The Hand of Death

Most everyone in America, especially from my generation, knows about the horrific disappearance and death of Adam Walsh, a little boy who was abducted from a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida on July 27, 1981. His head was subsequently found by fishermen in a canal in Vero Beach. A serial killer, arsonist and pervert from Jacksonville named Ottis Toole repeatedly confessed to Walsh's kidnapping and murder, then would retract his story, then re-confess all over again. He finally confessed again to the murder on his deathbed in prison.

Now, ordinarily, I wouldn't bother covering a downer of a story like the Walsh murder here on this blog - I have very little tolerance for lurid "true crime" news for its own sake. But it's where else the story leads that makes for some fascinating strangeness...

Toole was the gay lover and partner-in-crime of another serial killer - Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas and Toole met at a Jacksonville soup kitchen, and they soon developed a sexual relationship which led to a cross-country crime spree together. Both were caught up with by law enforcement agents separately - Toole in April 1983 for arson in Jacksonville, and Lucas two months later for the killing of an 82-year-old woman - but both told the story that they were members of a cannibalistic cult based in the Everglades called "The Hand of Death".

According to the book Hand of Death by Max Call:

Henry tells of his indoctrination into a nationwide Satanic cult, and says that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary camp in the Florida Everglades in the fine art of killing. Other training involved abduction and arson techniques. The first task he was given was the murder of one of the "students," a young black homosexual who had betrayed his oath to the Devil. He slit the man's throat and later that same evening, a Satanic ritual was performed in which the dead man's heart was cut out, his blood drained, and his body dismembered. All of the initiated members of the Hand drank the dead man's blood and ate pieces of his flesh. The remains of the body were then burned at an altar.

There were several hundred students at the Hand of Death training camp, coming from six different countries; over half of them were women. The camp provided unlimited access to all kinds of drug taking, which was encouraged recreational activity.

This would sound like absolute pure-D-baloney if not for the fact that both men told the same story separately, in different prisons to different interrogators. They claimed to have met a man calling himself Don Meteric who invited them to come to Miami and do "contract killings" for the Hand of Death. Meteric and Toole eventually admitted to Lucas that Toole had already been working for Meteric for years. According to Court TV, Lucas later said that at the time, he’d felt betrayed by Ottis and manipulated by him into joining the cult. Be that as it may, Lucas happily stayed a member and committed many more murders at their behest.

The group allegedly operated on remote swamp islands deep in the Everglades, accessible only by airboat. Police helicopters surveyed the Everglades and reported no sign of the encampments. Lucas told interviewers that the Hand of Death has connections to elements within the U.S. Government, so they were no doubt tipped off in advance to hide.

From David McGowan's Programmed to Kill:

Lucas claimed that he was trained by a nationwide satanic cult in a mobile paramilitary training camp in the Florida Everglades.... Henry further claimed the leaders of the camp were so impressed with his handling of a knife that he was allowed to serve as an instructor. Following his training, Henry claimed that he served the cult in various ways, including as a contract killer and as an abductor of children , whom he delivered to a ranch in Mexico near Juarez.

Three days before Lucas was scheduled to be executed, then-Governor George W. Bush (infamous for refusing to grant stays of execution to any Death Row inmate) did something he had never done before or since: he saved Henry Lee Lucas from the electric chair and commuted his sentence to life in prison instead. Of all the inmates he sent to death, many far more deserving of leniency than Lucas (he even sent to death a great-grandmother who killed her abusive husband in self defense) Bush chose to spare the life of one of America's most notorious serial killers.

Does that seem odd to you? If not quite, then perhaps this will - McGowan again:

And it could just be a coincidence that Toole, who was convicted in the state of Florida, shared with Henry the fate of having his death sentence commuted. Florida is, of course, a state that is also overly zealous in its application of the death penalty. Not zealous enough to execute the likes of Ottis Toole, however. In any event, it's interesting that both of these men had their death sentences set aside in states run by a member of the Bush family.

Toole died in prison in 1996, and Lucas in 2001. But the story doesn't end with their passing. In 2007, rumors began swirling that yet another serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, was also a member of the Hand of Death. Though he lived in Wisconsin in 1991 when arrested, Dahmer had actually been living in Miami Beach at the time Adam Walsh was murdered, and two eyewitnesses placed Dahmer at the Sears in Hollywood on the day Adam was abducted.

Dahmer preyed on young men and boys, and his modus operandi included severing his victims' heads. Dahmer denied any involvement with the Walsh case or with the Hand of Death group, but we'll never know for sure now because he was somehow killed in a maximum security prison by another inmate.

All of this is something to ponder on while you're driving down the long, lonely U.S. 41 in the Everglades, or the scary stretch of I-75 known as Alligator Alley there, connecting Naples to Miami for two hours of mind-numbing nothingness; dark swamps extending in all directions to the vanishing point.

Decorated House in Bradenton

Back home in Louisville, if you try to make your home a garishly decorated paradise, the city leans on you to get with the program and keep your house boring and normal like everybody's else's. Fortunately, in many areas of Florida, you can just let your architectural freak flag fly. We've given a previous example with this artist's home in Atlantic Beach and now here's a goodly one I've always enjoyed driving by in Bradenton.

