Ottis Toole

Ottis Toole
Born	Ottis Elwood Toole
Cause of death	Cirrhosis of the liver
Criminal penalty	Death, commuted to Life
Details
Victims	2-6
Span of crimes	?–1983
Country	USA
State(s)	Florida
Date apprehended	1983

Ottis Elwood Toole (March 5 1947 – September 15, 1996) (sometimes spelled Otis) was an American serial killer. Though he admitted to counts of murder, rape, and cannibalism, and was the suspect in several unsolved murders, he recanted and restated a number of confessions.

Toole was twice convicted of murder, and confessed to four more murder charges before dying in prison.

Early life

Toole was a native of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan. His father left the family when Toole was young, and he claimed his mother was a religious fanatic, and that his sister dressed him in girl's clothes. Toole also claimed his grandmother was a satanist who exposed him to various practices and rituals in his youth. He ran away from home repeatedly, and claimed to have started fires in abandoned homes from a young age.

Toole claimed to have committed his first murder at the age of 14. After being propositioned for sex by a traveling salesman, he ran over the salesman with his own car. This claim is unverified.

Toole was first arrested as an adult in 1964, on a charge of loitering.

Reputed murders

About 1978, Toole met Henry Lee Lucas in Florida. Both would later claim to have committed many hundreds of murders, sometimes at the behest of a secret cult called "The Hand of Death." Lucas would recant his confessions, saying he made such statements only to improve his living conditions in jail. Though some authorities have argued there is significant doubt as to Lucas' guilt, Toole is still generally seen as a serial killer.

On October 21, 1983, Toole confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh. He claimed to have kidnapped, raped, and killed the boy, and then cut his body up and fed it to alligators in a nearby swamp. A few weeks after Toole made the confession, however, police investigating the case announced that they no longer considered him a suspect. John Walsh, Adam's father, has said repeatedly that he believes Toole to be guilty.

Imprisonment and death

In April 1984, Toole was convicted and sentenced to death for a 1982 arson incident that killed 64-year-old George Sonnenberg in Jacksonville, Florida. Later that year, Toole was judged guilty of the 1983 murder of 19-year-old Tallahassee, Florida, resident Ada Johnson, and received a second death sentence; on appeal, however, both sentences were commuted to life in prison. While serving his sentence, Toole was briefly housed next to Ted Bundy in Florida's Raiford Prison.

Toole pleaded guilty to four more murders in 1991 and received four more life sentences.

Toole died in September 1996 in prison from cirrhosis of the liver. His last words were "Do not cry for me! It is a far, far better place that I shall go. Forget thee not, yet do not mourn. My soul will slip into the cold night to be greeted by sunshine and warmth. I will glide on gentle summer breezes. I will fill my belly with nectar and sweet ambrosia. Dewdrops shall quench my thirst. I bid thee farewell! Cherish what you have and celebrate my life as well. I will run through fields of tulips and shower under clear waterfalls. Remember me yet do not shed tears. I will dance in rainbows and sleep among clouds. I bid thee well, my fine friends!"

Park Journee Estep

In 1974, Park Journee Estep was convicted of the murder of a female massage parlor operator in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The woman, Sun Ok Cousin, was attacked along with a fellow female employee, Yon Lee. Lee survived being stabbed and slashed in the throat, although both women were set on fire. In her testimony, Lee described her assailant as clean-shaven, 6' 2", 195 pounds, and driving a white pick-up truck.

Estep steadfastly maintained his innocence until he was released on his first parole bid. At the time of the murder he was supposed to have been wearing a mustache, 5' 10", 150 pounds, and driving a red pickup truck.

In 1984 defense investigators turned up evidence to support Estep’s claim: a confession to the crime by Ottis Toole. However, Toole's mother stated that her truck tires had been slashed by vandals the day of Cousin's murder, and her son was there as a witness when police answered the call. Confronted with the report, Toole recanted his confession.

Toole’s description of the circumstances surrounding the crime supported his story. The confession ignited a flurry of activity by both the defense and the prosecution involved in the original trial, including interviews with Toole and Lucas.

On January 23, 1985, a documentary entitled Park Estep: A Reasonable Doubt aired on KKTV in Colorado Springs, discussing the recent changes in evidence. It was submitted for a George Foster Peabody Award and information about it can be found in the Peabody Award Archives at the University of Georgia Main Library.

