Proud - Day 9
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Let’s dig into the past a little to celebrate today’s famous subject…
Ottis Toole
Ottis hits all of the indicators. He would have been identified as autistic in today’s society. He was abused as a child, had a highly narcissistic and demanding mother, and had same sex attractions. I mean, that’s textbook.
Ottis is most famous as the prime suspect in the abduction, strangulation, annd decapitation of Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh. This grisly murder captured the attention of the nation and Adam’s father John went in to become an internationally renowned victims rights advocate and went on to found and host America’s Most Wanted. We will cover this later, as there is some controversy. Ottis and his later murderous partner (Henry Lee Lucas) were found to be serial confessors, and confessed to crimes that they couldn’t possibly have committed. For this Proud Remembrance, I’d rather focus on what was known.
By the time Ottis was 14 he was a cross-dressing hooker. That’s also when he killed his first victim, a traveling salesman that picked him up. After that, Toole drifted across the Southwest for a decade, supporting himself through prostitution, thievery, and panhandling. He is known to have also picked up many “dates” at rescue missions, dressed in drag over the years. Some of those dates disappeared. He started showing up on the police radar in 1974 as a prime suspect in the murder of a 24 year old woman named Patricia Webb in Nebraska. He quickly left Nebraska for Boulder, CO, where a month later he became the prime suspect in the murder of a 31 year old woman named Ellen Holman. So Ottis abandoned Colorado and hitchhiked back to Florida.
In 1976, he became sexually involved with Henry Lee Lucas, and the two began a long association of sexual and violent depravity. Again, The problem here, is that there is so much the two have confessed to, some of which is verifiable, some that cannot be verified, but is highly probable and suspected to be true, and others, that could not possibly be true, that it becomes hard to weed out suspicions from fact and fancy. What we do know:
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the two killed a police officer in West Virginia in 1976 when the officer was arresting Ottis for prostitution.
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they killed an unidentified woman known only as Cheryl in 1981. Lucas strangled her while Ottis bashed her head in with a tire iron. They confessed and led police to the area where the body had been discovered.
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In 1982, Ottis barricaded a 65 year old man that he was having an affair with in his own home and set it aflame, killing the man.
All told, Toole was convicted on 6 counts of Murder 1 and multiple arson convictions. There are approximately 20 other known cases that he has confessed to that authorities find it likely that he committed but charges could not be brought before his death. Some law enforcement officers have estimated his total number of victims as more than 30 but under 40. Then there was the big unknown one - Adam Walsh…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Adam_Walsh
police eventually concluded that Adam was abducted by a drifter named Ottis Toole near the front exterior of Sears after being instructed to leave by a security guard. Toole said that he had lured Adam into his white 1971 Cadillac Sedan de Ville (which had a damaged right bumper) with promises of toys and candy, then proceeded to drive north on Interstate 95 toward his home in Jacksonville. According to Toole, Adam, at first docile and compliant, began to panic as they drove on. Toole punched him in the face, but as this just made the situation worse, he then "walloped him unconscious." While Adam was unconscious, Toole drove north on the Florida Turnpike to a deserted service road just north of the Radebaugh Road overpass in northwest St. Lucie County (27°33′35″N 80°39′47″W).[23] When Toole realized that Adam was still breathing, he strangled him to death with a seat belt, dragged him out of the car and decapitated him with a machete. Toole also claimed to have incinerated the body in an old refrigerator when he returned to Jacksonville. He claimed that he wanted to make Adam his adopted son, but that was not deemed feasible. The source of the blood found in Toole's car could not be identified.[4] The police ultimately lost the bloodstained carpet from the car, the machete said to have been used to decapitate Adam and, eventually, the car itself. Toole, a confidant of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, repeatedly confessed and then retracted accounts of his involvement.[citation needed]
Toole was never charged in Adam's case, although he provided seemingly accurate descriptions as to how he committed the crime. The 2019 Netflix miniseries The Confession Killer shows footage of him apparently being fed information from interrogators and he later confessed to several cases he had no involvement in.[24] Several witnesses also placed him in the Hollywood area in the days leading up to Adam's disappearance.[4] In September 1996, he died in prison of cirrhosis at the age of 49 while serving a life sentence for other crimes.[12] Later, his niece told John Walsh that he made a deathbed confession to Adam's murder.. -
