There is no man so lucky as he who has found a true friend.

That sounds like some sage quote from an old book. Maybe it is. I think I made it up, but who knows? It’s 2009. I’m pretty sure the whole world is running out of new shit to blather on about at this point. That’s why they keep doing all those Hollywood remakes of stuff they should just leave alone.

Anyway, friendship is rare enough for regular people. But what about serial killers? It can’t be easy to find somebody as into gay sex, incest, bestiality, arson, murder and cannibalism as you are. It’s not like eHarmony is running a special site for these people… yet.

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole found each other in a Jacksonville, Florida soup kitchen, so right off the bat they knew they had something in common-- they both liked free soup. And neither one of them liked bathing or brushing their teeth, so that was something. Somehow-- through the magic of that first conversation-- they realized that they were both gay and wanted to get it on.

But there are some things you don’t spill your guts about over a bowl of hobo chili or the hot lovin‘ that follows, so it probably took a little time for them to realize all the other things they had in common. How their mothers had dressed them like girls until they were seven. Henry Lee’s mama was an alcoholic prostitute who used to make him watch her work; Ottis’ me-maw cut out the middle man and just molested him, apparently with the help of his sister or any other friends of the family who happened to wander by with an erection and an hour to kill.

Like a degenerate Hall and Oates, they knew a lot of the same songs in different keys. Ottis was epileptic and prone to seizures that made him blackout, fall down and hit his head often. Henry Lee’s brother stabbed his left eye out when he was 10, and his mother hit him in the head with a plank so hard that it left him in a coma for three days. Both of them were dropouts. Both of them liked to drift across the South, moving from job to job whenever they felt like it.

Like a scumbag Tenacious D, the two decided to roam around together and be drinking buddies. Henry Lee showed Ottis tricks of the trade he’d picked up while in prison for killing his mother after an argument-- the most important of which was, if you’re going to off a metric shit-ton of people, you have to mix it up a little bit. Do them all the exact same way, and people are going to catch on quick. Stab one. Shoot one. Choke one. Set one on fire. Bash one’s head in. When you’re finished, you can have sex with some of them, but not all of them. Don’t take pieces of them home to eat every time. All ages, sexes, shapes and sizes. Men or women.

Ottis had an IQ that ranged between 56 and 75; Henry Lee was never going to win Most Likely To Maybe Read, having dropped out of school in the 5th grade. It took them a little longer to learn what they were doing than it might have taken other people-- two half-wits rarely equal a whole in any circumstances. Later, when they were incarcerated and had taken up confessing as a hobby, they’d claim to have killed 108 people together.

But, like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the two drifted apart. Ottis’ 12 year-old niece Frieda escaped from pubescent chick jail, they decided to take her with them as they sleazed it up psycho-style across the Bible Belt. It didn’t take long for Henry Lee to make “Becky” his J.Lo and split up the act. Ottis didn’t want to share his buddy’s affections with anybody.

Ottis went his own way, spiraling further and further out of control. Eventually he was locked up after being convicted of over 20 cases of arson, some of which killed the people living in the buildings he torched. Henry Lee and Becky ended up in Stoneburg, Texas, as hired hands at a religious commune called “The House of Prayer,” doing odd roofing jobs and living in an apartment on the property. When that went sour they ended up mooching off of 82 year-old Kate Rich, a widow who felt sorry for them and took them in.

Becky got bored with her life, as all teens do, and thought things would be better if they went back to Florida. Henry Lee didn’t want to go, but the two of them started hitchhiking back east. He killed her at a truck stop after an argument and returned to Stoneburg two weeks later, telling anybody who asked that she’d gotten into a stranger’s car after a fight and he didn’t know where she’d gone. Everybody bought it. Not long after, he convinced Kate Rich to help him look for his lost love. They got into Lucas’ car with a six-pack and a butcher knife on the front seat and rode off into the heat. Nobody ever saw the old woman breathing-- or all in once piece-- again.

Without his girlfriend or his boyfriend, Lucas seemed to unravel. Eventually he was picked up on a misdemeanor weapons charge in Texas, and while sitting in his cell told one of the officers that he’d been killing people at random for the last 10 years. The Texas Rangers found that once they got him talking, Henry Lee couldn’t shut up to save himself. Eventually he gave over 3000 confessions to anybody who would bum him a cigarette, claiming responsibility for as many as 600 murders. Lazy cops from all over the country started using him as a clearinghouse for their unsolved cases, coaching him through confessions and letting him view case files before turning the tape recorder on so that he’d have some vague idea of what he was confessing to.

Henry Lee didn’t care. The cops kept feeding him cheeseburgers and milkshakes, giving him cigarettes and taking him on trips to view murder sites. He was given a special cell in the maximum security wing and allowed to roam around the jail at will. For a one-eyed dimwit, this was as close to the high life as he was ever going to get, and he lapped it up. Texas refused to extradite him-- he was too valuable as a scapegoat, and they weren’t about to let a prize like that get away.

Eventually the State of Texas gave Lucas the death penalty, and that’s when he changed his tune. Claiming to be a member of a satanic death cult or the one who delivered the cyanide to Jim Jones is one thing when you’re getting Happy Meals and GPCs on a regular basis, but when they start talking about killing you, apparently it’s time to freshen up the act. Lucas began recanting his confessions, claiming he was coerced into giving them and didn’t really mean it. This threw everybody into a tailspin. Attorney Generals began looking into his claims, and realized that a lot of the murders he’d confessed to had taken place when they could prove he was in another state.

The whole thing was a mess. Law enforcement began to look almost as stupid as Lucas himself, which threw everything into an uproar. He did it. He didn’t do it. He did some of them, but not all of them. Nobody was sure which ones he’d actually done, or which ones he’d just made up for a Shamrock Shake when he got tired of prison grub. George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas, in a pretty clear indication of how his own intelligence runs, eventually commuted Lucas’ sentence to life in prison. It was the only commutation he ever gave. And this was a guy who once executed a retarded man because he skipped over the part of the memo that stated he was retarded.

Henry Lee eventually died of natural causes in prison, fat and happy after decades of sweet, sweet confession grub. Whatever he actually did or didn’t do, he took it to the grave with him.

Ottis had died years earlier, also inside, from liver failure. Nobody claimed his body. After his death he was indicted for the murder of Adam Walsh, son of "America’s Most Wanted" creator John Walsh. Toole and Lucas remained life-long pen pals, claiming affection for each other right up to the very end.

There is no man so lucky as he who has found a true friend. Except maybe anybody who never had anything to do with either of them.

More Heroes for the Depraved:
Ed Gein
Ted Bundy
Richard Speck
Ed Kemper
Albert Fish