The Morning News from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 8

A8 The News-Journal papers Tuesday, April 16, 1985 Records show Lucas near Del. on days of some killings New details of Henry Lee Lucas' cross-country odyssey including a glimpse of his stay with relatives in Cecil County, his work on a mushroom farm in southern Chester County, and time spent in a Delaware motel have been pieced together by a Texas newspaper probing the story of the suspected mass murderer. Reporters for the Dallas Times Herald compiled an itinerary of Lucas' trek from his release from a Michigan prison in 1975 until his arrest in 1983, based on interviews with Lucas, with those whose paths he crossed, court and work records, rental receipts and other documents of personal transactions. Much of that evidence, the paper suggests, was ignored by authorities who have charged Lucas with committing crimes in one part of the country while records show he was elsewhere. For instance, on Sept.

9, 1975, records of the Kaolin Mushroom Farms in Avondale, show that Lucas was working there. Texas Rangers say he killed a man in Tyler, Texas, on that day. Lucas lived in Cecil County from 1975 until 1977, during which the Texas Rangers have said Lucas killed 30 people in 10 states. Pennsylvania and Maryland authorities have tracked Lucas' whereabouts and told Texas Rangers that it was unlikely he left the area for a long period, according to the Times Herald. When he first arrived in Cecil County, shortly after his release from prison in August 1975, Lucas lived with his neice, Aomi Pierce, and her husband in Perryville, the newspaper reported.

On Dec. 5, he married Betty Crawford in Elkton, and shortly afterward moved to Benjamin's Trailer Park in Port Deposit, where they lived until Lucas left on July 7, 1977. Crawford told the newspaper that during their year and a half together during which the 1976 murder of Serita Ann Hughes near Milford, a crime to which Lucas has supposedly confessed, occurred Lucas was away from home overnight twice, While living at the trailer park, Lucas made monthly rent payments and occasionally borrowed money from his landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Benjamin.

They kept records of the rental payments and the loans, along with the dates they were repaid, but the Texas investigators have never asked to see them, the Times Herald reported. After leaving his wife in 1977, Lucas stayed with his sister, Almeda Kiser, until the end of the year. Four years later, from late June to Oct. 10, 1981, the activities of Lucas and two companions, Ottis Elwood Toole and Toole's 13-year-old niece, Becky Powell, are well- documented. The trio spent the night of June 30 in a motel in Delaware.

Lucas, Toole and the girl remained in Delaware several days, according to Delaware police who checked them out July 11. On July 22, they were en route to Jacksonville, when Lucas was arrested in Pikesville, on an old auto theft warrant. During July, when they were known to have been in Delaware and Maryland, Luca? and Toole are credited with two killings in Colorado and Oklahoma'. It MIM BY MNOLTA THE WORLD'S FIRST AUTOFOCUS SLR CAMERA 1 SALE 349.99 Regularly $429 A. $79 off: Minolta Maxxum autofocus 35mm SLR systemf.

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Model AF-2. (96-14) iff" I grainy I Hughes Continued from Al of crimes to keep himself in the limelight and off death row. Hughes, who said he had a hard time holding back his emotions when he learned of Lucas' admission during a visit from his attorney Friday, said: "I want to hear more. I'm real anxious to see the tape. I want to be convinced also.

I'll probably be the biggest critic. I want to be sure. There are certain facts that only someone who was there could know." In the interview with Street and a private investigator last week, Lucas apparently told how he entered the Hughes' ranch-style home on a summer night in 1976. He described the interior of the house in detail and drew a diagram showing the placement of furniture and rooms, and noted that he saw someone asleep, according to the court documents. Lucas said that he saw his accomplice, Toole, struggling with a woman outside the kitchen door.

He said that the barking of dogs drove the two off after Toole killed Serita Hughes. In an affidavit accompanying a bail motion, Street said that Lucas identified 15 to 20 specific facts concerning the inside of the Hughes' house and another 10 to 15 details of the neighborhood and the crime, and "positively identified pictures of Serita A. Hughes as the woman who was struggling with his partner, Ottis Toole." It was not the first time that someone from Delaware had talked with Lucas in the Texas jail about possible involvement in local murders. In the summer of 1983, shortly after Lucas began boasting about the hundreds of victims he had slain around the country, Delaware authorities were in Texas to retrieve four escapees from the Delaware Correctional Center. Because of Lucas' known connections to nearby Cecil County, a deputy attorney general and a Delaware State Police officer were dispatched to interview him and came back with information that Lucas said he may have committed four murders in this state.

An intense investigation followed by Wilmington and Delaware State Police, but the only case officers thought they could tie to Lucas was the stabbing death of Linda O'Day, a New Castle secretary, in June 1981. That case still has not been resolved. Oberly said on Monday that Dela-. ware authorities were among the first to interview Lucas in the summer of 1983. Neither during that interview nor last year's interview did Lucas indicate any knowledge of the Hughes' case, Oberly said.

The attorney general said that he will not personally conduct the investigation into the "new information" that Lucas and Toole killed Serita Hughes. Deputy Attorney General Bartholomew J. Dalton, co-prosecutor in the first trial, will head the investigation, with assistance from the Delaware State Police, Oberly said. Dalton also will be in Superior Court on Wednesday when a bail hearing is held for Hughes. He is to be tried for the third time later this year.

The state will ask for $150,000 bond. The defense is asking that bail be set "in an amount commensurate with his current financial ability and that he be permitted to return to his sons and family in the state of California," until the trial is set. Hughes, who continues teaching inmates in the Delaware Correctional Center, said he is looking forward to being released from the prison near Smyrna later this week. "I have waited so long for some break to transpire to help prove what I've been saying all along that I had no part in this," he said. Pa.

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