Bringing Adam Home (2 page)

Jacksonville County Jail, December 28, 1983

Miami Beach, Florida—July 31, 1981

W
hen veteran Miami Beach PD homicide detective Joe Matthews got the call on Friday from captain of Hollywood detectives Steve Davis, asking that Matthews assist his department in the investigation of the disappearance of six-year-old Adam Walsh, Matthews was more than willing to join in. He was well aware of the anguish that had gripped the entire South Florida community since the boy had vanished earlier in the week. The reward offered for Adam’s safe return had risen to $100,000, the highest ever for a missing child in the United States, and the case, which would be likened to the Lindbergh kidnapping, had attracted the attention of news media, not to mention cops, across the region.

Four days had passed since Adam had gone missing from the Sears store in Hollywood, and though twenty-five officers assigned to the Hollywood PD detective bureau had worked the case full-time, along with assistance from officers from Broward and other South Florida counties, what scant leads they’d uncovered had come to nothing. There was no reason to suspect that Adam had simply run away or wandered off; there were no disaffected family members who might be suspected of abducting him; nor had there been any ransom note or report of anything unusual spotted at the Sears store that day. In short, there had been nothing, and in the days long before AMBER Alerts, children’s faces on milk cartons, and national databases that linked police departments in missing children cases, the Hollywood PD was up against a wall.

Furthermore, there was good reason for Captain Davis to contact Matthews. Matthews, thirty-five, had been employed by the City of Miami Beach since 1967, and had quickly risen through the ranks, promoted after only a year and a half as a patrolman to detective for the Criminal Investigations Division. In 1973, shortly after he married his wife, Ginny, he was promoted to the rank of detective sergeant. At about the same time, Matthews—always skilled at interrogation—had enrolled in a state-certified program for polygraph examiners, figuring the training would make him a better cop and, quite frankly, expand his prospects. He and Ginny had plans to start a family, and making do on a cop’s salary was always a challenge.

By 1976 Matthews had become the chief polygraph examiner for the Miami Beach Police Department and had started his own state-certified school for polygraph examiners—a sideline that became more and more profitable as word of Matthews’s skills as both an investigator and an instructor spread throughout the South Florida law enforcement community. The burly, avuncular Matthews was regarded as a tough but fair cop by his colleagues, and his meticulous style of interviewing subjects prior to the actual polygraph exam itself had proven to be most effective. As he was fond of reminding his students, “How can you know what kind of questions to ask if you don’t know the person you are asking them of?”

Among those many students he had trained over the years was Steve Davis, who had even gone on to intern under Matthews at his Southern Institute of Polygraph. And while Davis considered himself an able polygraph examiner, along with others who performed the same duties within the Hollywood police department—many of them also trained by Matthews—in this case he wanted the best. Matthews was not only a top polygraph examiner, he was a highly regarded cop and investigator.

“We need you up here,” Davis told Matthews, who needed little convincing. When he had heard the initial news bulletins late on the afternoon that Adam had disappeared, Matthews’s initial reaction was one of sadness, mixed with some resignation. He was an experienced police officer, after all, and the world was a hard place. Maybe the Walsh boy had just wandered away and gotten lost. Hopefully, he hadn’t fallen into one of the many canals that stitched the narrow habitable strip of South Florida land between the Everglades and the Atlantic. Hopefully, he would turn up safe somewhere.

But shortly after Matthews got home that evening, his feelings began to change. Ginny met him just inside the door, the kids’ pj’s tucked under her arm, wondering if he’d heard the news. He
had
heard, Matthews assured her.

“My God, Joe,” she told him, then. “I was on my way to that same Sears this afternoon. But Joey got sick, and I had to turn around. It could have happened to us, that’s what I keep thinking.”

