Movie Has Texas Inmate Seeing Red : Film: The subject of ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’ has recanted confessions to 600 murders. He abhors the gore in feature that got an X rating.

Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to 600 murders and then recanted them all, is angry about a film he says connects him to crimes he did not commit.

“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” opened this month in Dallas, Ft. Worth and Houston.

Lucas said he has talked to his attorney about suing “on the grounds of lying, on the grounds of connecting me to crimes I didn’t commit.”

The movie, which depicts a murderer methodically plying his craft, is so graphically violent and dark that it drew an X rating, prompting the producers to release the film without a rating.

Although Lucas has not seen the movie, he has heard and read enough about it to know that the level of violence is outrageous, he said.

“Anyone who sees it is crazy,” Lucas told the Dallas Morning News in Sunday’s editions.

“I don’t think they should show violence at all. . . . It should be outlawed,” he said. “You take a mentally disturbed person. It will (spur him on to violence). He don’t have to be nuts, but if he’s mentally disturbed, it could set off anything.”

Lucas, 54, is on Texas’ Death Row for the murder of a hitchhiker, never identified and known only by what she was wearing--orange socks.

Confessions and plea bargains have led to other sentences. “Nine or 10 life sentences--I don’t know which,” he said. All the cases, he contends, are based on lies.

Lucas was first arrested in June, 1983, on a firearms charge, he said. Montague County sheriff’s deputies took the opportunity to question him on the disappearance of Kate Rich, an elderly Ringgold woman who had befriended him.

The questioning continued for days. He said he decided to tell the officers what they wanted to hear--not just implicating himself in the death of Kate Rich and his girlfriend but also confessing to the 1979 “Orange Socks” murder near Georgetown.

“I eventually told (authorities), ‘Yeah, I committed 60 of them,”’ Lucas said. “That’s when all hell broke loose.”

Law enforcement officers from around the nation went to visit Lucas. He was given cigarettes by the carton, dined on steaks and milkshakes and was allowed liquor, he said.

Shown pictures, prodded with information, showered with attention, Lucas faced questioning in more and more cases. They grew from 150 to 360, and eventually he was linked to about 600 slayings.

By 1986 it was proved that Lucas was in other states, or even in jail, when many of the killings to which he confessed had actually happened. He now denies involvement in any of them.

Dozens of those cases have been dropped. But others have won him the harshest punishment.

“Now I look at it as a tragedy,” he said. “Not for myself. For the people on the street and the family of the victims. That’s the only way I can look at it.

“The murderers are still out there. Solving a crime on somebody else just to get it off the books, that’s no way for law enforcement to act.”