Ottis Elwood Toole: The Jacksonville Serial Killer

This article is reprinted from the book 

South of the St Marys River: Stories from the History of Northeast Florida

On July 27, 1981 Reve Walsh took her six year old, Adam shopping at a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida.  She left him playing video games in the toy department for a few minutes.  When she returned Adam was nowhere to be found.  Two weeks later the boy’s head was discovered by fishermen in a canal near Vero Beach, nearly 120 miles away.  Adam’s body was never found.  Over the following years, Adam’s father, John Walsh, became an activist on behalf of murdered and missing children and went on to host the television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

While the case was never officially solved, both the police and John Walsh believe they know who was responsible for Adam’s abduction and murder:  Ottis Elwood Toole of Jacksonville, Florida.

Ottis Elwood Toole was born in the Springfield area of Jacksonville on March 5, 1947.  As a young boy, Toole endured an upbringing that was a recipe for creating a serial killer.  His mother, Sarah, was a both a religious fanatic and a prostitute who dressed Ottis in women’s clothing.  His grandmother was a Satan worshiper who exposed him to grave robbing.  His father was an alcoholic who pimped him out for sex with older men when he was just five years old.  His older sister molested and raped him. 

Toole claimed that his family began the abuse when he came out to them as a homosexual at ten years old, however this contradicts his claim that he was sexually molested when he was five.  He had a homosexual relationship with another boy at twelve.  Two years later he dropped out of ninth grade and began visiting gay bars, often dressed in drag.  Around this time he also began starting fires in abandoned buildings.

When Ottis Toole was just fourteen years old he committed his first murder.  One night Toole met a traveling salesman.  The circumstances of how they met are unclear, but they agreed to have sex and drove to a secluded spot in the woods.  It is also unclear whether the two actually had sex but, according to Toole, he panicked or felt guilty, jumped into the man’s car and ran him over with it.

Ottis Elwood Toole spent most of the remainder of his teenage years in Jacksonville, committing petty crimes, prostituting, and torching abandoned buildings.  He was arrested in August, 1964 for loitering and again in 1965 for petty larceny.

In 1966 Toole left Jacksonville and began drifting around the Southwest.  As before, he supported himself by prostitution, petty crime, and panhandling.  In 1974 he was a suspect in the murder in Lincoln, Nebraska of Patricia Webb.  Patricia had just started her new job at an adult book store.  On the night of April 18 she disappeared from the store.  Also missing were more than fifty bondage magazines.  The telephone cord in the store had been severed.  Patricia’s nude body was found two days latter in a field on a nearby farm.  She had been shot multiple times and there was tape over her mouth.  Her murder has never been officially solved.

Ottis Toole next moved on to Boulder, Colorado.  Within one month he became the prime suspect in yet another murder.  On October 29, 1974 police discovered the body of 31 year old Ellen Holman near the border between Colorado and Oklahoma.  Ellen was traveling from her home in Trinidad Colorado to Pueblo when she disappeared.  Her car was found at an interstate highway rest stop.  Shortly thereafter, her body was found in an Oklahoma field with three bullet holes to the head.  As with Patricia Webb, the murder of Ellen Holman remains unsolved.

Under a cloud of suspicion in at least three states, Toole decided it was time to return home to Jacksonville.  It was there, in 1976, that Toole met fellow deviant Henry Lee Lucas while on line at a soup kitchen at Jacksonville’s City Rescue Mission.  At the time Toole was 29 and Lucas was 40.  They returned to Toole’s home and spent the night drinking, talking, and having sex.  The two men found that they had much in common.

Like Toole, Lucas had a horrible childhood.  Lucas’ mother was a prostitute who abused him both mentally and physically.  He would be severely beaten for the slightest transgression.  The young boy often witnessed his mother performing sex acts on strangers.  Like Toole’s mother, she dressed young Henry in girls clothing.  As an adolescent he sexually molested his younger brother and developed an affinity for torturing animals.  By the time he met Toole, Lucas had already served a ten year sentence for killing his mother.  He stabbed her in the neck with a knife after she hit him with a broom.

