Bringing Adam Home (17 page)

“That’s him,” Heidi said, pointing without hesitation at a photograph of Toole. “There’s that big gap between his two front teeth.”

Following their interview with Heidi, Hoffman and Hickman then interviewed Arlene, who independently selected Toole’s photo out of the array they presented her. She told the detectives that following the confrontation between Toole and her daughter, she’d found a Kmart security guard to walk them to her car, and that the big white car that both she and her daughter had seen the man get out of was still sitting in the lot at the time. Furthermore, she told Hoffman, she had driven straight home and called Hollywood PD to report the incident, though the detective couldn’t locate any record of that call.

Meanwhile, an intensive search for the rest of Adam’s remains was under way at the spot near mile marker 126 on Florida’s Turnpike, where Toole told detectives he’d left the body. Detectives from Hollywood PD had discovered from the lessee of the property, Sergeant James Carter of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, that the guardrail fence that had stopped their progress on the service road the day they’d first visited the area with Toole had been in place for only ten months.

Carter took them down the faint trail on the other side of the fence to show them that there was indeed a fork in the road, one branch that ran about a mile east to a grazing pasture, the other heading south to a shallow valley where Carter maintained a trailer park. At least that much seemed promising. The day he’d been out here with Toole, the man seemed incapable of any reliable memory.

Meantime, Hollywood PD had called in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, an agency far more experienced and better equipped to conduct the kind of search at hand. FDLE technicians used steel probes to examine the ground on the north side of the fork in the road, where Toole had claimed he’d left the body. In turn, the FDLE was assisted by specialists from the Florida Department of Agriculture, who surveyed the entire area with a special ground-penetrating radar unit. By late Wednesday, the team had identified seven locations just beyond the fence and north of the road as having unidentified objects buried beneath the ground. Because it was nearly dark, they decided to wait until morning to begin the actual digging.

Detective Hoffman had flown back to Jacksonville, in search of evidence that would prove Toole had been in South Florida at the time of Adam’s abduction. In discussing his movements in late July of 1981, Toole had told Hoffman that following his release from the hospital in Newport News, he received a check for $78 from the local Salvation Army to pay for a bus ticket back to Jacksonville. Hollywood detectives followed up, speaking to a Mrs. Hall in that Newport News agency. After a bit of rummaging about, Hall confirmed that in fact a check in the amount of $71.93, payable to the Greyhound Bus Corporation, had been given to someone named Ottis Toole by her agency on Friday, July 24, 1981. That was the amount the bus company had quoted for a one-way fare from Newport News to Jacksonville, she said.

When he arrived in Jacksonville, Hoffman met his counterpart Buddy Terry, who took him directly to the Duval County Jail, where Toole was being held. Terry was buoyed by the fact that a local judge had just declared Toole competent to stand trial in the boarding house arson that killed George Sonnenberg, but Hoffman couldn’t have cared less. He couldn’t wait to get to the county lockup, where he took Toole through another recounting of his movements in late July of 1981.

Toole told Hoffman that he’d taken the check from the Newport News Salvation Army and walked directly to the nearby bus station, where he’d had to wait for a couple of hours. He said it was “nighttime” when he finally boarded a bus bound for Jacksonville, and that he was not sure when he arrived back in the North Florida city, though bus schedules suggest it would have had to have been sometime early Saturday morning.

Nor was Toole exactly sure what he’d done the moment he stepped down from the air-conditioned bus into the cloying summer heat. Maybe he’d walked to Reaves Roofing to see if they might need him to work that day, or maybe he went instead to the residence of a Nancy Jackson over on Iona Street, where his wife Rita was staying at the time.

Probably he had gone to work and stayed in Jacksonville “a pretty good while,” he told Hoffman that evening, because he was broke, and his wife was getting tired of staying with this Jackson woman and wanted him to get them a place of their own. Everything was a little hazy in his mind, Toole said, but he did remember that he rented himself and Rita a place in one of Betty Goodyear’s rooming houses on East Second Street, and that is where his brother Howard came to beat him up for stealing his truck.

Hoffman left the matter of the chronology of Toole’s movements aside for a moment and returned to the details of the kidnapping and murder. When Hoffman asked what Toole had done with the machete and the shovel he’d used to bury the body, Toole told Hoffman that he had been wondering about that himself. With his mother’s house all burned up, he couldn’t have hidden those items there, now could he?

So what
had
he done with them? Hoffman wanted to know. And that is when Toole delivered a thunderbolt. “That’s why I’m trying to give you all these statements,” he told Hoffman. “I’m not really sure that I really
did
kill Adam Walsh.”

H
offman took a deep breath. So Toole was now saying that he had stayed in Jacksonville to work after he got back on Saturday, July 25? He was broke and had to make some money before he took his trip to South Florida. Did Toole realize that Adam had been taken from that Sears store in Hollywood on Monday, scarcely two days later?

Toole blinked, apparently trying to rack his thoughts into something resembling logical order. “So the only thing, if I really didn’t kill Adam Walsh, I would have to have been working the Monday, on the twenty-seventh?” he said to Hoffman.

Hoffman leaned back in his chair. “That’s the long and short of it,” he said. “We’ll check the company’s records. If you were working on July twenty-seventh, then everything you’ve told us about the murder is a load of BS.”

At this point, Buddy Terry could hold himself back no longer. Without asking Hoffman, he leaned across the table toward Toole.

“Ottis,” Terry interjected, “are you lying today? Are you sure you didn’t kill Adam Walsh? Now, come on now, let’s don’t do it this way. Look at me. Look at me, Ottis.”

But Toole wouldn’t look at Terry. “My mind ain’t gonna take much more of this shit,” he mumbled; then he began to cry.

“Just tell me the truth,” Terry said quietly, “that’s all I want to know.”

