Posted on 12/19/2019 5:27:54 PM PST by texas booster
When I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week by William H. Webster (the only person ever to have been director of both the FBI and then the CIA), I wanted to believe every word, because essentially he was calling President Donald Trump an idiot, which I believe.
But then I stumbled on The Confession Killer, a Netflix documentary about so-called serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, and I wondered how I could have forgotten. The very worst part of remembering the Lucas case for me was the forced recognition that “deep state” is not just a name.
It’s not just the government, either. The Lucas story, which was very much a Dallas story in the end, reminds me that the mainstream media can have deep-reaching dirty hands, as well.
Webster’s argument in his essay in the Times is that Trump crudely and unfairly maligned a great American institution when he called FBI agents “scum.” That part I still believe.
“I know firsthand the professionalism of the men and women of the F.B.I.,” Webster wrote. “The aspersions cast upon them by the president and my longtime friend, Attorney General William P. Barr, are troubling in the extreme.
“Calling F.B.I. professionals ‘scum,’ as the president did, is a slur against people who risk their lives to keep us safe. Mr. Barr’s charges of bias within the F.B.I., made without providing any evidence and in direct dispute of the findings of the nonpartisan inspector general, risk inflicting enduring damage on this critically important institution.”
I’m down with all that. But, thanks to Netflix, I can’t insist that anybody else — notably, Trump’s supporters — accept Webster’s words or my own bias at face value.
The Netflix series, directed by Robert Kenner and Taki Oldham, deals somewhat indirectly with an element of the Lucas case that was directly connected to my own life and experience, namely the rivalry between the Dallas Times Herald, where I worked, and what's now the A.H. Belo Corp., which still owns and operates The Dallas Morning News.
Lucas, who died of natural causes in prison at age 65 in 2001, confessed to more than 100 murders and was supposedly a strong suspect in 500 more. He was convicted and sentenced to death in one of those killings, but his execution was commuted by Texas Gov. George W. Bush after a Times Herald investigation proved Lucas was innocent of that murder.
The ultimate denouement of the entire Lucas story came in 1991 when a Waco civil jury slammed Belo with a $58 million libel verdict — at that time believed to be the largest libel award in American history. Belo’s WFAA Channel 8 television had broadcast a series of patently false stories accusing McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell of corruption. Feazell’s sin had been to publicly state doubts about the truthfulness of the great bulk of Lucas’ confessions.
By the time Feazell publicly questioned the Lucas confessions and the work of the Texas Rangers, the confessions already had been exposed as a travesty of lies by Times Herald reporters Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson. The other night I laughed out loud when Henderson appeared on my TV screen in the wee hours saying something I had heard him say a million times before in person — that he does not find criminals to be interesting persons. And that’s exactly why Henderson and Aynesworth were able to see through the fabric of lies.
The Texas Rangers, a special investigative division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, had helped orchestrate the Lucas confessions with the help of the late Jim Boutwell, sheriff of Williamson County just north of Austin. Together they took credit for “clearing” or solving murders all over the United States by getting Lucas to confess to them.
There was never any physical evidence to tie Lucas to the murders, only his own improbably detail-rich confessions. The Rangers and Boutwell helped make the Lucas claims more credible by spinning an entire legend and mystique around him.
Instead of the gap-toothed, droop-eyed drifter he appeared to be on the surface, Lucas, in the words of Boutwell and the Rangers, became a monster worthy of great fiction, an ingenious fiend lurking beneath a clever disguise as a gap-toothed idiot.
Henderson and Aynesworth went with the gap-toothed idiot. They took a map of the United States, marker pens and push-pins and plotted Lucas’ alleged murders and timeline. As Henderson observes in the documentary, Henry Lee Lucas couldn’t have made it to that many places all over America on that tight a schedule had he been strapped to the nose of a guided missile.
And it got worse. Some details of the killings cited by Lucas were included in original police reports but later were corrected because they were found to be in error. But Lucas confessed to those cases before the errors were found. In some, Lucas confessed to mistaken facts in the original police reports.