With so much in common – broken childhoods, lust for murder, sexual deviancy – the two quickly became lovers.  Lucas moved in with Toole.  Also living in the house were his mother and her current husband, his sister Drusilla Powell, a nephew Frank, and his eleven year old niece, Frieda.  In 1977 Ottis Toole unexpectedly married a woman named Novella, twenty four years older than himself.  His new wife, however, was dismayed by the homosexual affair being carried on by Toole and Lucas and his inability to perform sexually with a woman.  She was also expected to have sex with other men for Toole’s pleasure.  Some years earlier, Toole had married another woman who left him after just a few days for the same reasons.  Although Ottis and Novella did not divorce, she moved out of the house to stay with neighbors.

Ottis Toole and Henry Lucas supported themselves through a series of menial jobs and petty crime.  They would often disappear for long stretches of time, sometimes separately and sometimes together.  The pair would travel around drinking and robbing convenience stores.  Over time the violence against store employees accelerated as the two enjoyed inflicting fear and terror to feed their demons. Later, police would theorize that the pair killed at least nineteen people in and around Jacksonville.

Meanwhile, Sarah Toole purchased a house at 117 East 2^nd Street in Jacksonville.  The extended “family” moved into the house and she also took in boarders.  While living in that house, Lucas began a romantic and sexual affair with Ottis’ still underage niece, Frieda, who he called Becky.  Toole did not approve of the relationship as he viewed Frieda as more of a daughter figure.

Sarah Toole died in May of 1981 from complications following surgery.  A short time later, Toole’s sister, Drusilla, died from a drug overdose.  Her two children were removed from the home by authorities and placed in a juvenile facility in Barstow, Florida.  By all accounts, these developments hit Ottis Toole hard.

This article is reprinted from the book 

South of the St Marys River: Stories from the History of Northeast Florida

Following an argument, Henry Lucas stole a pickup truck and headed north, leaving Ottis totally alone.  Lucas was arrested in Maryland for car theft. He was held in jail from July 22 until October 6.  Ottis was deeply depressed so he drank and drugged heavily during this period.  It was also during this time (July 27) that young Adam Walsh was abducted from the Sears store in Hollywood.

When Lucas was released from jail he returned to Jacksonville.  The two men helped Becky (Frieda) escape from the juvenile facility and she and Lucas became inseparable.  Ottis, Henry and Becky were all that remained of the “family.”  In January 1982, Lucas and Toole became aware that the police were looking for Becky Powell and also for them for their role in her escape.  Without telling Ottis Toole, Henry and Becky took off.

After traveling cross country, the pair settled for a while at a ranch in Ringgold, Texas.  One day the two got into a heated argument.  Lucas lured Becky to a field where he cut off her head, carved the rest of her body into small pieces, and scattered her remains.  He then returned to the ranch. 

Residents of the small town were suspicious about Becky’s disappearance, none more so than Kate Rich, a woman who had previously befriended her.  Concerned that Kate was asking too many questions, Lucas lured her to the same field where he had murdered Becky.  There, he stabbed her to death, had sex with her dead body, and cut her into pieces.  He brought her remains back to the ranch where he spent several hours burning them in a wood stove.  Law enforcement would later find shards of her bones inside the stove.

Meanwhile, in Jacksonville, Ottis Toole sank deep into what is best described as psychosis, brought on by what he saw as a betrayal by both his lover and “daughter.”  Toole was deeply depressed and could be seen wandering around the neighborhood talking to himself.  His drinking and drugging accelerated.  In an apparent attempt to release his rage, he went on the road and killed at least nine more victims in six states before returning home. 

Toole’s pathological obsession with fire also continued.  Most of the fires that he set were in abandoned buildings.  There was one fire however, where the blaze he set was intended to take a life.  Toole had kindled a relationship with sixty-four year old George Sonnenberg, who was living at the boarding house on East 2^nd street.  Following an argument, Toole barricaded Sonnenberg inside the house and set it on fire.  Sonnenberg was pulled from the home with burns over his entire body.  He died several days later.

