Anna gets chatted up by her jeweller and Hannah has a ghost. In true crime news we cover Peter Madsen (the submarine murderer), Jeffrey Epstein and the missing security footage and the murder of one of the worst paedophiles in prison. We review The Confession Killer and Broken and for our Weird Crime Time we discuss a projectile seagull.
The Confession Killer
This Netflix documentary focusses on the life and crimes of Henry Lee Lucas who confessed to the murders of 100s of people. The documentary primarily focuses on Lucas after he was arrested and then covers the questions surrounding all of his confessions.
The documentary doesn’t really cover Lucas’s background so to give it some depth, here is a breakdown. Lucas was born in 1936 in a one room log cabin in Virginia. His mother was a sex worker and there are a couple of accounts that she would force Henry to watch her with her clients along with other accounts of child abuse. Before he was even 10 years old, Lucas’s alcoholic father died of hypothermia after collapsing outside in a blizzard whilst drunk. Lucas left school in sixth grade and ran away from home and drifted throughout Virginia.
Lucas claimed to commit his first murder in 1951 when he strangled 17 year old Laura Burnsley after she refused his sexual advances. As with most of his confessions, he later retracted this particular crime. A few years later he was convicted of dozens of burglary offences and sentenced to four years in prison. He escapes and then is recaptured three days later and serves his time.
In 1959, he leave Virginia and goes to Michigan to live with his half sister, Opal. At this point Lucas is engaged to marry a penpal whom he corresponded with in prison. His mother comes to live with them and disapproved of his fiancee. When his mother leaves Michigan to return to Virginia in 1960, Lucas decides that he is going to killer. He claims that they had a huge fight, she struck him over the head with a broom so her stabbed her. He leaves the scene and Opal comes back to find the mother bleeding heavily but not dead. She does later die but the cause of her death is listed a heart failure. Despite Lucas claiming that he killed his mother in self defence, he is found guilty of a second degree murder sent to prison in Michigan.
Just 10 years after his sentencing, he is released due to prison overcrowding. Only a year after leaving prison, Lucas was convicted of attempting to kidnap three schoolgirls. He marries a family friend in prison but they divorce shortly after his release as there are accusations of abuse including Lucas abusing this woman’s daughter.
Lucas decides then to head to Florida and here he meets Ottis Toole. He moves into Toole’s parents house and becomes close with Toole’s adolescent niece, Frieda ‘Becky’ Powell. Becky has a mild intellectual impairment and eventually Lucas convinces Becky to run away with him to California.
Whilst in California, they start assisting with the care of an elderly lady called Kate Rich after her daughter asks them. They are eventually run off the Rich farm after accusations of writing bad checks etc. Becky has decided that she is homesick and Lucas allegedly left her at a truck stop in Texas.
In 1983, he is arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm and confesses to murdering Becky and Kate Rich. He leads police to two bodies. He then asks what they are going to do about the hundreds of other people he has murdered. This is where the documentary starts…
Broken
Broken is a Netflix original, produced by Zero Point Zero and is four part docu-series that looks at how consumer products are made and how they are vulnerable to fraud, negligence and corruption which puts public health and safety at risk.
Each episode focusses on a different industry. The first is called Makeup Mayhem and looks at the counterfeit makeup industry which is exploding in popularity right now due to influencer hype and scarcity marketing tactics. The second is called Big Vape, which explores how vaping products designed for adults (obviously) are being used more and more by teens, and how they have become a targeted audience. This second episode also explores how the tobacco industry cashing in on it vaping. The third is called Deadly Dressers and focusses on poorly made, flimsy products that have toppled and killed a number of children. The last episode section is called Recycling Sham and how companies produce and market single-use plastic to be recyclable when it isn’t. When it isn’t recyclable it ends up in landfill and beaches on the other side of the world. The starkest part of this episode is the influence that the petrochemical industry has and the lengths they will take to overturn something as simple as a single-use plastic bag ban in a small Texas town.
One of the quotes from this series is there is a ‘price tag attached to the low price”. The price tag is the ecological impact of churning out tonnes and tonnes plastic, the impact on people living in areas destroyed by illegal forestry, the impact of losing a child to a cheap dresser that topples over, to the people living in the shadow of petrochemical plants who have elevated risks of developing health issues.
And when harm occurs that is caused by a company or corporation, you expect some kind of liability or some kind of punishment. Corporate crime is a tricky fish though.
For once, it is nice to see corporations in the firing line. Whilst consumer choices are important, consumers are not the sole problem. Ikea gets pretty heavily shredded in the Deadly Dressers episode about not only encouraging huge amounts of consumerism (we’ve all been to an IKEA and it is a maze designed to make you spend money) but also greenwashing it’s customers. Greenwashing is a term to describe a company that actually creates huge amounts of ecological harm but present themselves as being eco-friendly (BooHoo, Pretty Little Thing, H&M, Primark etc are also culprits).
Sources
Daily Express – https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1227918/richard-huckle-murder-worst-paedophile-britain-humberside-police-arrest
Independent – https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeffrey-epstein-suicide-video-deleted-tapes-jail-cell-death-a9277521.html%3famp
Daily Mail – https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7855039/amp/Graphic-photos-Jeffrey-Epsteins-autopsy-reveal-bloodied-neck.html
IMDB – https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=14&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwie3YeokKHnAhXREcAKHX8sAWUQFjANegQIAxAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt11168226%2F&usg=AOvVaw2ULdunJjsxCMVHW54W0zth
BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51105196
BBC News – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-51013458
Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lee_Lucas
Time – https://time.com/5745028/the-confession-killer-henry-lee-lucas-netflix/
