June, 1976
For detectives, Charlie and Spiffy seemed awfully ill at ease after we landed in New Orleans. Spiffy tried to pretend he trusted me, but he was ready to dive on me if I made a move. I wasn’t planning anything. I had no desire to escape. I honestly didn’t. It was a relief and so important to get those bodies back. But their jobs were on the line.
Charlie rented a nice 1976 Ford LTD, a two-door hardtop. We couldn’t do anything until Ed O’Donnell, the prosecutor, and Dr. Ronald Wright, a medical examiner from Dade County, arrived the next day, but I suggested going over to Mississippi to find Tammy right away. Charlie drove at about a hundred miles an hour. “Slow down. Slow down!” I kept saying. “These cops up here will get us.”
“Who the hell cares?” he said. “I’ve had tickets before. Let’s go!” And he stomped the gas pedal.
I gave them a description of where Tammy was buried, right in front of a triangle where the two roads come together. We pulled in and got out of the car.
“Her belongings are right here at the end of the ditch.” I showed them her pocketbook. It was about twenty-five feet from the foot of Tammy’s grave. Her rings, her shoes and a great many other things were in the drainage ditch. All we could see was one shoe.
“Just leave everything right where it is,” Charlie said. “Don’t touch a thing.”
We only stayed a few minutes, then went to look for Mark’s grave. The thicket was so dense you could hardly walk through it. Briars and everything else, all tangled up. It was that way when I buried him, except then it was wreath-shaped and the center, where I put him, was grassy. In four years, the center had grown up too. It made it rough. I was very worried about being able to find that grave. Tammy and I had walked over there once. I told her I’d lived in Mississippi a long time ago and had buried a dog there. I went to Mark’s grave because I felt a need to be close to him. That shows how crazy I was at the time. Honest to God. Because later I killed Tammy.
We drove back to New Orleans, about a thirty-five-minute trip. Charlie and Spiffy wanted to see the French Quarter, so we drove through it and then had the best steak I ever ate, at a place right across Canal Street from the French Quarter. Then they took me to the New Orleans Parish Prison.
I heard that jail is a hundred and sixty years old. It looks every bit of it. I got an eerie feeling as we walked in. There’s a tall stone wall around it. And two real old iron gates that swung open. I felt like we were walking back into the eighteenth century.
We walked through the gates, to an archway with bars overhead. An old redneck was sitting in a lawn chair under the arch, feet stretched out, a cigar stuck dead center in his mouth. Charlie and Spiffy told him I was a prisoner from Florida and that we were in transit. They did not tell him where we were going or why we were there.
“Ye-ah, ye-ah,” he kept saying, talking around both sides of the cigar. It was still dead center in his mouth. He passed us on to a couple of guards who took us up a real steep flight of wooden stairs. I’d never been in a place like it. I hope I’m never in a place like it again. At the top of the stairs was a dust-covered counter, probably sixty feet long. Only two people were there, a black guard and a black matron, about thirty, real pretty, quite flashy.
While I was being checked in, Charlie and Spiffy went downstairs, bought me a couple packs of cigarettes and then left. I took some clothes out of my bag to take into a cell with me.
Charlie and Spiffy had left word I was to be in a cell by myself. A guard took me to an empty cell that had four bunks and an extra mattress. I was tired and facing a lot the next day, so I laid out a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went to bed early. I went out like a light.
A real belligerent black guard came and stood in front of my cell at about nine A.M. He’d been marching back and forth bawling out, “Hey, boy, do this! Hey, boy, do that,” and throwing his authority around.
A mosquito bite on my foot was bothering me pretty bad. I got it when I’d kidnapped Terri and Brad, weeks before. My shoes had irritated it all the way down to the bone. I called the guard. “Hey, could I see you a minute?”
He turned around. “Who do you think you’re talking to, boy?”
“I’m talking to you. I want a Band-Aid for my foot.”
“You call me captain,” he said.
“I’ll call you nigger. That’s what you are.”
“What did you say?” And oh, fire flew into him.
“Nigger,” I said. “That’s what you are. You ain’t nothing but a nigger.” This cellblock is full of black guys and they’re all looking, but not saying anything. Because they agreed with me. I know what a nigger is, believe me. Only reason I said it was I knew Charlie and Dave were coming to get me any minute.
“Man, I want a Band-Aid for my foot. I don’t need any of your crap.”
It got so quiet you could have dropped a pin and the whole cellblock would have heard it. The guard stomped down the hall and disappeared. When he came back, he had a huge black prisoner with him, about six-foot-four and two hundred and forty pounds.
Oh no, I thought. I’m dead. I’m never going to see Miami again.
He had got this big guy out of the hole. He opened the cell door and put him in with me.
“You know what this man just called me?” he said to the big dude.
“No, what did he just call you?”
“He called me a nigger.”
The black dude looked at me with big eyes. Everything about him was big. I was already starting to hurt. “He called you a nigger, huh?”
“Yeah.” The guard closed the door, smiled at me and walked away. Now, I thought, he’s going to stomp a mudhole in me for sure. I didn’t say anything. The guy in the cell across from me was on his feet, grinning, eager to see all the action.
The big dude stood there. “What’d you call that man a nigger for?”
“Well,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I know what a nigger is and I also know what a black man is, and he is a nigger.”
Up came his huge arm. He patted me on the back. “Goddamn it,” he said, “you’re right. He is a nigger.” He sat down on the bunk.
“Right on, brother,” I said. We sat there talking. When the guard came back because Charlie and Spiffy had come for me, me and the big dude were joking, laughing and smoking. That upset the guard, and he took me out. My clothes were in my arms. “Leave your clothes here,” he said.
“I ain’t gonna leave them,” I said. “I’m going out of here, man, I’m not coming back.”
“Leave them here.”
“All right.” I walked up and laid them at the end of the tier. I knew I’d be right back for them. I went downstairs and sure enough, Charlie and Spiffy said, “Where are your clothes?”
“That nigger’s got them.”
Charlie and Spiffy looked at each other. “God,” Spiffy said. “We better get you out of here.”
We got the clothes and walked by the guard on the way out. He turned and stared after me.
