Bringing Adam Home (22 page)

On Friday, Hoffman spoke with Yvonne Grant, the manager of the Little Champ where Howard Toole committed his battery on his brother Ottis. That day was August 1, 1981, Grant confirmed, and like her employee Timothy Jones, she remembered that Ottis Toole had in fact been in her store previously, only a day—or at most, two days—prior to the incident.

The entire period from October 1983, when Toole made his first confession to the murder of Adam Walsh, to the following January 1984, during which Toole made at least seven more confessions to the crime, must have seemed very much a time of “one step forward, two steps back” for Detective Hoffman and the Hollywood PD. After two years with essentially nothing, a man already convicted of another senseless murder and implicated in dozens of others around the country had come forward to claim responsibility for the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh.

Yet despite the repeated confessions and the offering up of detail of the crime that it seemed only the killer could have carried with him, Hoffman could find no evidence linking Toole directly to the crime. It must have been a period of intense frustration for Hoffman, and one senses from a pattern of dogged, repetitive inquiries down the same oft-tracked trails a desperation in his actions.

But whatever degree of frustration Hoffman may have felt or whatever adjective one might employ to describe the tenor of his investigation, it seemed that he was weary of whatever Ottis Toole had brought to the table. As evidence, consider what happened next.

Jacksonville, Florida—January 6, 1984

T
hough there is no indication as to who called for the meeting between Detective Jack Hoffman and Ottis Toole on the first Friday of the new year of 1984, there is certainly no reason for Hoffman to have requested it. He already had seven sworn statements from Toole confessing to the killing of Adam Walsh, and, if Hollywood PIO Tony Alderson is to be believed, most everyone at Hollywood PD “believed Toole from the beginning.”

In any case, at 9:56 on Friday morning, January 6, Hoffman, accompanied by fellow Hollywood PD detectives Smith, Naylon, and Banks, entered the interview room at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and once again sat down with Ottis Toole.

“What is the reason that you are giving us this statement regarding Adam Walsh?” Hoffman began.

Toole fumbled a bit, but he seemed clear enough, ultimately. “Ah, I didn’t, ah, I didn’t kill Adam Walsh.”

Hoffman glanced at his fellow officers, then back at Toole. “You didn’t kill Adam Walsh?”

Toole shook his head. “No.”

Hoffman’s next question had an odd ring to it. Instead of asking Toole who or what had motivated him to call them in to say such a thing, Hoffman took more of a petulant tack. “Then why have you stuck with your confession all these months, from the first time I met you?” Hoffman asked. “Can you tell me why you stuck to your story all this time?”

Though there may seem a certain relevance to the question, it also seems that Hoffman had been prepared for what he was going to hear during the interview. In any case, Toole managed an answer for the detective, lame as it may have sounded:

“Ah, I was trying to hang Henry Lucas at first, but I found out he was in jail.”

Another interviewer might have pointed out to Toole that he had known for months that Lucas was in jail, and then gone to work on Toole, trying to determine just who had drawn up the scenario for the present morning’s meeting. But Hoffman did none of those things, and by 10:06, ten minutes after it had begun, the lead detective on the case signaled to his associates that the interview was over.

Hoffman then asked Buddy Terry to hand over the green shorts and yellow rubber zori that had been recovered during the excavation of the property where Toole’s mother’s house had stood, and Terry complied. Hoffman took the shorts and flip-flop back to Hollywood with him that evening, and placed them in the PD evidence room, where—rather than being shown to John and Revé Walsh for purposes of identification—the items inexplicably remained unexamined for more than thirteen years.

For all intents and purposes, Jack Hoffman’s investigation of Ottis Toole as a suspect in the murder of Adam Walsh was over. For whatever reason—his innate distrust of Toole, his inability to let go of Jimmy Campbell as a suspect, or simply a natural inclination to step away from a frustating task—Jack Hoffman had finished with Ottis Toole.

Shortly thereafter, the last vestiges of Detective Hoffman’s investigation of Toole were wrapped up without fanfare: in late January, the Tallahassee lab reported that hairs found in Toole’s Cadillac—vacuumed from the seats, headrest, and carpet—did not belong to Adam Walsh. Subsequently, according to an FDLE memo, all the evidentiary items examined by both the Tallahassee and Jacksonville labs were returned either to the Hollywood PD by registered mail or directly to Detective Terry of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

Ottis Toole’s difficulties with the law were scarcely over, to be sure. Just two weeks later, at the end of a three-day conference in Monroe, Louisiana, hosted by the Ouachita Parish Homicide Task Force, law enforcement officers from nineteen states issued a joint announcement that Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole had been positively linked to 81 murders out of the 150 or more that they claimed to have committed.

During his various interviews with those agents, Toole explained that quite often, after Henry Lee had sex with some of the female victims, he would turn them over to Toole to be killed. Toole, inflamed with anger and jealousy, was only too happy to comply. A number of the victims had suffered extensively, with multiple stab wounds and deep—though not fatal—cuts along the arms, thighs, and lower legs. Several had been disemboweled, and a number had been doused with diesel fuel—stolen by Lucas and Toole during erstwhile stints on roofing crews—then set afire.

In Jacksonville, Buddy Terry had enjoyed far more success with his own investigation of the arson case in which Toole had caused the death of Betty Goodyear’s tenant George Sonnenberg. Toole went to trial on those charges in late April and somewhat predictably testified that he did not in fact set the fire that he had on numerous occasions previously confessed to. The defense introduced Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, a psychiatrist, who testified that Toole was a pyromaniac, his intelligence on the borderline of retardation. He was childlike and impulsive, Dr. Sanchez said, subject to bouts of “overwhelming tension” that had to be relieved. “Setting fires is one of the ways he does it,” Sanchez said, and in such terms it might sound almost rational.

