Duel with a Demon? Or a Streak of Crazy Coincidences?

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

It was a quiet Sunday night at home, the winding-down of a great weekend. We had finished the house projects on our list, enjoyed a wonderful three-mile Sunday-afternoon walk/run along the shore of our favorite local lake, and were settling in for a quiet dinner.
    And not just any dinner! This was our post-hike family-tradition greatest-dinner-ever: a vegan, gluten-free, Mediterranean style Daiya frozen pizza, to which we added extra mushrooms, olives, and pineapple before cooking it absolutely perfectly in our air-fryer pizza oven. It isn’t often we have a perfect weekend and get to top it off with the perfect meal, but this weekend we achieved the near impossible.
    As I finished cooking the pizza and cut it into absolutely equal thirds under the very intense watchfulness of our seven-year-old son, my wife was flipping through photos on her phone. Her niece had just moved into her first-ever apartment, and had seen snow for maybe the third time in her life – she grew up in Houston, Texas – so we were being treated to a wide variety of indoor and outdoor images.
    One photo stood out from the others. It was a warmly lit, softly snowy cemetery scene, sort of a cross between a Norman Rockwell and a Currier & Ives, with the warm light of sunset melding perfectly with the neo-antique gas lights illuminating the tombstones and stone walkways. It was truly a stunning and inviting image. Yet, as I studied it I felt a cold chill creep over me: in seconds I went from enjoying the warmth of our kitchen to feeling like I had entered a walk-in freezer.
    What on earth?
    My wife looked up from her phone, took a quick glance my way, and said “Are you okay? You look like you are about to pass out.”
    “Not sure,” I muttered, as I staggered toward our living room, heading for the sofa.
    “Did you sugar crash?” my wife asked. “Are you dizzy? Are you having a seizure?”
    “Don’t think so,” I said. “Could you ask your niece if she knows anything about that cemetery?”
    “What? Don’t we need to be worrying about whatever is going on with you?”
    “Just ask her. Okay?”
    After a flurry of texts, my wife said, “She thinks some serial killer is buried there.”
    “Can you ask her if it is Henry Lee Lucas?”
    My wife, totally perplexed at this stage, said, “Do I need to dial 9-1-1?”
    “No. Just ask your niece. Will you?”
    A few moments later my wife walked back into the living room. It was her turn to look a bit shaken. “Yes, his name is Henry Lee Lucas,” she said. “How could you possibly know the name of a serial killer buried in some random cemetery in Texas?”

The answer to that question goes back 45 years, and to this day I still don’t know what to make of it.
    I grew up in Southwest Virginia, graduated high school, did a couple of years of community college, and then went to Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia. Today Virginia Tech is a big name in academics and national-level athletics; back then it was a pretentious wasteland of high ambitions but few results. Two years before I arrived at Tech, their big-talking but delusional head football coach scheduled a game against perennial national power Alabama. The Crimson Tide crushed Tech 77-6, rushed for 743 yards, scored on 10 of 14 possessions, and never punted. That about sums up the talk versus the reality of Virginia Tech sports in that era.
    I had wrecked a knee in middle school and was unable to pass a physical to participate in high-school sports. Probably just as well, since I was all of 5-feet, 7-inches tall and weighed 150 pounds, but at the time I knew – just absolutely, positively knew – I could hold my own, if I could just get on the field. By the time I got to Tech I was training like a madman, had a 32-inch waist and a 42-inch chest, had bulked up to 170 pounds, and could bench press almost twice my bodyweight. Take that you 6-foot, 4-inch, 225-pound jocks: I will show you what a lower center of gravity can do.
    Emboldened by strength and speed I had never before experienced, I was ready to give any and all college sports a try. I decided that my junior year at Tech would be the junior year I should have had in high school, when my gutsy but hopelessly over-matched team lost the state football championship in a game memorialized in the movie Remember the Titans.
    If there was ever a perfect fit for a 20-year-old with delusions of athletic prowess, the delusional athletics scene of Virginia Tech was it. But even there, the plan quickly fell apart. I learned the hard way that fitness and a lower center of gravity take you only so far, there is also the matter of learned techniques. You just can’t miss seven years of sports and step right in and compete with people who have been actually honing their skills while you dreamed of honing yours, especially when those people are bigger and sometimes faster.
    Dreams of team sports dashed, I retreated back to the world of the solo sports that had helped me survive high school: boxing, martial arts, archery, that sort of thing. And I discovered an “underground” bare-knuckle fight circuit where I could make some money while working out my frustrations. It was probably a match made in hell, but it felt like heaven. Why? Because I always won, hardly ever got hit hard, and I became a known and talked-about entity – a celebrity of sorts. I had finally found a sport I was actually fairly good at, so what if it was secretive and probably illegal?
    There is a certain thrill that comes with knowing people are targeting you, planning to take you down, and knowing they will fail. This is probably what the great athletes feel when they claim their championships in front of throngs of adoring fans. It may be what a lion, or a bear, feels when it wins a fight to claim its own turf. I never actually felt that way about myself, because I knew I had a dirty secret of an advantage: by age 20, I could break a brick with either hand, and I had some rudimentary boxing training.

