02x02 - A Suspect?

[bunniefuu]

[ Calls ]

Narrator: Secrets in the wild.

Brutal murders.

Beautiful
yet treacherous places.

These are the stories
of the investigators

who solve crimes
in the wilderness.

[ Roars ]

We had a human being
laying dead up there.

How did she get there?

Henry Lee Lucas
has been confessing

that he may have done
a homicide in Yosemite.

The reason for bringing him here

was for local law enforcement
to solve these crimes.

Lucas: My victims never knew
what was gonna happen.

He started talking about
the little triangle signs.

Man: This guy has been
to the crime scene.

I was telling them to not do
anything further with the case.

I was done.

Woman: Then the "Dallas Morning
News" published the exposé.

Some of those confessions
were bogus.

...that Lucas could not
have been the k*ller

in all the cases.

Man: I realized that there was
a m*rder*r out there,

and we don´t know
where that m*rder*r is.

And then the skull was found.

♪♪

♪♪

Woman: Yosemite is magnificent.
It´s mammoth.

And it´s humbling.

It´s a magical place to any
of us that have worked there.

Man:
I would go out into a meadow

and just lay there looking up
at the stars or the sky.

And I would say,
"I´m getting paid to do this?"

Man: From the giant sequoias

to the waterfalls

to the sublime evenings
in the high country at sunset.

It´s an amazing place.

I met my wife and was married
in Yosemite National Park

at the base of Yosemite Falls.

So it almost feels
like home to me.

I was working
the south end of the park,

and one day in 1984,

Kim Tucker calls me and says,

"We´ve got this detective from
Sacramento Sheriff´s Department,

and they have a person who is
confessing to k*lling people

in national parks."

He didn´t say yeah,
he did it at a certain time,

a certain place.

But he did say
he had k*lled many victims

in different scenarios

at a mountainous national park
in California.

♪♪

We all sat down and just started
talking about it.

We just intuitively
couldn´t match a case

with one that he was saying,

other than the potential
of the Summit Meadow case.

Coelho: I can´t speak for Kim,

but at that point, I had
never heard of Henry Lucas.

When Jim Boutwell first
arrested Henry,

he was convinced
that Henry knew about k*lling.

He knew it because of the crimes
he´d already confessed to.

He k*lled his mother,
stabbed her in the neck.

He k*lled his common-law wife,
Becky Powell, 15 years old.

Stabbed her in the chest,
and then he dismembered her.

With Kate Rich,

he k*lled her,
and then he burned her body

in a makeshift stove out beside
the shack where he was living.

♪♪

Man: He was callous.

He was indifferent
to the suffering of victims.

He had no long-range plans.

He used people to gratify
his personal needs,

and he was sadistic.

So it made him a very,
very dangerous man.

Man: In Texas, Lucas has been
charged in 22 murders

and has received
seven sentences so far.

He´s under the death penalty
for a Williamson County m*rder,

serving four life sentences
for murders in Denton,

Kaufman and Montgomery Counties
and has two 75-year terms

for killings in Montague
and Terry counties.

Henry was guilty of committing
murders across the country --

not just Texas,
but in other states, as well.

As Lucas started confessing
to more and more crimes,

his fame grew.

When I was hired to work on
the article for "Life" magazine,

it was the first of its kind --
a feature on serial k*lling.

It was considered
a new phenomenon.

You can´t help wondering
how many people like him

might be loose in America
right now,

k*lling without
being caught.

You´re absolutely right.

Lucas got national and
international media attention.

He did become a celebrity.
He did live TV interviews.

I´ve tracked them from
over the United States, almost.

I´d follow them
on the highway.

I go around them
play with them, back up,

and let him go by me.

A woman alone
ain´t safe at all.

Mr. Lucas, what you say
sends a chill through my bones.

I do nothing
but travel alone.

Yeah, but just think if
I was out there.

Cuba: People are fascinated
with serial K*llers.

We know there´s evil and danger
in the world.