Whatever the jury thought of Dr. Sanchez’s explanations, they seemed far more compelled by the evidence presented. On Friday, May 11, that body took thirty-five minutes to reach its verdict: Ottis Toole was guilty of the arson murder of George Sonnenberg, and the recommended penalty was death.

As he was being led from the courtroom, a furious Toole whirled on Detective Terry, who had supplied much of the evidence during the trial. “Friends don’t testify against friends,” Toole shouted at Terry. “I’m going to fuck you.”

Toole, who had been formally charged with nine other murders in Texas, Colorado, and Louisiana by that time, was sentenced to death for the murder of Sonnenberg and was finally transferred back into the State of Florida prison system at Lake Butler on May 18, 1984. Shortly after his arrival at Lake Butler, Toole granted an interview to
Jacksonville Times-Union
reporter Mickie Valente, during which he repeated his confession to the murder of Adam Walsh.

He took Valente through the details of the abduction, explaining once again that he had done it to “keep him for myself,” and the decapitation—“I put both hands on it [the machete] and I chopped his head off.” And he included the information that he had given Hoffman about what he had actually done with Adam’s body, though he had a grisly coda to add.

He had taken the body back to Jacksonville and stuffed him into a discarded “icebox” on his mother’s property, Toole told Valente. And then he said, “I took that machete and I cut out some of his side and I ate some of it.” And following that, he burned the corpse and tossed the remains into a Jacksonville city dump on the following day. As to the specter of execution for his current conviction, Toole told the reporter that he was not really concerned. “It might not really happen,” he said. “You can always appeal, for years and years.”

Only three days after that sensational story appeared, on May 24, 1984, the FDLE returned the principal piece of evidence in the case—Toole’s Cadillac—to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. There had been no word from Hoffman or the Hollywood PD in the wake of Toole’s sordid public confession, and with no hold placed on the car as evidence, it was subsequently sold by the sheriff’s office to a used car dealer. A St. Augustine resident named Sirree Safwat bought the vehicle, despite his complaint that it lacked carpeting on the floorboards and trunk. Less than a year later, after the car began to exhibit serious engine problems, Safwat said, he sold it to a junk dealer as scrap for $50.

On October 18, 1984, Detective Hoffman granted an interview with the
Florida Today
newspaper in Cocoa. In it, he told the reporter unequivocally that Ottis Toole was no longer considered a suspect in the murder of Adam Walsh. “He was a suspect until we were able to put holes in his story,” Hoffman told a reporter, though he did not say what those “holes” were. “His confession only vaguely matched” the actual details of the killing, Hoffman claimed. An aide to Broward County state attorney Michael Satz said that his office concurred, though he also made it clear that the call was entirely Hoffman’s: “Hollywood police apparently saw fit to say that Toole is no longer suspected and we’re just agreeing,” press aide Dave Casey offered.

When Buddy Terry heard the news, he was not surprised. As far as he could tell, Hoffman had never really taken Toole seriously. He believed that Hoffman had missed an opportunity to nail Toole for the Walsh murder, but at least Toole was in prison, Terry thought, and facing execution. Clearly, he would have to put the rest out of his mind.

Which he might have done, were it not for the astounding news that Terry soon was to receive from his superiors. Hoffman, it seemed, was not quite finished with Ottis Toole and the Adam Walsh case, after all. He had filed a complaint with Duval County authorities that Terry had supplied Toole with case file information that Toole used to concoct his confession. Terry had done this, Hoffman alleged, because the Jacksonville detective and Toole had formed a secret agreement to write a book based on Toole’s sensational confession.

Terry, who hadn’t even heard of Adam Walsh the first time he overheard Toole confessing the crime to Brevard County detective Steve Kendrick, was dumbfounded by Hoffman’s allegations. Still, while the matter was investigated, he was to be transferred out of the robbery and homicide unit where he had served as a detective for more than twelve years, back to the uniform patrol division, assigned to the graveyard for wayward detectives, otherwise known as the Communications Center.

Chapter Five

As Evil Does

Q:
Tell me about some of the weapons you’ve used to kill your victims.

A:
I’ve used jack handles, two by fours, shovels, axes. Run them over with a car. Strangled them with stockings, skip ropes, phone cords. You name it.

Q:
And shot them?

A:
Oh yeah, shot ’em. Sure. In the head. In the chest. In the back. In the stomach.

Q:
And sometimes in the top of the head . . .

A:
. . . sometimes, if somebody’s been going down on you. You have to be careful there, though.

Q:
And this is with a handgun?

A:
Usually. A .22, a .25, a .357 magnum. But sometimes a shotgun. And I’ve used a rifle, too.

Q:
Is there any weapon you never used?

A:
I never used an ice pick. That would have been good, though. I wish I would have used an ice pick, just once.

—Ottis Toole to Texas Rangers,

March 24, 1984

Hollywood, Florida—November 14, 1984

G
iven the train wreck that the investigation of Ottis Toole had become, the November Wednesday that would have marked the celebration of Adam Walsh’s tenth birthday instead seemed to serve as a milestone of frustration. A year or so before, it appeared that his killer had been found, and while it would not bring their son back, John and Revé Walsh might have found a certain kind of relief had Toole been charged and tried. At the very least, some sense of justice might have prevailed, some semblance of the possibility of order restored to their world.

The Walshes were certainly not the first parents to be visited by such predation and calamity. As they soon found out in the aftermath of their loss, thousands of families around the country had suffered similar tragedies and had been similarly frustrated in their ability to find help from local law enforcement agencies and the justice system. Children went off to corner stores, or out in backyards to play, and they simply never came back. Or sometimes were brought back in body bags.