    When a 170-pound refrigerator with a head unloads an uppercut that can break a brick into an opponent’s ribs, that fight is pretty much over. It may occasionally take a second punch, but not often. No need to hit someone in the head and risk seriously hurting them, no gangland style beatdowns with lots of blood and gore and black eyes and all that: just move around a bit, dodge a few wild punches, and launch that uppercut. When your opponent is curled on the floor in a fetal position, screaming in agony and pissing all over himself from the punch he just took, that fight is over: no need for a referee because there is no need to count him out. Which was a good thing because we didn’t have referees and ring-side assistants and all that; when you went into that warehouse on a Saturday night, or a dark parking lot at 3 a.m., you were on your own. We didn’t even have ring girls, which was a real tragedy.

As happens in life, as you get better at something, you inevitably get moved up and have to take on tougher competition. I slowly noticed I was fighting other guys who could also dance around and dodge punches just about forever, so I decided to work on my cardio capability: the longer you can bob and weave and run and dodge, the more tired the other guy gets, and the more effective it makes that one big punch – a big punch it was now taking several rounds to land, instead of a few minutes.
    And so I fell in love with long bike rides. Anywhere I could ride instead of drive, that’s what I did, which was a good thing since I was a broke college kid with a 1968 Renault R8 that I had assembled from parts of two cars. The transaxle was held on by U-bolts that would probably be illegal to mount wheels on a propane grill today, but I drove that beast nearly 70,000 miles. The transaxle made an ominous whine when I first put the car together and it was still making the same whine when the floorboard finally rusted out and some important stuff – including the gear shift handle – disappeared. You can only drive so far permanently mired in second gear, even in what had turned out to be an incredibly tough Renault.
    The best bike rides were at night, under a bright full moon, and since there was little traffic back then, they were generally safe. But there was one section of road that gave me the creeps, day or night. On a hot summer afternoon, or a chilly moonlit autumn evening, I felt like I was freezing inside whenever I pedaled through that area. I dismissed it as exertion, or maybe impending dehydration, and tried to ignore it as no big deal. It was on a steep climb back toward town, up past what locals called “the old cheese factory,” and if I hit that steep pitch after an 80-mile ride (as in when I rode back from visiting my family, who lived 40 miles away) I could almost walk as fast as I could pedal.
    One night, under a brilliant full moon, taking that climb at a snail’s pace and feeling my whole being freezing with the same strange dread I always felt when riding through there, I heard a yell from my left. It was a man running out of his gravel driveway, swinging an axe, and screaming he was going to kill me. What the hell?
    Knowing I couldn’t outrun anyone in my cycling shoes, I jumped off the right side of my bike and was still trying to formulate a plan when the man closed on me with his axe raised. For lack of a better strategy I shoved my bike at him, which he tripped over and went sprawling, dropping his axe in the process. As he tried to get up, I grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the neck. He went limp, so I grabbed his axe, threw it into the woods on the opposite side of the road, and pondered options.
    No cell phones back then, and no traffic, so I had a problem. When he started moving a bit, I again grabbed him by the hair, sort of half-dragged and half-walked him out of the road and back into his driveway, and then punched him again in the neck. Twice. He collapsed onto the gravel and I figured he would be there a while, so I continued my ride.
    Coming into town, I spotted a police car parked at a convenience store. I walked in, saw an officer in uniform, and said, “Some lunatic just tried to attack me with an axe as I was riding up by the old cheese factory.”
    I was expecting excitement, assistance, maybe some headlines.
    The cop looked at me. “Was that the other side of the apartments, or between here and the apartments?”
    “The other side, near the old cheese factory, like I said.”
    “Hmmm…that’s in the county. Out of my jurisdiction. You will have to report it to them.”
    “Can you do that?”
    “What’s to report? He’s probably gone by now. Where did you last see him?”
    “He tripped over my bike trying to take a swing at me with the axe. He was still lying in his driveway when I left.”
    “Where’s the axe?”
    “I threw it into the woods, on the opposite side of the road from his driveway.”
    “Good idea. But I doubt anyone could find it in the dark. So even if I get them to go out there, we have no weapon and probably no attacker. I will let them know and maybe they will look into it tomorrow. Glad you weren’t hurt. I have to get back to my patrol.”
    And that was it. No police report, no investigation, and as I pedaled home I realized he hadn’t even asked for my name. Apparently being attacked by someone with an axe didn’t count for much, unless a victim was actually killed in the attack.
    The next day I mentioned the incident to a guy I worked out with. His dad owned a service station, a garage, and a bunch of rental properties, so if he asked the cops to look into something, they would actually do it.

