Bringing Adam Home (36 page)

And why was it that Reaves had not told detectives this back in 1983 when they questioned him? Matthews asked. Well, because they never asked, Reaves replied. He and Ottis had their conversation about the killing a few days after the detectives had called about the dates of Toole’s employment, Reaves said, and he’d just never seen the point of calling the cops back on his own.

And besides, there was the matter of the book contract that he and Ottis had worked out, Reaves added.

Really? Matthews replied, blandly, trying to conceal his eagerness. Just what book contract was Reaves talking about?

It took Reaves, who was undergoing treatment for lymph node and prostate cancer, a bit of time to find the document in his files, but finally he came up with a copy for Matthews. Dated October 29, 1983, shortly after Ottis made his first confessions to detectives from four separate jurisdictions (Steve Kendrick of Brevard County, Jay Via from Louisiana, Buddy Terry of Jacksonville, and Jack Hoffman from Hollywood), the agreement gave John Reaves Jr. the exclusive rights to any film and book adaptation of the “life and deeds of Toole.” Ottis and Reaves would split any profits fifty-fifty, the contract stipulated, and even if something happened to Toole, his surviving brothers and sisters would reap the rewards. In return for affixing his signature at the end of the document, Toole received an immediate advance against earnings of $10.

So indeed there had been a book contract, Matthews realized. Reaves was just a businessman who’d recognized a good possibility when he’d seen one.

Matthews would never know why Hoffman was so reluctant to pursue Ottis Toole, but if it truly was his belief that Buddy Terry had struck a book deal with the killer, what a shame it was that he’d never taken the trouble to have a follow-up conversation with John Reaves Jr. It would have dispensed with the chief ostensible reason why Hollywood PD and others in law enforcement and the media were so reluctant to believe Toole’s account of the killing, and it very possibly could have changed the course of the investigation.

On the following day, March 16, 2006, Matthews interviewed Sarah Patterson, the woman who called
America’s Most Wanted
following the 1996 segment on Adam, indentifying herself as Toole’s niece and claiming that he had confessed the killing to her. Patterson, the last person to visit Toole in prison before his death, reiterated her account of her uncle’s confession during that visit. Nothing had changed in the ten years that had passed, she said. There was no doubt in her mind that he had done exactly what he said he did.

She did not mean to be unfaithful to her uncle, who had always been good to her, but Patterson simply felt that after Ottis’s mother died, he lost what tenuous grip he might have had on self-control. “When Grandma Sarah died,” Patterson said, “this whole family went to hell.”

There were some good moments, however. During his stay with her just prior to her wedding years ago, he had offered to bake a cake for the occasion, but then he’d dropped it right before the reception. Uncle Ottis had spent his last $20 to buy her another, she recalled. But right was right, and the parents of that poor boy down in Hollywood deserved to know the truth.

At the end of her interview with Matthews, Patterson said she wanted him to have something her uncle had given her the last day they’d talked. She handed over a sheet of paper and Matthews found himself studying a multicolored drawing signed by Toole.

It was a clown’s face, Patterson said, and a clown’s face should make you happy. But this clown’s face haunted her. Looking at its dark-circled, bulging eyes and its protruding tongue reminded her of what evil her uncle did by taking the life of Adam Walsh. As much as she had once loved her Uncle Ottis, she now wanted only to forget him.

Jacksonville, Florida—March 17, 2006

T
he day after his interview with Sarah Patterson, Matthews interviewed retired Jacksonville sheriff’s detective Jesse “Buddy” Terry. Terry had known Ottis Toole for nearly twenty years prior to his arrest for the murder of George Sonnenberg, Terry told Matthews. A lot of cops knew Ottis Toole—he had been a fringe dweller in Jacksonville from the time he was a kid. As an adult, Toole—openly gay, and prone to dressing in drag—had been picked up several times for prostitution and various petty offenses, and was a suspected arsonist as well. No one, however, made him for a serial killer until James Redwine, the delinquent son of Toole’s landlady, fingered Toole in the arson-murder of George Sonnenberg, and Toole began to talk.