But if we can encapsulate it
in a name and an identity,

somehow that helps us
understand it.

Cox: Everybody, at a point, was
caught up in Henry Lee Lucas.

I think Lucas enjoyed
the notoriety

that he had -- had achieved.

You know, for the first time,
he really amounted to something.

Henry was asked why he had
confessed to all the crimes.

Henry´s response was,

"Look at all
the friends I´ve got.

I never had those before.
Now I´ve got friends."

♪♪

I was the special assistant
to the attorney general

of California,
a man named John Van de Kamp.

Based on the corroboration
that we´ve obtained thus far,

we´re talking now about



To my knowledge, it´s by far and
away the greatest mass m*rder

committed by any single
individual in this country.

Marquis: I think he claimed,
in California,

we´re talking about
dozens of murders.

California police --
their pressure and their passion

is to clear their cases.

They don´t care
what´s going on in Texas.

It became very apparent that
agencies weren´t communicating

with each other.

There was territorial issues,

and there was nobody
really able to put together,

"Wow, we just had two deaths
in this county,

and hey, there´s another
one up in a park.

Gee, I wonder
if we have somebody

traveling around
k*lling people."

He learned in his early years
that successful criminals

did not have identifiable MOs.

So he did stabbing,
strangulation,

the use of g*ns, mutilation,
necrophilia, decapitation.

You name it, he did it.

Dr. Hickey: We see the same
cycle over and over again,

where they go through
terrible abuse, and in the end,

they present themselves
as powerful people.

You know, "I´m a powerful
person. I´m someone important.

Pay attention to me.
I´ve k*lled a lot of people."

My take on Henry Lee Lucas
was that he enjoyed k*lling.

Enjoyed the creation of misery,

that he somehow
derived pleasure from this,

and that he was -- he was
the personification of evil.

♪♪

Coelho: So now we have
some missing people.

Yes, we have some remains
of a human.

We need to go figure out
what´s going on here.

Could he possibly
have been the person

there that k*lled somebody
at Summit Meadow?

♪♪

Marquis: I don´t remember
any time in my life

ever hearing about an agency

saying, "We´ll bring
the k*ller to you."

But they did.

Tucker: They told us they were
bringing him to California.

He was gonna have a tour
in California.

Marquis: It´s called a tour,

which is
a little sensationalistic,

but it was somewhere between

Covered a lot of mileage,

I think about several thousand
miles within California.

But it was essentially the last

Man: So you went down
that way?
Lucas: Yeah.

Tucker: The California
Department of Justice

worked with the state
of Texas justice officials

to bring him to California

because there were many cases
that were unsolved.

The attorney general used
his office to make it happen.

We didn´t know whether
this was gonna bear fruit.

Coelho: Lucas was with
a sheriff´s detective,

and they were gonna drive
around to different spots

where he led the investigators

to places
that he committed crimes.

Coelho:
Just to see the kind of areas.

Some were open fields.

Some were homes
or apartment complexes.

On December 4th,
Elizabeth Mary Wolfe, 27,

was brutally stabbed to death
in her apartment in Davis.

Lucas led officers
to the apartment house

and was able to satisfy officers

that he had definitely
committed the crimes.

Tucker: They did not bring him
to Yosemite.

We ended up meeting with him
in the Sacramento County jail,

end of August of 1984.

Coelho: Because of his notoriety
and what he said he´d done,

there was a lot of security.

Tucker: Until I actually
sat down face-to-face with him,

I had no idea
what he was like personally.

I wasn´t expecting some frothing
maniac screaming in a jail cell.

But he looked just a normal
late-40-year-old man who,

in this case, he was a suspect
in multiple homicides.

Tucker: If he had been
cleaned up,

had clean clothes on,

had a good haircut,
brushed his teeth,

I wouldn´t have thought
anything of him.

Coelho: He looked normal
until he opened his mouth.

And then you could tell that
there was something off here.

Coelho: When he talked about
k*lling people like you and I

might be talking about what we
had for breakfast this morning,

he was cold and matter-of-fact.

