Henry Lee Lucas

            
             In modern society, there are many sick minds. What corrodes these minds to the point of lunacy? No one really knows for sure. The decay of human sanity obviously has its roots at childhood. Some people who have had rough experiences as children turn out to be murderers as adults. These adults kill, and show little or no remorse for their crimes. When these murderers are caught and questioned, authorities are often appalled at the explanations of the gruesome crimes given by the murderer. It has been said that one of these murderers is no different from another, but Henry Lee Lucas is an exception.
             Henry Lee Lucas was a sick man, and, like most serial killers of our time, the roots of his insanity had its roots in his childhood. First of all, he was " the son of a prostitute and a double amputee" (Pederson, 64). His parents brewed bootleg whiskey in their two-room, dirt floor cabin in the woods outside of town, " his mother doing occasional turns as the neighborhood prostitute" (Seize the Night, 1). His father, called "no legs" lost both of his legs in an accident when he was drunk. Secondly, Henry suffered from brutal attacks and humiliation at the hands of his mother. On Henry's first day of school, his mother put dress and a wig with pigtails on him and sent him to school looking like a girl, barefoot as well. Later that day, one of the teachers gave him a pair of shoes to wear. When Henry got home, he was beaten brutally for accepting the gift. When Henry accidentally cut his eye, reportedly while playing with a knife, his mother let him suffer until doctors had to finally remove the withered eye, replacing it with a glass eye, which he wore for the rest of his life. Finally, through his mother, Henry came to learn that life, like sex was cheap. Henry learned that life was cheap because whenever Henry found a pet and brought it home, his mother killed it. He found that sex was cheap through his mother's acts as a prostitute.