With his lover, he roams the country and kills more than 100 people.
At 5 years old, young Ottis Toole knows the cemetery of Jacksonville (Florida) by heart. He goes there every week with his grandmother. They do not lay flowers there for the deceased, nor do they pray for the repose of their souls. At night, they break in to desecrate the fresh graves and dig up the corpses! Ottis then spends hours helping his satanist grandmother dismember them in preparation for her insane rituals…
A first murder at 14 years old
At the age of 7, he drinks as much as his father, to forget the sexual abuse he makes him suffer. At the age of 9, her stepfather, also incestuous, introduced her to drugs. He borrows clothes from his older sister, who forces him into prostitution. He commits his first murder at 14, running over a traveling salesman who tried to attack him. Left to his own devices, he lives off theft and spends several periods in prison. For the next ten years, he wandered from Colorado to Nebraska. His path is strewn with disappearances and crimes that remain unsolved for the police.
Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas, a couple of sadists
In 1976, he was 29 years old when he met in a Jacksonville soup kitchen the great love of his life, Henry Lee Lucas: a loser who more or less had the same profile as him and who had just been released following serving a conviction for matricide… For five years, this sadistic couple sows death in their path, elusive because they cover thousands of kilometers across many states. They rob grocery stores, gas stations and various small businesses. Before grabbing the cash register, Ottis and Henry kill the merchant in the back room, then the violent post-mortem, whether he is male or female, they don’t care. Hitchhikers are almost daily prey. The modus operandi of the duo is variable, they kill at random, anyone, anyhow. When he has the opportunity, Toole dismembers his victims and eats them, accompanied by a sauce of his own composition. His companion does not share his culinary tastes: Lucas prefers to indulge in bestiality.
108 victims in 6 years
On June 11, 1983, the latter was arrested for carrying illegal weapons and questioned by the sheriff regarding two murders committed in the region, near Ringgold (Texas). Lucas confesses in two days and adds that he killed at least 300 people alone: “I have been committing murders for ten years, but no one wants to believe me. I can’t go on like this. He denounces Toole for the homicides committed since their meeting.
The Jacksonville cannibal was in turn arrested in Florida a few months later. He begins by confessing to four murders of which he is suspected, then boasts of having made 108 victims with his accomplice Lucas. In 1984, they were both sentenced to life imprisonment. In prison, where he died of cirrhosis in 1996, Toole became a star, promising anyone who would write to him to give them the recipe for his cannibalistic “barbecue sauce”.
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