He said, "Well, you´re
a park ranger, you know.

I happen to k*ll people."

Coelho: And all of a sudden,
it really hit home.

This guy might be for real.

We had very limited time.
Take your number.

You have an hour
to talk to Henry Lucas.

So we knew we were gonna
have to interview him again.

Tucker: We didn´t want
to plant information with him.

We wanted to hear
what he had to say

and then take the information
that he gave us

and see if we could make
that match

what we knew of our own case.

Coelho: I had a map of one of
the park brochures saying, okay,

"If you came in Yosemite,

do you remember
which road you drove in on?"

Tucker: He was pretty cagey.

I did think
he was trying to evaluate us

and probably every other officer
who talked with him.

Coelho: Kim was one of very few
investigators who were female.

I was the only woman working
in the office at the time.

Honestly, there were people
that did not feel women

should be in this type
of an occupation.

You still had some egos that
wanted to resist having women.

But I think if you think about
Jenny Rousseau or Kim Tucker,

those rangers brought a certain
kind of enforcement style

that was less intimidating.

Coelho: There are a number of
times in this case where Henry

reacted a little bit more openly
to Kim than me as a man.

Tucker: We were encouraged that
Henry would probably do better

if we brought some cigarettes.

I was lighting
cigarettes for him.

I was pouring drinks for him.

I mean, I was thinking,

"He´s probably enjoying
all this personal service."

Coelho: He indicated that

he had picked up a female
hitchhiker out of the park.

Woman: Typically, the victims
of the stranger violence

were people that were vulnerable

and people
that were outside alone.

Coelho: The hitchhiking culture
in those days,

whether you were a hippie
or a hippie wannabe,

hitchhiking was the cool
thing to do.

It was normal
to see people hitchhiking,

whether it be off of freeways
or in the mountains.

Dr. O´Toole:
There were people that were
up and down the coastline,

and just because
of the culture and the time,

it wasn´t unusual for them
to trust people

and just go with them
after they just met them

for a short period of time.

♪♪

Tucker: And he described her
as being a hitchhiker,

a white female,



And I thought that description

would fit the profile
of our victim.

Coelho: He wasn´t real specific.

He thought possibly
she was blonde.

♪♪

His statement was that
they had consensual sex.

After they had sex,

he strangled her, left her there
with shrubs and brush over her.

Okay.

It felt like he was trying
to provide information

that would keep
the conversation going

because we´d light him
a couple of cigarettes.

When you´re in prison,
particularly in prison for life

or on death row,
a milkshake,

you know, a steak at Sizzler
is the height of luxury.

And Lucas got a lot of that.

He was the star of the show.

Coelho: It wasn´t enough
where we felt "aha."

There´s no "aha" moment
there at all.

I noted in my report that he
mispronounced the word Yosemite.

And it made me wonder,

"Does he really know
what he´s talking about?"

But we didn´t want to draw
any conclusions at that point.

One of the things
that you want to do

is keep your mind
completely open.

Tucker: We had enough
to make us think, "Well,

we need to look at him further.

If there is more investigation

that we can do,
we need to do it."

Marquis: There´s a tremendous
pressure, both then and now

in law enforcement,
to clear cases.

In some places,
it´s even the metric

by which success is measured.

Every police agency
in the United States

has unsolved murders,
and for many police entities,

they hate that even worse
than having tried somebody

and lost the case ´cause
the case is not pinned down.

Some of it is very human,
to identify a victim

and be able to bring some degree
of finality and resolution.

The major reason
for bringing him here

was for local law enforcement
to solve these crimes,

to clear them up,
as Lucas said himself,

so that at least the families
would know, finally,

what had happened
to their particular loved ones.

Man: But with the books
closed on 15 murders,

there are dozens more in which
Lucas is a suspect.

California authorities believe

if they can bring him back
from Texas again,

they´ll find many more who fell
victim to the hands of death.

We went back and we talked
with Assistant

United States Attorney
in Fresno, Ivan Abrams.

