May, 1976
Memorial Day and clear. Miami’s pink twilight fades into soft black. Biscayne Boulevard traffic, homebound at the end of a holiday, moves fast and heavy. Robert Frederick Carr III, thirty-two, guides his Ford Torino in the free-streaming flow. Home is not his destination.
I didn’t plan a rape that night, although I was in that state of mind. I was fighting it hard, but it was difficult. I’d started drinking heavy again. And there she was. She was just too damn convenient.
I’d finished two six-packs of beer and gone back to a convenience store for more. Driving north, the boulevard crosses a canal. A small bridge drops off fast as you reach the far side. I must have been doing fifty miles an hour. And there she was, in the middle of my lane, flagging traffic. Long blonde hair, a midriff top and white cut-off dungarees. I had to stop or hit her.
I stomped the brakes. Traffic flew past in the left lane. Brakes screamed behind me. Cars swerved to miss her as she ran. There was nothing I could do. I opened the door on my side and she dove headfirst into my Ford. She slid by my shoulder into the back seat on her stomach. Horns blared and I burned rubber.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“Anywhere you want to go, babe.” Her words were thick and I could smell her booze over my own. She slumped, tanned legs folded under her in a yogalike position. She was wiped out, stoned, drunker than anybody I’ve ever seen still walking and talking. She could hardly sit up.
“What are you doing out in the middle of the street?”
“Take me home?” Her eyes, in a perfect oval face, were blue—and blank.
“Where do you live?”
“Fifteenth Street, just off Sunrise Boulevard.”
“That’s Fort Lauderdale! You’re in Miami.”
“You think I’m too drunk to know where I’m at? Goddamnit! I know where I am. Let me out of here!”
“Come on up front and let’s talk about it.”
She tumbled headfirst into the front seat. I took her arm to help her sit up. Her skin and hair were soft. I wasn’t even looking for a victim. I’d made up my mind I’d rather die than do it again. I meant it, but it no longer mattered. It was a matter of urgency and a matter of fact. I was going to rape her, no matter what.
My fantasy of rape is to pick up a victim, somebody who will disappear very nicely, like a hitchhiker. My fantasy is to pick them up, rape them, do what I want to do with them, and then—so they can’t tell anybody—kill them. I fantasized raping victims when I had sex with my wife. I didn’t want anybody to know. I felt very different from everybody else and I didn’t want to be different. Yet there’s a little rapist in everyone. Other people have the same fantasies and never carry them out, but for somebody like me, there comes a time when he is going to rape. It becomes the most important thing in his life, a constant deep driving sensation, more important than every other thing in life.
The line that separates fantasy and premeditation is a narrow one. I wasn’t premeditating it. It was just that she was there—and I was losing my mind.
Her name was Jenny, she said. She was twenty-two. She’d argued with a date and walked out on him. While she talked, she groped around on the seat, looking for her purse. She was empty-handed when I picked her up. She mumbled that she must have lost it—in the “other taxi cab.”
The other taxi cab? I thought about that. Then she confirmed it.
“How long you been driving a cab?” she said.
I had it made. She was so drunk she thought she was in a taxi. I could take her anywhere, with no problem.
“A long time,” I lied. “Trust me. I’ll get you home.”
“I lost my purse.” She still groped in search of it. “I don’t have any money. But you can come by tomorrow and I’ll pay you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I grinned. I had to keep her calm. I had to get her into the woods before I pulled the knife. She kept asking where we were as I drove south. I was scared of her. Drunk, she might do anything. If I pulled the knife now she probably would dive on me, biting and scratching and screaming. If I pulled the knife too soon, I would have to use it.
I swung west, out of Miami—into the Everglades. There was little traffic. The buildings slipped away to nothing, swamp on one side of the road, a canal on the other. Drunk as she was, she got suspicious.
“Where are we?” she said, looking all around.
“On A-l-A, about halfway to Fort Lauderdale.” A-l-A, the coast road, follows the beach. Stretches of woods run along it.
“I don’t remember any of this on A-l-A,” she said. She squinted out at the passing scenery.
I had to buy time. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and smiled again. “Just sit tight. We’ll be in Hollywood soon. You’ll know where you are then.”
Just a few more minutes. Up ahead Route 27 crosses the Tamiami Trail. Just beyond that, the road narrows from four to two lanes. I knew she’d be alarmed. But the little dirt road that snakes left, into the swamp, is only a half mile further. It runs southwest, about 150 feet off the trail, then west, parallel to it. A deep canal and thick brush separate them. I was going to use the same spot I had used over and over. That’s how urgent it was, knowing the police could drive up at any time.