“You bring me back here,” I told Charlie and Spiffy, “and I’m going to hang myself, so help me. No way you’re bringing me back here tonight.”
“We’ll find another place,” Charlie said. “Maybe over in Mississippi. They say there’s a nice jail over there.”
Ed O’Donnell and Dr. Wright were behind us, in a brown LTD, as we drove out. I looked out the back window and saw Ed behind the wheel. His glasses were tinted. I couldn’t really tell much about him, but I already knew I didn’t like him. He was the man who was going to prosecute me and I’d be damned if I was going to like him.
Ed O’Donnell had arranged with authorities in neighboring Harrison County to borrow their crime squad truck, a van that carries all the most modern equipment, for this job. We were to meet all of them at a truck-weighing station in Hancock County, just outside Louisiana. I just couldn’t believe the sight. Every hillbilly in the south end of Mississippi was there. There must have been twenty people standing around in their hunting boots and their hunting pants and their hunting vests.
We pulled up and Charlie and Spiffy got out. I stayed in the car. One at a time the Mississippi cops were looking over at me, sitting in the back seat. I was very leery about all these people. They all had red faces, real red. They were all staring. They all looked like they wanted to shoot me. I was too scared to say a word.
Charlie and Spiffy wore Levis. They walked over to the men and started shaking hands. They were obviously uncomfortable. Finally somebody said, “Okay. We’ll follow you.” Charlie and Spiffy and O’Donnell and Dr. Wright headed back toward the cars. We were going to lead them all to Tammy’s grave.
Dr. Ronald Keith Wright, Dade County’s chief deputy medical examiner, had flown to New Orleans from Miami that Monday morning, June 7, with Edward O’Donnell, a topflight assistant state attorney. Precise and meticulous, the thirty-one-year-old pathologist had not yet met Robert Carr and he was dubious.
“All I knew was he’d been picked up during a rape, had admitted other rapes and then confessed to a wild story of going to Louisiana and Mississippi to bury bodies. That seemed sort of hard to believe, particularly considering the length of time, nearly four years, that was involved on two of them. I felt like we might be chasing wild geese.”
The first time he saw Carr was at the truck-weighing station in Mississippi. “About eight cars were pulled up there and he was sitting in the back of a Ford LTD. I noticed he had bright red hair.” Haggard and chain-smoking, Carr had looked nervous to Wright and older than thirty-two, his actual age. “He’s about my age,” Wright said, “and I would have guessed him to be ten years older.”
One car fell in behind another. Wright thought it looked like a funeral procession winding out of the truck-weighing station. In many ways, it was.
The guys who drove the crime squad truck didn’t like me. I could tell by their looks. I had a deep fear of those barefooted fools in Mississippi. I was dead serious. I’d heard stories that the cops there would shoot you, turn around and say, “Hey, you didn’t see that, did you?” And the others would say, “Naw, I didn’t see nothing.”
The big white crime squad truck with POLICE across the top in black letters was right behind us, a dead giveaway to the press and anybody else watching. I was scared. The sheriff of Hancock County, Sheriff Ladner, an old gray-haired guy in baggy britches and a 1935 suit, followed in his 1974 Ford. The county coroner, a little skinny guy with gray hair, came along too. We turned into the little dirt road that led to where Tammy was buried.
We drove on up to within twenty-five or thirty feet of the grave. Ed O’Donnell drove in behind us, then the crime squad truck and then the Harrison County sheriff in a white Buick. He wasn’t like the other sheriff, Ladner. This one was very educated and very professional. He seldom said anything. When he did, it really meant something.
Anyway, the old Hancock sheriff and the coroner drove in and came tromping up the road. “This where it’s at?” the coroner said. I said yes. “We’ll get this one out and then we’ll go up and get the other one,” he said. “Where’s the other one at, exactly?”
“A little ways up the road,” I said. “But we’re not going to get that one today.”
“Oh, yes we are. We’re getting them both and finishing this job today.”
“I got news for you, friend. We’ll get this one today. We’re going to get the other one tomorrow.”
He shut right up, walked off and started talking to the old sheriff.
I walked over to Charlie. “Put a set of leg irons on me, would you?”
“You want them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t want to move too quick and have them shoot me.” I was looking at one of the guys driving the crime squad truck. A big burly guy, about two hundred pounds, wearing a forty-five on his side and looking at me with big blue eyes. Probably thinking, This guy kills little kids. Later he turned out to be one hell of a nice guy. But I was nervous and still trying to figure everybody out. They put on the leg irons, but they hurt my ankles. I finally walked over to Charlie and said, “Take these damn things off.”
The old sheriff heard and reacted like somebody insulted him. If he had somebody in leg irons, they’d damned well stay on.
“You sure you want them off?” Charlie said.
“Yeah, I want them off, Charlie. Where’s the key?” He handed it to me, but I couldn’t reach down and unlock them myself. “Here,” I said. “You do it.” Charlie squatted down, unlocked them and took them off. The sheriff was going wild.
I wanted to get Tammy’s stuff out of the canal. They got the crime squad’s ladder off the truck, I dragged it up, let it out and threw it across the water. I crawled out on it and started fishing for Tammy’s things with my hands. Pretty soon I came up with a badly worn white shoe that I had filled with mud to make it sink, and a roll of film that had been in her pocketbook. Her makeup case was floating on top of the water.
“Is there more in there?” somebody said. I said yeah. I was looking for her bracelet and the shell Tammy had painted for my daughter. When I threw it all in there, I’d chunked it down into the mud with the shovel so it wouldn’t float.
When I fished all we could find out of that portion of the ditch—in the center between the forked roads—we moved the ladder to the end of the fork where I’d thrown her rings. It was a bright sunshiny day. Trees shaded the water and the sun’s reflection made it hard to see bottom. The truck was equipped with a generator and a spotlight that weighed about forty pounds. They handed it to me and I beamed it down in the water, scanning back and forth. I looked for her rings but it just wasn’t working. They were so small, and there was about eight inches of pine twigs and broken tree limbs on the bottom. It was very hard. Finally I dragged the ladder out of the way, stripped off my shoes and socks and got down in there, shining the light. There’s crawfish in there, three and four inches long. I was stepping on them, scanning the light, stepping back and forth in the water. I almost gave up and then I found one ring. The birthstone.
