Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah

Author:Maurice Chammah [Chammah, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Tucker’s death was the first in a run of news events out of Texas that scrambled the usual narratives about capital punishment. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, stories about death sentences and executions had fallen into patterns: the monstrous murderer and the undeserving victim, the steely-eyed prosecutor delivering justice, the governor soberly overseeing the execution. There were occasional challenges to this script, including Errol Morris’s movie The Thin Blue Line and the subsequent exoneration of Randall Dale Adams, as well as the news reports about sleeping defense lawyers. But these stories came and went. Now, with increasing competition in the twenty-four-hour news cycle—both Fox News and MSNBC went on air in 1996—an unusual or evocative case could stick around, challenging the conventions of the execution story genre and pushing politicians and the public to think about the death penalty in new ways. This was especially difficult, politically speaking, for Governor Bush: Whereas his predecessors could score easy points by giving the public what it wanted, now it was increasingly unclear what the public, or at least the majority of it, actually did want, and what role in the drama the governor was supposed to play.

A few months after the Tucker execution, Bush was confronted with another case that was garnering national interest. A serial killer named Henry Lee Lucas was set to be executed for the murder of a young woman who had been found dead on Halloween 1979 in a culvert off a highway about an hour north of Austin. She had never been identified, so she was named for the only clothing found on her: Orange Socks.

Lucas had confessed to the killing after being arrested for two other murders. (He had already served time in prison for the murder of his mother.) And now he kept confessing to other crimes beyond the “Orange Socks” murder. Eventually, the Texas Rangers set up a Lucas Task Force Office at the Williamson County Jail, north of Austin. Lucas referred to it as “my office.” He realized that if he kept talking he would keep drinking milkshakes and watching color TV rather than be sent to death row. His confessions grew increasingly outlandish. He said he had killed the union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and that he was a member of a Satanic cult that sold babies into slavery in Mexico. He said he’d delivered poison to Jim Jones in Guyana and had been paid to assassinate President Jimmy Carter.

His claims were greeted with a stunning lack of skepticism from law enforcement officers, who traveled from around the country to ask him about unsolved murders. The Rangers admitted that they “refreshed” his memory by sharing information about victims and letting him look at crime scene photos. Through his confessions, he helped police close more than two hundred murders—despite a dearth of physical evidence—and was interviewed about thousands more.

Many reporters took these claims by law enforcement at face value. But the Dallas journalist Hugh Aynesworth started tracking down

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.