The name Henry Lucas
was familiar to me already.

I was aware of the universe
of serial K*llers.

The Rangers and I discussed
how we could develop the case

and what we would need
to have a prosecutable case.

Today, we´d have the DNA.
We´d have an identification.

Fairly decent case.

But this was before DNA analysis
was very well-developed.

We had a confession of sorts,
but there were things missing.

One of the things I know
I wanted was an identification,

if possible, of the victim.

The United States Attorney´s
Office were very interested

in pursuing it,

but not so much in other
units of the park.

Reynolds: Managers didn´t want
these heinous crimes,

the information that occurred
in their park, to get out

because it´s gonna
suppress visitation.

There was certainly an interest
in not fanning any kind of flame

that Yosemite or other parks
were a dangerous place to be.

Coelho: But Henry told us enough
where it appears

that he had visited Yosemite.

We´ve got the human remains
of Summit Meadow,

and we realize that we have got
to talk to our bosses

so we can go to Texas,

so we can spend as much time
as we wanted with him.

Tucker: There was resistance
from my immediate supervisor,

but the Chief Ranger
for the park did support

the whole effort.

We needed to get another
interview as soon as we could.

♪♪

I had never been to Texas.

Coelho: We went to the
Georgetown, Texas, jail

where the Texas Rangers
had him in custody.

And they were expecting us.

They had an interview room
set up for us.

Man: There´s a case in
California, in a national park.

Officers from any agency
could come

if they had a legitimate reason
to talk to him.

Tucker: The Texas Rangers
were very welcoming.

I remember Bob Prince
pretty vividly.

They asked us if we were armed,
and I said no,

because we weren´t allowed
to fly armed at that point.

And this Texas ranger said,
"Well, you´ve got to be armed

if you´re gonna go interview
Henry Lucas."

He goes, "Here, take my g*n."
That was a first.

I was like, "Wow, okay,
this is kind of different."

Prince: I considered him
very dangerous.

Had extremely quick hands.

And I´d also advise
each officer,

"Make sure that you don´t let
your weapon be close to him."

Coelho: They had Henry
come out of the cell,

and he remembered us.

Tucker: We thought we could
probably prompt his discussion

or maybe his memory
by showing him some photographs.

And we had the map of the area.

Coelho: One thing we did show
him was the picture of the view

from Glacier Point,
Half Dome, Yosemite Valley.

Just the beautiful view
in general, thinking

that would stir
his recollection.

And it did.

He said,
"Yeah, I remember seeing it."

So at that point, we asked him,

"Did you still have
the victim with you?"

"Oh, yeah." And I said, "Okay,
describe where you stopped."

And he drew us
a really sketchy little map.

It was to his best recollection
of where they stopped.

He provided further description
about how the crime occurred.

Coelho: They decided they were
just gonna have lunch.

In one statement, he said he had
four cans of Budweiser beer

and fried chicken
wrapped up in tin foil.

He said they had beers
and then they had sex.

And then he said
it was time to go.

She indicated
that she didn´t want to leave.

So he said, "Well, then
I´ll just leave you here."

And then he said, "I strangled
her and k*lled her."

Strangling is a particularly

personal way of k*lling people.

Hands on, strangling,
and looking somebody in the eye.

You have to be incredibly sick
to do this kind of stuff.

Tucker: He said he left
some food wrappers.

And there was a canteen at
the site and part of a jacket --

the victim´s jacket.

He was providing further
description about the scene.

But I also, sitting there,

I thought,
"Well, he could be guessing.

He could be recounting something

he´s told somebody else
and that´s generic enough

that it could fit
something else."

I said, "What was remarkable
about the area?"

"Nothing. It was a field."

And then he said,
"Oh, I do remember one thing,

is there were these
signs nailed up in the trees

about 10, 15 feet up
in the trees."

I´m thinking, "What are you
talking about? Signs?"

And he said, "Yeah, they had
numbers on them."

Light bulb went off with me.