“Two things are operating here. He did want to be stopped. I don’t mean he stayed awake nights plotting to be stopped. It’s something that he would not be aware of. On the other hand, survival is still a very powerful force. He would have liked to get away with it. The problem Robert Carr had was this constant dichotomy of, at some moments, having nothing but contempt for himself and wanting to be caught, and other moments of wanting to survive. I believe he had reached a point where he really consciously and unconsciously wanted to be caught.”
—Dr. Arthur T. Stillman, forensic psychiatrist
I punched the Torino up to seventy, to swallow up the distance faster.
The road narrowed. Sure enough, she exploded. “Where the hell are we going? Stop! Let me out!” I cut onto the dirt road so fast the car skidded sideways. She slammed into the door. She screamed, trying frantically to make the handle work. No way. It was disconnected, like all the other times.
I hit the brakes and rolled to a stop. Hysterical, scared and furious, she jumped at me, trying to claw my face with her fingernails. I pulled out the knife. It made things worse. She started screaming again. But nobody was there to hear her. There was nothing but black swamp and the sounds of crickets and frogs in the canal.
A few cars passed, back out on the Tamiami Trail. But nobody could hear her. My car windows were closed tight and the highway traffic moved fast. You could hear a car approach, then it would streak by and was gone. I threw the knife on the floor and grabbed her by the hair. I shoved her head tight against the seat. She wouldn’t stop screaming. The urgency I felt is a sexual sensation that is just beautiful. It is so good that it makes me not care. I know I am hurting somebody, but I don’t care.
I slapped her. I must have hit her ten times. Just hard enough to make her know I was boss.
“Quiet down!” I said each time. “You’ll get hurt if you don’t.” She finally realized she couldn’t win. She stopped struggling and screaming and I eased up on her hair.
“Now be good! I swear I won’t hurt you. Listen to me. Do as I say.”
“What do you want from me? Please. I don’t have any money!” Frantic, she was breathing hard, choking back sobs.
“I’m going to rape you. Nothing is going to change that. Fight and it won’t do any good. You’ll just get hurt.”
She caught her breath, swallowed and just sat there, staring back at me with a drunken, blank look.
In the past, when my mind was clearer, I never would have taken a girl like this one. My victims all had to be passive and much, much younger. But my mind was so bad now, I almost never even knew the day of the week. There was no measure of time. And it must have showed, somehow. Some people avoided me completely. Other times, hitchhikers would suddenly ask to get out of the car, for no reason at all.
I knew from the start that this girl would fight me. I didn’t care. I think I wanted her to fight. The more she fought, the more I could justify what I was going to do to her.
I took the keys out of the ignition, opened the glove compartment and took out the Vaseline jar. She watched, without saying a word. I unzipped my pants and pulled her head down, into my lap. I tried to make her take me in her mouth. She was over me, on her hands and knees. Suddenly, without warning, she lurched forward, grabbed the door handle on my side, jammed it down and dove out of the car, right over me.
I grabbed the waist of her dungarees as she went by and rolled out of the car with her, dragging her to the ground. I jumped to my feet, my penis still hanging out, and jerked her to her knees. She caught my penis in her teeth and bit it, as hard as she could.
I slammed her down hard and jumped on her. She screamed loud enough to be heard in Miami. Sharp pieces of coral rock cut her as she lay squirming in the road. The more she fought, the more I wanted to hurt her. I think I enjoyed the fight. The more she fought, the more pressure I felt, and the more I lost track of reality. I kept hitting her and hitting her and she kept screaming.
A truck rumbled in the distance. It got louder. I had to shut her up. I jammed my hand over her mouth and gripped her head. She twisted and jerked away, screaming. I had to stop her. Fast! I grabbed her throat, squeezed and choked off her air completely, just as the truck thundered by. Now a motorcycle approached. I kept squeezing, strangling her, waiting for it to pass. It took forever as it came. I felt her body go limp.
The cycle’s engine faded. When I let go of her throat, she was unconscious. I picked her up and put her face down on the car seat, her butt up, her legs hanging out the open door, her feet on the ground. I reached underneath her, unfastened her cut-offs and pulled them off. She wore a brown bikini bathing suit underneath. I tore it off and threw it out in the road. She was beautiful, perfectly proportioned from head to foot. She started to regain consciousness but there was no fight left in her. She was too weak. She lay perfectly still. I greased her butt with the Vaseline and had anal intercourse with her. She grunted and gasped, but made no other sound. I climaxed and it was over, at least for then.
I told her to get over on the passenger’s side of the car. Scared out of her wits, she was beginning to sober up a bit, though not as much as I would have thought, under the circumstances. She did as I said, quietly. I got back in the car, my head still pretty much out of it. I certainly wasn’t concerned with how she felt.
“I thought I was dead.” Her whisper was raspy. “I felt myself dying. Oh my god!” She started to cry.
