Lucas, Toole, and the Murder of Adam Walsh | Fledgling Criminals | 1

This episode originally aired in 2024.

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

It's July 27th, 1981, in a Sears parking lot in Hollywood, Florida.

33-year-old Revay Walsh walks across the pavement, her six-year-old son Adam at her side.

Adam's yellow flip-flops slap against the ground as mother and son approach the entrance to the department store.

An hour ago, Revay's husband John called to say that some lamps they'd been looking at had gone on sale and suggested she pick them up.

It's hot out, so Revay was more than happy for an excuse to spend time in some air conditioning.

As they walk through the sprawling store, Revay feels Adam tugging on her hand, trying to pull her towards a video game display in the hi-fi department.

There's a group of kids standing around a screen taking turns blowing up aliens.

Figuring that shopping for lamps will bore any six-year-old to tears, Revay tells Adam that he can stay and wait for a turn at the game.

She leans down to make sure he can hear her over the sounds of the game, telling him that she'll just be over in the furniture department.

She points to the far corner, and Adam nods.

Then Revay lets go of her son's hand and watches him rush closer to the television screen, his favorite white sailor's hat standing out among the other kids' baseball caps.

Revay's only gone a few minutes, maybe ten, long enough for her to look for the lamps, fail to find them, then ask a sales associate if they have any in the back.

Once the employee's taken down Revay's phone number with a promise to call when the lamps come back in stock, Revay heads back towards the hi-fi department.

But when she gets closer, Revay can tell that something isn't right.

She can't hear the sound of the video game anymore, nor can she hear kids arguing over whose turn it is.

When she rounds the corner and arrives at the display, her heart stops.

There's no one there.

Revay calls out to Adam as she walks through the maze of televisions and stereos.

Soon she's practically running up and down the aisles.

She asks a couple of sales associates if they've seen a little boy, describing his green shorts, his yellow flip-flops, and his white sailor's hat.

But no one remembers seeing Adam.

So, she rushes back to the furniture section in case he came to find her.

But he's not there either.

As the minutes pass, Revay's concern ratchets up in a full-blown panic.

But she's too scared to venture far from the video game display in case Adam comes back and she misses him.

Still, she manages to get the staff to help her, getting them to make an announcement over the store's loudspeaker telling Adam that his mother is looking for him.

It doesn't help, nothing helps.

And after two frantic hours, it's finally abundantly, terrifyingly clear, Adam Walsh is gone.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

The telling of true crime stories is full of difficulties.

Not only do you risk glorifying the acts of some of history's most despicable figures, you often do so at the expense of their victims.

And then there are the issues of reliability.

In many cases, the best, fullest account of a crime comes from its perpetrator, someone who, for obvious reasons, can't always be trusted.

Sometimes, law enforcement are able to use evidence to paint a full and complete picture of the events in question.

In those cases, official records can be an invaluable source of trustworthy information to either corroborate or disprove individual accounts.

Couple that with rigorous reporting by journalists, and you've got a recipe for a balanced true crime story.

But if you don't have any of those things, what if you simply can't trust what the criminal says happened?

Can't trust what the cops say happened?

And can't trust what the journalists say happened?

What then?

Well, then you get a story like this one.

Complicated, fascinating, hopelessly tangled.

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole aren't easy figures to sketch.

That's because there's a chance that some of the chapters of this story never happened.

Or that they did, but not quite the way we're told they did.

Some of the narrators can be believed, but not all the time.

And some pieces of the puzzle don't connect the whole story till the very end.

Some of the facts are immutable.

Henry and Ottis were both killers with multiple deaths to their name.

But just how much red is in each of their ledgers is something that's still debated to this day.

This is episode one in our four-part series on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Fledgling Criminals.

It's the fall of 1943 in Blacksburg, Virginia, almost four decades before the disappearance of Adam Walsh.

Seven-year-old Henry Lee Lucas is holding a long piece of grapevine in his hands, while his older brother Andrew hacks at it with a knife.

They're in a patch of trees not far from their family home.

The boys have plans of turning the grapevine into a swing, but first they need to get it to the right length.

