Featured Image Credit: x/mordidful
Topics: True crime
Emma Rosemurgey
A serial killer, convicted of six murders but suspected of being responsible for hundreds of deaths, laughed in a chilling resurfaced interview in which he admitted to 'playing with the law.'
Disturbing footage from an interview with Ottis Toole shows the killer laughing as the officer asks him how he responds to claims he and his accomplice, Henry Lee Lucas, were responsible for up to 700 murders.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1947, Toole was raised by his 'extremely religious' single mother and grandmother. He dropped out of school at a young age, having been classified as a developmentally disabled child.
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He quickly turned to a life of petty crime and later revealed his first murder had taken place when he was just 14 years old. The then-teen recalled being picked up by a salesman who forced him into having sex, prompting Toole to run the man down with his own car.
However, it was in the mid-1970s, when he began a relationship with Lucas, that his real murder spree began.
His mother passed away in 1981, and following her death, it's claimed he took nine more victims across six different states, but it was a murder in 1984 that finally saw him incarcerated for murder.
Toole was convicted of locking his victim, 64-year-old George Sonnenberg, in his home, before setting it on fire. Sonnenberg died of his injuries a week later.
Once convicted, however, the killer confessed to many, many more murders, claiming to have assisted his partner in crime Lucas in another 108.
A month after his first conviction, Toole was indicted for the murder of Ada Johnson, who was just 19 at the time of her death.
In 1991, he pleaded guilty to four more murders in Florida and later passed away in jail in 1996.
In the chilling interview, which has recently resurfaced on X - formerly Twitter - Toole laughed as he admitted he didn't know just how many crimes he'd confessed to, before claiming he'd done so in a bid to 'mess with the law'.
More than a decade after his death, in December 2008, police announced they had definitely decided Toole was guilty of the murder of America's Most Wanted host John Walsh's son.
Police have since said they don't believe many of the confessions made by Toole, making it impossible to know how many people he actually killed.