BY THE WAY: PASTTIME WITH OFTEN SAD CONSEQUENCES

Perhaps the theatre of the bizarre, a.k.a. Phyllis Wilcox's Texas claimed-she-saw-and-was massacre, tells us something about a curious American pastime. It's called people using people.

I'm talking about the hoax that never got a chance to gather momentum last week, thanks to the diligence of people like Cape Girardeau Police Chief Howard "Butch" Boyd and a Denton County, Texas, sheriff who knew he smelled a fishy story.

Boyd knew from the start that a woman claiming to be Becky Powell, who was murdered by death row inmate and serial killer Henry Lee Lucas in 1982, really was Phyllis Wilcox.

There was an arrest record, birth and marriage dates that didn't mesh, and a long list of claims that just didn't make sense.

Phyllis Wilcox was 41 years old. Becky Powell would have been in her late 20s if she were alive today.

There was a lawyer with a reputation for suing members of the media who damaged his case with bad information. Vic Freazell, who represented Lucas, won a $14 million judgment against a television station.

Freazell isn't overly fond of the Texas Rangers, who worked as a unit to put Freazell's client behind bars for good.

That made interviews with those who knew about the judgment a tad difficult. No one wanted to say much on the record. But finally Weldon Lucas, a Denton County sheriff who was convinced Becky Powell was killed in 1982, said enough is enough.

Weldon Lucas said this was nothing more than a hoax and he could prove it with dental X-rays of Becky Powell.

People Phyllis Wilcox used to work with weren't the least bit surprised to learn of the scam. Wilcox told her former co-workers when to tune in to CNN to watch her dupe-the-nation plan.

The Washington Times believed Wilcox's story. So why wouldn't a CNN audience? Only trouble was, Boyd wasn't going to give up and neither were the Texas Rangers nor the Denton County sheriff.

The more information that was gathered about Wilcox, the more I realized this was really an American tragedy. As a teen-ager, Phyllis Wilcox was so shy most of her former high school classmates confused her with her sister, Bonnie, an overachiever who won a trip to Detroit to collect a science award.

Now Phyllis was seeking national attention by trying to pull off the biggest scam of her life.

Wilcox has a history of drug problems and arrests. But there was a positive side of her that Earl Stovall, her former boss, recognized.

Stovall said he was willing to consider Wilcox innocent until proven guilty. She could keep her job if she would just concentrate on making change instead of trying to change the minds of customers and co-workers who may or may not have favored capital punishment.

That's when Stovall put Wilcox on the day shift so she could be supervised. She said she would have none of it and quit. She quit on April Fools' Day, 1994.

She visited Henry Lee Lucas in jail a few times and wrote several letters to him and other death row inmates. Henry Lee responded. Phyllis Wilcox said she was in love with him.

In love of what, though? Apparently there is a lucrative market for letters returned from serial killers if they're written and signed instead of typed.

Wilcox told a reporter for the Houston Chronical that she made some money from the sale of the letters. Her husband, Kurt Wilcox, encouraged her to go ahead with the hoax in order to cash in on the story via a tabloid story or television appearance.

The story collapsed last week, however, when Boyd faxed a copy of a 1970 Cape Girardeau Central yearbook photograph that had Phyllis Wilcox's name next to it. It looked just like the woman claiming to be Becky Powell. The real Becky Powell would have been 2 in 1970.

In the end it was people helping people that prevailed. Sadly enough, however, people like Phyllis Wilcox may never understand how or why this is a better way to live.

~Bill Heitland is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.