Unfortunately, the vine's too thick, the knife's too dull, and Andrew's too weak.

When he starts trying a sawing motion with the knife, the blade slips, glancing along the bumpy vine towards Henry's face.

Henry squeezes both his eyes shut, but the instinct comes a fraction of a second too late.

There's a flash of pain as the knife slices across Henry's nose and into his left eye.

Henry hears the clatter of the knife dropping to the ground.

Then his older brother demands that Henry open his eyes so he can take a look and see what's wrong.

Henry can feel blood running down his face, a lot of it, and opening his eyelid only makes it worse.

He and Andrew rub at the blood, clearing most of it away so that Henry can see out of both eyes, but everything still looks cloudy and dark.

When the boys go inside their family's one bedroom shack, their mother Viola is more exasperated than anything.

Taking time out of her day to rush her son to the hospital is a hassle she could do without.

Still, she does so anyway, and Henry's face is properly cleaned up.

But Viola is not a particularly affectionate woman and has neither the time nor inclination to visit her son while he remains in the hospital for several weeks.

She stops by just once.

Other than that, Henry's on his own.

Not that that's much of a change of pace for the kid.

So far, his childhood has been pretty miserable.

Viola's a heavy drinker, as mean as a rattlesnake, one neighbor says.

She brings local men into the family home, and trading a romp in the sack for 50 cents.

It's money the family desperately needs.

Viola's husband Anderson isn't able to contribute much to the household.

A heavy drinker like his wife, he lost both his legs after passing out on the train tracks one evening.

These days, his only prospects are skinning minks to be used in clothing, and selling pencils from a blanket in town, relying on the pity of locals to make the effort worth his time.

Occasionally, when he scraped together a dollar or two, Anderson slipped some money to his son Henry for an outing to the movie theater.

It's an indulgence they both pay for when Viola finds out.

She's just as likely to hit her son as she is her husband.

Not long before his injury, Viola walloped Henry across the back of the head with a plank of wood, knocking him unconscious.

So although Henry stay in the hospital as a lonely one, at least it's a change of scenery.

When he's allowed back home, he returns to school, but it turns out he's no safer there than with his family.

Teachers are allowed, even expected, to hit their students when they get out of line.

One day, one of Henry's instructors lashes out at his classmate with a ruler, but the metal edge of the ruler catches Henry across the left side of his face, rupturing his already injured eye.

So, back to the hospital Henry goes.

This time, the only thing the doctors can do is remove the ruined eye.

Then, when he's recovered from the procedure, Henry's fitted for a glass eye.

The prosthetic embarrasses the boy.

He can tell when people are staring at it.

And it doesn't help that it doesn't quite fit him properly.

So his left eyelid always droops down, half obscuring the iris.

He'll never do a good job looking after the eyeball either, which only makes it stand out more prominently.

Still, there's nothing Henry can do except continue to grow up.

But his education and the ways of the world will take an extreme turn before he's even reached puberty.

People in Blacksburg all know Bernie Dowdy is a young man with some kind of intellectual disability.

They also know that he's regularly sleeping with Henry's mother, Viola, and not because he pays her.

Just what the attraction is between them, no one really knows.

He's in his mid-twenties, she's in her fifties.

He's slower than most, she's meaner than most.

But whatever it is that brings them together, Viola and Bernie are happy enough in each other's company, even in front of Viola's husband Anderson.

People in town whisper that Anderson's not Henry's father, that it's really Bernie.

And whether Bernie knows or suspects his role in Henry's life, he certainly takes it upon himself to teach the boy what he feels is an important lesson.

One day, when Henry's around ten years old, Bernie shows him how to kill livestock and then use the bodies for sexual gratification.

Years later, it's a memory Henry will share with people when they ask him about his childhood.

Whether it's true or not, it's a story he repeats, a touchstone moment of his life.

That extreme moment of pseudo-parental bonding aside, Henry's early years aren't completely morally bankrupt.

Henry starts dealing pretty much as soon as he's old enough to understand that it's wrong, but is also fast enough to know he won't get caught.