I did find her pocketbook and a couple of peppermint schnapps bottles. The burly cop from the crime squad truck worked right with me, holding the electric cord so it wouldn’t sag into the water. I worked my butt off. I was scared we wouldn’t find all of her stuff, and we didn’t. The ring that says “FOREVER” is still down there, somewhere among the pine twigs. Her bracelet is there. The shell with Donna’s name on it. A lot of things. They’re still there.
I told them Tammy’s clothes were about forty feet up in the woods, near a tall pine tree. They were the clothes she was kidnapped in, her blouse and dungarees. The old sheriff went tromping in there, kicking the ground, picked them up and came walking out with them. Some kind of animals had eaten holes in her pants. They were full of holes.
“For Christ’s sake, Sheriff! That’s evidence!” Ed O’Donnell, the prosecutor, yelled. “Leave them alone! Put them back where they were!”
“Well, I didn’t know,” the sheriff muttered. He put them back and they took pictures of them.
They wanted pictures of everything, just as it was. They even videotaped the whole thing going on.
Before they hooked up the camera, Ed O’Donnell read me a waiver, which I signed. It allowed anything I said to be used against me in court.
Ed is black-haired and about a hundred and eighty-five pounds. He’s about thirty-five and very positive looking, very nice looking. He’s a legal beagle. He doesn’t break any laws. He’s got a very deep distinct voice and really means what he says. He is very precise about how he handles everything. I was glad about that. I wanted everything perfect. It was important to me that everything be just the way I described it. It was a way of confirming that I had been honest. I wouldn’t even let them dig yet.
“We’re going to get Tammy’s things back first,” I told them. It was important. I felt somehow that Tammy’s mother, father and sister would want this stuff. I felt it would mean a whole lot to them. Even what’s still up there in that ditch. I’d love for somebody to go up there and get it. I hated leaving anything for scavengers—human scavengers.
After I found everything I could, I drew an outline of the grave, of exactly where they should dig. It was loose soil. Somebody had dug up a tree there once. That’s why I chose that spot to bury her, so it wouldn’t be conspicuous. Nobody who saw it would pay attention to it.
They got shovels and started digging. I got a sick feeling in my stomach. “I don’t want to be here,” I said.
“I talked to Carr a little bit when we got there,” Dr. Wright said. “His descriptions as to why he did these things were very interesting to me. Tammy, if I could diagnose from his description, seems to have become catatonic following the episode at the phone booth—from fear as much as anything. Just literally frightened to death.
“And, as he said, he couldn’t put her on a plane like that. There was nothing else to do but kill her. In a way, that’s logical. I was impressed by his incredible memory and was to become more impressed by it as time went by. The general terrain is such that you can’t see the woods for the trees. Yet Carr walked over and said, ‘There’s her purse.’” And there it was.
“Bob directed us to these places like he’d lived there all his life,” Wright said. “The thing most striking about him is his incredible memory for fact, long, long after the fact. It’s better than anybody I’ve ever seen. His senses of position and timing—and they’re interrelated—are better than anybody I ever met.”
I walked around behind Ed O’Donnell’s car. Once in a while I’d peek around and see them digging. I sat down in the front seat. I sat there waiting and all of a sudden I knew they’d got down to the body. I smelled it. It made me so sick I almost threw up.
“We began to see the body, shoulder and buttocks, discolored due to decomposition,” recalled Wright, who by then had performed autopsies on more than two thousand victims of violent or unexplained death. “She was wearing a dark blue pullover blouse, without a bra. That was all she had on. He’d doubled her up, with rope between her knees and around the back of her neck.”
Wright himself pulled the body up out of the ground. After two months, the body was in reasonably good condition. One major reason was that the grave was four feet deep, not a shallow grave by any means, though that description was used later, over and over again, by the news media.
“There was some vital reaction to the ties around her hands,” Wright said. “She did struggle a bit when her hands were tied. For some reason, that caused Sheriff Ladner to believe she’d been buried alive—which she hadn’t.”
The investigators carefully photographed Tammy Huntley’s remains, arranging her body on a white sheet out in the clear spring sunshine.
“We did the autopsy in the Hancock County Forensic Science Center—which was the middle of the woods,” Wright said. He had managed to borrow a suture removal kit from a local hospital. It included scissors and a scalpel with an impossibly dull blade. The dead girl’s internal organs were decomposed, but Wright was able to perform tests that confirmed that Tammy Huntley had been strangled and that she was dead when buried.
“Carr was upset when we dug up Tammy,” Wright said. “I think he thought a lot of her. At least he said he did—and he acted like it.”
They had the body up on the ground. The odor was awful. I was getting sick. I took a can of Coke, swallowed about a fourth of it and slung the rest away. I never saw her body. I never looked. I couldn’t. Memories kept flooding back. I remembered that day in the car when Tammy asked me what I would do with her body. She seemed so worried about it.
They told me that Dr. Wright was doing an autopsy right there in the woods. I asked him later, “Did you put her back together? Did you put everything back the way it was?” It was so important. She would have wanted it. She didn’t want to be seen, you know, indecent.
“Don’t forget to pick me up at nine o’clock.” Those were Tammy Huntley’s last words to her mother. They haunt Barbara Paul still. She had returned at nine precisely to the teenage rap session to which she’d driven her youngest daughter. She waited and waited. Tammy wasn’t there. She never saw her again.
Tammy died just as her young life was smoothing out. Troubled as a teenager, she had dropped out of school and wound up in juvenile court. The judge recommended the rap sessions. She enjoyed them, helped other youngsters, got a job. Her future seemed bright. “I don’t believe she got in the car with him of her own free will,” Mrs. Paul said, after Robert Carr’s arrest. “I have to believe she didn’t.”
“We said prayers every night she was missing,” said Tammy’s sister Sandy, a lovely, long-haired twenty-three-year-old. “She was a good girl.”
“When she didn’t call at Easter, or on Mother’s Day—I knew she was dead,” William Huntley, the girl’s father, said. “Waiting for a phone call, it’s terrible.”
When the phone call came it was from police.
The family remains bitter.