“Shut up!” I said. “Or you’ll feel it again.” From that moment, she did everything I told her without an instant’s hesitation and never said another word. She performed oral sex on me for a long time. Later I had anal intercourse with her again. She gave me no problem.
Hours passed before I could look at Jenny and feel some compassion for her pain. I also began to feel pain of my own—the bite on my penis. I took it out to see how bad it was. Her teeth had torn each side, but the pain wasn’t bad enough to stop me. Not while I was in that state. I don’t think I knew what pain was—my own or anybody else’s.
Even though she was drunk, it was dark and there was no way she could identify me, I sat there quietly, imagining wild things: that she would get the knife and kill me; that she would scream and holler when I took her into Miami and tried to let her out; that she would go get the cops and come looking for me. My mind rejected the truth, that she was just a drunk who couldn’t tell anybody anything.
I was looking for a reason to justify killing her. An hour passed in this quiet dreamlike state. Then I wanted to rape her again. I shoved her down on the seat, her head against the passenger’s door, and began intercourse with her, trying to climax over the pain of the gashes on my penis. She lay still, her face pale, her eyes wide.
I’m quite sure I was going to kill her. I was too far gone. I’d already choked her half to death. I hadn’t stopped because I felt sorry for her or wanted to spare her life. I had stopped strangling her so I could rape her.
All of a sudden, as I drove my penis into her, I felt a strange sensation. A warning chill. Something was about to happen. I lifted my head just above the seat. A pair of headlights had turned onto the dirt road. They cut through the dark, swinging around the curve toward my car.
“Oh my god!” I said. I jumped up. I knew it was the cop, the same one that had found me there a few weeks ago. Nobody ever comes in there but cops. I threw Jenny her cut-offs. “Put them on!” I fumbled frantically in the dark, looking for the car keys. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I wanted to crank up the car, run it right into the canal and dive out. In the commotion of watching it sink and trying to fish her out—I’d get away. But I could not find the keys.
The green-and-white squad car rolled up behind me. I watched it in the mirror. All of a sudden, he hit the siren, real quick. I felt the blood rush to my face.
Jenny was squirming and scrambling, pulling on her clothes. The knife was on the floorboard. I shoved it under the seat. I pushed her down flat on the seat. “You stay down!” I told her. She lay there, struggling to get her clothes on, still too drunk to piece things together. I was pretty safe as far as she was concerned. Barefoot and without a shirt, I got out and walked back to the cop’s car. I figured it was the same cop—he and another officer had lectured me for sleeping in the car out there—and it was. The same round face with bushy eyebrows and dark eyes. And this time he was alone. I can kill him, I thought.
“Didn’t I stop you out here a couple of weeks ago?” he said.
“Yeah. You did.” I grinned. I tried to be real friendly.
“What are you doing out here tonight?”
“Well, I couldn’t get into the shop. I got a job in a TV shop and I’ve been staying there, but tonight I couldn’t get in.”
“Can I see your driver’s license?” I handed it to him and he shone his flashlight on it in the darkness.
“Where you working at?”
“Rand Radio and TV.”
“You haven’t found an apartment or moved into anything yet?”
“I’ve been staying at the shop, but tonight I couldn’t get in,” I repeated. I kept trying to hammer it into his head so he would just climb back into that police car, drive it out of there and leave me alone. He swung the flashlight beam across my car, almost casually. Jenny was crouched on all fours in the front seat. The light hit her blonde hair, just a glimpse, but a dead giveaway.
“Are you alone?”
“No. I’ve got a girl with me.” He looked at me kind of strange.
“Well, let’s have a look,” he said. He turned his broad, brown-shirted back to me and walked to the car. I can drop-kick him, I thought, and get his gun. But he’s a big guy. He’ll probably shoot me. And I don’t have the knife.
He walked up and shone the light in Jenny’s eyes. And she was just petrified, filled with fear and booze. She’d been beaten, strangled and every other thing when she fought. When she surrendered, she was treated so brutally that she was terrified. She may have thought she heard a siren but wasn’t sure. But when he walked up and threw the light in her eyes, she took a deep breath and came rolling out of that car.
“Officer! He raped me!” He shot a look at me and I shrugged. He stared at her.
“Well, how come you didn’t complain a minute and a half ago? When we were standing right there?”
“Officer, please. Please believe me. He raped me!” Her voice was shrill. She staggered back and forth. She could hardly stand up. He reached out and grabbed her arm. I was still behind him. I wanted to kick him in the kidneys and try to get his gun. But I just stood there. I was scared. No, I thought, I’m not. I knew it was going to happen. I knew I was going to be arrested. To hell with it, I thought.
He helped her balance, staring down at her halter top and ragged-legged dungarees. “How much have you had to drink?” he asked her.