Matthews stopped, staring back at her, feeling goose bumps prickle even his thick skin. They lived in the unincorporated area known as Southwest Ranches, then a sparsely populated area of Broward County a few miles from the fringes of real civilization and the Hollywood store where Adam had gone missing. The houses there sat on lots of an acre or more, and some neighbors still kept horses. The urban centers of Fort Lauderdale and Miami were nearby, and if you wanted a dose of the city, you could easily get it. But out here you could pretend you were still part of an old-time Florida, where foxes and raccoons and possums roamed, and if you were talking about predators, you meant the eagles and hawks and ospreys that still cut the skies overhead.

Matthews glanced into the family room, where his brood—four kids in five years—were raising their usual clamor in front of the TV set while Scooby-Doo hightailed it from a make-believe monster. His oldest son Joey was almost exactly the same age as Adam Walsh, born one day before him, on November 13, 1974. After Joey, there had come two more sons, Greg and Michael, and in 1979, just two weeks before Joey’s fifth birthday, their daughter Christina was born. The things you take for granted, he found himself thinking, a wave of dread drifting over him.

It was a feeling that only increased over the course of the week, as reporters continued to chronicle the lack of results in the search for Adam Walsh. By the time Davis called to issue his plea, Matthews was more than primed to help. “Anything I can do,” he assured Davis, who immediately put in a call to Emmit Miller, Miami Beach police chief, asking that his former instructor be loaned to HPD to conduct interviews and polygraph examinations.

“We need all the help we can get,” an anxious Davis told Chief Miller, and the deal was done.

Miami Beach, Florida—August 5, 1981

I
n truth, the Miami Beach that Sergeant Matthews set out from to meet with his Hollywood PD counterparts the following Wednesday bore very little resemblance to the high-octane, pretty-peopled playground of today. Nor had it yet become the drug-fueled, money-laundering center of exotic crime mirrored in
Miami Vice
, where Crockett and Tubbs donned unstructured suits and chased swarthy miscreants in cigarette boats and Ferraris.

There was crime in Miami Beach to be sure, but it was still largely the old-fashioned variety that made its own kind of sense. From the 1930s, mob money had fueled the glittering beachfront resorts where big-name talent performed and movers and shakers cavorted, but much of that was about providing willing customers with what they craved: babes, booze, cards, and dice. Victimless crime, as it used to be called, and hardly a thing that outraged anyone, unless you happened to be standing behind a pulpit on Sunday morning. Besides, by 1981, most of the gambling action had moved on to Las Vegas and other climes, and the Eden Rocs, the Fontainebleaus, and their paler cousins up the Beach were already sliding toward irrelevance.

Residents of Miami Beach, as well as Americans just about anywhere, were aware of a trend toward more disturbing crimes. Truman Capote’s depiction of the senseless 1959 murders of a Kansas farm family in his landmark
In Cold Blood
had opened the eyes of a nation to the possibility that dim-witted losers or small-time grifters might morph into homicidal maniacs at a moment’s notice. Ten years later would come the stunning Manson Family murders in Los Angeles.

In the wake of the Clutter and Tate/LaBianca killings had come a number of ghouls to command the headlines, including David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977, killing six persons and wounding seven more in a series of shootings that he said were ordered by a demon who possessed his neighbor’s dog. Even more prolific was Ted Bundy, the law student turned killer of coeds and young women, at least thirty of them, including half a dozen in North Florida.

Not only had the nature of evil begun to divorce itself from any semblance of rational explanation, it seemed, but subsequent developments would suggest that the forces of good had lost their power to respond. In 1979, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Iran, and the mighty U.S.A., for all its bluster, appeared powerless to do anything about it. A vaunted military rescue operation failed miserably, and only the ouster of yet another president, it seemed, was enough to appease the kidnappers—not until 444 days had passed, and Ronald Reagan had replaced Jimmy Carter, were the last fifty-two hostages released.