“I hope to God this man [Carr] never gets out,” Barbara Paul said and broke down, sobbing.
“Tammy had so much ahead of her, it was all thrown away,” her sister said softly.
Her father wiped his eyes. “I don’t understand the courts. I don’t understand the system. What justice is there for my daughter?”
I thought Todd’s grave would be hard to find. As it turned out, we had a lot more trouble finding Mark.
I spent the night in a jail in Mississippi. Charlie and Spiffy picked me up early. I dreaded what lay ahead. The same crew from the day before was there, exactly the same. Anxious about finding the grave, I got confused in the thicket, looking for a road that had been there, and couldn’t find it. So much had changed in four years.
Finally I just walked as Mark and I had, retracing our steps. Dr. Wright found an old well I didn’t remember and wanted to dig there. He loves any sort of exploration. That’s why he’s in the profession he’s in, I guess. He’s tall and he stands there saying, “Ummhumm, ummhumm.” He was smoking a pipe that really turned me off and made it hard for me to like him. The bowl was skull-shaped. I thought it was a poor choice of pipes, especially for this trip, no doubt about it.
The whole thicket was different. We had to hack our way through it. “Nothing looks right to me,” I said. We walked down the road. I tried to figure it very carefully and asked a lot of questions. I wondered about the lighter wood. Lighter wood is the heart of a felled pine tree that’s rotted. All the oil draws to the center, a real hard piece of pine that burns like kerosene if you break off a splinter and light it. People use it to start fires with, that’s why it’s called lighter wood. Or at least that’s what they called it when I was a kid. I remembered marking Mark’s grave with a piece of lighter wood and a small, short, boomerang-shaped log. I’d planted a small tree on top as well.
“How long does lighter wood last?” I asked them. “Will it last four years?” Nobody knew.
And what about the grave itself?
“When you dig up a piece of ground,” I said, “the deeper you go the darker the clay gets. When you shovel the dirt back in, some of the darker clay is on top. Does it stay dark, or does it change color?” If it stayed, I thought, I could go around sticking a shovel in the ground to see if I turned up any dark clay near the top. But nobody could tell me.
I’d left the lighter wood pointing southeast to northwest. I figured it would be easy. There can’t be but so much lighter wood out there. And there should be only one or two pieces lying southeast to northwest. We found four, all southeast to northwest. I picked the one I thought the likeliest and we dug. Charlie and Spiffy had been partying in New Orleans the night before. They were hung over. Spiffy was sitting on the ground.
“I’m not working,” he said to me. “The hell with you.” I kept digging.
The old sheriff kept taking my picture. He had one of those zip cameras. Every time I turned around, he’d snap a picture and I’d hear it go zzznnnppp.
We didn’t find anything. We dug in two more spots. Doctor Wright stood there, watching every shovelful of dirt, waiting to turn up something. Nothing turned up. They cut a bunch of trees down with a power saw and cleared out a big area.
By one o’clock we’d found nothing and they were talking about getting a backhoe. I expected this skeleton to be all together, you know? Like in a classroom where you can stand it up in a corner. I didn’t know it falls all apart, that it turns into a bunch of bones you have to put back together.
“No,” I said, “no backhoe. You’ll rip it apart.” I wanted everything together. God knows, I thought about Mark. I didn’t want whatever was left of him ripped apart by a backhoe. That bothered me. Finally, it got late and they did get a backhoe.
After an hour of digging, clearing away trees and brush and digging some more, they stopped to get something to eat. I ate a couple of baloney sandwiches, had a Coke and was ready to start back. The sun was sinking and I was getting more and more anxious.
“I want to walk through the woods to see if I can find another spot to dig,” I told Spiffy. “I want to look around.” I went back down the trail they’d cut with the power saw and on up into the woods. Spiffy didn’t even know I was gone. I grabbed a shovel on the way. My eyes searched the brush as I walked, trying to spot something familiar.
A piece of lighter wood caught my eye. Next to it was a boomerang-shaped piece of wood.
“This is it!” I said. The little tree I’d planted was gone. Just half the size of a pencil when I put it there, it must have died and rotted away. But there was no doubt in my mind.
I scraped the leaves and pine twigs away and saw red clay. “Spiffy, I found it!” I yelled.
He came running. “That’s what you said in the last three places.”
“Spiffy, I found it. So help me, this is it.”
“Show me,” he said. I scraped and scraped. When I finished, there was a perfect square of red clay in the dirt.
“I believe you,” Spiffy said.
The guy who owned the backhoe, a tall, skinny man, had dug enough to know how the ground should look. “He has found it,” he said. “Look at that—red clay just right on top of the ground.”
We started with shovels but they insisted on using the backhoe. I objected, but finally agreed. “All right,” I said, “but stop when I tell you to stop, because I know just how deep it is.” The guy was good with that backhoe for sure. He dug down and kept scraping it back until he got down about eighteen inches.
“Stop!” I yelled. I didn’t know it but he’d already hit Mark’s foot and dragged a tennis shoe halfway out of the hole. I got down in the grave and stuck the shovel down one time. I turned it up and a leg bone popped up to the top of the ground. “Oh no,” I said, and fell backward onto the dirt. I climbed back up to Doctor Wright. “There’s his leg,” I told him. “This is it.”
Doctor Wright got down in there with a little scoop. I sat on the dirt behind him.
Now I could see Mark’s head, part of his skull. His hair was darker than it had been. I moved back, trying to put Doctor Wright between that and me. Doctor Wright was throwing bones up into a basket as he came to them. I wanted to get out of there.
Dolores Wilson flicked on the car radio as she drove home from her bookkeeping job. “I heard that a boy missing for nearly four years had been found dead. I had the feeling it was Mark.” A daughter met her at the door to say police officers had been there. “I guess I knew then, but I had hope until I heard. I couldn’t believe he was dead.”
Police also paid a call to the restaurant where Jayne Peyton was employed. “They hadn’t found the body yet,” she said, “but they said they were reasonably sure they would, and they were almost sure it was Todd.”
The long wait was over. The pain of uncertainty gave way to truth so devastating that their worst nightmares paled by comparison.
“I’m glad,” Mrs. Peyton said softly, “that he told where the children were. At least I think I’m glad. This has been a disaster to my family. It destroyed everything, our financial lives, our emotional lives, our children.”