He happily pilfers from stores in town and slips into people's homes to snatch their valuables.

But thievery isn't something Viola approves of.

When she discovers him with someone else's jewelry, she marches him right to the victim's front door to watch Henry apologize for his behavior.

She also promises that she'll deliver a sound beating to her disappointment of a son when they get home.

But despite Viola's determination to straighten her son out some, it doesn't take.

Henry likes to peep in windows, buy cigarettes when he can afford them, and drinks moonshine whenever he can get his hands on it, a habit he picked up from his dear old mother.

Then in 1950, Henry's world shifts out of balance.

One winter's evening, Viola and her husband get into a particularly bad fight, and Anderson crawls out of a window to escape the screaming and violence.

But he's had a few too many drinks again, so when he lands in the snow beneath the window, he passes out.

That's where his family finds his body the next morning.

After that, the rest of Henry's family leave the shack he's always called home.

Viola and Bernie officially move in together, and Henry decides he doesn't want to go with them.

By this stage, the 14-year-olds only manage to reach the fifth grade, but he figures he knows enough to take care of himself.

He drifts around for a while, sometimes staying with an older half-sister, or otherwise crashing wherever he can find shelter.

He works as a farmhand for a spell, but it doesn't last long.

Mostly, he lays low and keeps himself out of trouble with the law.

But eventually, he's arrested for the first time for reckless driving.

He's loved being behind the wheel ever since his brother Andrew taught him how to drive when he was younger.

Now he mostly likes to go fast.

In March of 1952, Henry's record gets a bit longer with a second arrest, this time for burglary.

He and two of his half-brothers break into an electronic store, and Henry manages to get away with a small radio.

But it costs him.

When the police catch him, he's hauled before a judge who decides that the 15-year-old could use some structure in his life.

So Henry's sent to the Beaumont Training School for Boys, a place designed to mold unruly teens into upstanding citizens.

It's there Henry finally has people paying close attention to him for the first time in his life.

Staff at the school test him and put his IQ at 76, which is well below average.

They also note that while the teen is easy to get along with, he also likes to get his own way as much as possible.

Any task that Henry's assigned requires him to be under close supervision.

Otherwise, it probably won't get done.

Henry's life could be much worse than he has it at Beaumont.

Compared to the ramshackle building he grew up in, the sturdy walls and the three square meals at the school are relatively luxurious.

Even still, he makes a couple of escape attempts during his first few months there.

Gets away too, just not for long.

Both times he's caught and returned to the school, and beaten for his troubles.

After that, Henry decides to keep his head down and serve his time.

He writes to his mother to ask her to send small things to make life more comfortable, but Viola tells her youngest that she hasn't got the money to send him treats in the mail.

Her reply frustrates Henry.

He's never felt like Viola's cared about him, and here again is the proof she won't even scrounge up some money to make him happy.

Putting his mother out of his mind, Henry focuses on impressing the administrators of the Beaumont School.

They're well aware that he's not interested in talking to them about the problems of his childhood, but they do notice an improvement in his behavior and schoolwork.

At the end of May 1953, Henry finally makes it to the sixth grade, just before his seventeenth birthday.

In an evaluation, one of his teachers praises Henry for trying hard to do what's right, and goes on to recommend him for release from the school at the end of the summer.

Some of the staff have reservations about Henry, though.

They've noticed his improved behavior, but call it a facade designed to impress.

Henry hasn't actually changed for the better, they say.

He's just learned the rules of the game.

Still, in September of 1953, Henry's released.

Everyone watching him walk out of the Beaumont Gates hopes the teenager will turn over a new leaf, that this will be a new start for the troubled boy.

Sadly, it won't be.

Henry Lee Lucas is just a few years away from taking his first life.

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It's Wednesday, Adams.

I see you're trying to distract yourself from your of the null thoughts.

Let me help.

Here's a recording thing made of my latest root canal.

Wednesday, season two begins August 6th, only on Netflix.

It's late in the summer of 1954 in Richmond, Virginia.

18-year-old Henry Lee Lucas is sitting in the back of a bus.