Terry recounted to Matthews the details of the various interviews he had witnessed where Toole confessed to the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, and went back over the visit he’d made to South Florida, accompanying Toole on his tour of the crime scenes. From the outset, Terry said, he was not sure why Detective Hoffman was so reluctant to view Toole’s confession as truthful, for it seemed clear to every other detective who’d been involved that Toole knew things that only Adam’s killer could possibly have known.

As to Hoffman’s accusations that he had cut a book deal with Toole, Terry was comforted to hear what Matthews had discovered about the real partners in that undertaking, but he was still indignant. He felt that he’d been used as a scapegoat in the matter, Terry said—there was so much public outcry at the lack of progress in the case that his own department was happy to let Hoffman’s claims go unopposed. Though an internal affairs investigation eventually cleared Terry of Hoffman’s allegations, and the detective was offered his old job back, the department never issued a formal statement on the matter. To Terry, it seemed that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was perfectly willing to have it seem as if he had manufactured Ottis Toole’s various confessions out of whole cloth.

Yes, practically speaking, the investigation was in the hands of Jack Hoffman and Hollywood PD, but if his own superiors had been more forceful in refuting Hoffman’s trumped-up charges, more attention might have been given to Toole’s statements that clearly proved his involvement in the crime.

To that day, there remained no doubt in Terry’s mind that Toole was responsible. “He even drew us a little stick-figure diagram of the area where the killing took place and how he stood over Adam with his machete to cut his head off,” Terry told Matthews. Hoffman took the diagram away with him, Terry said, but as Matthews discovered, no such drawing had found its way into the case file. Somehow, he was not surprised.

W
hen he had concluded his interview with Detective Terry, Matthews once again pulled out copies of the various interviews that Jack Hoffman had conducted with Toole at the Duval County Jail: the first had taken place just before midnight on Wednesday, October 20, 1983, and during that conversation Toole had described the Cadillac he was driving, the Sears store from which he took Adam, and the force he employed in rendering Adam unconscious. He had used a “bayonet” to decapitate Adam, Toole told Hoffman, and during that interview, he also claimed that Henry Lee Lucas was present during the abduction and killing, and that Lucas had sex with the decapitated head.

In the course of his statement, Toole told Hoffman that he had been “window shopping” in the mall before he made his way to the Sears store and remembered looking at some of the wigs displayed in a nearby shop. Broward County state attorney’s investigator Phil Mundy had later ascertained that there was indeed a wig store operating in the Sears Mall at the time of Adam’s abduction. It might have seemed an inconsequential detail, but Matthews knew there had been no mention of “wig shops” in any of the press coverage of the case. How could Toole—cross-dresser and wig fancier that he was—have known there was a wig shop in that mall unless he’d been there and seen it with his own eyes?

When Hoffman and his partner Hickman left the room following that first interview, Detective Terry had confronted Toole about his contention that Henry Lee Lucas had taken part in the crime. Toole admitted lying about that and asked to speak with Hoffman and Hickman again to clarify the matter. Shortly after midnight, the Hollywood detectives took their second statement from Toole, during which he once again described using “four or five” blows to sever Adam’s head from his body, though in this interview Detective Hoffman began to refer to the weapon as a machete instead of a bayonet. For a second time, then, Matthews noted, Toole had confirmed detailed autopsy findings that had not been made public. And later, when Toole was trying to broker his way out of Raiford, his jailhouse lawyer Gerald Schaefer would tell Broward County investigators that Toole had used
both
a bayonet and a machete in the murder.

Following those statements, on Friday, October 21, Hoffman flew with Toole to South Florida, where Toole guided detectives to the Hollywood Sears store where Adam was taken, and then to the spot near mile marker 126 on Florida’s Turnpike where he said he had decapitated and dismembered Adam. Finally, he identified the canal at mile marker 130 as the spot where he disposed of Adam’s head. At the time, Matthews noted, the only person in the party who knew Toole had ID’d the very place where fishermen had found the severed head was Jack Hoffman.