That night in jail I couldn’t stop pacing the cell. I was shaking when I talked. My voice broke. I went to pieces. I thought about Mark and Tammy—and Todd coming up. I was scared after all that trouble finding Mark. I thought we’d never find Todd. I finally collapsed on my bed at four-thirty. I woke up at about nine-thirty, nervous and crying. I couldn’t pull myself together. A guard came up. “Come on,” he said, “let’s move.”
Doctor Wright spent a great deal of time with Carr during the grave-digging expedition.
“He killed Todd because he was too whiny and wouldn’t do what he said. He killed Mark because he was, first, too much like him, and second, too cooperative. Also, because he was a witness to the murder of Todd. Mark couldn’t win,” Wright said.
“I think people like Carr don’t get any better. That is to say, there is no way to reintroduce the superego, if you want to put it in Freudian terms.
“They don’t redevelop a conscience. Carr has a little conscience, but it’s retroactive. He can feel a little guilty afterward, but it doesn’t affect his behavior. It’s difficult to know what to do with these kinds of people. They can’t ever be allowed to be loose.
“Probably the best thing to do with somebody like him—and with 110 million males in the United States, there are probably about twenty like Bob Carr running around at any one time—is to execute him. Capital punishment has zero recidivism. I was rather much in favor of doing that with Bob Carr. In spite of the fact that in some kinds of ways—I think a lot of him. He has a very brilliant mind. It’s too bad that he doesn’t have the control that should go with it.
“I don’t know if it was his childhood or not. Maybe he’s just absolutely flawed genetically. Goddamn, he’s a brilliant guy. If things had just been different, he could have been anything. The way he can manipulate people—he could have been president. Whatever he did, he could have been the best. He is the best at what he is now.
“Without him, the victims never would have been found, ever.”
We drove west toward Baton Rouge; we got to Laplace, Louisiana, and hit US 61 north. I thought Interstate 10 used to end at Laplace and I couldn’t be sure if where we turned off was the same place I’d turned off with Mark and Todd.
I’d only been there twice, once when I killed Todd and once to bury him. In the four years since, the interstate had been completed. Everything is different. I told them the landmarks to watch for as we drove along. But they weren’t there. I knew we were going to miss it.
We drove about fifteen miles north on Route 61 when I suddenly spotted an old white building ahead. I remembered it! I’d turned around beside it when Mark and Todd were with me. “There’s a road on the left up ahead,” I told them. “It goes into the woods. You have to drive through a dump to get down in there.” We got up closer to the building, looking for the road—and there it was. “Make a U-turn,” I told Spiffy. “There it is.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” We turned, went back and drove down the dirt road, further and further, Doctor Wright behind us. They knew I was right. Everything I’d described was there: the trees, the canal, the railroad tracks. This was the spot, no doubt about it. We stopped and got out.
“Okay,” Ed said. “Let’s not bother anything now. We don’t have a shovel anyway.” We drove on into Gramercy. I didn’t know it was that close, only about a half mile away. If I’d realized that, I never would have stayed there with Mark and Todd.
Nobody from the local prosecutor’s office could go with us that afternoon. They said to call again in the morning. We drove back toward New Orleans while Charlie and Spiffy wondered what to do with me. I was scared to go back to the New Orleans Parish Prison. That black guard would get me.
“We’ll find something else,” Charlie said.
We stopped, asked a cop and found the St. John’s Parish Jail. I went in there and they let me have a shower, the first I’d had in days. Charlie and Spiffy told them they wanted me by myself. They didn’t want anybody with me. The guards gave me a mattress and put me in a holding tank—wire mesh overhead and on the sides and steel benches along the walls. Floodlights lit up the cell. The door has a foot-square glass window in it and you could see through to the jail office where a girl was working. I wanted to use the toilet, but I was scared she’d peek through the glass. I finally went to sleep.
When I woke up, I heard a TV come on with the news and tried to listen. I heard my name, but I couldn’t make it all out because of the noise in the jail. The TV was about sixty feet away and the sound bounced back and forth off the stone walls. I sat there thinking, Oh my god, the press is here at the jail. I knew they were out there.
Finally Charlie and Spiffy came in. “We’ve got a problem,” Charlie said. “The press has surrounded the jail.”
They worked out a scheme with the sheriff of St. John’s Parish. The sheriff handcuffed and shackled another prisoner and marched him out, with rifle-armed guards and his head down. Photographers and TV cameramen ran over each other snapping his picture. They put the poor guy and some shovels in a station wagon and drove away, a film crew right on their bumper.
I walked out the side door with Charlie and Spiffy, hopped into the LTD and took off. The reporters didn’t even see us.
After the bodies of Mark and Tammy were recovered, Hancock County Sheriff Sylvan J. Ladner, Jr., released details to the press, along with the Polaroid pictures he shot at the gravesite.
“We dug her out of the ground Monday,” Ladner told reporters, describing the recovery of Tammy’s body. “All she had on her was a little blouse. This man Carr is just a sex fiend in my book. He talks about it just like he was discussing everyday matters, as coolly as a man giving you the time of day. He said he lived in the woods with her, eating out of cans and bags.”
Ladner quoted Carr as saying, “I killed her because she was getting despondent. I was going to take her to the New Orleans Airport and put her on a plane back to Miami, but she was getting despondent. I didn’t want that.”
“It just makes you sick,” Ladner said. “She was buried alive. All crunched up and bent over. She smothered to death. But it’s nothing to him. He’s just unconcerned. He wasn’t nervous. The little boy’s body didn’t faze him. It just makes you sick to your stomach.”
Charlie and Spiffy were proud of how they had fooled the reporters. We traveled incognito from then on—using phony names—because reporters were swarming. Ed called the local sheriff, who told him, “Meet us by the bayou.” He and Charlie took off while Spiffy, Doc and I stayed there eating at a chicken place.
I thought they knew where it was. They got lost and came back three hours later. The bayou was awful big, they said. But they had finally found the sheriff, who had a black deputy named Washington with him.