“Officer, please!”
“Come on with me,” he said. He took her back to the police car, opened the back door, put her inside and slammed it, locking her in. He walked back up to me. “How much has that girl had to drink?”
“Quite a bit.”
“Did you rape her?”
“Nope.”
“I didn’t think so,” he said. “But we get a lot of complaints like this, and we have to check all of them out. Let me go talk to her. Just stay here by the car. Then I’ll be back to talk to you.”
If I had dived into those Everglades he wouldn’t have, he couldn’t have, chased me. But I stood there. He went and talked to Jenny, then came back to me. “She’s got a pretty good story,” he said.
“You don’t have a rape case. I didn’t rape her.” I wasn’t giving up anything.
“Well, she is pretty drunk.”
I jumped on that, and put my foot in it. “Unless Florida law says she’s so drunk she doesn’t know what she’s doing and therefore any relationship with her is rape…”
“It does,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He went back to his cruiser and got on the radio. Another squad car drove in and pulled up behind his a few minutes later. A sergeant got out. He and the officer took me over to his car. “Just get in,” the sergeant said. “We’ll be back with you in a minute.”
“Sure.” I got in and they shut the door.
They were running a computer check on my driver’s license. Right then I knew I was caught. My Connecticut license was forged. So was my registration. My license plates belonged to somebody else. No numbers would match. Nothing was right.
Another police car pulled in, two female rape squad detectives. One had light-colored hair and eyelashes that curled up. She was wearing a dress and high heels. The other had dark hair, deep-set eyes, and wore slacks. They were both quite pretty, but I was not impressed by that at the moment. It was plain to see that all was not going well for me.
Another car arrived, with crime lab technicians. The lab guys got out and started talking. One of the detectives opened the door of the cop’s car and let Jenny out. She’d begun to sober up by that time. She walked around and helped the police look for the knife. I watched as they searched my car. While the cops went through the trunk, Jenny walked past the car where I sat, locked in the back seat behind a heavy wire screen.
“Jenny,” I said, loud enough for the female cops to hear. “Jenny, why don’t you tell the truth?” I was trying to influence them what little I could.
“If they don’t hang you, you bastard, I will!” She walked on by. Then one of the woman detectives passed.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked.
“A little later,” she said.
The first cop came back. I asked if I could have a cigarette. “Later,” he said. Jenny got in the car with the two women cops and the three of them left.
The two women detectives from the Sexual Battery Unit took Jenny to the Rape Treatment Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Robert Carr was taken to the homicide bureau at the Dade County Public Safety Department’s headquarters in Miami. PSD detectives were already investigating three rapes in the South Dade area where Carr was arrested. And there had been a murder. The decomposed body of Angela Chapman, a twenty-five-year-old retarded prostitute, had been found on May 16, about a mile and a half from the same location.
Homicide Detective Charles Zatrepalek and his partner, David Simmons, had made little headway in the murder case. There were few leads, the best of which seemed an obvious link to the rapes. One of the rape victims, a fifteen-year-old boy, had memorized his abductor’s license plate number. It was traced to a Connecticut used car dealer. The dealer had sold it to Robert Carr. Connecticut State Police knew the name. Carr had been paroled there after serving time for sex crimes. They sent the Florida detectives a copy of Carr’s arrest record and his mug shot. The picture had been circulated among PSD officers at roll call a day before his arrest. Now the suspect was in custody.
Detectives Zatrepalek and Simmons were off duty at the time of the arrest. They were called at home late at night. The arrest was good news to the investigators, who had found only frustration in their search for a killer. They rolled out of their beds and headed for the station. The sleep they lost that night was just the beginning.
They’d made me leave everything in the car just as it was, and my shoes and socks were lying on the floorboard. I was barefoot. They made me change clothes and took away the ones I was wearing, which didn’t make me too happy. They weren’t treating me the best in the world.
Two homicide detectives, Charlie and Dave, came walking in at about three o’clock in the morning. Charlie is about six feet tall with dark brown hair and mustache, a fantastically good-looking guy. He wore a dark vest with a white shirt and dark pants. His voice is deep and confident. He looks you right in the eye when he speaks. He would make a good salesman.
What does this prick think he’s doing? I thought. Who does he think he’s pulling the wool over? I’ll show him.
All the cops call Dave “Spiffy,” because you never see a speck of dirt on him and he must spend a fortune on clothes. He is about five-foot-seven, maybe shorter. He looked like a leprechaun in his green suit and vest. He has a blond, boyish look about him, clean-shaven, with very boyish ways. I wished the little squirt would just get off my case and stay away. I didn’t like these guys at all.
