I was never particularly interested in Henry Lee Lucas until recently. I saw Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer a long time ago, and I knew that it was roughly based on him. I had no idea of how many people he had supposedly killed until I read more about him in David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill. In that book, McGowan claimed that Henry had been involved in a Satanic cult and had killed hundreds of people. His source for this information was a long out of print book called Hand of Death. I had to read it.

Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story – Max Call

Henry Lee Lucas was born to a “sadistic bitch” of a mother. She wanted a baby girl, and when Henry came out of her womb she was very disappointed. Moments after his birth, she told bystanders that she would have her newborn baby hooking by age 5. She planned to dress him in girls clothes and charge extra. The first time she fed him, she said, “suck your mommy’s tittys” and pinched his dick to make him cry. Nobody who was present for this was alive when this book was written, but it will become clear as the story progresses that Henry Lee Lucas had an excellent memory, so he definitely would have been able to remember what his mom said to him moments after he came out of her womb.

After murdering his mother and serving time, Henry got out of jail and met Ottis Toole. They became lovers. After a killing spree, a car starts following them. When they confront the man in the car, a likeable chap named Don Meteric, he asks if they want to work as hitmen for Satanic organization. When they agree they are invited to a cult camp in a Florida swamp where they murder a man, eat his flesh and drink his blood and then partake in an orgy as his corpse is set on fire.

Henry then attends a murder school at the camp, but he’s so good with knives he ends up becoming one of the teachers there. The cult is called the Hand of Death. There were thousands of members at the time that Henry was a member, but nobody else has ever admitted to being a member.

Henry’s first assignment is to kidnap kids and for satanic paedos making snuff movies. He’s taught a chant to chant while he is sacrificing children to Satan, “Ambe ishke ho asseko.” I tried putting this through google translate, but it doesn’t seem to be any known language. Then I thought it might be an anagram. I played around with the letters for a bit, but the best I came up with was, “Homo Abe seeks his AK.” I’m not sure.

After killing some kids, Henry then takes Ottis’s 12 year old cousin on a romantic road trip. She gets horny when he’s about to kill, but Henry is a decent man and won’t have sex with this child until later. This is true love after all. It’s also quite confusing. A little later, after describing her 15 year old breasts as “soft and tender”, the author says Henry started sleeping with her when she was 9, even though he previously said 12. Whether it was 9, 12 or 15, this is a child being discussed.

When his 12 year old ‘wife’ converts to Christianity and tries to get him to pray, the actual real Satan touches the back of Henry’s head and tells him to ignore her. Henry obviously ends up killing her. (In real life, he had sex with her corpse, but for some reason this tidbit is left out of the book.) After this, he continues to kill until he is caught. He occasionally snorts a line of cocaine to leave him feeling “mellow and relaxed.”

When Henry is finally arrested, he’s given a Bible in jail he sees the light of Christ and decides that the only way he can redeem himself is by confessing to all 600 of the murders he committed.

That’s the story in this book. It turns out that while Henry admitted to 600 murders, he probably only killed 3 people, including his mom. It turns out that Henry really liked attention, and the police officers working his case got him to admit to a bunch of murders for their own benefit. It made them look like big-shots, and they were able to use him to help out their buddies. In the introduction to this book, Sheriff Jim Boutwell states that Henry had recently admitted to murdering a Texas police officer. This was very convenient for the police officer’s family as his death had previously been ruled a suicide and this meant that his family couldn’t access his insurance. When the insurance company discovered it was actually a murder, they had to pay up. Admittedly, that was a pretty nice thing for Henry to do, but admitting guilt to murders you didn’t commit allows the real murderers to walk the streets. The cops getting Henry to admit these murders claim that they truly believed he was the most prolific killer of all time, but in reality, he was a smelly, one-eyed idiot who would claim to be from the moon if it made his listener happy. These cops were treating him better than he had ever been treated in his life.

There’s a Netflix documentary that does a really good job of showing how awful these police officers were at their jobs. At one point in the show, Henry claims to have driven from the USA to Japan to commit murders. He does so in the presence of the cops who are using his testimony to close murder cases. It’s mad. I found it funny that the documentary doesn’t make a single reference to the Hand of Death, the book or the cult. They didn’t have to stoop so low to prove their point.

This book is complete garbage. It’s almost pornographic in its descriptions of child abuse, and most of the narrative is clearly a complete fabrication. There was never a Don Meteric or a Hand of Death. The last third of the book, the finding Jesus stuff, makes the exploitative nature of the first part particularly perplexing. Both Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole did awful things, but both of their lives were horrifically sad. When Henry was a child, his own mother beat his head so badly that he suffered brain damage and lost an eye. Ottis Toole was raped by family members as a child. To paint these utterly tragic figures as elite satanic assassins for the sake of entertaining a bunch of repressed Christian perverts is truly despicable. Max Call was a scumbag.