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“I had been trained how to do this,” Jim tells me four decades later, “and I’m looking around at these detectives I’m supposed to respect and I’m seeing they’re doing absolutely everything wrong.” Jim and his backup called for detectives and an evidence technician. He told Holt Knotts and the couple’s three children, 12 and 13 year old daughters, Brenda and Sherry, and 11 year old Bo, to stay behind the curtain that walled the living area off from the office.
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When Jim arrived, the first officer at the scene, he saw tire tracks in the dirt parking lot, just after 4:30 a.m., and had the presence of mind to “pull up short” and tell his backup to angle his car to block off the area. Ottis aside, what did Dianne Tadlock do to wrap herself into his mythology, the urban legends and true crime paperbacks, his Ottissey? But who grants innocence and who takes it? Sexually abused from earliest childhood, Ottis was prostituted by his family of prostitutes, likely born brain damaged, never had a chance. Maybe it’s less objectionable to make fiction of the real person known as Ottis Toole, since he never was innocent, tried to burn down half his neighborhood and walked Main Street for tricks. So you might say it doesn’t matter that Ellory says Knotts was raped when she wasn’t, that he fictionalizes the date, that he makes up “Cherokee County.”īut Dianne was a real person. Violent American primitivism is exotic to Brits, though they were never as civilized as they thought and we’re even less civilized than they think. And you can tell because he says the victim is “called” Elizabeth Knotts that he’s British. Ellory’s 2010 novel The Anniversary Man, which says, “And so it went on – killings through Christmas, through January, February and March of 1980.” It lists bodies dumped “at the side of the highway,” killings of “mom-and-pop owners of a liquor store in Austin, Texas,” then, “Twenty-first of November, while robbing a motel in Jacksonville, Cherokee County, Lucas raped, then shot to death, a thirty-one-year-old woman called Elizabeth Knotts.”Įllory’s novel is what most novels are: fiction. Brenda and Becky at the pool at the Malabar, 1979, image courtesy Knotts familyĪnd then there’s chapter 47 of R.J.