And they kept questioning me. I still thought I could bluff them. “No way do you have a case,” I told them. “You know you don’t have a case. Ask the girl where she was picked up. She can’t tell you. Ask her.”
“All right,” Charlie said. “We’ll go talk to her.” They left me in a small office for about twenty minutes, then came back.
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “She can’t remember getting in your car. She thinks she left her purse there. But we can’t find it. Do you know where it is?”
“She didn’t have one. She left it in somebody else’s car. He’s probably the guy who raped her.” Can you imagine what a witness they would have had if they put her on the stand? Whack! That would be it. I began to feel better. They didn’t have me after all.
Charlie looked at me hard. “Okay, Bob.” He closed the door and threw a file onto the table in front of me. Right on top, looking back at me, was my picture. Florida police hadn’t taken any pictures of me yet. The file cover was blue, like the Connecticut parole board uses. He opened it, then looked at me.
“Remember Terri and Brad?”
My heart jumped. “No,” I said.
“Remember Lisa Styne?”
I said no.
“Sure you don’t want some treatment, Bob? Sure you don’t need help? You’ve already been to prison, in Connecticut.”
He knew my whole life story.
“We know everything, Bob. We’ve got you. Now do you want some treatment? Or do you want to just go back to jail and stay there until you rot? We’d like to help you.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He came back with a hot cup of coffee for me, then left again. I sat there, thinking. Terri, a seventeen-year-old girl I raped, had told me I needed help. A lot of things she had said made sense.
Charlie came in again. “Okay,” I said. “Sit down. I want to tell you something. I did it. I’m guilty. I do remember Terri and Brad. I do remember Lisa Styne. And yes, I did rape Jenny.”
“What about the other girl, Angela Chapman? Did you kill her.”
“No, I can’t talk to you about that one because I don’t know anything about it.”
“Now, come on, Bob. Let it all out.”
“So help me, I don’t know. I’ll take a polygraph test.” I really didn’t know anything about her. Charlie said okay. He was willing to forget the murder, for the time being, and settle for the rapes. He and Spiffy brought in two stenographers. They took me through all the rapes—Lisa, Terri, Brad and Jenny. I told them about every Florida rape I ever attempted or committed. I only lied once. I told Charlie there were no sex attacks on two boys named Michael and Jeff. I only confessed to kidnapping them, nothing else. No rape had been reported. I didn’t want the boys or their families dragged through it.
We worked all day and into the night, with me making statements to the stenos. They sent out for hamburgers and we kept on working. Finally they had only one more to go and the typist was working on it. They’d been good to me all day, naturally, because they were getting the confessions they wanted. I still hadn’t signed them. They were typed and lying on a desk. I sat eating my hamburger, talking to Charlie and Spiffy. They had worked around the clock. It was about nine o’clock at night.
“Now,” said Charlie. “Let’s talk about Angela Chapman.”
“Who?” I said.
“The girl that got murdered out in the ’Glades. Now, Bob,” he said, “you know you did it.”
I threw my half-eaten hamburger in the air.
“Charlie! I didn’t do it! If you want to call me a liar, do it after a polygraph test, but right now, please, I didn’t do it!”
“Okay, Bob. Have it your way.” I knew by the way he said it that he still believed I did it. But he laid off and I read through the confessions and signed them all.
Charlie and Spiffy took me over to the jail and left me there. Exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in my cell, thinking. I thought about what I hadn’t told them. And I remembered the Connecticut State Prison and how hard I tried to get psychiatric help while I was there. Even though I should have known better, I got there actually believing prisons had changed and I could get help. At one point I had almost confessed and told about Mark and Todd. Still, nobody would listen. Regardless of how hard I tried, nothing ever came of it. I thought of Tammy, who would never grow up, never have children, never see her baby brother again. And Mark. He would be fourteen now. I’d been searching for a solution. I didn’t know what that solution would be. But I had thought of confessing. I had actually walked up to the door of police headquarters. But I couldn’t walk in and give myself up. I couldn’t do it. All these things were heavy on my mind.
I finally fell asleep at about three A.M., and woke up again at four, Tammy, Mark, Todd and the others on my mind. I had to let everything out. So help me, I thought. I have to do it right this minute. I can’t put it off any longer.
A guard walked by and I asked him for a pencil. I wrote “T. R. Huntley,” on a matchbook cover and handed it to him. “Call over to homicide and tell them I have to talk to somebody about this person,” I asked him.
He called and came back. “They don’t want to talk to you until about nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” I knew then that they didn’t know about Tammy. Her name meant nothing to them. It was five-thirty. The hours dragged. My only fear now, despite the possibility of death or life in prison, was that I would change my mind.
Finally morning came and I went for an eight o’clock bond hearing in Jenny’s case. I wore a ridiculous suit of clothes they gave me and a pair of shower shoes.