Around his ankles, shackles keep his feet from moving too much, and the handcuffs around his wrist make it difficult to steady himself when the bus takes corners a bit too fast.

It's been less than a year since Henry was released from the Beaumont Training School for Boys, but he's already back in custody.

Out of the windows, Henry can see the vast white walls of the local penitentiary loom into view.

It feels like they stretch on forever.

But eventually the bus pulls into a short driveway and passes through a gate and a chain link fence.

When the bus finally comes to a stop, Henry's led down the steps and into a walled courtyard.

He looks up, taking in the vast structure.

It feels like a grim kind of graduation.

His first adult prison.

After leaving Beaumont back in the fall, Henry visited a couple of his older siblings for short periods, but couldn't settle.

And when he needed money, he fell back onto what he knew, theft.

An arrest followed in short order.

And now the Richmond pen is going to be his home for the next four years.

At least, it's supposed to be.

But Henry gets pretty bored in prison.

Sure, he's fed and sheltered, but he doesn't enjoy working in the fields or on road gangs.

And while he likes that prison offers him the opportunity for regular sex, he still longs for freedom.

So in May of 56, less than two years after his arrival at Richmond, he and another inmate make a break for it while they're out working by the side of a highway.

By hitchhiking and stealing a car, Henry makes it all the way to Michigan, but no further.

A few weeks after his escape, Henry's arrested again, and this time he's facing more charges.

Transporting a stolen car across state lines is a federal offense.

So Henry sent away to a federal prison in Ohio for 18 months.

When that sentence is up, he's shipped right back to Virginia to serve out the rest of his time in Richmond.

Finally, in September of 1959, 23-year-old Henry is paroled.

It's been over five years since his most recent burglary conviction, but he's a free man again.

From Virginia, he heads northwest to Michigan.

His half-sister Opal lives with her husband in the rural industrial town of Tecumseh, and they've agreed that Henry can stay with them until he gets back on his feet.

Not long after Henry's arrival in Tecumseh, though, Henry and Opal's mother Viola visits for the holidays.

Opal and her husband live on a farm, but also own a house in town.

That's where Henry's crashing for the time being, and it's where Viola ends up, too.

For a couple of months, everything goes well.

Then on January 11, 1960, Henry and Viola are having a few drinks with Opal at Bag Shaws, a popular tavern in town.

They snipe at each other for much of the evening, but Opal tunes them out so she can focus on the television above the bar.

Henry and Viola leave together to head for home while Opal goes back to her husband at the farm.

The walk back is when things take a turn.

By now, Henry and Viola are both too drunk to know exactly what they're fighting about.

But when Viola slaps her son, he hits back.

Now fully grown with straggly brown hair and plenty of tattoos, he's not the little boy she used to beat around the house.

When they get inside, Viola follows Henry upstairs, unwilling to let the argument go.

That's when Henry doesn't.

He doesn't even register the fact that he's taken out his pocket knife, but suddenly it's in his left hand.

Then the blade is buried in his mother's neck just below her ear.

Viola Lucas crumples to the floor, blood trickling slowly from the wound in her neck.

It's quiet in the little house.

Henry goes downstairs to smoke a cigarette, wiping away his tears as he taps ash into a tray.

He knows he can't stay here.

They'll take him back to prison.

So after he finishes a couple more smokes, he turns out all the lights in the house and locks the front door on his way out.

It's well past midnight when he breaks into a garage on East Patterson.

He grabs the keys to a 57 Ford and heads straight for the highway.

The next morning, Opal's the one who discovers Viola's body in the upstairs bedroom.

At first, she thinks her mother simply died of a heart attack.

But when she brings the police chief by to take a look, he quickly spots the blood.

There's not much of an investigation necessary.

Everyone saw Henry leave the tavern with Viola the night before.

And now, she's murdered in the bedroom and he's nowhere to be found?

The Tecumseh chief puts out a broadcast to police channels in Michigan and Ohio.

Henry Lee Lucas is wanted for murder.

It's the afternoon of January 16th, 1960.

Five days after the murder when Henry's picked up.