We drove to the place we’d been the day before and sprayed each other with insect repellant, to keep off the mosquitoes. I started turning some dirt over, trying to find that different color clay near the top. I dug in a few places. Then I walked up between three trees, stuck the shovel in the ground again and turned it over.
“Here it is,” I said. “Right here.”
“That’s it,” Ed O’Donnell said. “If he says that’s the place, that’s the place. Dig there.”
I felt good. I dug on one side and Washington, the deputy, dug on the other side of the hole. We hit water and the hole filled. We kept digging. Then all of a sudden, we started tossing up bones. I just kept digging. I couldn’t see much because I was in the water and Todd’s bones didn’t really bother me.
Doctor Wright came down in there, picking out the bones and throwing them up into a tray. I even picked up a handful and threw them in. It didn’t bother me, not even when he grabbed the Levis and started tearing them off and bones came up in the Levis. Then Doctor Wright reached down in the hole and yanked out a skull. And I took off.
I stood by the car.
“Are you all right?” Ed said. I was shaking again, but not as bad as the first time.
“Take it easy,” the sheriff said.
All of a sudden, a small plane flew overhead. We all looked up. “I bet it’s carrying reporters,” the sheriff said. He took the thought right out of my head. It was a two-engine plane, probably a mile away. It was high, but it saw us. No doubt about it. It saw us.
“I’m going to tell you something,” I said. “You guys can shoot me, but if any reporters show up, I’m taking off through these woods to the railroad tracks. I’ll meet you over there.”
“Don’t worry,” Ed told the sheriff. “Don’t shoot him if it happens. He’s not going to try to escape.”
I’d never been publicized before. I didn’t want the publicity. I don’t want it today. I think the whole story of my kidnaps and rapes should be known. It will do a lot of people good to know how these things happen. But I can’t see why the press and TV have to make a celebrity out of a criminal. It’s like a reward for some people. Like Manson. They say he never reached a goal in life. Yes he did. He wanted fame and that’s what he got. He killed people to get it. He got his reward.
“We better get you out of here,” Charlie said.
Washington put me in his new Mercury. My pants and shirt were muddy, top to bottom. He took me to the jail and they booked me in a segregation cell under a phony name and a phony charge—resisting arrest.
Reporters started calling the jail. The jailers told them we’d already got a plane out of New Orleans for Connecticut. It was nice in that segregation cell. It was cool. And the beds were nice. There were two bunks. I took both mattresses, put them on one bed and sacked out. There was a nice shower right in the cell with me. I enjoyed that.
Charlie and Spiffy came by about ten o’clock the next morning to drive to New Orleans. They’d kept Mark’s and Todd’s bodies in the trunk. Bones in a bag. Then they’d been boxed for shipment to Doctor Wright in Miami. Ed and the doc had already flown back. Their part of the trip was over.
Everything had already hit the newspapers. I walked around at the airport wondering if somebody was going to recognize me. They didn’t.
Somebody did recognize Carr’s face. Earl Feyard, twenty-seven, the man in the pickup truck who had pulled their car from a ditch when Tammy and Carr were stuck, saw Carr on television. He came forward to say he’d been turkey hunting in the area in early April. “I noticed a car on the side of the road,” he said, “and walked down there. I saw this man and a girl. He told me he was stuck and he’d appreciate it if I would pull his car out. They didn’t act strange or nothing, just perfectly normal.”
Feyard said Carr told him they got stuck when they pulled off the side of the road to get some sleep during a heavy rainstorm.
“He said they’d been in New Orleans and he was bringing the girl back to her parents in Miami. I pulled his car out, he offered me money and I left.” He spent about an hour with the couple. “The girl,” he said, “didn’t act scared.”
We turned in the rented car and called my lawyer, Mike Von Zamft, before we caught the plane for New York. Mike told Charlie that Fred Francis, an NBC television reporter, was going to meet us there. He gave Charlie a number to call and we took off. From the air, I looked at the Mississippi River below. It looked like a snake. “There’s Turkey Island,” I said. We flew over it again. But the bodies weren’t there anymore.
At LaGuardia we walked through the terminal and down to a big baggage claim turntable. You know how New York is, people packing in there and fighting over their luggage. Charlie and Spiffy, Florida boys, were looking all around, like they were about to be eaten alive. While we waited for our luggage to come around, they decided we were going to need a porter. They both decided at the same time—and took off in different directions. I turned around—no cops! I was standing there alone in the crowd. I waited. When they got back I told them I’d thought of running.
“You wouldn’t,” Spiffy said. They knew I wouldn’t. A porter took the luggage and we caught a bus to the car rental place. Charlie and Spiffy wanted a Lincoln Continental. The clerk said she had a Granada with an AM-FM radio. The Granada was four-door, silver, with a red vinyl top. Charlie took the wheel.
We drove to a motel room in Newark, New Jersey, and called Fred Francis. Charlie and Spiffy knew him, the trip was almost over and I didn’t mind talking to him. I told him he could interview me the next day and he and his camera crew could go with us to find Rhonda’s grave. While we waited for him, I phoned Joanne.
“There are reporters out here bothering me,” she said. She sounded frantic. “Where are you?”
“In Rhode Island,” I lied.
“These reporters are driving me crazy. Listen to this.” She held the phone up to the TV. I heard a man I knew, who ran an auto service, being interviewed about me on the news. He called me a bum.
“Everybody’s getting a piece of the meat,” I said.
Reporters and cameramen were hounding Joanne. They’d had cameras set up in the yard for days, she told me. They tried to take pictures through the window of the house. They sneaked up the outside stairs. I told her to sic the dogs on them.
“Joanne,” I said, “just calm down. Call the Norwich Bulletin, tell them I just telephoned you and said we were in St. Louis and the Connecticut thing was just a hoax to throw the press off the track.” She did it and it helped some.
I spent the night in the Essex County Jail. The next morning Charlie and Spiffy arrived about ten o’clock. We took off for Connecticut in the Granada, the NBC camera crew following in a station wagon. We took the New Jersey Turnpike, the New England Thruway and then the Connecticut Turnpike to Route 52. We got off at the Canterbury exit and I showed them the way out to the grave.
We pulled in on the dirt road and I told them to stop where Rhonda’s grave was. It hadn’t been that long ago. Kathy and I used to go parking up there. My old Miller High Life wrappers were still all over the ground.
