that Henry Lee Lucas was not responsible for the slayings of 12 area women, as he had claimed.

Lucas has been convicted of several murders and is on death row. He once claimed to have killed hundreds of people across the United States over several years.

“We were convinced he was making it up,” homicide Lt. Ron Waldrop said. “But we were a little bit concerned people would think we were negligent in not clearing cases.”

After a July, 1984, tape-recorded interview in which Lucas confessed to a fictitious slaying, authorities declined to charge him in the killings of 12 women in the city.

Police “made up a report, a folder, fictitious pictures, and allowed him to solicit information (from the investigation) with graphic details,” Waldrop said Wednesday. “It never happened, but he remembered it vividly. At that point, we knew he was confessing to stuff he hadn’t done.”

The police interrogation followed efforts by authorities in 26 states to close more than 200 cases attributed to Lucas. Later, evidence surfaced that seemed to put him far from the scene of some crimes he had admitted to.

Recently, Lucas has said he lied in claiming responsibility for the slayings. He said he was trying to make investigators look ridiculous.