There were other signs as well that fault lines had begun to split an orderly world. In December of 1980, apparent lunatic Mark David Chapman pumped four bullets into the back of Beatles singer John Lennon—perhaps the most beloved entertainer of his age—as he strolled arm in arm with Yoko Ono outside his Manhattan apartment. Chapman could offer no reason for the killing beyond the voice inside his head that told him, “Do it, do it, do it.”

The attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life by John Hinckley Jr. on the following March seemed positively rational in comparison—at least Hinckley claimed that he wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. Nor did it compare to the events of May 13, 1981, when would-be Turkish assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II four times as he made an appearance in St. Peter’s Square. Theories abound as to why Ag˘ca did what he did—he has been described as everything from an addled opponent of all things capitalist to an agent of the Russian KGB to a brainwashed operative of a Muslim cabal. But what was certain was that someone had actually fired bullets into the body of the pope of the Catholic Church with the intent to kill.

And yet for all the impact such actions may have had upon the underlying psyche of a civilization, it remained in some ways a doggedly innocent age. When in late 1980 Calvin Klein presented CBS-TV with a jeans ad in which fifteen-year-old actress Brooke Shields dared to murmur, “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” the network indignantly banned the spot.

And there were other concerns to divert the attention of a nation, as well. The first IBM personal computers were rolling off assembly lines, the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer was set for July 29, and thirty million tongues were wagging that Luke and Laura from television’s
General Hospital
would soon follow suit.

So far as any national obsession with crime went, the burning question in most American minds for most of the previous year was, “Who shot J. R.?” The final episode of the highly successful television series
Dallas
had ended that spring with a cliffhanger in which an unknown assailant fired a bullet into the body of overbearing Texas kingpin J. R. Ewing. More viewers than in all previous television history—an estimated 83 million—watched J. R. go down, and, due to an ensuing Hollywood writers’ strike, they would have to wait until late November to learn who pulled the trigger.

As for “ordinary” crime in Miami Beach, there was no shortage of it, not given what had recently taken place in Castro’s Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida. In April of 1980, some 11,000 Cubans seeking to escape the clutches of the Communist regime sought refuge on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, setting up a clamor that resounded in the world press and had the Cuban émigré community in South Florida seething.

Faced with yet another political and public relations nightmare while also loath to do anything that did not somehow redound to his own benefit, Castro hit on a solution that he considered genius. He would open the nearby port of Mariel, he announced, and allow any Cuban Americans with relatives who wanted to leave the island to come down and pick them up. The response of the Cuban community in South Florida was overwhelming. The ensuing Mariel Boatlift put just about every one of the area’s seaworthy craft (and a number that were not) into service shuttling refugees across the narrow Florida Straits.

But the apparent gesture of mercy in fact came with a heavy price. In order to rid himself of undesirables who put a strain on his own social services infrastructure, Castro emptied his jails of criminals of every stripe and his mental institutions of the most deranged, shuffling these individuals into the desperate throngs that filled the docks at Mariel. In the month of May 1980 alone, almost 90,000 Cubans arrived in Miami, many of them without relatives, without education, without prospects . . . and many of them with long histories of violent and criminal acts. It was the beginning of the
Scarface
era in Miami, and the truly despicable of the Marielitos found easy pickings among the frail and the elderly in South Florida, and particularly in Miami Beach, which had long been a haven for retirees.

In fact, the incident that was often talked about when Joe Matthews’s name came up among those in the know was one that had taken place at about this time in South Beach, long before it became a glamorous place.

For far less than the cost of a night’s lodging in the Delano or the Carlyle today, a retiree in 1981 might have been able to lay down a month’s rent for a room in any of the crumbling Art Deco relics that occupied the stretch of Ocean Drive from Fifth to Fifteenth. In those days, the tourists and the players were still staying well northward up the beach, and there were no buxom models or chiseled skateboarders to dodge on South Beach, no plethora of fern-draped sidewalk cafés to choose from, no daisy chain of Maseratis nosed to Lamborghinis nosed to Aston Martins clogging the streets, no $25 valet parking, no pricey boutiques selling furs for pets.