My serial killer dad stopped horrific sex attack to call & wish me happy birthday…then sent me X-rated letters from jail
EVERY family has a secret, but none so dark as Donna Carr's.
For almost 50 years she has tried to hide the fact that her dad was a serial killer, rapist and paedophile.
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Robert Frederick Carr III was arrested in 1976 for raping a hitchhiker - and then shocked detectives by confessing to four rapes and murders, and six further rapes.
He'd kept his first victim, a 16-year-old girl, captive in a forest for 10 days, raping her throughout before finally strangling her. He also picked up two 11-year-old boys who were hitchhiking, raped them, strangled one and killed the other four days later.
During one of his sickening sex attacks, evil Carr told his victim that he had to stop so he could find a payphone to call Donna to wish her a happy birthday.
Donna was just 12 years old when his twisted crimes - nearly all of which involved children under the age of 18 - were exposed, and along with her mother and younger brother, she was vilified in her local community.
They were forced to live their lives in the shadow of their father's horrifying crimes, bearing the stigma of being the children of a sadistic killer.
When teenage Donna refused to go and see her father in prison, sickeningly this led Carr to send sexually explicit letters to his own daughter from his cell.
He died in prison of prostate cancer, aged 63, and after years of hiding her family's devastating secret, Donna decided to bring it out into the open in the hope of making peace with her heritage.
Donna, from West Virginia, says: 'That is the secret I have been keeping my entire life and it has affected every aspect of my life.
"I honestly feel like it is time for me to move past this. It happened when I was 12 and I am now 60 and I am tired of it hanging over my head.
'I honestly think that there are some mental illnesses that you are born with. I honestly do believe that some people are just born evil -and I think my father was one of those people.'
The Dull Truth About Serial Killers
In the years before he was caught, Carr - a TV repairman and car salesman - was constantly on the move, trying to out-run his evil crimes.
For most of Donna's childhood she lived out of her father's car as he moved the family from state to state.
He kept them under tight control, subjecting her mother to horrific abuse and making sure they never stayed in one place long enough to put down roots.
'The memories with my father, there are very few that are good,' she recalls.
'They were mostly bad. He always had an underlying anger about him... when I was 12 my dad was actually caught in the process of a rape and he was arrested, and that was when he decided to tell them that he had murdered four people, raped and murdered them.
'When he had one of his victims he told her he had to stop and find a payphone to call me for my birthday, and I remember that phone call.
I honestly think that there are some mental illnesses that you are born with. I honestly do believe that some people are just born evil - and I think my father was one of those people
Donna Carr
'I've always felt horrible for what he did. It bothered me for a very long time, when this came out I was no more than 13 years old and it had been all over the national news.
'For years I was afraid of sharing my story and that is because my father was still alive in prison. He is dead now.
"One of the reasons this became such a family secret is because every time I shared the information, immediately I no longer mattered. It became about what he had done, and so I stopped talking about it.'
'Long line of bad men'
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Thirty years ago Donna decided to begin searching her family history in the hope she would find someone good from her ancestry to help her put to bed the horrors of her father.
Donna, who is married to husband Jim and has a 27-year-old daughter, Hailey, says: 'Family means everything to me.
"I started doing family history research because I wanted to find somebody in my family who was good, who was a little bit better along the Carr family line, because my father is a serial killer.'
She adds: 'I just think that to know that not everybody in that line of family was bad... that at some point in time there was somebody I could've looked up to.'
But Donna had her work cut out, coming from a "long line of not very good men".
Her grandfather spent time in prison for a grand-theft auto charge.
But her 10-year search also led her to a man she suspected was her great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Carr.
Donna hoped that he would be the kind, family man she longed for in her family's history.
I started doing family history research because I wanted to find somebody in my family who was good, who was a little bit better along the Carr family line, because my father is a serial killer
Donna Carr
But there were two Nicholas Carrs - so a new documentary for Acorn TV, called Relative Secrets with Jane Seymour, sent British archaeologist Natasha Billson to the US to help Donna uncover her family's past.
Natasha explains: 'I think Donna found comfort in looking at the genealogy, trying to find someone who was relatively good in all the other male figures of her family line. She had been doing it for 30 years.
"She had folders and folders of all the information she had collated over that time. She was just trying to find an answer.
"It took her 10 years to find Nicholas Carr, but there were two of them and she couldn't find which one was her ancestor, which is where we came in.
