Robert Frederick Carr III was born in 1944 and grew up in Connecticut. He had a record for burglary and sexual offences by his twenties and worked in a series of labouring jobs.
In September 1972 he abducted Mark Wilson and Todd Payton, two boys aged eleven and nine, from Manchester, Connecticut, and killed them. In 1976, in Florida, he killed Tammy Huntley, a teenage hitchhiker. Rhonda Holloway, twenty-one, is also named in the record.
He was arrested in Florida in 1976 after an attack on a woman who survived and identified him, and he confessed to the three killings and to a long series of assaults. He was convicted and given life.
From prison he wrote extensively about himself and cooperated with the writer Alan Prendergast, whose account of the case, The Poison Tree, drew on hundreds of hours of interviews. Carr's own explanations of what he had done changed repeatedly across those years, and investigators who dealt with him regarded a good deal of what he said as unreliable. Three killings are established.