Ian Brady Henry Lee Lucas Criminal Profiling
June 20, 2007
In his book, The Gates of Janus , Ian Brady examines the case of Henry Lee Lucas and he comes to the following conclusions. Henry Lee he claims was sadistically abused by his father and as a result he at the age of 23 killed his mother for, in effect, just standing by and letting it happen. Brady is correct in pointing out to the reader that this phenomena of the victim of abuse sometimes killing the so to speak innocent parent is not uncommon but he is wrong in his facts and almost certainly wrong in his conclusions.
Henry was no doubt abused by his father though not sexually but this was as nothing compared to the abuse from his mother. His mother , a prostitute , would bring men , several men at a time home and Henry and his young sister would be forced to watch , to literally stare at his mother having sex with these men. If he so much as let his eyes wander from the action for even a very brief moment she would beat him mercilessly. Much of the time his father would be gone for several days on drinking sprees. It also must be noted that his father did in fact try to stop this going on but the local welfare didn’t really believe his complaints about his wife and indeed were giving support to his wife at the time.
Brady also claims that Henry was of average or below average intelligence. He seems to base this on the fact that Henry was something of a feckless drifter with no noticable ambition and little education. But yet again Brady is wrong. Henry when arrested for the murder of his young wife and a woman called Kate Rich began to confess to something in the region of three hundred murders. He convinced the police and the press and through them the entire American nation. He later withdrew his confessions and surprisingly everyone believed him all over again. He claimed that he had seen all the other murders in the papers and decided that he would confess to them all as he , in his own words , “Wanted to be famous , like Elvis Presley”. All this sounds just fine unless you just sit back and think about it for a while. Imagine that you were in police custody and decided to , for whatever reason , confess to a whole array of crimes committed over several years and thousands of miles. How many names , dates , locations etc would you remember? It’s true that much of the time the police were almost leading him on , giving him bits of information about many of the killings to ‘help’ him remember but this does not explain Henry’s ,for the most part , very convincing story. No matter which way you look at it or which of his confessions you believe the one thing that becomes quite clear is that Henry Lee Lucas was far from being a fool.
Henry Lee was a casual killer. He , as far as we know , never planned anything. He lived on the road much of the time and travelled thousands of miles and his story (his first confession) is , no matter how extradordnary it may sound very , very convincing. I have little doubt that he did in fact kill all those people , and I am equally sure that there are others doing the same thing right now. Henry had in some ways the perfect system for killing , ie keep it simple and keep it moving. Brady is certainly wrong about the mans intelligence and seems to , for some reason or other , have believed the official version of events. There is no doubt that Henry Lee did confess to some crimes that he obviously could not have committed , having in some cases been in prison at the time , but that is neither here nor there. Criminals such as Lucas (and Brady) mix half truths , and lies when speaking to the police. This is probably the one thing that all murderers have in common and if anything makes Lucas’s story more believable. But Brady , based on just the afore mentioned fact jumps to the opposite conclusion in spite of his own personal experience. One gets the impression that he is so busy trying to impress us with scholarship that he overlooks the immediate and obvious.
Brady also claims that an ‘eminant author’ asked for his advice in the case and had material sent to him from the FBI at Quantico ( Psychological Profiling Unit of the FBI) which I just don’t believe ever happened.
There is of course no way that we can be sure about the truth about Henry Lee Lucas but Brady’s certainty in the matter is just a little too rigid. Henry Lee’s story may or may not be true but it is not at all improbable that he did in fact kill hundreds of undocumented people on empty highways all over the USA.
I am one of those who belive Brady is a remarkable and highly intelligent man. He has no doubt researched Henry Lee and other criminals of note but he simple does not have , as you and I do , the means to see all the research and the wider debate surrounding people like Lucas. Nor does he have the ability to test his ideas as we do by being able to ‘bounce’ them off a wide circle of people with common interests.
The movie Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer was based on Henry Lee but it’s a romantic Hollywood version that has very little of fact in it.
You can see Henry himself on Youtube but after you watch him don’t be too quick to jump to a conclusion. Henry Lee is very convincing in claiming that he admitted to all these murders for as he tells it , an endless supply of cigarettes and a bit of fame but he was equally convincing when claiming that he was a mass killer. The police did let the whole thing develop into something of a circus and even the then Governor of Texas George Bush acted out of character for the first and only time in his life but all of that acts as something of a diversion and it’s easy to find yourself thinking that Henry was just a hapless fool. But no one disputes that this man killed three women two of them within a very short space of time immediately before his arrest. He killed these women without so much as a second thought and if he had not been caught would have moved on and lost himself out on the highways yet again. So the question you have to ask yourself is was Henry acting out of character when he killed these people or was he just out of luck in getting caught. I have a feeling that if Brady and Lucas had met in real life then Brady might not have lived long enought to write his book. Watch the Youtube video and make your own mind up.
