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American Criminal Intro

1:00Felix Bunnell here, producer and host of Unsolved Histories, with a word about the podcast American Criminal. It's from Airship, the studio behind American Scandal, Business Movers, and History Daily. American Criminal dives deep into the lives and misdeeds of some of history's most notorious criminals, exploring the dark side of the American dream. Fraud, theft, murder, and worse. Whatever the case, whoever the criminal, you don't know the whole story until now. Previous seasons have included the jaw-dropping story of a series of bombings that rocked Salt Lake City to its core, with rare Mormon documents holding the key to the puzzle.

1:39The woman who laid the foundation for the modern adoption industry by stealing babies and selling them to desperate parents. An assassination inside San Francisco's City Hall that stunned a city already reeling in the wake of the Jonestown Massacre. Today, we bring you a clip from Episode 1 of American Criminal's Serial Killers, Serial Liars. The story of two killers who claim to be the most prolific murderers America has ever seen. Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were mysterious figures who definitely lied and embellished parts of their life stories.

2:10When Lucas was arrested for the murder of a beloved grandmother, he shocked a small Texas town by freely admitting to killing 100 other women before that. As media and investigators from around the country converged on Lucas' cell to hear more, he wove a patchwork story of how he and his literal partner in crime, Otis Toole, traveled across America, killing indiscriminately whenever they could. For his part, Toole was responsible for one of the most shocking murders of the century, one that changed the way Americans responded to missing children forever.

2:41The story was sensational. By the end of his confessions, Lucas was taking responsibility for hundreds and hundreds of murders. Few people questioned the truthfulness of Lucas' story, and those who did were silenced by the Texas Rangers, who were proud of their work getting Lucas to confess. But was any of it true? Lucas and Toole undoubtedly each had red in their ledgers. But just how much? And why were they so willing to confess to so many murders? To listen to the rest of Serial Killers, Serial Liars, Fledgling Criminals, plus more from American Criminal, search for and follow American Criminal wherever you get your podcasts.

3:23This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

Adam Walsh Disappearance

3:36It's July 27th, 1981, in a Sears parking lot in Hollywood, Florida. 33-year-old Revae Walsh walks across the pavement, her six-year-old son Adam at her side. Adam's yellow flip-flops slap against the ground as mother and son approach the entrance to the department store. An hour ago, Revae's husband John called to say that some lamps they'd been looking at had gone on sale and suggested she pick them up.

4:11It's hot out, so Revae was more than happy for an excuse to spend time in some air conditioning. As they walk through the sprawling store, Revae feels Adam tugging on her hand, trying to pull her towards a video game display in the hi-fi department. There's a group of kids standing around a screen, taking turns blowing up aliens. Figuring that shopping for lamps will bore any six-year-old to tears, Revae tells Adam that he can stay and wait for a turn at the game.

4:41She leans down to make sure he can hear her over the sounds of the game, telling him that she'll just be over in the furniture department. She points to the far corner, and Adam nods. Then, Revae lets go of her son's hand and watches him rush closer to the television screen, his favorite white sailor's hat standing out among the other kids' baseball caps. Revae's only gone a few minutes, maybe ten, long enough for her to look for the lamps, fail to find them, then ask a sales associate if they have any in the back.

5:15Once the employee's taken down Revae's phone number with a promise to call when the lamps come back in stock, Revae heads back towards the hi-fi department. But when she gets closer, Revae can tell that something isn't right. She can't hear the sound of the video game anymore, nor can she hear kids arguing over whose turn it is. When she rounds the corner and arrives at the display, her heart stops. There's no one there. Revae calls out to Adam as she walks through the maze of televisions and stereos.

5:50Soon, she's practically running up and down the aisles. She asks a couple of sales associates if they've seen a little boy, describing his green shorts, his yellow flip-flops, and his white sailor's hat. But no one remembers seeing Adam, so she rushes back to the furniture section in case he came to find her. But he's not there, either. As the minutes pass, Revae's concern ratchets up in a full-blown panic. But she's too scared to venture far from the video game display in case Adam comes back and she misses him.

6:23Still, she manages to get the staff to help her, getting them to make an announcement over the store's loudspeaker telling Adam that his mother is looking for him. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. And after two frantic hours, it's finally abundantly terrifyingly clear Adam Walsh is gone. From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

7:02The telling of true crime stories is full of difficulties. Not only do you risk glorifying the acts of some of history's most despicable figures, you often do so at the expense of their victims.

7:36And then there are the issues of reliability. In many cases, the best, fullest account of a crime comes from its perpetrator, someone who, for obvious reasons, can't always be trusted. Sometimes, law enforcement are able to use evidence to paint a full and complete picture of the events in question. In those cases, official records can be an invaluable source of trustworthy information to either corroborate or disprove individual accounts.