Henry Lee Lucas

    A week later he came back with some news: “My dad says it was probably a guy named Henry Lee Lucas. He’s crazy as a loon and has been doing stupid stuff his whole life, but he’s mostly harmless.”
    “He tried to attack me with an axe. That’s harmless?”
    “You know what I mean. He got sentenced for some petty crimes and craziness and just got out of jail and moved back here. His cousin lives out that gravel driveway. Henry Lee is probably staying with him, but he won’t be around long. He always gets caught and sent away again. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

Lucas with his friend,
serial killer Ottis Toole

With the modern advantage of Wikipedia, it is easy to build a profile of this “mostly harmless” criminal. [“Henry Lee Lucas,” Wikipedia.] By the time I encountered him, if it was indeed Lucas, he had been sentenced to four years in the Virginia State Penitentiary for burglary, had escaped after three years, had eventually been recaptured, served his time, and was released. In 1960 he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for killing his mother – because they had gotten into a heated argument – but he was released in 1970 due to prison overcrowding. A year later he was convicted of attempting to kidnap a schoolgirl – or three schoolgirls, depending in which “official” account you choose to believe – and he was sentenced to five years in prison. When he finished that stint, he married someone he had become pen pals with while in prison, but he left that marriage when his stepdaughter accused him of sexually abusing her.
    For the next few years, Lucas drifted around West Virginia and his former home area near Blacksburg – the era I had my encounter with him; again, if it was indeed him. When your only interaction with someone is punching them in the neck a few times in the dark, it’s difficult to make an exact identification. The guy looked and certainly acted the part, but Lucas wasn’t the only crazy redneck living in that area. Yet that strange cold chill will always make me wonder.
    After college the bike rides ended, as did the trips to Blacksburg, and I forgot all about Henry Lee Lucas.
    A few years later I was assigned to do a newspaper article on a local fisherman and hunter of note. I couldn’t find my notes from that era, but his name was Jerry, as I recall, and I went to his house to photograph some of the record-class fish he had caught and had mounted on his trophy wall. Trophy rooms sort of creep me out, so when I started to feel that strange cold chill as I walked into the room, I tried to dismiss it as the impact of all the vacantly staring glass eyes, but it seemed more vivid than that.
    Along a wall of newspaper clippings about Jerry’s fishing successes, I spotted it: A clipping with a photo of Henry Lee Lucas.
    Frozen in place, I said, “I have to ask. Why do you have a photo of Henry Lee Lucas on your wall?”
    “Because the SOB killed my dog and stole a bunch of my guns before he went on his killing spree. I saw him sitting in his truck down the road when I went to work that morning, and something told me I should go home and guard the place. Wish I had. How do you know about him?”
    And so I recounted my possible encounter from a decade earlier.
    “Sounds like him,” Jerry said. “You should have left him in the road, maybe someone would have run over him and killed him.”
    Again thanks to Wikipedia, I can see Lucas had been a very, very busy guy in the years I had forgotten about him. Depending on which version of various articles or police reports you might choose to believe, he killed somewhere between 10 and 100 people during that era. And he allegedly helped a partner in crime kill 10 to 100 more. Lucas was ultimately convicted of murdering 11 people and sentenced to death for one of the murders, but then Texas Governor George W. Bush commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in 1998.

Lucas as a child
(He lost an eye to
infection after a fight
with his brother.)

   It was the only death penalty Bush commuted as governor; why he chose Lucas may never be fully answered. By many reports, Lucas endured a horrific childhood that could have left anyone emotionally damaged, and maybe that caught Bush’s eye? Or did Bush think commuting a death sentence would soften his image in his upcoming quest to become president. Who knows?

    Lucas died in prison from congestive heart failure in 2001; he was 64 years old. His remains are buried in a cemetery near where my wife’s niece now lives in her new apartment.
    There are very few events that have happened in my life that I can’t sit down and rationally and coherently sort them out. Why I always had that feeling of cold and dread when riding by “the old cheese factory” was mystery enough, but how a digital image sent through my wife’s phone tapped into that 45 years later, is beyond my ability to comprehend. Or was it all a coincidence? Did the steep climb at the end of a long ride push my fitness to the breaking point, and did a sugar crash throw me off mentally while I was waiting to eat pizza?
    You will have to make of it what you will, because I am still trying to sort it out myself.

Copyright © 2021 by Paul Clark