Just west of Toledo, Ohio, a cop spots Henry hitchhiking and recognizes him from the broadcast alert.

When Henry confirms his name, the cop cuffs him and helps him into the back of his patrol car.

Back at the station, Henry denies having anything to do with his mother's murder, at first.

But he gives up that charade pretty quickly.

Within a few hours of his arrest, he's describing the crime to the Ohio officers and agrees to be extradited to Michigan.

At trial a couple of months later, Henry admits on the stand that he didn't particularly love his mother.

Still, the prosecutor decides that it probably wasn't a first-degree murder.

Everything about the crime screamed heat of the moment.

The jury agrees, and after less than an hour's deliberation, they convict Henry of second-degree murder.

When sentencing rolls around, the judge takes pity on Henry.

Judge Rex Martin says he believes that Henry's upbringing contributed to his past crimes, as well as this one, and that Henry can still get his life together.

He hands down a sentence of 20 to 40 years, but tells Henry that if he behaves well, he could be free while he's in his early 30s.

He encourages Henry to educate himself while he's inside, and to stay in touch with his family while he's behind bars, to write them letters.

Judge Martin even promises that if Henry writes to him, he'll respond.

It's the kind of advice and support that the judge feels is important to someone like Henry.

Unfortunately, it's a kindness that won't pay dividends.

Henry's time in the state prison of Jackson, Michigan is a mixed bag, and it starts with an alarming confession to a psychologist.

Henry tells the doctor that he had sex with his mother's body after she was dead.

By this stage, there's no way to confirm whether he's telling the truth, but the statement puts prison staff on notice.

By early 1961, 24-year-old Henry is exhibiting signs of significant mental illness, and tells his counselors that he's experiencing suicidal thoughts.

He's eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent for treatment at a state hospital.

After five years, Henry's deemed healthy enough to return to the maximum security prison.

A couple of years later, the general consensus is that Henry's much improved, and in early 1970, he's recommended for parole.

That June, he walks out of another set of prison gates, ready to return to his family again.

At first, he moves in with his half-sister, Nora, in Maryland.

But Nora's husband can't stand Henry, so Nora asks Opal to take Henry back again.

It's a big ask for Opal and her husband, Kenneth.

After all, the last time Henry was with them, he killed Viola in their house.

Still, Opal decides that forgiving her brother is the right thing to do.

And they agree to bring Henry to Michigan once more.

They probably shouldn't have, though.

It's late summer of 1971, when Henry arrives back in Tecumseh.

This time, Henry doesn't stay in Opal and Kenna's home downtown.

He lives with them on the farm.

It's a condition of his parole that he be somewhere he can be monitored.

But that plan puts him in close proximity to animals, which Henry's had a dark fondness for since he was a teenager.

First, Kenna finds their pet dog hanging behind the shed.

Then their goat turns up horribly mutilated.

And although Kenneth and Opal feel like they should say something about the shocking incidents to the police, they reason that they can't prove that Henry's to blame.

So reluctantly, they let it go.

But then, Henry does something that takes the decision out of his family's hands.

It's a couple of months after he arrives in Tecumseh when Henry borrows Kenneth's 65 Mercury.

Henry drives the car about 10 miles south to Palmyra.

There, he spots a 15-year-old girl waiting for the school bus.

He approaches the teen and tells her that he'll shoot her if she doesn't get into the car.

The girl backs away from Henry and keeps him talking long enough for the bus to arrive.

With witnesses around, Henry panics and speeds off.

Later that same day, Henry tries a different tactic.

He pulls the mercury over to the side of the highway and waits.

Spotting a teenage girl behind the wheel of an approaching car, he flags her down.

The girl stops and rolling down her window, asks Henry if he needs a ride anywhere.

But she's barely finished the question, when Henry points a gun at her and tells her to put her hands in the air.

Like Henry's earlier would-be victim, this girl also figures that the best thing she can do is put distance between herself and the crazed gunman.

So she floors it, leaving a frustrated Henry alone in his car once again.

It doesn't take long for the police to figure out who tried to abduct the teenagers.

