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Robert Frederick Carr, state inmate 055664, was quietly buried in a North Florida prison cemetery with no family to claim his body.

His dark legacy, however, is not forgotten.

Michael Von Zamft, the lawyer who defended Carr: "He was very charming. Carr didn't look scary. He was very slight. Wispy hair. I could see how teenagers would get a ride from him. He didn't look threatening.''

Ed O'Donnell, the man who prosecuted Carr: "It was really an unusual experience to listen to him describe how well-planned his crimes were, and how controlling he could be over others. These kids had a lot of chances to get away and wouldn't because he had control.''

David Simmons, the detective who arrested Carr: "In my 33-year career in law enforcement, Carr ranks as the most dangerous child sexual predator-murderer I ever investigated.''

Edna Buchanan, the journalist who chronicled Carr: "He was about the most evil person I ever met. . . . It was such good news that he is no longer on the planet.''

Carr, 63, died July 6, after admittance to a North Florida prison medical center. His cause of death has not been determined, says the Alachua County Medical Examiner's Office.

He had been imprisoned at Union County Correctional Institute, a state inmate since 1976.

As serial killers go, Carr is virtually unknown today. But he was important here in Dade County -- Carr offered investigators an early, candid glimpse into the twisted minds of sexual murderers.

In 1976, he confessed to kidnapping, raping and murdering 11-year-olds Todd Payton and Mark Wilson, and 16-year-old hitchhiker Tammy Ruth Huntley.

A fourth victim, Rhonda Holloway, 21, was later unearthed in a remote part of Connecticut. Carr also admitted to raping more than a dozen more boys and girls.

The television repairman was caught only after a Metro police officer stumbled onto him trying to rape a housewife.

He later led O'Donnell, Simmons, Detective Charles Zatrepalek and deputy medical examiner Dr. Ronald Wright on a cross-country trip to dig up corpses.

Carr said he was born evil.

In 120 hours of tape-recorded jailhouse interviews, he told Buchanan of his troubled childhood: killing baby chickens with a stick; being paid by men for sex at about 11, stealing cars as a teen.

Violent fantasies

As an adult, he married in Connecticut.

''While I had sex with my wife, I would fantasize about raping somebody else,'' he told Buchanan, who later wrote Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder.

Between 1973 and 1975, Carr was imprisoned for a rape in Connecticut and paroled. He later claimed he wanted to stay in prison for psychiatric treatment.

While in Miami, he would troll Biscayne Boulevard in a car with the inside door handle dismantled so victims couldn't escape.

He kidnapped Mark and Todd, who were hitchhiking, from North Miami Beach on Nov. 13, 1972, manipulating them into an extended road trip and later raping, strangling and burying them in Mississippi and Louisiana.

''What he did to those children was truly unprintable,'' said Simmons, now a sergeant with Miami Gardens police. Four years later, Carr did the same to hitchhiker Tammy, also from North Miami-Dade.

After he was arrested for the attempted rape in 1976, he confessed to Simmons and Zatrepalek.

With an uncanny memory, he led the four men to the remote spots in Mississippi and Louisiana where Mark, Todd and Tammy's skeletons were buried.

''A 10-day odyssey,'' Simmons remembered of the grave-digging trip.

''It was amazing. Some of these things happened years before we went out there,'' said O'Donnell, now a defense attorney.

Carr later plead guilty -- against Von Zamft's advice -- and received a life sentence, in part because he cooperated with investigators. Carr was talkative with detectives and with reporters.

''I don't have any fear of death. I've seen enough of it to know,'' Carr said shortly after his confession. ``It's peaceful. It's like sleep.''

Hard time in prison

His time in prison was not peaceful.

Carr was booted from a state mental hospital because he was hoarding wire cutters and pliers. He sent letter after letter to the detectives, Buchanan, O'Donnell and even his ex-wife.

He rambled, angrily. Carr claimed he and the Manson cult killers from California would soon embark on a bus tour to teach public safety.

Simmons saved the letters for years -- he figures he received two or three monthly for a decade -- before throwing them away. Buchanan called the prison to have the letters stopped.

