Child  abductors  who  kill  their  victims (Part 1)

There are very few human beings that are more contemptible than those fiends who abduct small children and then kill them. On average, 100 children in the United States alone are abducted and murdered by strangers each year. There is approximately one child abduction-murder for every 10,000 reports of missing children. Sexual assault was the primary motivation. The majority of the killers—53 percent were known to have committed prior crimes against children, the most common being sexual assaults. In this article, I will tell you about one of those sub humans.

Otis Elwood Toole

This man was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. According to him, his mother was abusive; Toole claimed she would dress him in girls' clothing and call him Susan. His father was an alcoholic who abandoned him. As a young child, Toole was a victim of sexual assault and incest at the hands of many close relatives and acquaintances, including his older sister and next door neighbor. He claimed that his maternal grandmother was a Satanist, who exposed him to various Satanic practices and rituals in his youth. He was a serial arsonist from a young age and was sexually aroused by fire. I don’t know if he made all that up or it is true but if it is true, then his childhood years was the formula for the creation of a serial killer.

He was often designated as suffering from mild mental retardation, with an  I.Q.  of 75. He also suffered from epilepsy, which resulted in frequent grand mal seizures. Throughout his childhood, he ran away from home often and often slept in abandoned houses.  Toole claimed to have committed his first murder at the age of 14, when after being propositioned for sex by a traveling salesman, Toole ran over the salesman with his own car.

Toole was first arrested at the age of 17 in August 1964 for loitering. Much information on Toole between 1966 and 1973 is unclear, but it is believed that he began drifting around the Southwestern United States and that he supported himself by prostitution and panhandling.

While living in Nebraska, Toole was one of the prime suspects in the 1974 murder of 24-year-old Patricia Webb. Shortly after, he left Nebraska and briefly settled in Boulder, Colorado. One month later, he became a prime suspect in the murder of 31-year-old Ellen Holman, who was murdered on October 14, 1974. With many accusations against him but no charges having been laid against him, Toole left Boulder, Colorado and headed back to Jacksonville.

In early 1975, Toole returned to Jacksonville after drifting and hitch-hiking through the American South. On January 14, 1976, he married a woman 25 years his senior. She left him after three days, when she discovered that he was homosexual.  Toole later said during an interview that his marriage was a tactic meant to conceal his true sexuality.

In 1976, Toole met Henry Lee Lucas at a Jacksonville soup kitchen. They soon developed a sexual relationship. Toole later claimed to have accompanied Lucas in 108 murders.

     

There are many strong opinions that this duo didn’t commit that many murders. While they were in custody, they realized that they could be taken around the United States by hoodwinking the sheriffs in various states that they killed people in those states. The duo would be taken to those states to supposedly tell the sheriffs where the bodies were. Of course, no one found the bodies but the sheriffs could claim that the murders in their counties were solved when in fact they were not solved at all.

                                                

On January 4, 1982, Toole barricaded 64-year-old George Sonnenberg in a boarding house where he was living in Jacksonville and set the house on fire. Sonnenberg died a week later of injuries he sustained in the fire. In April 1983, Toole was arrested for an unrelated arson incident in Jacksonville. For that crime, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. While in custody, Toole confessed to killing George Sonneberg. Toole signed a confession stating that he and Sonnenberg had begun a sexual relationship and, after the two had an argument, Toole lit Sonnenberg's home on fire.

       

One is forced to ask, “Why would anyone admit to committing a murder?” One explanation is notoriety.

Two months later in June, 1983, his accomplice Henry Lee Lucas was arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm. It was then that Lucas began boasting about the murderous rampage orchestrated by the two. At first, Toole had denied involvement but later began backing up Lucas's confessions. Lucas later recanted his confessions, saying he made such statements only to improve his living conditions in jail.

During Toole's trial for murdering George Sonnenberg, Toole claimed that he did not light the home on fire and only signed the confession so he would be extradited back to Jacksonville. On April 28, 1984, a jury found Toole guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to death.

Later that year, Toole was found guilty of the February 1983 strangulation murder of a 19 year-old Tallahassee, Florida woman, and received a second death sentence. However on appeal, both sentences were commuted to life in prison. After his incarceration, Toole pleaded guilty to four more Jacksonville murders in 1991 and received four more life sentences. Obviously, he was attempting to advance his notoriety to a much higher level.

Now I will tell you about a more famous murder he claims he committed that had followed an abduction of a small child.

Adam John Walsh was born on November 14, 1974. Revé, Adam Walsh's mother, took her son, Adam shopping with her in a Hollywood, Florida Sears department store on July 27, 1981. She said that she stopped to check out lamps a few aisles away and left Adam at a kiosk with Atari 2600 video games on display. Shortly afterwards, she said that she returned to find that Adam and the other boys had disappeared. A store manager informed her that a scuffle had broken out over whose turn it was at the kiosk and a 17-year-old security guard demanded that the boys leave the store. The security guard asked the older boys if their parents were in the store, and the boys said that they were not. It was later stated by Adam's parents that he must have been too shy to speak to the security officer, who presumed that he was in the company of the other boys, and put him out the same door. Based upon Revé’s claim that Adam was in the store with her, it was conjectured that Adam was then left alone near an exit of Sears that was unfamiliar to him.

Adam's severed head was found by two fishermen in a Vero Beach, Florida, canal on August 10, 1981. The rest of his body was never recovered.

Toole years later told the police that he had abducted Adam from the mall and drove for about an hour to an isolated dirt road where he decapitated him and fed the rest of his body to alligators in the swamp.  Investigators lifted bloodstained carpet from Mr. Toole’s white Cadillac. But DNA testing then was not as advanced as it now, and investigators could not tell if the blood was Adam’s. When a detective assigned to the case in 1994 went to order DNA testing on the bloodstained carpeting from Mr. Toole’s car, the carpeting and the car were found to be missing. That was a direct result of police stupidity.

 The police later took another look at 27 years of tips, psychic revelations, often-botched police work and a serial killer's chilling admissions and decided it was time to ease the suffering of the Walsh family and time to point the finger at the man Hollywood Police Chief Chad Wagner said had been the prime suspect all along—Otis Toole. That put the boy’s parent’s minds at ease since they now had closure. 

The problem was that Toole being a prime suspect and being proved to be Adam’s murder in a court of law that he was guilty of murder are two different things. And with Toole having a propensity to exaggerate, quite frankly, I have my doubts that this man actually killed the boy.  I think he confessed to that murder for the notoriety it would bring him. However, it is still possible that he killed the little boy. Unfortunately we will never know. On September 15, 1996, Toole died in prison at age 47. No one claimed his body so it was placed in a pauper’s grave.

 

President Bush signed the  Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. It will help prevent child abuse by creating a National Child Abuse Registry, and requiring investigators to do background checks on adoptive and foster parents before they approve to take custody of a child. By giving child protective service professionals in all 50 states access to this critical information, it will improve their ability to investigate child abuse cases and help ensure that the vulnerable children are not put into situations of abuse or neglect.  That being as it is, Adam Walsh didn’t die in vain. It is a terrible shame that he had to die for that law to come about.  His death also brought about over 1,000 apprehensions of criminals through John Walsh’s television series, America’s Most Wanted.