(2 of 2)
According to his own creepily cool account, before he teamed up with Toole in 1976 Lucas traveled from state to state, living out of his car, surviving on odd jobs or thefts, and randomly picking up victims. Sometimes he killed alone, sometimes with casual companions. The victims were often hitchhikers of either sex and any age or race. Some were shot, others strangled, still others stabbed. Many were mutilated.
"It was difficult to believe at first," recalls Texas Investigator Paul Smith, "but then we corroborated some of his statements." Lucas cooperated fully, drawing detailed pencil sketches of his victims and, in a few cases, leading investigators on walking tours of murder sites.
Lucas fingered Toole, currently serving a 20-year sentence in Raiford, Fla., for arson, as his most frequent accomplice. During subsequent interviews with police, Toole, Lucas' occasional lover, claimed more than 50 murders of his own, mostly of young men. Like Lucas, Toole was chillingly matter of fact in the telling. "It's as though he were discussing the weather," reported one detective.
Toole's composure collapsed only once, while explaining how he kidnaped and beheaded six-year-old Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Fla., in the summer of 1981. Adam Walsh's disappearance from a shopping mall became a national cause celebre two years ago. It led to the passage last year of the federal Missing Children Act, giving the FBI more authority to investigate disappearances of children, as well as the filming this fall of a made-for-TV movie, Adam. By coincidence, the show aired a week before Toole's prison confession, which he later recanted. But police still consider him the case's prime suspect. "He knows things only the murderer could know," says one Florida policeman.
So many investigators sought information about the two men as possible suspects that last month a three-day conference was held in Monroe, La., to pool the facts. Eighty investigators from 21 states gathered to watch videotapes of the confessions, swap notes on missing-persons files and unsolved homicides, and compare crime lab evidence. And this week 150 detectives from all over Michigan will convene in Lansing to attempt to determine whether Lucas, and possibly Toole, is linked to as many as eleven unsolved murders in the state.
Unlike the serial murderer, the mass murderer, as criminologists define him, confines his spree to one general area and strikes over a relatively short period of time. A prime alleged example: Angelo Buono Jr., the so-called Hillside Strangler, who stands accused in the deaths of ten young women during the Los Angeles winter of 1977-78. Last week he was found innocent of one murder but guilty of two others. The second guilty verdict, returned on Saturday, could subject Buono to California's death penalty. —By Alessandra Stanley. Reported by David S. Jackson/Houston, with other bureaus