Those are what´s called
Nordic ski trail signs

for backcountry Nordic skiers.

Don and I both know
what those were, but we thought,

"Well, that´s something
that an ordinary person,

if they hadn´t been there,
wouldn´t have commented on."

I mean, I must have driven up
that road a thousand times

while I was working there.

You don´t just go nail signs
to trees in a national park.

The only place that we had
any signs in the -- in the trees

there were
the Nordic ski trails.

So I´m thinking, "Oh, my God,
that would be Summit Meadow."

That would be the spot.

It´s like this guy
has been to the crime scene.

That´s when it hit us.

I´m pretty sure
I went like that to you.

And I´m think-- ´cause my mind
was going a mile a minute.

Something is clicking.

I´m -- At that point,
I´m thinking,

"I got to get back
to Summit Meadow.

I got to get back there now."

♪♪

We both reconvened in the park,
I think, on November 1st.

We pulled up the area
that it was a natural place

to pull off the road,

and there are not
a lot of pull-outs there.

I think both Don and I realized

that it was the pull-out
described by Henry Lucas.

I got out of the car
and looked up.

That was the real "aha" moment.

"Oh, my God. There´s what
he´s talking about right there.

There´s the Nordic ski trail
signs right there in the trees."

We follow the creek bed up
to the tree line,

which wasn´t very far, you know,
maybe 25, 30, 40 yards

at the most, probably.

Tucker: And we went up and
looked around at the scene,

trying to find the area
that he described.

And that´s where we did find
some of the items.

Coelho: We found a couple
of Budweiser beer cans...

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

...and a wrapped-up piece
of tinfoil

that obviously animals had
kind of chewed on a little bit.

It looked like
it was a fried piece

of a chicken leg,
and that was it.

We´re thinking,
"Okay, here we go."

Tucker: The canteen was in
the same general area.

I think you found it.
Found the canteen.
Yeah.

Coelho: So we documented it,
photographed it,

took measurements.

At that point,
we found the piece of --

it was a piece like this of
a forest-green jacket,

the nylon those jackets
were made of.

I don´t know that what we found
was proof,

but I felt like we had found
the scene that he described.

I thought, "Oh, sh*t,
we got him." [ Chuckles ]

"Wow. I can´t believe it.
This has got to be the spot."

What happens next is
I find out the next day

that Kim has been removed
from the case.

I was told to not do
anything further with the case.

Coelho: I was mortified.

I went to my boss and said,

"Listen, I need Kim
back here to help me.

She sat there with these
interviews with Henry Lucas.

We absolutely have to
have Kim involved."

My boss said,
"Well, I´ll see what I can do."

He wasn´t successful.

Tucker: They did not want
to have people

who were working full-time
as criminal investigators.

And when you have
a case like this,

it was a full-time job

that would have had a different
pay and benefit package

that had been previously
made available to Rangers.

What they were trying to do

was prevent
a tidal wave of employees

seeking pay and benefits
of a law-enforcement officer

in the federal government.

Rousseau: The conflict in
the National Park Service

at that time was that there was
management who felt

that the function of a ranger
was a generalist.

They should not specialize.

Man: Kim and Don, with some
other of their colleagues,

were amongst a small number
of people

doing that specialized work
at a time

which that kind of
specializing in law enforcement

wasn´t the direction
the agency wanted to go.

♪♪

That was it for me.

Of course, I´m standing
thinking...

It´s just a deer-
in-the-headlights look.

"I need another ranger
to help me,

or another investigator."

Now what do I do?

Tucker: I transferred into
the concessions

management branch of the park.

Kim, when she was pulled
from that serial-K*llers case,

she´s a good friend.

She was feeling embarrassed

that her status as an
investigator was diminished.

Of course she felt demoted.
Anybody would.

When somebody walks up and says,

"Give me your g*n
and your credentials,"

that´s devastating.

Reynolds: She´s a pioneer,
and sometimes pioneers

that are gonna create
something better for the future

may have to go through crap
like this.