One of the investigators I had met the night before, Dan Devin, a big rape squad detective with acne scars, was sitting there when I was brought into the courtroom. He planned to ask for a psychiatric evaluation and to try to get me into a sex offender rehabilitation program. He was sincere. He wanted to help me. Never in my life had I cooperated with police and not got what they promised. If you fought them, they wanted to send you to prison. If you cooperated, they cooperated.
I wanted to talk to Dan before my case was called. But they sat me in the front of the courtroom. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I couldn’t get his attention. I turned to a jail guard, a big black guy, about six-foot-five. “I want to talk to you,” I said.
“Be quiet,” he told me. He had already marched two defendants out of the courtroom for talking. If I speak loud enough, I thought, maybe Dan will hear me.
“I want to talk to you, mister,” I said a little louder.
He sat down on a seat behind me and leaned forward. “What do you want?”
“That officer right there.” I pointed to Dan. “I need to talk to him.”
“You can’t.”
“Look, I want to talk to that officer!” I raised my voice.
“Okay, okay.” He got up and walked back to where Dan sat.
Dan came up front. “Is it important?”
“Is murder important?”
His face changed. “You’re damn right it is.” He had me taken to a holding cell.
“I want to confess to some murders,” I told him.
“Some murders?”
“Yeah.”
“How many is some murders?”
“Four.”
He looked like he didn’t know what to say. “Here? In Florida?”
“Three of them from Florida and one in Connecticut.”
“Okay,” he said. “Somebody from homicide will pick you up after court and take you over to talk about it.”
I had finally done it—there was no backing out now.
Charlie and Spiffy showed up at about ten-thirty that morning. They let me walk across the street to headquarters without handcuffs. I was amazed. But it helped. I felt more a part of things, rather than the subject of it all.
They took me into a tiny office, about nine by six feet, at the rear of the Sexual Battery Unit. A big desk almost filled the room. Charlie sat down. “Well, Bob, what’s on your mind?”
“Give me a pencil and paper.”
He pushed a legal pad and pencil across the desk. I took a deep breath, then wrote: Mark Wilson, Todd ———, Tammy Ruth Huntley and Candy. I drew a line after Todd because I didn’t remember his last name. I handed the paper to Charlie. He and Spiffy looked at it.
They were sure Angela Chapman would be one of them, and they had pulled some files on unsolved murders they thought would be the other two Florida cases.
“We never heard of these people,” Charlie said. He looked disappointed.
“All right, now,” Spiffy said. “Where are these people from?”
“The first three are from Miami. The other one’s in Connecticut.” Candy was a prostitute. Her real name was Rhonda Holloway.
“Well, how come they were never reported missing?”
“I imagine they were. You’ll find their names in your missing persons files.”
“You mean nobody knows they’ve been murdered?”
“No, nobody knows.”
They looked at each other. “You sure they’d be in our missing persons files?” Spiffy said.
“They should be.”
They went out. In fifteen minutes they were back, carrying some folders. The looks on their faces told me they knew.
“Sure enough,” Charlie said. “Here they are, two eleven-year-old boys missing since 1972 and a sixteen-year-old girl missing this year. It makes no sense. Where are these people?”
I told them I had hidden the bodies. I told them where. This was big stuff to them. They were beaming. Everybody has their own brand of ego. I sat there in that little office and they kept running out and coming back. They really got into this thing. Their bosses agreed they would have to take me on a trip, to Mississippi, Louisiana and Connecticut, to find the bodies. I stayed in the homicide office working late that night with Charlie and Spiffy. We talked a lot, and what started as a con friendship became real, I think, as we got to know each other.
Charlie asked me if I would make videotaped confessions. I knew they could be used against me in court, and I asked him if they could.
“No, no, not necessarily,” he said.
“Don’t give me that,” I told him. “You don’t have to pacify me. Be honest, and I’ll be the same with you.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “We’ll try to keep them out of court. They will be training films.”
So we made the tapes—everything I could remember about Mark and Todd. I spent the night in jail and went to court again next morning to be arraigned in Lisa’s case. I jumped on the judge the first chance I got. “I haven’t seen an attorney yet,” I told him. “I’m talking to the cops and making videotapes and this court hasn’t gotten me an attorney.”
“See that an attorney speaks to this man,” he said, and told the bailiff to take me back to jail.
On the way out, the public defender handed me a piece of paper with a name on it—Michael Von Zamft. “Call this guy,” he said.
I was allowed a phone call back at the jail. Von Zamft’s secretary answered. I told her he was appointed to represent me.
“Mr. Von Zamft will contact you in two or three weeks,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t talk to anybody. Don’t say anything.”
