Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [35]
While Toole told the doctor that he thought his memory was “poor” and that he “had trouble thinking,” Miller adjudged that his basic cognitive functions were intact and that he exhibited only minor memory problems related to immediate recall. “Can tell time and is of average native intelligence,” Miller said. “Is able to register, store, and retrieve data fairly well.”
The doctor’s clinical impression was that Toole exhibited borderline character disorder and that while he was a “severely disturbed man,” he was nonetheless competent to stand trial. Meanwhile, Miller recommended that Toole receive treatment for “psychosexual conflicts, pyromania and alcoholism-drug dependency.”
While Toole received no formal treatment for his problems, he was awarded a speedy trial where he was summarily convicted of the two May arsons he confessed to in his Springfield neighborhood. He received a fifteen-year sentence for one fire and a five-year sentence for the second, with the terms to run consecutively. On Thursday, August 11, 1983, he was received at the Union Correctional Institution at Raiford, Florida. At the age of thirty-six, and with a lifetime of bad news behind him, the tide of Ottis Toole’s fortunes had finally begun to turn.
At the same time that Toole arrived at Raiford, his former partner Henry Lee Lucas was facing serious difficulties of his own in Texas, where he and Becky Powell had gone when they’d fled Jacksonville back in 1982. Lucas had been arrested in Stoneberg, a hamlet northwest of Fort Worth, near the Oklahoma border, on June 11, 1983, suspected in the murder of a woman named Catherine Powell. Powell had been discovered in her rural home outside Tyler, Texas, the previous summer, sexually abused and shot once in the head. In addition, Lucas had been questioned by Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, detective Jay Via about a series of unsolved murders in the county seat of Monroe and elsewhere in the area.
Finally, Lucas began to crack. He admitted that he had killed Catherine Powell the previous August, and he also said that he had killed Ottis Toole’s niece Becky, then fifteen, in Denton, Texas, a few days later. Lucas would eventually claim responsibility for more than two hundred murders, though he also told police that he had been assisted in several of the crimes by a man from Jacksonville, Florida, named Ottis Toole. While authorities were uncertain as to just how much credit to give these claims, police with dead-end cases from around the South were soon on their way to Texas to speak with Lucas.
One such detective was Buddy Terry, from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide unit. On Thursday, August 11, during an interview with Terry, Henry Lee Lucas confessed to the murder of eight women in Jacksonville between 1979 and 1981. Lucas also recounted another crime to Terry, one that involved Ottis Toole.
He’d been with Toole when he set fire to one of Betty Goodyear’s rooming houses, Lucas told Terry. Toole was upset with several of the men who lived in that particular house because they would not respond to his sexual advances, Lucas said. While Lucas watched, Toole took a can of gasoline from the trunk of his car, made his way into a vacant back bedroom of the house, doused the room with the fuel, and lit it with a match.
Lucas told Terry that the two of them drove around the block several times, watching as the flames built, firemen responded, and residents leaped from windows. Lucas said that they also watched as EMS technicians dragged resident George Sonnenberg to the front porch and worked desperately to revive him. From Toole’s point of view, Lucas assured Terry, things could simply not have turned out better.
Jacksonville, Florida—August 30, 1983
Following his interview with Henry Lee Lucas in Texas, Detective Terry returned to Jacksonville