Ottis Toole

What the record shows

Ottis Elwood Toole was a Jacksonville, Florida drifter and arsonist convicted of six murders committed in Florida between 1980 and 1983. A jury convicted him in 1984 of the arson death of George Sonnenberg and he was sentenced to death; the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction but vacated the sentence in 1985, and he was resentenced to life. A second 1984 death sentence, for strangling a 19-year-old Tallahassee woman, was also reduced to life, and in 1991 he pleaded guilty to four more Jacksonville murders. With Henry Lee Lucas he confessed to many more killings, most never corroborated and later recanted. He died in Florida State Prison in September 1996.

According to the Florida Supreme Court's opinion in Toole v. State (No. 65,378, November 25, 1985), a Jacksonville boarding house burned on January 4, 1982, and resident George Sonnenberg died of his injuries. Toole, a handyman for the owner, was questioned while incarcerated at Lake Butler on an unrelated offense and confessed to setting the fire after arguing with Sonnenberg; at trial he denied it and said he signed the statement to get back to Jacksonville. UPI reported that Sonnenberg, 64, died a week after the fire and that Toole was already serving 20 years for burning two abandoned Jacksonville houses in 1983.

The jury found Toole guilty of first-degree felony murder on April 28, 1984, and recommended death; Circuit Judge James L. Harrison imposed the sentence in May 1984, UPI reported. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction but held that the trial judge had wrongly refused a jury instruction on extreme mental or emotional disturbance, given defense evidence of pyromania, borderline intellectual functioning and a personality disorder, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. According to Fox News and the Wikipedia article, this and a second 1984 death sentence, for the February 1983 strangulation of a 19-year-old Tallahassee woman, were both reduced to life imprisonment.

Toole's notoriety rests mainly on his association with Henry Lee Lucas, whom he met in Jacksonville in the 1970s. After Lucas was arrested in Texas in June 1983 and began confessing to hundreds of murders, Toole first denied involvement and then backed many of Lucas's claims. UPI reported in 1984 that authorities said the pair had admitted to more than 300 killings, though investigators doubted many of them; Wikipedia records Toole's own uncorroborated claim of 108 murders with Lucas. Reviewers later concluded that Lucas could not have travelled the distances his confessions required, and both men recanted. The courts convicted Toole of six murders; the confessions remain unverified.

In October 1983, while in prison, Toole confessed to the July 27, 1981 abduction and killing of six-year-old Adam Walsh from a Sears store at a Hollywood, Florida mall. NBC News reported that fishermen found the child's severed head in a canal near Vero Beach two weeks later and that his body was never found. Toole confessed and recanted repeatedly; ABC News counted 24 documented confessions. Authorities lost the bloodstained carpet from Toole's car and then the car itself, preventing DNA testing. He was never charged in the case.

On December 16, 2008, twelve years after Toole's death, Hollywood Police Chief Chadwick Wagner announced that the department considered Toole responsible for Adam Walsh's murder and closed the case, acknowledging missteps and apologizing to the Walsh family, NBC News reported. No new physical or DNA evidence was presented. It is a police conclusion, not a court verdict. Adam's father, John Walsh, has said he believes Toole was the killer.

In 1991 Toole pleaded guilty in Jacksonville to four further murders and received four life sentences, according to Fox News and the Wikipedia article. He died on September 15, 1996, aged 49, at Florida State Prison in Raiford of liver failure; NBC News reported that no relative claimed his body and he was buried on prison grounds. Toole was born in Jacksonville on March 5, 1947. The Wikipedia article reports a childhood of abuse, early arrests and repeated fire-setting.