None knew of his death except O'Donnell. He's not sure why but he received a mail notice from the prison.

''Now,'' Simmons said, "his maker can decide his everlasting punishment.''

1,400 years added to sentence of killer-rapist in Florida

'None could be more evil than this man'

The Miami Herald

June 8, 2000

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Robert Frederick Carr's crimes were so wicked, his victims so young and vulnerable, the Miami-Dade County child rapist and killer will meet his maker 1,400 years before Florida lets him out of prison.

Florida's three-member Parole Commission on Wednesday added 14 centuries to his sentence. It set a tentative release date for July 30, 3414.

"There are many evil men in the world," Commissioner Frederick Dunphy said as an aide used a calculator to figure out how much time Carr's crimes will cost him. "None could be more evil than this man."

Carr's spree cost Jayne Peyton and her family their hearts. Carr kidnapped, tortured and strangled Peyton's youngest son, Todd, 11, leaving "a hole in the fabric of our family," she told the commissioners, tears in her eyes.

"The pain he has caused this family is agonizing," she said.

In November 1972, Todd, then a North Miami Beach Elementary School fourth-grader, and a buddy, Mark Wilson, also 11, caught Carr's eye.

He lured them into his car. He had rigged the door handles so the boys couldn't escape. The trunk of his car was filled with food, jars of petroleum jelly and a shovel.

Carr, a soft-spoken redhead and one-time house painter, raped the boys and strangled Todd, burying him in a shallow grave in Mississippi. Four days later, he strangled Mark. For the terror Mark likely felt, knowing that he too would die, the commissioners added 20 years.

A judge sentenced Carr to life, which then included the possibility of parole.

"This was a guy who never had to grab anyone or hit anyone over the head to drag into his car, he was like the boy next door," said Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Herald reporter who conducted 120 hours of jailhouse interviews with Carr. "But once he got them in his car, they were at his mercy. . . . Pure evil," Buchanan called him.

Four years after the boys disappeared, Carr was caught raping a hitchhiker at knifepoint. He later led detectives to two small, shallow graves in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, telling searchers where to dig. He also led them to the Mississippi burial site of Tammy Ruth Huntley, 16, of North Dade.

Carr also assaulted a 15-year-old named Sari after picking her up at a concert in Hollywood, Fla. She testified Wednesday. "He looked like the guy next door. He had a puppy," she said.

At knifepoint, he assaulted her repeatedly over 36 hours before she escaped. Sari, her husband, Rick, and her mother sat beaming as the Parole Commission meted out prison time in centuries. For making it impossible for the children to open the car doors: 15 years. For each rape: 50 years. For each child's death: 100 years.

"Thank you," Sari called out quietly as the months began to multiply. "Thank you."

Carr wasn't at the hearing. He is prisoner No. 055664 at Union Correctional Institution in North Florida, where a parole examiner had suggested a release date of 2086 -- or age 143. Carr told the examiner he wasn't interested in parole and was seeking an appeal.

As the people in the hearing room sat silent, Sari's mother put on reading glasses and read from Buchanan's book, Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder.

" `I was really trying to hurt her,' " Buchanan quoted Carr. " `I was trying to kill her.' "

"I tried to find a way to make you feel the terror," Sari told the commissioners. "No one could tell you of his evil better than Robert Carr in his own words."

Carr, Robert Frederick III

Paroled from a Connecticut prison in October 1975, 32-year-old Robert Carr resumed the career of sexual assault and murder that his last arrest had interrupted. A series of rapes in Dade County, Florida, ended when Carr was picked up by police at the end of May 1976.

In custody, he soon confessed four murders, including those of three Florida children and a woman in Connecticut. Carr led investigators to the Gulf Coast graves of three young victims, two of whom -- 11-year-old boys -- were first reported missing on November 13, 1972. Back in Connecticut, Carr helped police find the grave of an adult female victim, murdered shortly after his parole. Unearthed by detectives on June 13, the woman was found fully clothed, with her hands and feet bound. Statements issued by Carr's defense attorney, in Miami indicated that the woman was Carr's final victim in a three-year string of homicides.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers - Hunting Humans

Robert Frederick Carr