“Are you sure that’s the spot?” Charlie said.
“Yeah, that’s the spot.” There was white sand all over.
“How do you know?” he said. “I don’t see how you can tell.”
“I know,” I told him, “because I put her there.”
Fred Francis interviewed me and had me point to Rhonda’s grave for the camera. I didn’t like that. I felt very uncomfortable.
I threw a stick, just a piece of stick, on the grave to mark it.
Charlie and Spiffy drove me back to the Essex County Jail in New Jersey and took off back to Connecticut, about a 150-mile drive. By the time they got back, it was too late to do anything. They showed the Connecticut police the grave and brought Rhonda’s body up the next day. I couldn’t stay in Connecticut. I didn’t want to. I knew that if they got the chance they’d hold me and I wanted to go back to Florida.
They told me Rhonda was right where I said she’d be, right on the money.
I didn’t get to see Joanne or the kids. At first I’d hoped to see Joanne, but the reporters were all around. After all I’d been through, I just didn’t want to face the pressure and confusion. Charlie and Spiffy offered to sneak Joanne out and bring her to New Jersey. I said no, absolutely not. I wasn’t going to run the risk. It would have depressed me anyway.
The news that Carr had murdered two children while free on bond in Connecticut sex cases and killed twice more shortly after his parole set shock waves through the state penal system. “I blame Connecticut for those last two murders,” his attorney, Michael Von Zamft, said later in Miami. “They could have been prevented. They never should have happened. Carr was incarcerated from December, 1972, until September, 1975, for sex crimes. He attempted to get treatment. He wrote letters, he complained, he asked for help, he even threatened litigation to make the State of Connecticut help him. Instead, they paroled him, they turned him loose rather than give him treatment. Connecticut blew it. He wanted help and he didn’t get it. The defendant is very remorseful. He wanted to tell where the bodies were. He did not accept my advice. He believed these families should know their children are dead and not coming back—and he wanted treatment.”
In Waterford, Connecticut, Detective Lt. Thomas Viens said the charges against Carr in the cases of Ann Martin and Susan Webb had been reduced through plea bargaining, which resulted in his early parole. “This is another plea bargain that blew up in our face,” he said. “I’m not surprised at what’s happened. That guy was sick. A rape is one thing, but when you go into that other sordid stuff, that’s something else again.”
“We had two good cases on him,” former Chief Prosecutor Edmond O’Brien said, explaining the plea bargain, “but one of the witnesses was reluctant. The kids in these kinds of cases are always reluctant. You can lose those cases as easily as you can win them.” So he had agreed to reduced charges. “But I never thought that guy would make parole,” he said.
Connecticut Corrections Commissioner John R. Manson said there had been nothing to indicate that Carr needed anything “but normal psychiatric counseling available to all inmates.” Carr was enrolled in a psychiatric program and Alcoholics Anonymous, Manson said, “but dropped out of both on his own volition. “Carr’s complaints are not surprising,” he said. “I’ve got a file about five inches thick with correspondence from Carr while he was with us. And it’s all consistent—he blames everyone for everything. But he never blames himself.”
We caught a plane for Florida later that day, Sunday. All the way back I said to myself that when I got there I’d hang myself. I was completely friendless. I didn’t have anybody. Joanne was hostile to me. I faced a possible death penalty. I just didn’t want to live. Charlie and Spiffy sensed it. They knew. “Bob,” Charlie said, “you’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?”
“Why not?” I said. I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I just wasn’t going to lie. I was going to kill myself. I planned to do it that night.
Charlie and Spiffy came over to the jail that night after we got back and brought me two cartons of cigarettes. They didn’t give me up after I showed them where the bodies were. “Bob,” Charlie said, “we want you to put some phone calls on our credit card. Call whoever you want, wherever you want.”
“Well, I guess I’ll call my wife,” I said. And Joanne was feeling better and was down to earth again, and that kind of set a spirit in me. And I called Kathy.
“Oh my god,” she said, when she heard my voice. “I’ve been so worried. How are things? What’s going on?” It felt so good to talk to her on the phone. It picked my spirits up all the way.
“Jesus,” I said. “I’ve got all this. Maybe I won’t kill myself—not tonight anyway. Maybe I’ll wait.” If it hadn’t been for those phone calls I would have done it. There’s no doubt about it.
I wrote Ruthie a letter telling her I had kidnapped Michael. That’s all I said. “If he wants to tell you anything, I’ll leave it to him. If Michael wants to tell you about it, that’s his prerogative, but, Ruthie, please don’t force him. It’s a very hard thing.” I got no reply. I can understand why. She read about the murders. She realized how many lies I told her.
Robert Carr was arraigned in the murders of Mark, Todd and Tammy and the rapes of Jenny, Lisa, Terri and Brad (who had given police his license tag number) on July 9, 1976. He pleaded guilty, against the advice of his attorney, Michael Von Zamft. He faced the possibility of the electric chair for Tammy’s murder only. Florida had had no death penalty at the time Mark and Todd were killed, nearly four years earlier. The maximum sentence for their murders and the rapes was life in prison.
Obsessed by a compulsion to be in control of his case, Carr resisted his attorney’s attempts to defend him. Angered at delays, he clashed with Von Zamft several times. “I’m trying to get this thing over with,” Carr complained. “They’re trying to make me fight for my life—that’s a sick feeling. If I get the death penalty based on the facts and not on some legal technicality, I’m definitely not opposed to it. When everything is over, I’d like to feel good about it.”
Among the battery of appointed psychiatrists was Dr. Charles Mutter, who said Carr raped on impulse and killed out of fear of discovery. He described Carr as a sociopathic personality with sexual deviant behavior, but “no sign of psychosis or organic brain damage.”
He, like the others, said Carr was able to aid his defense and competent to stand trial. Carr, he said, “has severe sexual impulses which have existed since age twelve…Drinking most likely produces a release phenomenon and only adds to his impulsive behavior…”
Dr. Arthur Stillman, director of the Institute of Human Relations, pointed out that though Carr “is preoccupied with the fact that he was refused proper psychiatric help [in Connecticut State Prison] and demonstrates a great deal of resentment, he cannot explain why he did not therefore seek out psychiatric help while free.”