June 20, 2007 at 11:39 pm
As per usual this is another awesome post. Keep up the book review!
January 18, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I concur with Ian Brady, in that Lucas was a ‘primitive’ a lesser read person who acted as schizoid personality and entered the depressive phase at one and the same time. That Freud and Klein both had this feature of seeing the observed patient become unglued when parenting was taken away in the mother’s role.
Abgrall in Belgium chases a serial killer who was a vagrant who eluded most other regions officers in Holland and Heaulme has this knack of killing and taking in a partner to commit with him. Heaulme was also of very limited cognition, but still made rings of police admitting some and not others. It is said the absence of a properly formed and working penis made him suffer bouts of insanity and rage as a known condition they say of deficient in Lacanian have and have not phallus.
I believe also that there is Journal evidence that shows the abuse victim does project that anger onto the so called innocent. It depends what a child or man feels of his mother or that person as ‘innocent’. I think the bursts of killings were his projecting of internalized conflicts much like the case of the patient who had suffered all his childhood from criticisms and lack of getting it right from his domineering mother. Double-blind the psychoanalyst called it as the patient tried to bully him into doing a procedure in the treatment room. The patient on return chastised the analyst for doing as he wanted and only have a job. Later the analyst took him back to childhood and he found he had transferred this hurt back to others who he could manipulate where he could not his mother. He then could re-internalize this pattern and break free of the controls and the dehumanising this caused him. Taking a real patient example from my case books this highlights that Lucas killed his mother instead of his father as he loved her and hated her. He entered the fragmented ego stage of splitting in good and bad object, the object being the mother.
In this state the boy child grown to man killed the bad part that hurt him and in doing so the innocent good part. After which he would mourn, grief and miss these parts as all were now destroyed. So in Kleinian and Post-Kleinian I have to agree that the inner world and outer world conflicts led to the destruction of the object, not the father, but the mother. She was innocent in the way that she was his ‘mirror’, his internalized good enough mother who he watched and got aroused at one minute, and hated her the next for letting someone else beat him in a torture routine.
He hated then, the absence or lack of mothering as good enough mother. But he loved her. That is the crux of what I think Ian Brady is intimating without boring you with the Journals and writers who are psychoanalysts.
Lucas was naive and wise, not academic, there is a difference. A street criminal knows how to play the system, and institutions teach those inside as recruits and learning centres of such competences from this vast pool of incarcerated minds. If the opportunity was there Lucas being of the mind of a wild animal as ‘primitive’ would continue to murder on a spree and in serial killing because his mother was dead. His mourning I would say played out to the audience of women who he could not find substituted the loss of his mother in the good and bad parts. They were his search for her, and he never again found her like again.
Bragging in the sick mind is by transference, those who do not achieve, have reality that is their own do take the route of counter transference by implicating and contaminating the good analyst, friend or contact they meet. It is how they function the schizoid state as I read and understand it in Winnicottian terms.
Education is not intelligence, how you use linguistics, codes, culture, language and interaction to the best advantage is. It is a role play of character where the identity is not fixed and is fluent to some other form. So in conclusion I agree with some of the Lucas aspects having read it in US myself. But Lucas as a prolific killer of woman was really killing the same bad part to rid himself of the internalized angst that he had grown to be salient wanting of the chemical effect as an addiction to the feeling neurocognitively.
Therefore, the statement that the abused victim kills the innocent person is right instead of the perpetrator. So who did Myra want to kill when she took the local lads and lasses from her own class structure as survivors of the inner city poverty trap? Was it her grandmother, or was it her being ousted from the nest and the family hearth, if so then the anger was at families she saw who should have tossed their kids out in her sadistic view and did not. Enter Ian who to her was tossed out in her way of thinking. Enter the breadwinner and orator who she could fantasy write of yet hate at the same time as her journal says.
There are different ways of looking at why as in Profiling a person engages in an act, and what is intelligence. A rat can get the cheese every time and a student can write a good grammatical essay. Whether the rat or the student can think outside the box is another matter, in the end the goal is to get the cheese or to have the perfect essay. But the reality is it is programming.
Science taught me how to observe and to critically act on bias internalized. In science there is a way of testing that is not psychic reality it is empirical and qualitative testing. Huxley observed in his day a phenomena to be proved different with more inspection. Just as on species is viewed the same so in time new taxonomy makes a fragmented class and sub-class, that speaks for Lucas too – a sub-class taxonomy of being.