On May 30, 1976, a Metro-Dade police officer came upon a car in the Miami area and found a man raping a hitchhiker he had taken at knifepoint. The man was Robert Frederick Carr III, a thirty-two-year-old television repairman on parole from Connecticut. In the interrogation room he surprised the detectives by confessing to four murders and describing each of them in detail, and over the weeks that followed he traveled with Detectives David Simmons and Charles Zatrepalek and the deputy medical examiner, Ronald Wright, to find the graves. He also admitted raping more than a dozen boys and girls. Simmons said years later that in a thirty-three-year career Carr ranked as "the most dangerous child sexual predator-murderer I ever investigated."
Carr was born on December 22, 1943, in Virginia. By his own account his childhood was a hard one: he said he had been forced into prostitution at eleven and had stolen cars as a teenager. As an adult he moved to Connecticut, married, and made his living fixing televisions. He told investigators that when he had sex he fantasized about rape and murder. He sometimes went by the name Robert Hunt.
The first killing he described was that of Tammy Ruth Huntley, sixteen, who vanished in the Miami area while she was waiting for her mother to pick her up. Carr drove her to Mississippi and held her in the woods for ten days, raping her, and on April 7, 1972, he strangled her. "I killed her because she looked like she was getting despondent," he said. In the months after her death, he told detectives, he raped four more girls and two boys.
On November 13, 1972, back in Florida, he picked up two eleven-year-old friends, Todd Payton and Mark Wilson, who were hitchhiking from North Miami Beach. The rear doors of his car had been fixed so they could not be opened from inside, and the trunk held food, jars of petroleum jelly and a shovel. He raped both boys and strangled Todd, and four days later he strangled Mark. He buried one of them in Mississippi and the other in Louisiana. Their parents reported them missing when they did not come home, and it was more than three years before anyone learned what had happened to them.
In 1973 Carr was convicted of rape in Connecticut and sentenced to four to eight years. He was paroled in 1976 after serving less than three. That year, on parole, he gave a ride to a young hitchhiker named Steve Fishman, who later became a newspaper reporter in Connecticut and decades afterward was still asking himself why he had been spared. Shortly after that ride Carr killed Rhonda Holloway, twenty-one, and buried her in the Connecticut countryside. For a time after his arrest he refused to talk about her death. Her body was later found in Connecticut.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life, convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and four of sexual battery; the killing of Mark Wilson brought him an additional twenty years. He served part of the sentence in a state mental hospital until staff found he had been hoarding wire cutters and pliers, and he was returned to prison. From there he wrote letters to Ed O'Donnell, a prosecutor who had worked on the case, and struck up a relationship with Fishman, telephoning him almost every day with the details of how he had killed the two boys. Edna Buchanan's book on the case, Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, was published in 1979.
Carr died at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida, on July 6, 2007, at sixty-three. His daughter told CNN the cause was prostate cancer.