Carr was entitled to an advisory jury who would hear the evidence and recommend a sentence of either death in the electric chair or life in prison, with a twenty-five-year minimum.
Carr didn’t want a jury. Eager to be sentenced and be done with it, he waived his right. Circuit Judge Natalie Baskin, however, refused the waiver and ordered the jury empaneled. Carr angrily demanded a new lawyer. He complained that Von Zamft refused to go along with “the way I want to run my own case” and wanted to “pull all kinds of tricky maneuvers I’m not interested in.”
Judge Baskin allowed Von Zamft to withdraw and appointed private defense attorney Ronald Dresnick. Carr and Dresnick, his own choice of a lawyer, clashed almost immediately. Carr sulked in his cell and refused to attend a court hearing after his new attorney suggested he was incompetent.
“I was tired, I thought I was making sense,” Carr said. “And he finally leaned over, looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You’re incompetent.’ Tears came to my eyes and I ran him out and told him not to come back.”
Dresnick’s explanation to the judge was that three or four trying hours spent together had ended with both he and his client frustrated, he said. What set off the conflict, he said, was “when I stated to him that ‘I am not convinced at this time that you are competent to stand trial.’ For a moment I noticed the first emotion I have seen in the man. His eyes got red. They filled with tears. He softened up and said, ‘You know, I think you’re right.’ Then, just as quick as could be, he snapped back out of it and got very hostile…because he perceived that his game plan was not going the way he wanted it to go…Up until the time he entered a guilty plea everything was going the way he wanted it…He had complete control of the situation. When he was arrested he told the police he wished to confess. They went along and let him confess…He took them and Mr. O’Donnell to Mississippi and, again, he was in the driver’s seat, controlling the situation and everything was going along well.”
Dresnick quoted a psychiatrist as saying that Carr’s “weak ego structure demands that he be in control…As soon as he perceives that things are not going the way he wants, he begins to fall apart…”
Dresnick pleaded that his client was indeed falling apart and incompetent to aid his defense. More psychiatric tests were ordered.
Carr’s mother visited him in jail, then retreated to Virginia before his fate was decided. She did not want her name linked with his, she said, because she might lose her job as a result. “I’ve been reading detective magazines since this happened,” she said. She pores over the pages seeking an explanation, some understanding of the son she never could comprehend. “That fellow who killed the people on the tower in Texas,” she said hopefully, “he had a brain tumor. Suppose they sent Bobby to the electric chair and then found out he had a brain tumor?”
A jury chosen on September 13, 1976, heard the testimony of psychologist Geraldine Boozer, director of a sex offender rehabilitation program. Carr showed the ability “to conform to society’s expectations,” she said, and intelligence tests ranked him in the top 16.1 percent of the general population. “Though he may rationalize and justify, he knows that rape and murder are wrong.”
Psychiatrist Stillman had examined Carr’s mother during her visit. He described her as “intelligent, but a woman who is very flat emotionally—rather detached and cold, a person who has operated invariably in what she believed was the right thing to do, but seldom with any compassion or affection.” He called her a person “who shows little positive emotion…a refrigerator that has never been defrosted.”
She “almost asked not to be made to feel guilty,” he said, “justifying her position, showing an absolute lack of emotion and no feeling of compassion whatsoever for her own son…She also had a history of severe alcoholism for a number of years, and while under the influence of alcohol often engaged in punishing Robert mercilessly.”
Asked by Prosecutor O’Donnell why Carr killed his victims, the doctor blamed “unconscious repetition compulsion…People tend to repeat with others what was once done to them. For example, we know that child abusers were abused children themselves…Under stress they do to others the very thing that was done to them. As far as I am concerned, Robert Carr has been killed many times, so to speak, by his parents. It’s been a kind of death…and I believe that he was meting out to others what was done to him, ostensibly under the disguise of love.”
“Are you saying,” O’Donnell asked, “that he was killed as a child, so he killed them?”
“Yes. As far as he was concerned, he was dead many times.” Stillman called the roots from which Carr sprang “the kind of background that creates sick people and grinds them out faster than we can cure them.”
The jury listened and recommended mercy. The judge agreed. She sentenced him to 360 years in prison and recommended he never be paroled. He will be eligible for parole in twenty-five years. Due to the length of Carr’s sentence Connecticut officials said they would not prosecute in the case of Rhonda Holloway.
I didn’t fear the death penalty. I don’t have any fear of death. I’ve seen enough of it to know. It’s peaceful. It’s like a sleep. I didn’t want to die, but if they killed me, I wouldn’t have squirmed. The hostility that made me kill is the same hostility that society turned on me and I feel very sorry for them. Believe me, I lived it and it’s not worth it. Love is more important than hostility. I love Charlie Zatrepalek, I love Spiffy Simmons. I love Ed O’Donnell and all those people who took me to court and tried me. I love them and I understand them. But they don’t understand me and it’s so simple. All they’ve got to do to understand me is, just once, to know themselves.
Some people thought I’d be sorry I confessed if I got the electric chair. They were wrong. I never would have changed my mind. I never will. It was the right thing to do, the right thing for people like Tammy and Mark, and God knows how many others who would be dead if I stayed free. It was the right thing for me.
I wasn’t going to go in there and beg them not to kill me. I kidnapped fifteen people and I killed four of them. If they decided to kill me, great! I would have walked in there and sat down in the electric chair like I was going to dinner. There is no justice. I hate the system. I despise it. I have no respect for it and never will, as long as I live. If I ever do, that’s when I’ll be insane.
A few months after sentencing Robert Carr was transferred from the prison system to a mental hospital for the treatment he said he had sought so long.
A year after his arrival, hospital officials announced they had done all they could to help Carr. He had threatened the lives of staff members and persons outside the hospital and failed to attend therapy sessions. Doctors concluded that “his interest in the treatment program seems to be primarily to stay out of prison.”
As officials debated the site of his future confinement, Carr was caught with wire cutters, pliers, money, a small crowbar and a supply of food in his possession. Shortly after, he was transferred from the hospital back to Florida State Prison, where he remains in maximum security.