8:08Couple that with rigorous reporting by journalists, and you've got a recipe for a balanced true crime story. But if you don't have any of those things, what if you simply can't trust what the criminal says happened, can't trust what the cops say happened, and can't trust what the journalists say happened? What then? Well, then you get a story like this one. Complicated, fascinating, hopelessly tangled. Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole aren't easy figures to sketch.

8:42That's because there's a chance that some of the chapters of this story never happened. Or that they did, but not quite the way we're told they did. Some of the narrators can be believed, but not all the time. And some pieces of the puzzle don't connect the whole story till the very end.

Henry Lee Lucas Childhood

9:02Some of the facts are immutable. Henry and Otis were both killers with multiple deaths to their name. But just how much red is in each of their ledgers is something that's still debated to this day. This is episode one in our four-part series on Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole, Fledgling Criminals. It's the fall of 1943 in Blacksburg, Virginia, almost four decades before the disappearance of Adam Walsh.

9:34Seven-year-old Henry Lee Lucas is holding a long piece of grapevine in his hands while his older brother, Andrew, hacks at it with a knife. They're in a patch of trees not far from their family home. The boys have plans of turning the grapevine into a swing, but first they need to get it to the right length. Unfortunately, the vine's too thick, the knife's too dull, and Andrew's too weak. When he starts trying a sawing motion with the knife, the blade slips, glancing along the bumpy vine towards Henry's face.

10:08Henry squeezes both his eyes shut, but the instinct comes a fraction of a second too late. There's a flash of pain as the knife slices across Henry's nose and into his left eye. Henry hears the clatter of the knife dropping to the ground. Then his older brother demands that Henry open his eyes so he can take a look and see what's wrong. Henry can feel blood running down his face, a lot of it, and opening his eyelid only makes it worse. He and Andrew rub at the blood, clearing most of it away so that Henry can see out of both eyes.

10:43But everything still looks cloudy and dark. When the boys go inside their family's one-bedroom shack, their mother Viola's more exasperated than anything. Taking time out of her day to rush her son to the hospital is a hassle she could do without. Still, she does so anyway, and Henry's face is properly cleaned up. But Viola's not a particularly affectionate woman and has neither the time nor inclination to visit her son while he remains in the hospital for several weeks.

11:16She stops by just once. Other than that, Henry's on his own. Not that that's much of a change of pace for the kid. So far, his childhood has been pretty miserable. Viola's a heavy drinker, as mean as a rattlesnake, one neighbor says. She brings local men into the family home, trading a romp in the sack for 50 cents. It's money the family desperately needs. Viola's husband, Anderson, isn't able to contribute much to the household.

11:48A heavy drinker like his wife, he lost both his legs after passing out on the train tracks one evening. These days, his only prospects are skinning minks to be used in clothing and selling pencils from a blanket in town, relying on the pity of locals to make the effort worth his time. Occasionally, when he's scraped together a dollar or two, Anderson slips some money to his son Henry for an outing to the movie theater. It's an indulgence they both pay for when Viola finds out.

12:19She's just as likely to hit her son as she is her husband. Not long before his injury, Viola walloped Henry across the back of the head with a plank of wood, knocking him unconscious. So, although Henry's stay in the hospital is a lonely one, at least it's a change of scenery. When he's allowed back home, he returns to school, but it turns out he's no safer there than with his family. Teachers are allowed, even expected, to hit their students when they get out of line.

12:50One day, one of Henry's instructors lashes out at his classmate with a ruler, but the metal edge of the ruler catches Henry across the left side of his face, rupturing his already injured eye. So, back to the hospital Henry goes. This time, the only thing the doctors can do is remove the ruined eye. Then, when he's recovered from the procedure, Henry's fitted for a glass eye. The prosthetic embarrasses the boy.

13:21He can tell when people are staring at it, and it doesn't help that it doesn't quite fit him properly. So, his left eyelid always droops down, half obscuring the iris. He'll never do a good job looking after the eyeball, either, which only makes it stand out more prominently. Still, there's nothing Henry can do except continue to grow up. But his education and the ways of the world will take an extreme turn before he's even reached puberty.

13:52People in Blacksburg all know Bernie Doughty as a young man with some kind of intellectual disability. They also know that he's regularly sleeping with Henry's mother, Viola, and not because he pays her. Just what the attraction is between them, no one really knows. He's in his mid-twenties. She's in her fifties. He's slower than most. She's meaner than most. But whatever it is that brings them together, Viola and Bernie are happy enough in each other's company.