Key Deer

The Florida Keys have their very own species of deer that exists only there: the Key Deer, Odocoileus virginianus clavium, originally roamed all of the lower Florida Keys but is now limited to a stretch from about Sugarloaf Key to Bahia Honda Key. How did they get here in the first place? Well, deer can swim, but it's been surmised by scientific sorts that they got here over a land bridge that must have existed towards the end of Wisconsin Glaciation period, roughly 10,000 years ago.

The earliest known written reference to Key Deer comes from the diary of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a Spanish sailor shipwrecked at the age of 13 in the Florida Keys in the 1550s. The Calusa captured and enslaved the ship's crew, eventually killing them all except for Fontaneda. He spent the next seventeen years living among them, learning several native American languages in the process and traveling extensively through Florida. In 1566 he was rescued by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Florida's first Spanish governor and founder of St. Augustine.

Estimates of Key Deer population are put as high as 800 nowadays, a far cry from the days when they numbered in the tens of thousands but certainly a step up from 1955 when it was feared that only as few as 25 specimens existed.

Alligator Wrestling

Florida's already been a pioneer in the dubious fields of bear wrestling and coleslaw wrestling, so it shouldn't really surprise anyone that at some point, some crackers would gaze upon a gator and say, "let's rassle it."

You can observe alligator wrestling matches in all its puzzling glory at Gatorland in Orlando and you can even, for a ten dollar fee, jump in the ring and wrestle one yourself. Me, I can't imagine paying money to watch such a thing or even to partake in such a thing, but on the other hand I suppose some of these rasslers can't imagine paying money to put a rolled-up handful of tobacco leaves in your mouth and set fire to it. To each their own.

But even kids are allowed to wrestle at some of these places, and that's definitely not cool. Parents, hypnotized by the dazzling circus-like atmosphere, apparently convince themselves that it's not that dangerous to let junior go out there and risk being eaten.

Don't let anyone convince you otherwise: it is dangerous, quite dangerous. A few years back, an article in Garden & Gun laid bare the insanity of the pursuit, mostly without judging but by letting the words of the wrestlers hang themselves:

Williams has “sat on more gators than you’ve ever seen in your life” and been bitten “too many times to count,” including once, during a show, when the gator’s teeth came straight through his hand. “The gator did what we call a lockup,” he explains. “He grabbed my hand and wouldn’t release. I told my backup guy, ‘We have a problem here,’ and he laughed and said, ‘What do you mean we?’” ...The force exerted by a twelve-foot alligator’s jaws is more than two thousand pounds per square inch, which is akin to having a Chrysler dropped on your wrist bone. Wrestlers have lost hands, had their heads crushed. Stitches numbering into the hundreds are not uncommon.

Despite the dwindling numbers of its hardcore practitioners, the art of gator wrestling has been "a thing" in Florida since at least the turn of the last century, and doesn't seem to be disappearing anytime soon. I'm surprised PETA hasn't made a bigger deal out of this, since they'll harass just about every other business on Earth that doesn't use animals in a way they approve of. But what with the popularity of dog racing here as well, may I propose alligator racing as a safer, saner, kinder-to-the-critter exploit? (At least no one here's thought of dog wrestling.)

Interestingly, according to Florida Memory, this most American of entertainments was actually introduced by the Seminoles. Somehow, there was a myth going around among the white man back then that Seminoles wrestled gators. When the Seminoles started marketing themselves as a tourist attraction in the early 20th century, they appropriated that misconception and played it up, staging alligator wrestling matches for the curious rubes from Minnesota to gawk at. And in so doing, they actually made the myth come true. Other manufactured "traditions" employed by the Seminole tourist traps include Totem Poles, Western-tribe-style costumes, and the Seminole Doll, which has actually now morphed into a bonafide cultural tradition with the passage of time.

Clear Sky

To paraphrase Brian Wilson, I've been all around this great big world and I've eaten all kinds of pancakes. But none beat the offerings at one of my very dearest favorite mess halls, Clear Sky in - where else? - Clearwater.

Oh, to be sure, their lunch specials are mighty tasty - such as the lobster roll pictured below - and I had some scintillating cocktails here. Most notably, one happy afternoon was spent tossing back Mudslides on the patio while waiting for the hand of fate to tap me on the shoulder.

But really, I came to Interzone for the pancakes, and more often than not, whenever I'm in CW I come to Clear Sky to get a steamin' platter of big round mapley things before adjourning next door to Havana Cigars and getting a stogie to stroll on the beach with.

Hulk Hogan lives in Clearwater, by the way, and has a surf shop right across the street. From your vantage point at Clear Sky you can often see him coming and going from his store, and I even bumped into him (not literally) shopping for groceries at Nature's Food Patch.

Easy Street

You've heard the phrase "living on Easy Street", but maybe you didn't know where to find it. Now it can be told: it's in Port Charlotte, FL. (And if you were looking for someone to tell you how to get to Sesame Street, it's in Opa-Locka.)

I hope you appreciate this picture, because as I was taking it, I looked down to see a huge black snake - probably a black racer - wrigglng beside my foot. If you were driving on the Tamiami last week and saw some guy in a fedora leap six feet in the air for seemingly no visible reason, yeah, that was me.

Slimer's Value Center

And then there's Slimer's Value Center in St. Pete Beach. Me, I would have played up the Ghostbusters angle on my logo but I guess they weren't feeling it. Never went in here. They sell women's clothing and I don't buy a lot of that. Well, except on special occasions. Anyway, there you have it.

I just checked and I see they've gone out of business. I guess it's up to me to preserve the legacy of Slimer. And his/her center. And its value.