Ottis Elwood Toole was born in Jacksonville, Florida on March 5, 1947, into extreme poverty and abuse. He had an assessed IQ around 75, was epileptic, and was living rough and setting fires by his teens.
He met Henry Lee Lucas at a soup kitchen in Jacksonville in 1976 and the two travelled together for years, along with Toole's young niece and nephew.
When Lucas began confessing in Texas in 1983, Toole began confessing in Florida, and between them they claimed hundreds of murders across the United States.
Almost all of it collapsed. Toole recanted repeatedly, gave incompatible versions, and was demonstrably elsewhere for many of the killings he described.
He was convicted of two: the 1982 arson murder of George Sonnenberg, an elderly man burned in his own house in Jacksonville, and the murder of Ada Johnson. Two death sentences were commuted to life. The Florida press called him the Jacksonville Cannibal, a name the record does not support in any particular.
The case that attaches to his name is Adam Walsh, a six-year-old taken from a shopping centre at Hollywood, Florida in July 1981 and found decapitated two weeks later. Toole confessed to it several times and retracted several times. He was never charged.
The physical evidence that might have settled it, including a car and a machete, was lost or destroyed by the Hollywood police department, and every subsequent review described the investigation as badly mishandled.
Adam Walsh's father John Walsh went on to create America's Most Wanted and campaigned for twenty-seven years for an answer. In December 2008 the Hollywood police formally closed the case and named Toole as the killer, on the balance of what remained. He had been dead for twelve years.
He died of cirrhosis at the Florida State Prison hospital on September 15, 1996, aged forty-nine. Nobody claimed the body.
Two convictions against hundreds of confessions, and the one case the public knows him for was answered by a police force closing a file it had already lost the evidence for.