'She was carrying that surname and it was tainted by all these abusive men.'
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Natasha's team of experts uncovered that the Nicholas Carr who matched her family tree had travelled alone from Ireland, where he was born, to New York by ship in 1853, just after the end of the potato famine.
As Donna's DNA revealed she had very few ancestors left, they believed Nicholas fled Ireland after losing his entire family to the famine.
But that wasn't the end of his tragedy, In 1866 he had an altercation with a neighbour that ended in bloodshed and Nicholas Carr spent a year in prison in 1867 for manslaughter.
Donna says: 'Hearing that is a little gut-wrenching. The last thing I wanted to find in my family history was another person that was a murderer.'
Reformed character
But unlike many prisoners at that time, Nicholas didn't attempt a prison escape, even when his young daughter died.
He stayed and served his sentence - and tried to atone for his crime in the most unusual way.
Natasha says: 'He stopped the other prisoners trying to escape. And he made a record of all the prisoners which he gave to the police. Prison records were not well-kept at the time.'
A letter from the local sheriff was published in the local newspaper declaring: 'We are indebted to Mr Nicholas Carr for a list of prisoners confined in the county jail since last 24 October with the nature of their crimes.'
Natasha says: 'Courage and honour. Like Donna, Nicholas was brave enough to confront his past.'
Despite his conviction for manslaughter, he became Detective Carr and opened up his own detective agency, the first of its kind in Wilmington where he lived.
And Natasha's team found more than 100 newspaper articles detailing how Nicholas Carr went on to help people.
Natasha says: 'There are so many - a child went missing, within two weeks he found her. A young lad who wanted to go to Ireland to meet his family. He went to buy a ticket and was scammed of his money.
"What did Nicholas Carr do? He went and found who scammed the young man and got the money back and got him on the ship to go to Ireland. He has gone above and beyond for his community.
'There is respect associated with his name, and we see it built up over a decade. We can see his determination and perseverance for justice, wanting to help his community.'
Robert Frederick Carr III's crimes
ON May 30, 1976, Carr was caught by police while he was raping a hitchhiker at knifepoint.
On his arrest he shocked detectives by confessing to four murders, explaining the crimes in detail.
Tammy Ruth Huntley, 16, vanished while waiting for her mother to pick her up. Carr drove her from Miami to Mississippi. On April 7, 1972, after raping her over the 10 days he kept her captive in the woods, he strangled her, saying, "I killed her because she looked like she was getting despondent.'
In late 1972 Carr visited Florida, and on November 13 that year he picked up 11-year-old friends Todd Payton and Mark Wilson, who were hitchhiking from North Miami Beach.
The inside back doors in the car were disabled and the boot was filled with food, jars of petroleum jelly, and a shovel. Carr raped the boys and strangled Payton. Four days later he strangled Wilson.
In 1973, Carr was convicted of rape in Connecticut and sentenced to four to eight years in prison, but was paroled in 1976, after serving less than three years.
Upon his release in Connecticut, he would kill his fourth and final victim, 21-year-old Rhonda Holloway, before burying her body in a rural area.
Carr confessed that after Tammy Huntley's murder he raped an additional four girls and two boys. Only four were reported, for which he was charged and pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to life in prison for the rapes and murders. He died of prostate cancer in prison in 2006.
David Simmons, the detective who arrested Carr, said: "In my 33-year career in law enforcement, Carr ranks as the most dangerous child sexual predator-murderer I ever investigated."
A tearful Donna says: 'A developing city needed him. Not bad for a hungry boy from Ireland.
"I needed this. I do have a father and what he did is horrific. But I didn't do it.
'I have had to out-run this my entire life, so learning about Nicholas and finding out what kind of person he was is just amazing to me.
"I know he is the good one in the family line. He was a human and he was part of the community and loved.
'I believe I am drawing closer, learning to deal with emotions. Letting it out for the first time in my life has been therapeutic and difficult, but good.'
Natasha adds: 'It is hard enough to read about it, let alone speak to someone who is the daughter of a serial killer, and that being her defining phrase that has always gone with her, she can't escape it.
'I just had so much respect for Donna, that she was able to live through that, overcome it, and also see that it was not normal, and break the cycle, make her own path - and also to tell others that if you have been through trauma, you can get through it.'
Relative Secrets with Jane Seymour is streaming now on Acorn TV.
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