“Wait a minute, lady! I am talking to people. I’m even making videotapes. I’m charged with four rapes and I just confessed to four murders.”
“Hold the phone.”
There was dead silence, then suddenly a man’s voice on the line. “Don’t say another word to anybody!” It was Von Zamft. Those were his first words to me. He didn’t even say hello.
I told him everything.
“Don’t show them where the bodies are,” he said, “until I get you a deal for life.”
“Go to hell,” I said. “I got to show them where the bodies are before I chicken out.” I was backing myself into a corner, knowing what I was doing, so I couldn’t change my mind. It was like a rape situation. If I was going to kill a victim—such as Todd—I’d deliberately tell him things, things that would make me have to kill him.
“The detectives are coming for me at three o’clock today,” I told Von Zamft. “We’re going to make another videotape.”
“Don’t make any more tapes! Don’t talk to anyone.”
“I am going to talk to them. They’re picking me up at three. If you’re sincere, you’ll be there—won’t you?”
“Well, sure. Three o’clock? Where? At homicide?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be there.”
Charlie and Spiffy picked me up and I told them about Von Zamft. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said. “It’s just that I think it’s in my best interest.”
“We don’t think you really need a lawyer,” Spiffy said. They had told me earlier that if I wanted an attorney at any time, they would get one. They seemed sincere. When Charlie and Spiffy advised me of my rights, they explained everything they said, they didn’t just read it off a card. But as we talked now, I sensed that they feared Von Zamft.
“We hope you realize,” Charlie warned me, “that this guy is really pushy. We hope you realize that.” It made me more eager to get Von Zamft in there, to see what he could do.
I wasn’t disappointed.
At three, he came charging in, a big young guy, dark, well dressed, sharp, shrewd, with lots of fire and lots of guts. Von Zamft struck me as sort of a semi-egomaniac, out to prove something—a game player. He kept urging me not to give anything away, not to admit anything, not to give them the bodies. “Don’t say anything,” he kept telling me.
“I am going to talk,” I told him.
“I know that,” he said. “But I have to advise you.”
He’s fantastic. I had to respect him. The only reason we didn’t get along is because I didn’t want to fight. I wanted the truth to come out. He was trying to do what he thought best for me. He wanted to get me off as light as possible and didn’t want to lose a bargaining position.
“Don’t talk to them any more,” he said, “until I can go to the state attorney’s office and have them put in writing that you won’t get the death penalty, or twenty-five years to life, but will get a zero to life sentence—with psychiatric treatment.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “I have a feeling,” he said, “that you’re not going to take my advice.”
He was obviously ready to fight for me. I liked these cops and I had only just met this attorney. Yet he was going to stand there and plead for my life. I felt obliged to give him something to fight with. He was sitting there watching everything go out the window. I had to give him something.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t show them where the bodies are for a few days. Then, I’m going ahead with it.” As soon as I said it, I felt sick to my stomach. It sounded like blackmail. He wanted me to use the bodies to get what I wanted first.
“When are you supposed to leave on the trip to find the bodies?” he said. I told him Monday.
“No,” he said. “It’s got to be put off until Tuesday or Wednesday. I need more time to work out an agreement.”
Charlie and Spiffy had spent the morning with a prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Ed O’Donnell, researching the law. The news was good. Tammy, Mark and Todd weren’t murdered in Florida, but the crimes began there, with kidnapping, giving the state the jurisdiction to try me for the murders as well. I would have rather committed suicide than be tried in Mississippi or Louisiana. And a 1972 law gives Florida the right to treat the murderer-sex offender as it would the non-murderer. That, they said, guaranteed me treatment. They were eager to make promises. They felt my cooperation had to be induced. It didn’t.
All I asked was that the story be withheld from the press until it was over and the bodies recovered. I knew where we were going and I knew it would make our job impossible if reporters flocked in there. Those graves were going to be very hard to find. With people tromping all over the place, any landmark I might recognize could be totally destroyed.
They agreed.
We made some more videotapes over the next couple of days, going over Tammy’s case, then Rhonda’s. I agreed to a polygraph test. It was important to me to prove my honesty. If we had trouble finding the graves after all this time, they had to know I was one hundred percent honest—or they might give up on me and we’d never find them.
The examiner concluded that I did not kill Angela Chapman, or anyone else whose murder I had not already confessed, and that I did intend to show them where the bodies were.
The air was finally clear between Charlie, Dave and myself and it felt great. They were buying me roast beef sandwiches, big, long submarine sandwiches about two inches thick. They were overfeeding me. I was about to get gout, I tell you. And this wasn’t county money, it was out of their own pockets. And they were putting in all kinds of overtime. Charlie hadn’t seen his baby daughter for days. She was asking who daddy was, he said.