In popular culture

A character based on Toole was portrayed by Tom Towles in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Date of Birth 5 March 1947, Jacksonville, Florida, USA ��Date of Death 15 September 1996, Hollywood, Florida, USA. (cirrhosis of the liver) ��Birth Name Ottis Elwood Toole ��Height 6' (1.83 m) ��Mini Biography Ottis Elwood Toole was a self-confessed serial killer and cannibal who admitted to many murders and was the suspect in many more unsolved murders, some of which he committed with his friend Henry Lee Lucas. Toole was convicted of murder twice and confessed to four more murders, for which he was convicted by a court of law. Toole admitted to the killing of Adam Walsh, the young son of John Walsh, the creator and host of the television program "America's Most Wanted." Although never proven, Walsh believed that Toole was the murderer of his son.��Toole was raised in Jacksonville, Florida in a broken home. His father ran away when he was a child; his mother was a religious fanatic, and his grandmother was a satanist. While his sister dressed the young boy in girl's clothes to play with him, Toole's satanic granny allegedly involved him in various occult practices, including robbing graves for body parts to be used in her fiendish rituals. Grandma dubbed Ottis "the devil's child," an epithet he would live up to while still in his teens. Understandably, the young Toole repeatedly ran away from home.��Toole claimed to have begun his career as an amateur arsonist, beginning with the burning of abandoned homes, while still a youngster. He allegedly claimed his first murder victim at the age of 14, when he killed a traveling salesman who propositioned him for sex by running over him with his own car after they had trysted in the woods. The murder has never verified.��First arrested as an adult in 1964 on a charge of loitering, Toole had an IQ of 75, which is considered border-line retarded, though the low score might be the result of his being virtually illiterate. No charmer, Toole did manage to get himself married for a short-time, but his wife left him in a huff after realizing he was homosexual. A drifter, Toole would support himself as a male prostitute.��Fatefully, Toole met the one-eyed bisexual Henry Lee Lucas in a Florida soup kitchen in late 1976, when he was 29 years old and Lucas was 40. The two hit it off, becoming lovers and boon traveling companions; whether they actually were serial killers together is still clouded in mystery, though it likely is true. ��In 1978, Toole and Lucas moved in with Toole's mother and sister in Jacksonville. Lucas fell in love with Toole's 10-year old female cousin, Frieda "Becky" Powell, whom he eventually adopted and lived with as husband and wife. But that lay in the future. Toole and Lucas went to work for a local roofing company, but they often missed work as they frequently went back on the road, two men born to ramble, spreading their version of hell along the highways and by-ways of America.��After Lucas had been arrested, he implicated Toole, who was serving time on a Florida arson charge, in mass murder. Toole then offered confessions of his own. By October 1983, police were sure that Toole and Lucas had committed at least 69 killings, which they announced at a press conference. The number was increased to 81 at a January 1984 press conference, and by March 1985, 90 murders had been attributed to Lucas in 20 states, and he and Toole were credited with a further 108 killings. Police would eventually claim over 200 murders were solved due to Lucas' confessions, as Lucas was taken to various states and had his memory prodded about unsolved killings.��Toole, now on Florida's Death Row for murder, corroborated much of Lucas' confession, including his claims to have committed hundreds of murders, singly and as a duo.��In 1983, Toole claimed to have committed the 1981 abduction and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh. Since he knew the store from whence the child was kidnapped, a fact that had been withheld from the public, and had claimed to have injured Adam in a way consistent with the physical evidence, Adam's father, John Walsh, believes to this day that Toole was the culprit. The negligence of the local police, who impounded Toole's car but lost the blood-stained carpeting that could have provided a forensic link to the murder, stymied any attempt to positively attributed the heinous murder to Toole. Cruelly, the cold-hearted Toole offered to take Walsh to the body of his dead son for a fee, but was turned down. Toole later recanted this confession, but Henry Lee Lucas insisted that Toole had killed the boy.��John Walsh became a crusader for victim's rights and the host of the TV program "America's Most Wanted" after the tragic loss of his son.��In April 1984, Ottis Toole was convicted of murder for a 1982 arson incident in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida that resulted in the death of an elderly man. He was sentenced to death, and received a second conviction and death sentence later that year for the 1983 murder of a 19-year-old girl from Tallahassee, Florida. Both death sentences were reduced to life in prison on appeal. In 1991, Toole pleaded guilty to four more murders and received four more life sentences. Many officials who doubt the veracity of Henry Lee Lucas' confessions believed that Ottis Toole was a genuine serial killer, and a cannibal. In November 1983, police taped a jail-house telephone call between the two while Lucas was in the midst of his confession spree. Neither had seen or spoken to the other for more than half a year, making it impossible for them to fabricate a joint story congruent with their confessions for the purpose of fooling the authorities. Ottis Elwood Toole died of cirrhosis of the liver, in prison, in September 15, 1996.