Among noted twentieth-century criminals, few had as ghastly a profile as Ottis Toole. In one tall, snaggle-toothed frame, the Florida drifter seemed to combine many perversions. Convicted of arson and murder in 1983, he had taken glee in watching populated apartment buildings burn. In jail, he professed to be a rapist, child-murderer, and cannibal. His many victims allegedly included 6-year old Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, host of the popular Fox TV true-crime show, "America's Most Wanted." Echoing Toole's claims was his sidekick, the self-professed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Never conclusively proven, their stories led to intensive nationwide investigations.
Born in poverty in 1947 in Jacksonville, Florida, Toole had a childhood of unrelenting misery. Sexually abused by male relatives, made to handle corpses by his voodoo-practicing grandmother, fed barbiturates by his mother, shot at by brothers, and forced to wear dresses by his sisters, he was a cauldron of rage with little formal education. According to the crime writer Sondra London, he killed his first two victims at the age of fourteen, running over a man with a truck and strangling a woman. By his twenties, he was a convicted arsonist.
In 1976, Toole met Lucas in a Jacksonville soup kitchen. They swapped murder stories, Lucas a recent parolee who had killed his own mother. Thus began a six-year long friendship with the pair drifting from state to state, doing menial jobs, and, if they are to be believed, conducting an endless murder spree. They preyed upon women, homosexual men, and children. Hitchhikers were typical victims, with the transvestite Toole dressing in women's clothing to help lure female victims into the car.
Taken along for the ride were Toole's pre--adolescent niece and nephew. For years Lucas sexually abused the mildly retarded Becky Powell, whom he later confessed to murdering. The nephew ended up in a mental institution.
After their incarceration in 1983--Toole for arson and murder, Lucas for Powell's murder--extraordinary confessions followed. The pair said they killed not merely for their own pleasure but on the orders of a cult called the Hand of Death, which allegedly sacrificed women in Satanic rituals and snuff films. As Lucas' estimates of the body count reached as high as 600, police escorted him around the country to crime sites. Inconsistencies and unraveling lies cast doubt on the story and led some to call it a hoax. However, police investigators from 19 states held a summit in Louisiana that concluded the pair might have committed 81 murders.
Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Toole spent his last decade of life in prison giving grisly interviews about eating human beings. In one, he confessed to the 1981 murder of Adam West, but he later recanted and was never charged. The victim's father, John West, criticized authorities for not further pursuing Toole's connection to his son in his 1997 book, Tears of Rage. The crime was unsolved at the time of Toole's death from liver failure in 1996.
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