So in December of 1971, Henry's in court again, this time on two charges of attempted kidnapping.

By chance, he ends up in front of Judge Rex Martin again, who expresses disappointment in Henry.

Still, when he hands down a sentence of four to five years, Judge Martin urges Henry to write to him as he did previously.

The judge, at least, is still invested in Henry's rehabilitation.

On August 22nd, 1975, 38-year-old Henry Lee Lucas is released from a Michigan prison, again ready to pick up his life where he left off four years earlier.

But two days later, on August 24th, someone else's life comes to an abrupt, violent end.

That night, 18-year-old Debbie Williamson is out for dinner with her parents and younger sister in Lubbock, Texas.

They're celebrating Debbie's father's birthday.

Her husband's at work, so Debbie's folks drop her at home after the celebration.

Just a few hours later, though, Debbie's husband calls to tell them that he's found Debbie's body.

She's been stabbed 15 times and left sprawled in the driveway.

Unfortunately, the search for Debbie's killer will go nowhere fast.

And while investigators in Lubbock spin their wheels, Henry Lee Lucas is some 1,600 miles away, completely unaware that 1 day he'll play a key role in Debbie's story.

In the meantime, he's setting himself up with a new life.

Back in Maryland and with another half sister, Henry meets Betty Crawford, a single mother to 3 little girls.

She's 10 years younger than Henry, but they get along well enough that she quickly agrees to marry him.

Thing is, Henry's not half as interested in Betty as he is in her daughters.

He sexually abuses the girls for over a year until the summer of 1977.

That's when Betty and her relatives start to suspect that Henry Lee Lucas, the convicted killer, might not be such a stand-up guy after all.

Figuring he's worn out as welcome, Henry leaves while Betty's asleep one night that July, taking basically nothing but the clothes on his back.

From Maryland, Henry drifts around the Eastern seaboard for a while, until he decides to head south.

He doesn't have a destination in mind, but as the decade draws to a close, something, maybe fate, is pulling him towards Florida, and a meeting with someone that will change Henry's story forever.

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It's the early 1950s in Jacksonville, Florida, more than 20 years before Henry Lee Lucas abandons his wife in Maryland.

Young Ottis Toole is playing near his family home.

The Tooles live in the Springfield neighborhood.

Once an affluent part of the city, it's a shadow of its former self these days.

The wealthy residents have all moved out, and most of the businesses have followed.

That leaves Springfield with a lot of empty buildings, uncollected trash, and bored children roaming the streets.

Ottis is five or so, and he's different from the other kids.

He's got epilepsy, and is noticeably slow mentally.

In 2024, we'd recognize that Ottis has some kind of developmental disability.

In the 1950s, though, Ottis' differences just make him a target.

One of his neighbors, a boy a few years older than Ottis, is sick of the kid following him around.

So one day, when Ottis isn't looking, the older boy picks up a rock.

It's a big one.

He needs two hands to even hold it.

Then, with a grunt of effort, he hefts the rock at Ottis, hitting him in the back of the head.

Ottis goes down, and his attacker runs away laughing, thinking he's finally taught the neighborhood weirdo a lesson.

Ottis survives the assault, but the head trauma at such a young age certainly doesn't help his prospects.

And the incident with the rock seems to worsen his epileptic seizures.

All of it contributes to the general perception that there's just something wrong with Ottis Toole.

Given that this is the 1950s, it'd be hard to find someone who disagrees with that assessment.

Not just because Ottis' brain doesn't work the same way as other people's, but because his sexuality makes plenty of folks uncomfortable.

Now, depending on who you ask, Ottis' mother Sarah either loves and protects her youngest son or resents him for being born a boy.

She either embraces his unique, challenging personality or dresses him as a girl and calls him Susan.

Whatever the truth, it doesn't change the fact that when Ottis hits puberty, he feels himself drawn to other boys in the way those boys start looking at girls.

In itself, Ottis' orientation isn't a problem.

But as early as sexual encounters will shape the way he experiences and thinks about sex for the rest of his life.

A Neighbor, A Man A neighbor, a man, starts molesting Ottis when he's young.