In May of 1983 Jacksonville authorities were investigating the arson fires of two buildings in Springfield.  They questioned two teenagers who said they witnessed Ottis Toole set the fires using gasoline.  They picked up Toole who readily confessed not only to those arsons but to some forty others that he had committed over the past two decades.  Toole was arrested and sentenced that August to twenty years in state prison. 

Later that year, Toole was arrested and convicted of the murder of Ada Johnson, 19, of Tallahassee.  Ada had been missing from her home for week when on February 27, 1983 when her lifeless body was found in the woods.  She had been stabbed multiple times and shot in the back of the head.

By the time Ottis Toole was arrested, Henry Lucas was already in jail in Texas being held for the murders of Becky Powell and Kate Rich.  While in custody Lucas admitted to a slew of gruesome murders, including those that he committed with Toole.  Confronted with Lucas’ statements, Toole not only collaborated the accounts, he went on to admit to many more.  Between the two men, they confessed to literally hundreds of murders, tortures, and rapes.  They also claimed that they ate the flesh of many of their victims and at one time killed on behalf of a satanic cult.

Toole confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh.  Toole claimed that he had abducted, raped, killed and dismembered Adam.  He then drove around with the boy’s head in his trunk for two days before remembering that it was there and dumping it in the canal.  Because the police mishandled critical forensic evidence, Toole was never charged in the case.

Ottis Elwood Toole was convicted of killing both George Sonnenberg and Ada Johnson.  He was sentenced to death.  Later, upon appeal, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison. 

Ultimately, Toole was convicted of four more murders.  Former Malone, Florida, Mayor John McDaniel was shot during a convenience store robbery near the border of Florida and Alabama.  Jerilyn Peoples, 18, interrupted Toole and Lucas while they were burglarizing her home in Holmes County, Florida.  She was beaten and stabbed to death.  Brenda Jo Burton, 23, also from Holmes County, was likewise stabbed to death inside her home.  Ruby McCary, 71, was shot dead in her home in Chipley, Florida, during a robbery.  Toole received four more life sentences for those crimes. 

Ottis Elwood Toole died of liver cirrhosis while incarcerated at Florida State Prison in Raiford (also known as Raiford Prison) on September 15, 1996.  He was 49 years old.

Henry Lee Lucas was convicted of eleven murders.  He received life in prison for all except one, where he was sentenced to death.  The death sentence was commuted to life in prison by then Texas Governor George W. Bush who sited supposedly flimsy evidence used to convict him.  He died of natural causes on March 12, 2001 while incarcerated at the Ellis 1 Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections outside of Huntsville, Texas.  He was 64 years old.

During their incarceration both men openly admitted to multiple murders, often described in sickening detail.  Sometimes their stories agreed; other times they did not.  In total Ottis Toole claimed to have murdered some 108 people.  Henry Lucas boasted of over 600 kills.  While it was widely believed that they made these claims just to get escorted off prison grounds to identify crime scenes, law enforcement did clear about 300 cold cases based on their statements.

The life of Ottis Elwood Toole was one of ultimate selfishness, cruelty and depravity.  While the circumstances of his childhood may partly explain his perversion, they do not excuse it.  There were absolutely no redeeming characteristics attributable to the man.

If there was any good that came out of Toole’s murderous existence it was how his kidnapping and killing of Adam Walsh brought the plight of missing children to the attention of the nation.  After Adams’s abduction from the Sears store, his father John Walsh became a vocal advocate on behalf of missing, exploited, and murdered children.  John Walsh’s tireless efforts at public awareness led to the creation of missing persons units at most police departments and prompted Congress to pass legislation creating a national database of missing children.  Private industry participated by placing the photos of missing children on milk cartons.  He later went on to host the television show “America’s Most Wanted” which is credited with helping to arrest over one thousand of the country’s most dangerous criminals.

(Authors note:  Ottis Toole and Henry Lucas admitted to killing hundreds of people.  Indeed, the press dubbed them the “Confession Killers.”  Although many of their admissions could not be collaborated, some were used as source material in this chapter if no official accounts were available.)

This article is reprinted from the book 

South of the St Marys River: Stories from the History of Northeast Florida