Rousseau: And to have someone as
talented as Kim be displaced,

it was like, "Well, what chance
have any of the rest of us?"

Coelho: Within a year,
I left the Park Service,

and I was hired
as a special agent

with the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service.

Tucker:
When Don eventually left,

the active part
of the investigation stalled.

Man: They are called
serial K*llers, mass K*llers,

recreational K*llers.

Some authorities estimate
they are responsible

for more than 2,000
of the 20,000 murders

committed in this country
every year.

Abrams: Serial K*llers come in
all shapes and sizes and forms,

but they seem to be able
to pick their victims,

tragically, so that they can,
by and large, get away with it.

It turned out there are lots of
serial K*llers,

far more than
we ever knew about.

Man:
Henry Lee Lucas k*lled at least

during an eight-year spree
that only ended

when Texas authorities
caught him last year.

Cox: Hugh Aynesworth was an
old-time Dallas journalist.

In the early eighties, he worked
for the "Dallas Times Herald."

He and someone else
on the staff, Jim Henderson,

started looking
into the Lucas case.

Early on, they apparently
were suspicious

that the claims he was making
were just simply too outlandish.

That he could not
possibly have --

have traveled as much as he did.

Cuba: Aynesworth worked
for something like a year,

interviewing people,
collecting information,

investigating the records.

Cox: They started putting
together a timeline of

when he claimed to be where,
and then they started looking at

how long it would
take him to drive

from point "A" to point "B".

If he claimed a m*rder
on one day and the next day,

many hundreds of miles away,

that certainly calls
into suspicion

whether he could have
actually done that.

Cuba: There wasn´t enough time
for him to drive

between the two places.

Hugh worked very hard showing
that there were discrepancies,

that he was present
at a work site when he confessed

that he was somewhere else
committing a m*rder.

There were a lot of questions
of all of the confirmed cases.

When Hugh Aynesworth
published the exposé,

everything came to a halt.

Man: Uh, Hugh,
let´s start with you.

You wrote the conclusions
in the "Dallas Times Herald"

that there´s no way
he could have been involved.

Tell us just a couple
of examples of this.

Well, as one example, in 1981,
when Mr. Lucas was charged with

and confessed to k*lling
a woman in Baytown, Texas,

three and a half hours later,

he confessed to a k*lling
in Texarkana, Arkansas.

And, in fact, we found out
he was selling scrap metal

that day
in Jacksonville, Florida.

It was at that point that
the district attorney

in McLennan County,
Vic Feazell, took note.

He was uncomfortable with three
cases confirmed in his county.

The Henry bandwagon was rolling,
man, and everybody

that could jump on it
was jumping on it.

And I just said,
"No, no, this isn´t right."

Cuba: At that point,
a grand jury had been called

by Joe Maddox and Vic Feazell

to investigate
all of these confessions.

Man: A special grand jury met
in Waco, Texas,

today to hear the story of
a self-described mass m*rder*r.

The question they want
answered -- "Is he really?"

I can´t talk about what
the grand jury is thinking

or feeling right now or
what´s being presented to them,

but my office definitely
has been suspicious.

We were able to get witnesses
from all over the United States

into our grand jury.

This lady policeman up in Dallas
came down with a fake file --

a made-up m*rder
with made-up pictures --

and Henry confessed to it.

The D.A. in Little Rock --

he had prosecuted a m*rder*r
in Little Rock

and had convicted him.

Next thing we know, here´s Lucas
confessing to that m*rder.

Once he got into it
and they were buying it

and he saw how easy it was,

he said, "I just wanted
to make fools out of them."

Back in the ´80s,
it didn´t make sense

that someone would plead guilty
or confess

to these murders
that they didn´t commit.

Psychopaths who are serial
sexual K*llers will embellish

and lie about crimes
that they didn´t commit

just to manipulate
law enforcement.

And if you´re able
to manipulate the police,

that´s the ultimate
in manipulation.

