Henry Lee Lucas, 64, the one-eyed drifter who confessed to hundreds of murders across the nation but later recanted, died March 12 in the infirmary of the prison here, where he had been taken after complaining of chest pains. The cause of death was undetermined pending an autopsy.
Lucas, the only man spared from a Texas death sentence by then-Gov. George W. Bush, died at the Ellis Unit, where he was serving six life sentences plus 210 years for nine slayings.
He was condemned to death for the slaying of an unidentified woman whose body was found in 1979 in a ditch. The victim became known as "Orange Socks" because that was all she was wearing. No witnesses or physical evidence linked Lucas to the crime, but he confessed four times. Later, he said he had lied, and work records and a cashed paycheck indicated he might have been in Florida at the time of the crime.
Bush agreed there were questions about the conviction and commuted the sentence to life in prison just four days before Lucas was to receive a lethal injection in 1998.
During Bush's six years as governor, 152 people were executed in Texas.
Before being sent to prison in Texas, Lucas served 15 years in Michigan for beating his mother to death.
After his arrest in 1983, he claimed to have killed as many as 600 people across the country, and detectives from 40 states talked to him about an estimated 3,000 homicides. Lucas later recanted, though many of the murder cases attributed to him never were reopened.