The phone rang in my study one sunny day in June, 1976. It was a source in the Public Safety Department of Dade County, Florida, where I cover crime for the Miami Herald. He had a tip on a story. “A fellow we picked up for rape has confessed to four murders,” he said, “and two of our detectives are taking him on a trip to dig up the bodies.” They were going to Mississippi, Louisiana and Connecticut. The police wanted to keep the arrest a secret until they were sure the man was telling the truth.
I asked who the victims were, rattling off the names of a few local people who had disappeared. “None of them,” the source said. “One is a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been missing for two months, another one’s from Connecticut, and the other two are a pair of eleven-year-old boys who’ve been gone for four years.”
Nearly dropping the phone, I shouted, “Mark and Todd!” He didn’t know the names, but I did. Their file lay on my desk at the office. I had been planning a magazine piece on some of the area’s most perplexing missing persons cases. Theirs was to have been included. The baffling disappearance of Mark Wilson and Todd Peyton had long intrigued me. The boys, who grinned with engaging innocence out of yellowing four-year-old newspaper clippings, had vanished as though they had been swallowed up by Miami’s steamy sidewalks or whisked away in a flying saucer.
But they hadn’t been. This self-described kidnapper, Robert Frederick Carr, whoever he was, had to be telling the truth. Mark and Todd had not been mentioned in a newspaper for years. They’d been forgotten by all but their loved ones. There was scant chance that a heavy drinking drifter who had spent time in a Connecticut prison, as my informant described Carr, would know that those two small boys had even existed—unless he’d made them vanish. Two days later the story broke, nationwide, with the recovery of the first body in Hancock County, Mississippi. I covered the story from the start.
Traveling with Carr on the grave-digging trip was a Miami medical examiner, a prosecutor and two detectives. The doctor, the lawyer and the investigators found Carr fascinating. They suggested I talk with him at the jail. “You’ll like him,” each of them said. That seemed improbable. They insisted I go see Carr. Then Carr himself insisted. He had read the news stories about his crimes. Several times he telephoned my office from jail, saying my stories were the only accurate accounts. He invited me to come and talk to him, and I did.
He was far from what I expected. Pale and chain-smoking, disturbingly soft-spoken, lucid and articulate, Carr seemed unlikely as a murderer. We sat alone together in a cell. He was obsessively eager to tell his full story. He wanted me to write it, to help prevent that kind of tragedy from happening again, he said. He faced a possible death sentence. If any crime deserved that penalty, I thought, his did. I wrote nothing more about him.
He kept calling—and writing, long letters penciled on lined yellow paper in a precise hand, each i dotted with a little circle. Concerned that I had “lost interest” in his case, he wrote: “I sincerely hope you would have seen fit to continue and bring the necessary matters to the attention of the public. It would be a great loss if you decide to discontinue your efforts, and the loss will not be suffered by you or I, but the future victims.” “I need your help…,” he wrote. “I remind you that if I am sentenced to death I may die before anything can be written and someone has to know this story. Possibly you will not want to get involved and I could never blame you, but I sincerely hope you will at least hear me out. I know you would have been happier if you had found a mad animal here the day you came, and if it would make you happier, I will walk out there on all fours if you will come back to hear me out.”
He was right—I didn’t want to get involved in what was to become a two-year exposure to gut-wrenching confessions and a painful and shattering story. Carr was right about something else, I knew: his story had to be told. Never before, to the knowledge of the psychiatric and legal authorities I spoke to, had such an intelligent and self-analytical rapist-murderer been willing to expose his psyche for the benefit of society. Carr begged me to help him make that act of revelation—to write a book. And I agreed.
For three months I spent endless hours at the North Dade Detention Center, alone with Carr in a short hallway barred by locked gates at either end. A draft blew along the hallway, making a sighing noise, and there were eerie whispers and echoes, all of which were picked up by my endlessly turning tape recorder. Each time I was admitted, my belongings were searched. During the first few sessions a guard stood by, alert for hours, never taking his eyes off Carr. Eventually the search became cursory and the guard went away. I had become part of the jailhouse routine, familiar and forgotten. Carr would be served his lunch, then often his dinner as we still sat talking. Sometimes red-eyed, upset or angry, he was always polite.
I never feared him, but once; one evening, when the day’s tapes were filled, I was ready to leave and no one came. I gathered up my belongings and stood by the bars. Carr still sat at the wooden table provided for us. I waited. No guard. I called. No one answered. I rattled the bars. Carr watched, chain-smoking. We were alone. After twenty minutes a guard passed. “Are you two still in there?” he said apprehensively and reached for his keys.
That night, by coincidence, I read a psychiatric report on Carr. “Highly dangerous, unpredictable, violent and homicidal.” The next day, bound again for the jail, I caught sight of my mirror image, my blouse fastened with a long, trailing scarf. Carr’s victims all had been tied. I quickly changed clothes and went on to the jail.
At night I transcribed the tapes, reliving the long and wracking interviews. Soon I began to realize that this was not an aggrandizement of himself, a boastful memoir or conscience-salving wallow. Something else was unfolding, something never done before—a piercing and relentless self-probe by a man who had committed crimes beyond belief.
We worked harder, fighting time. He thought he was going to die. He wanted to finish this first.
“I’ll turn against you,” he said simply, at the end of one session. Throughout his life, he said, sooner or later he had turned against everyone important to him, everyone who tried to help him. “Please don’t let it stop you from writing this,” he said. I assured him that it wouldn’t.
From a window of the lakeside jail he would watch me arrive. I didn’t know it until he casually mentioned my car, a Camaro, and my driving—he’d seen a screeching, high-speed turn off the highway. He’d owned a Camaro too. He’d used it to kidnap and rape. He described how simple it was to dismantle the Camaro doorlocks so that once his victims stepped into his car there was no escape.
After the first few visits I never left without a pounding headache. Taken into Carr’s nightmare world, I found that nothing looked quite the same to me anymore. Not my car, or the hitchhikers I would pass on my way home, or playing children, who resembled Carr’s victims. I would go directly to my apartment, strip off my clothes and step into a scalding shower, head still throbbing. I wanted to scrub away things that weren’t there, that would not wash away.
After three months Carr was moved upstate, into the prison system. We exchanged more tapes by mail. All told there are more than one hundred hours of his softly accented, gentle voice telling the secrets, memories and dreams of a life that had become a monstrous instrument of destruction. I know more about him than I do about myself, or anyone else on earth.
It happened as he said it would. He turned against me. He needs to be in control. He decided to delete, change or shade things now that his situation was different. He wanted things done his way. I refused. He wrote angry letters, dozens of them, expletives underlined in red with such force that the pen tore through the paper. I knew that were he not behind bars, chances are I would be tied up and locked in the trunk of his car—the punishment that worked so well with his victims who did not obey.
I kept my earlier promise to him. It didn’t stop me.
Edna Buchanan
March, 1979