Through his sobs, Toole shook his head. “No, I didn’t kill Adam Walsh.”

Terry ventured a glance at Hoffman, who wore his characteristic scowl of disgust, then turned back to Toole. “Are you sure, or are you not sure?”

Toole was still staring down at the interview table. “I’m sure I didn’t,” he said.

“How are you sure?” Terry persisted. “What makes you sure you didn’t kill Adam Walsh?”

Toole finally looked up at Terry, his voice plaintive. “Because if I was really sure, I could come up with his body,” he said.

Hoffman broke in then, demanding to know where Toole had come up with all the details he’d been giving them about the crime.

“
I made it all up
,” Toole said in an anguished voice, and then he began to cry again.

It was enough for Hoffman. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was 10:30 in the evening. They’d been listening to Toole ramble on for forty-five minutes, and they were just going in circles. He snapped his notebook shut and stood to leave the interview room. Terry, however, stayed behind with Toole.

For the next ten minutes, while Toole wailed in misery, Terry sat patiently, making the occasional reassuring sound, gradually calming the prisoner down. Finally, Toole stopped sobbing and appeared to pull himself together.

“You okay now?” Terry asked. He glanced at his watch. It had been exactly twelve minutes since Hoffman left the room.

Toole nodded. “I need to talk to that guy again,” Toole said. Terry glanced toward the door through which Hoffman had departed.

“Detective Hoffman?”

Toole nodded again.

“And why do you need to talk to him?” Terry inquired, carefully.

“Because I wasn’t telling the truth just now,” Toole said. “About not killing Adam Walsh.”

Terry nodded. “I’ll just go get him, then.”

I
n his
fifth
interview regarding the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, recorded shortly after Terry brought Hoffman back to the interview room that night, Toole spoke calmly and in an assured tone of voice, adding details to his account that he had not included in any of his previous statements. He told of walking directly from the Jacksonville Greyhound station to the yard of the roofing company where he knew the Cadillac he’d given back to Faye McNett was stored. He used the keys he’d kept to get inside the fence and took the car, driving to the burned-out site of his mother’s home. From under what was left of the front porch, he dug up the can he’d used as a bank and pocketed the $300 or so that was there, then went down to the gas station on the corner, filled the tank, and got on I-95, headed south toward Miami.

“I had everything right in the car,” he told Hoffman. “I had all kinds of tools, a shovel, a machete underneath the seat.”

As to his encounter with the child outside the store, Toole was even more forthcoming. “He told me his name was Adam, that his mom was in the store shopping. He told me he liked baseball, that he was playing on some kind of Little League team,” Toole recalled. He liked talking to the boy, and it was then that he decided that he was going to take him and raise him for himself.

As to the moments when his plans began to fall apart, Toole was appallingly graphic. “He was crying more and getting a little bit louder. And so that’s when I really did slap the daylights out of him. I slapped him pretty . . . pretty darn hard. I slapped him dead in the face. Dead across the eyes.”

But it seemed not to be enough. “He kept getting a little bit wilder and I hit him real hard in his stomach and that would take the wind out of him. And I did punch him in the eyes a couple times . . . more . . . more than a couple of times.”

Finally, Toole said, “I really hit him hard in the stomach. I grabbed onto his throat and started choking him, with both hands. He was unconscious. He never . . . never gained consciousness.”

Toole took the detectives back through his account of finding a place to pull off the turnpike, of stopping the Cadillac at the fork he’d mentioned in the service road, and of carrying Adam’s body out. “I pulled the bayonet out from underneath the seat,” he said, repeating the use of that term for the weapon before he began once again to refer to it as a “machete.” And then Toole said, “Well, I done chopped him down. I chopped his head off. I had to come down real hard.”

After it was done, Toole said, “I pulled his shirt off, wrapped his head up in it and put it in the car.” When he finally decided that he should get rid of Adam’s head, he had been driving no more than five or ten minutes. That is when he spotted the canal and the wooden bridge and pulled over and threw the head into the water. He stood and watched to be sure it would sink, and then he turned and got back into the Cadillac. He drove to the next rest plaza, and pulled in beside the entrance to a gas station restroom, where he went in “to clean up and all . . . got all this blood off me.”

He filled his tank then and drove back to Jacksonville to the site of his mother’s burned-out house, where he parked and slept in the car through the night. In the morning, he woke and cleaned up the car and his tools, and that was pretty much that.

Detective Hoffman noted that it was 11:41 p.m. when he asked Toole his final question of the evening. Just why was it that Toole had lied to him earlier about not having killed Adam Walsh? Hoffman wanted to know.

Toole shrugged. “I couldn’t get my head together,” he told the detective, as if that ought to explain everything.

W
hile it was surely a blow to Hoffman that Toole had briefly recanted his confession, a more experienced homicide investigator might have reassured the Hollywood detective that this was not out of the ordinary. According to Toole’s own words, the killing of “that little boy” was the worst thing that he had ever done. And while it is not out of the ordinary for a guilty person to confess in order to find some peace, neither is it unusual for that same person to later recant. The reasons are many: fear of reprisal, a wave of psychological denial that one has actually done the worst thing possible, and on and on. Furthermore, if one were looking for the model of rational behavior, you wouldn’t be searching among convicted killers in the first place. The fact remained that Ottis Toole had confessed to this killing on multiple occasions, citing details that only someone who’d been present could have known.

But Hoffman had not joined the Hollywood Police Department until late in 1975, and he served as a uniform patrolman for nearly three years before he was transferred to the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective. When he took over the investigation of the Adam Walsh case, he had less than three years of time in grade as an investigator, and no experience at all with a case of such magnitude and difficulty. If his reputation as a know-it-all was merited, such an individual would be especially prone to second-guessing himself in his heart of hearts.