After we finished up one midnight and I got back to the jail I finally decided to call Joanne, my wife. Charlie and Spiffy had asked me if I wanted to and I said no. But then I thought about it and decided that since we were making the trip, it would be better if I told her. I called Connecticut from the pay phone in the jail lobby and reversed the charges.
“Where are you?” she said.
“I’m in jail.”
“Oh no.”
“Well, maybe it’s better,” I said. “Don’t take it so hard, Joanne, because it was meant to be.”
“For the same thing?”
“You mean the same thing I was arrested for in Connecticut? Yeah.”
“Oh my god.”
“Joanne, do you remember when I was in prison in Connecticut and I told you I killed two people?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, I really did, and I’ve confessed to those murders.”
“Oh no, please!”
“That’s not all, Joanne. There’s more to come. I killed two more people and one of them’s in Connecticut.”
She started to cry. “What’s going to happen?”
I explained that we were going on a trip to find the bodies, that we’d be coming up there. “I’m trying to keep the press out of it,” I said.
“I hope you can, for the sake of the kids.”
For the next couple of nights, when we finished taping, Charlie and Spiffy would take me downstairs and let me call Joanne, on the county. They let me talk as long as I wanted to talk. That was a big help to me. They never forced things in any way. I felt very good about our relationship. They were doing so many nice things for me.
But after a while they started getting impatient to leave. “Why should we leave Monday?” Spiffy said. “Why can’t we leave Sunday?”
So I called Von Zamft Friday night, to tell him we were leaving Sunday. To get his home number, I called a relative I found in the phone book. His niece answered. She sounded about thirteen, a very fresh, pretty voice. She went to a lot of trouble to get his number for me.
When I told Von Zamft we were going, he wanted me to wait.
“I’ve got a meeting all set up,” he said. “We’re going to make the deal. They’ve got no choice.”
“That makes no difference,” I said. “I’m leaving with them.”
I guess the deal would have gone through. But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. To hell with the cops and the state attorney’s office. I didn’t confess to the murders to give the cops points. I was thinking of the families of my victims. It was a conscience problem.
Von Zamft gave me a big argument. I sat there listening, getting really bored. Charlie and Spiffy were sitting there in the office. Charlie was writing something and every once in a while he’d shoot a mean look, not at me, but at the telephone.
“I just talked to your niece on the phone,” I told Von Zamft. “She sounds very nice, very young, very sweet. She could have been one of my victims. What if she was buried in Mississippi or Louisiana? What would you be telling me?”
“Bob, look, I know where you’re coming from…”
“Don’t give me that, Mike. Just answer my question. How would you feel if it was her? Would you still be saying don’t, don’t show anybody where the body is?”
“Bob, I know you’re going anyway. There’s no use in even discussing it.” His voice broke a little.
“Suppose I was holding her for ransom, would you say don’t give her up until you get the money?”
“Bob, let’s not even discuss it. My advice to you is don’t go. But I know you will anyway. I wish you the best. I hope you’ll call me from up there.”
He was doing what he thought best for me. I respect that, but I wanted him to understand my position. I confessed for a reason, to ease my conscience a little bit. If I extorted something out of somebody, then my conscience would still be burdened—by the extortion.
We left Sunday for Mississippi. Charlie and Spiffy got about a thousand dollars traveling money, plus the airline tickets, from the prosecutor’s office, and they’d been shopping. They bought me two complete changes of clothes, pants, shirts, socks and a sweatshirt. It said “Sweat Hog” across the front. And they got me a straw hat with a little Schlitz can on top. They put it on my head. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but, I thought, if I show up in Mississippi wearing a “Sweat Hog” shirt and a Schlitz can on my hat, I’m liable to wind up being the object of target practice.
I changed clothes and shaved over in the homicide office. Then another detective drove us to the airport. Spiffy’s girlfriend sent along a box of cookies, shaped like flowers with red dots in the centers, to eat on the plane.
We took a National DC 10 that left for New Orleans at one-forty P.M. It was a whole new experience for me. I had never been on a jet before. We sat in the center section, toward the back. No handcuffs. I was never handcuffed. I felt a little strange as the plane surged on takeoff. Spread out below was the beautiful city of Miami. The plane banked hard through white clouds. I could see the Everglades sweep beneath us. Then the shimmering blue Gulf of Mexico.
An hour and four minutes later we were landing in New Orleans. As we approached the city, the plane laid over to the right and we could see the ground. We were flying two thousand feet in the air and as far as the eye could see there was nothing but woods. I had told Charlie and Spiffy about the dismal area we were heading into. “Look out the window over on that side of the plane,” I said, “and you’ll see where we’re going.”
“Is that the spot?”
“That’s the place.” And we were flying right over Turkey Island, so help me. Right over Tammy’s grave.