14:24Even in front of Viola's husband, Anderson. People in town whisper that Anderson's not Henry's father, that it's really Bernie. And whether Bernie knows or suspects his role in Henry's life, he certainly takes it upon himself to teach the boy what he feels is an important lesson. One day, when Henry's around 10 years old, Bernie shows him how to kill livestock and then use the bodies for sexual gratification. Years later, it's a memory Henry will share with people when they ask him about his childhood.

14:58Whether it's true or not, it's a story he repeats. A touchstone moment of his life. That extreme moment of pseudo-parental bonding aside, Henry's early years aren't completely morally bankrupt. Henry starts stealing pretty much as soon as he's old enough to understand that it's wrong. But is also fast enough to know he won't get caught. He happily pilfers from stores in town and slips into people's homes to snatch their valuables.

15:29But thievery isn't something Viola approves of. When she discovers him with someone else's jewelry, she marches him right to the victim's front door to watch Henry apologize for his behavior. She also promises that she'll deliver a sound beating to her disappointment of a son when they get home. But despite Viola's determination to straighten her son out some, it doesn't take. Henry likes to peep in windows, buys cigarettes when he can afford them, and drinks moonshine whenever he can get his hands on it.

16:02A habit he picked up from his dear old mother. Then in 1950, Henry's world shifts out of balance. One winter's evening, Viola and her husband get into a particularly bad fight, and Anderson crawls out of a window to escape the screaming and violence. But he's had a few too many drinks again. So when he lands in the snow beneath the window, he passes out. That's where his family finds his body the next morning.

16:35After that, the rest of Henry's family leave the shack he's always called home. Viola and Bernie officially move in together, and Henry decides he doesn't want to go with them. By this stage, the 14-year-olds only manage to reach the fifth grade, but he figures he knows enough to take care of himself. He drifts around for a while, sometimes staying with an older half-sister, or otherwise crashing wherever he can find shelter.

17:05He works as a farmhand for a spell, but it doesn't last long. Mostly, he lays low and keeps himself out of trouble with the law. But eventually, he's arrested for the first time for reckless driving. He's loved being behind the wheel ever since his brother Andrew taught him how to drive when he was younger. Now, he mostly likes to go fast. In March of 1952, Henry's record gets a bit longer with a second arrest, this time for burglary.

17:37He and two of his half-brothers break into an electronics store, and Henry manages to get away with a small radio. But it costs him. When the police catch him, he's hauled before a judge, who decides that the 15-year-old could use some structure in his life. So Henry's sent to the Beaumont Training School for Boys, a place designed to mold unruly teens into upstanding citizens. It's there Henry finally has people paying close attention to him for the first time in his life.

18:11Staff at the school test him and put his IQ at 76, which is well below average. They also note that while the teen is easy to get along with, he also likes to get his own way as much as possible. Any task that Henry's assigned requires him to be under close supervision. Otherwise, it probably won't get done.

18:37Henry's life could be much worse than he has it at Beaumont. Compared to the ramshackle building he grew up in, the sturdy walls and the three-square meals at the school are relatively luxurious. Even still, he makes a couple of escape attempts during his first few months there. Gets away, too, just not for long. Both times, he's caught and returned to the school and beaten for his troubles. After that, Henry decides to keep his head down and serve his time.

19:08He writes to his mother to ask her to send small things to make life more comfortable, but Viola tells her youngest that she hasn't got the money to send him treats in the mail. Her reply frustrates Henry. He's never felt like Viola's cared about him, and here again is the proof she won't even scrounge up some money to make him happy. Putting his mother out of his mind, Henry focuses on impressing the administrators of the Beaumont school.

19:38They're well aware that he's not interested in talking to them about the problems of his childhood, but they do notice an improvement in his behavior and schoolwork. At the end of May 1953, Henry finally makes it to the sixth grade, just before his 17th birthday. In an evaluation, one of his teachers praises Henry for trying hard to do what's right, and goes on to recommend him for release from the school at the end of the summer. Some of the staff have reservations about Henry, though.

20:11They've noticed his improved behavior, but call it a facade designed to impress. Henry hasn't actually changed for the better. They say he's just learned the rules of the game. Still, in September of 1953, Henry's released. Everyone watching him walk out of the Beaumont gates hopes the teenager will turn over a new leaf, that this will be a new start for the troubled boy. Sadly, it won't be. Henry Lee Lucas is just a few years away from taking his first life.

20:45Henry Lucas is just a few years away from taking his first life.

20:57Henry Lucas is just a few days away. Hee. Hee.

21:02Hee.

21:13Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee.