January 2023 Bonus Review: You're Wrong About Henry Lee Lucas
Sarah Marshall and Rachel Monroe on how a garden-variety creep became an archetype
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
That’s the question (or a question) at the center of You’re Wrong About’s August 22, 2022 episode, “Henry Lee Lucas w. Rachel Monroe” — who Lucas in fact murdered, versus the hundreds of murders he confessed to. The go-to descriptive for Lucas is “prolific serial killer,” but was he either? And why has American culture needed him to be both?
The story
You may not listen to You’re Wrong About regularly; you may not really connect with Lucas as a case narrative; I’ll still recommend “HLL w. RM,” because if you like what we do at Best Evidence enough to have a paid subscription, you’ll like what “HLL w. RM” does. The episode is kind of about Lucas’s crimes, and whether he killed three or three hundred — but its primary aim, as stated by Marshall in the intro, is “not to study the crimes but to study the way we the public reacted to them.”