Decades later, looking at the incident through a warped lens, Ottis will claim that he enjoyed what happened to him.

But without doubt, the abuse twists his perspective.

He's exposed to things his mind just isn't ready to handle.

Maybe, somehow, that's the reason behind his strange, sexual fascination with fire as well.

In his early teen years, Ottis loves to follow the sound of sirens around the city.

When he can't find any blazes already burning, he likes to start his own.

Then standing in the shadows, he pleasures himself, breathing in the smoke and listening to the crackling flames.

Of course, with a childhood like his, it's hardly surprising that Ottis grows into a troubled adolescent.

In October of 1960, the 13-year-old is sent to the Florida State School for Boys over a break and enter charge.

By the time he gets out the following summer, Ottis isn't interested in any more schooling.

In fact, he's sick of being a kid altogether.

He frequently skips class and runs away from home whenever he's feeling restless.

Eventually, he stops going to school altogether, never managing to graduate the eighth grade.

But by this stage, Ottis figures he doesn't need to learn anymore.

People already tease him about how smart he isn't, and he knows that four more years of struggling to read textbooks isn't going to change that.

Turns out, though, that the structure of school was the only thing keeping Ottis in check until now.

Once he gives it up for good, he starts racking up an impressive rap sheet.

In 1964, at age 17, he's busted for loitering in a park that's a known cruising spot for men.

About a year later, he steals a car and drives it into Georgia, leading a state trooper on a brief but thrilling high-speed chase.

Of course, crossing state lines makes the theft a federal offense.

So Ottis is sentenced to two years in federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.

When he's released in 1967, Ottis goes back to his mother in Jacksonville.

Sarah is a devout woman and seems to have a somewhat stabilizing influence on her son.

She can't stop Ottis from breaking the law completely, but he certainly slows down some once he's back with her.

Still by the mid-1970s, Ottis has 13 arrests to his name, one of which is for carrying a concealed weapon.

His other arrests speak to Ottis' sexual interests, lewd and lascivious behavior, public exposure, peeping in windows, and even cross-dressing.

Now, to be sure, some of the charges stem from society's general desire to police queer and trans communities, but mostly they're a symptom of Ottis' inability to control himself and his clear disregard for other people.

Still, Ottis recognizes that the things that make him different also make him a target, and in 1966, he decides to do something about it.

That year, he meets an older woman who's intrigued by him.

Tall and gangly with crooked teeth and straggly hair, Ottis isn't much to look at, but he's always been shy, and sometimes people mistake that quality for an air of mystery.

Plus, at 51, the woman is over 20 years older than Ottis and figures she could do worse in a campaign.

So the mismatched pair marry in January of 1977.

Ottis has no interest in having sex with his new wife, alone at any rate.

The only time he seems into it is when he brings home other men who want to have sex with them both.

Unsurprisingly, the union doesn't last, but soon after Ottis abandons his bride, someone captures his attention in a way like no one else ever has, or ever will again.

It's February 11th, 1979.

Spring is definitely in the air, but winter hasn't finished with Florida just yet.

It's cold in the evenings, so when 32-year-old Ottis walks past the homeless shelter in his neighborhood, he's not surprised to see plenty of people outside hoping for a warm place to sleep.

What does surprise him is the familiar face among the small crowd.

Ottis first met Henry Lee Lucas at a tavern in Pennsylvania a couple of years earlier.

They shared a few drinks, compared prison stories, then went their separate ways.

Now Ottis is overjoyed to see someone he knows.

He bounds over to Henry, giving him a playful punch on the arm.

The men spend a few minutes catching up before Ottis tells Henry that he should just come home to Casa de Toole.

Henry happily accepts the invitation, flooding Ottis with warmth.

He can feel it deep in his soul.

This is going to be the start of something really special.

From Airship, this is episode one in our series on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.

On the next episode, Henry and Ottis' friendship blossoms into a twisted criminal partnership.

We used many different sources while preparing this episode.

A couple we can recommend are the Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas by Mike Cox, and the documentary series, The Confession Killer.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham for Airship.