What emerges clearly in this new documentary is what Aynesworth and Henderson proved plainly in their stories almost 40 years ago: Boutwell and the Rangers were feeding Lucas the facts he needed to make his confessions convincing. Lucas was confessing to dozens and dozens of murders he had nothing to do with and would have known nothing about had he not been coached.
Why would he have confessed to murders he didn’t commit? The documentary offers a few esoteric-sounding theories about things like “factitious disorder.” I don’t know how convincing I found all that. If there is such a thing, it’s not a bar to becoming president. I’m more likely to go with Aynesworth and Henderson’s theory based on the gap-toothed idiot.
In fact, Henry Lee Lucas himself would not be all that interesting, certainly not worth a well-wrought five-part documentary series, were it not for the deep-state story as exposed in the Feazell libel suit. Feazell was a young, ambitious district attorney in Waco when he stubbed his toe on the Lucas case and began digging deeper.
He was the first elected official anywhere in Texas to cast doubt on the work of the fabled Texas Rangers in securing mass confessions from their star prisoner. For that, Feazell earned the bitter and vindictive animosity of James B. Adams, then director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Adams had arrived at the DPS in 1980 already bearing a reputation for dark arts. In his previous job as second-in-command at the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, Adams had been the focus of scathing cross-examination by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Utah Sen. Frank Church.
The Church committee called Adams and other top FBI officials to task for the FBI’s egregious abuses of power in a top secret program called COINTELPRO, in which the FBI had attempted to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to either drop out of public life or kill himself. In his testimony, Adams blamed it all on Hoover, who had been dead for three years.
After Feazell questioned the truthfulness of Adams’ Texas Rangers, WFAA began its series of stories accusing Feazell of taking bribes. In 1986, the FBI and Justice Department presented the WFAA stories to a federal grand jury as evidence. When Feazell was arrested on a Waco parking lot, WFAA was there waiting with multiple camera crews.
He was tried on federal bribery charges. A number of Waco criminal lawyers testified they had paid Feazell bribes. The jury acquitted him.
Jurors told reporters after the trial that they had found the FBI’s evidence unbelievable. Later in the libel trial, it emerged that the IRS had launched tax probes of the lawyers who accused Feazell prior to their agreements to testify against him in the criminal trial.
The huge libel verdict against WFAA, later settled for an undisclosed amount, was the civil jury’s own clear message. Those jurors hadn’t believed any of the accusations, either. They saw WFAA and Belo as malevolent co-conspirators in a government plot to convict an innocent man who had dared tell the truth.
Here is what really sticks with me from all of this. The Times Herald, which ceased publication in 1991, told the truth about Henry Lee Lucas. The Herald told the truth about the Texas Rangers and Sheriff Jim Boutwell. But in and of itself and by its own efforts, the Herald made no difference. It didn’t stop anybody from anything. It went out of business.
In spite of the stories in the Herald, the Rangers, with their deep reach into federal law enforcement, were able to orchestrate a vast complicated vendetta against Feazell that involved the FBI, the IRS and the Justice Department. They also were able to reach into establishment media and persuade a major publishing and broadcast company to help do their dirty work for them.
Only American juries put a stop to it. Regular American citizens sitting in jury boxes spotted the immense web of lies against Feazell and called those lies for what they were.
In a piece about it for D Magazine in 1991, Carlton Stowers quoted a person who been a juror in the civil trial talking about one of the Belo lawyers, John McElhaney:
“In his opening statement,” the former juror told Stowers, “Mr. McElhaney stood there and talked down to us, saying that they were going to be using some big words during the trial but would carefully explain them to us. I’m a school teacher with a college degree. I know the big words.”
When I read William Webster’s words lauding the honorable history of the FBI and the honest federal employees who work there, I believed what he said, and I still do. My own bias here is obvious. Ask me to place my bets one way or the other, I’m still going to put my money on the FBI being honest, the press being diligent and Trump being a fool.
But I’m glad I stumbled on the Netflix series in my insomniac wanderings. It reminded me of something I had put aside, for whatever reason. I’m still going to bet on the FBI and the press. But I may not bet the entire farm.
Schutze is one of my favorite liberals. Hates Trump, mocks conservatives but he does find acorns.
An interesting read for thoughts from the other side.
Trump didn’t call all FBI personnel scum. This is the usual misquoting by another lying leftist.