Feazell: I think the lesson
of law enforcement here

is don´t buy this stuff
hook, line, and sinker.

Check out everything.
Check it out.

Just ´cause somebody says they
did it doesn´t mean they did.

Dr. O´Toole: Self-reported
information in a case

is the most
unreliable information.

Feazell: I was really hoping
that these three cases

he confessed to in Waco,
that I could just get him in,

get my picture taken with him,
get my good PR,

close that case,
and move on down the road.

So I really understand

how the locals could have been
sucked into this,

because they have
their own confirmation bias.

They want this case
to be solved.

They´ll interpret it in a way
that confirms their bias.

And that´s just easy to do.
That´s human nature.

Dr. O´Toole:
Investigators can give

the offender
information unwittingly.

And in fact, that´s how
many interviewers were trained.

Show the picture.
You give them information.

Help to refresh their memory
as best as you can.

And for most offenders,
that might be fine.

But for someone
like Henry Lee Lucas,

you may be giving him
the very information he uses

to manufacture the case
that he never committed.

Feazell: I didn´t want to be
letting somebody plead guilty

to something they hadn´t done.

We said there is not enough
evidence for an indictment.

♪♪

Man:
Texas´ attorney general says

his just-completed
investigation shows

that Lucas could not have been
the k*ller in all the cases

and that
law-enforcement officers

were too willing
to accept confessions

without checking the facts.

There are murderers that are
walking the streets today

as a result of
the unprofessional handling

of the Lucas matter.

Marquis:
I remember that in 1985,

the accusations against Lucas
were being discredited.

A lot of us who were involved

in putting together
the original grand tours

were getting very,
very skeptical.

Coelho: When we talked
to him, he confessed

to a number
of other homicides

in Yosemite
that just did not exist,

that we have
no record of it.

Some of the things
that he described to us,

I mean, were so outrageous,

you´re like,
"That just didn´t happen."

Is this guy pulling our leg
or telling us the truth or what?

My default position on him
was, "He´s lying."

Yeah.

Unless we could corroborate.

Yeah. Our case is
circumstantial.

I don´t think we´ll ever have
any kind of -- of --

of scientific evidence.

The location --
he spent so much time in parks

that he could have
camped there.

I don´t know that that would --
That just means he´s been there.

That doesn´t mean
he k*lled anybody there.

Basically, all you got
is his confession.

Until he got down to the --
to the beer cans.

Was Budweiser
his beer of choice?

Yeah, that´s a fact.
Okay.

Beer can -- check mark.

That green jacket --
check mark.

Yeah.

On a scale of 1 to 10,
[Chuckles]

probably a four.

So, you know,
you got two things

that -- that would
keep you churning.

But I don´t think you´re
anywhere close.

♪♪

Marquis:
Although Lucas confessed
to a lot of cases in California

and he was taken on the
grand tour of a bunch of sites,

the bottom line is

Henry Lee Lucas was
never prosecuted

for 98% of the crimes
that he ad-- well, admitted to.

Abrams: The identification
of the victim

was something that was,
I thought, very necessary.

We couldn´t identify the victim.

We came to the conclusion,

and this is within
the U.S. attorney´s office,

that the case just wasn´t ready.

And so the case became
a long-term,

open, unresolved case.

♪♪

Tucker: A few years later,
I had twins.

After I had left the
law-enforcement ranks.

One´s a girl, and one´s a boy.

It was a great place to grow up.

They had a vibrant school.
They lived in a beautiful place.

So my life went on.

♪♪

♪♪

Coelho:
Somewhere while I was an agent,

I got a call one day.

I think it was from Kim´s boss.

Apparently, some visitors
were walking

on another Nordic ski trail

to the edge
of the Yosemite Valley.

And here´s a skull
laying on the ground.

The skull was found about
the same time my son was born.

Coelho: It was further west
from where we were searching.

"And we´re wondering
if you think it could be

from the Summit Meadow case."

That´s not even something
we were expecting.

We still want to identify her.

I thought, "Well, now this
is getting closer."

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