I blew him off completely by his mischaracterization of President Trump referring to FBI agents as SCUM, which they are, the ones who conspired with Cllinton, Clapper, Comey, et. al., to bring down a sitting, duly-elected President.
Eff him and his liberalism and acorns.
Always a false premise, always.
He needs to listen to that small voice of reason.
“I wanted to believe every word, because he was essentially calling President DonaldTrump an idiot, which I believe.”
Err, umm... , you really want to confess this in public?
Horowitz concluded Jim Schutze showed no documentary evidence of bias.
The writer of this article is an idiot and his employer a fool.
In this article he constantly contradicts himself and even after the long description of the Henry Lucas case and how the prosecution and cops involved fabricated evidence and used shills for witnesses, he tells us that he will bet on the character of the FBI before he will bet on President Trump.
An outstanding example of my theory that a real lib has a problem with the genes that enable the ability to reach logical conclusions on matters of ethics, honesty and character.
First off he was talking about the leadership of Comey & McCabe, and both truly are scum. He also said there are many fine people in the FBI. So I side with President Trump, they are indeed scum.
aint that the truth ; “question begging” on parade in this article..... but I get his point:)
The president tonight touted the report and said, “The inspector general found that the FBI’s spying application contained 17 errors and omissions commonly known as lies and deceit! When the FBI — and you have great people in the FBI, but not in leadership. You have not good people in leadership.”
The acorn of that story is that after Lucas was convicted of killing his mother and after serving 10 years they let him out. Luca begged prison officials not to let him out because he would “kill again”, he pleaded. Guess what, the liberals let him out and then the killing spree started. I am not sure what you find “interesting” about what this liberal writer has to say about anything.
>>Trump crudely and unfairly maligned a great American institution when he called FBI agents “scum.” That part I still believe.
Ask the writer what he thought of Hollywood’s treatment of J. Edgar Hoover. What does he think of G.Gordon Liddy?
I’m sure there are heads of the FBI and agents that he thoroughly is disgusted by.
So why when Communists were in the FBI should they be shielded by the scum label?
“Calling F.B.I. professionals ‘scum,’ as the president did, is a slur against people who risk their lives to keep us safe. Mr. Barr’s charges of bias within the F.B.I., made without providing any evidence and in direct dispute of the findings of the nonpartisan inspector general, risk inflicting enduring damage on this critically important institution.”
Tell this turkey to go see the Richard Jewell movie which covers a real life case where FBI agents attempted to railroad an innocent man so they could wash their hands of a case and play the hero, accuracy in conviction be damned.
“I wanted to believe every word, because he was essentially calling President DonaldTrump an idiot, which I believe.”
Yeah? Where’s your ten billion dollars in assets, genius?
>>Lucas, who died of natural causes in prison at age 65 in 2001, confessed to more than 100 murders and was supposedly a strong suspect in 500 more. He was convicted and sentenced to death in one of those killings, but his execution was commuted by Texas Gov. George W. Bush after a Times Herald investigation proved Lucas was innocent of that murder.
This is an old prosecutor trick. Ball up a lot of charges, get someone who is guilty of some charges, to confess to all of them so they can close the books and in exchange he can get life in prison instead of the death penalty. It happened in the Pacific Northwest with the Green River killer.
I think it is a travesty of justice to say that Henry Lee Lucas couldn’t be executed because one of a number of capital offenses was ‘wrongfully confessed’. He was guilty as sin in horrible murders and there is no doubt in that regard.
>>Lucas was confessing to dozens and dozens of murders he had nothing to do with and would have known nothing about had he not been coached.
There have been instances of some people confessing to crimes they’ve heard about while in prison to let some other criminals go free.
>>The Church committee called Adams and other top FBI officials to task for the FBI’s egregious abuses of power in a top secret program called COINTELPRO
They got the charges against Bill Ayers for bombing the Pentagon dropped because they believed the Weathermen’s rights had been violated.
Guilty as sin yet free as a bird
“An outstanding example of my theory that a real lib has a problem with the genes that enable the ability to reach logical conclusions on matters of ethics, honesty and character.”
Dunning Kruger. Illusory superiority.
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