It could have been the end of the matter then and there, Matthews thought, but it was not to be. On the following Wednesday, October 26, Hoffman returned to Jacksonville to take a fourth statement from Toole, ostensibly to clarify the suspect’s movements from the time he left the hospital in Newport News, Virginia, and his arrival at the Sears store in South Florida shortly thereafter. It was during that fourth statement that Toole broke down and told Hoffman, “I’m not really sure that I really did kill Adam Walsh.”

It occurred to Matthews that Hoffman might well have responded by asking Toole how he could have known, for instance, where Adam’s head was discarded or how many blows it took to sever his head from his body, but he did not. Instead, Hoffman concluded his interview and walked out, leaving Buddy Terry to calm Toole down.

Not fifteen minutes later, Toole asked Hoffman to return so that he could tell the truth. Indeed, he had committed the crime, he assured Hoffman. He’d simply been upset there a few minutes ago: “I couldn’t get my head together,” he said. In this fifth statement, Toole went once more through a detailed account of the crime, including a graphic description of his disposal of Adam’s head. After he’d driven north for five or ten minutes following the dismemberment, Toole said, he pulled off the turnpike again:

“I seen a little . . . a little bridge down there and I walked down there and I throwed it in, throwed it in the water.”

And what happened next? Hoffman wanted to know. He probably meant to ask what Toole did after he threw the head in the water.

But Toole took Hoffman quite literally. The head sank, he said, simply.

There was a pause. “You’re positive about that?” Hoffman asked.

“Positive.” Toole replied. And shortly thereafter, the interview was concluded.

Matthews tossed the transcript down on his desk, shaking his head. That exchange might as well have been typed in red, with double underlining. If a cop needed any further assurance that Toole had done just what he said he’d done, there it was on the page before him.

“
It sank
,” Matthews repeated. Yes, that’s exactly what would have happened. Adam’s head would have hit the water and sunk like a stone. If Toole had been making his story up, he’d have probably said something like, “It went floating off,” or “It went under for a second and then it bobbed right back up.”

Matthews had investigated a murder case once and had known something was wrong from the moment he heard the tape of the 911 call. “Help. I think my husband’s dead. He’s just floating there facedown in the pool.”
Yeah? Not unless he was lying on the bottom for a couple of days first, lady. Dead bodies—and body parts—hit the water and go down like lead. After a couple of days and enough decomposition, gases form in cavities and then gruesome things float to the surface.

N
or were such oversights the only oddities Matthews found during his examination of Hoffman’s records. Along with the failure to include Toole’s drawing in the case file and the failure to request that the Walshes come in to identify the items of clothing found during the search of Toole’s mother’s yard, Matthews discovered another startling inconsistency.

As Matthews worked his way through the case documentation, he eventually came to a mention of the polygraph examination that he had administered to Jimmy Campbell during the early hours of August 8, 1981. Following that examination Matthews had his first conversation with Detective Hoffman regarding his polygraph examination of Campbell. Prior to that conversation, Hoffman had not even known Campbell’s name, but within moments, the Hollywood detective was declaring his virtual certainty that Campbell was the perpetrator. And following the heated exchange with Detective Matthews, Hoffman tracked down and interviewed Campbell as to his alibi for the time of the kidnapping.

All that was clear in Matthews’s memory. However, as he studied Hoffman’s files more carefully, Matthews discovered something dumbfounding: Hoffman had filed a report claiming that he had interviewed Jimmy Campbell on Friday, August 7—
the day before
Matthews had alerted Hoffman to Campbell’s very existence. Nor was there mention of the fact that Matthews had already conducted a polygraph examination that cleared Campbell of any guilty knowledge concerning the crime. The report suggested that Hoffman had tracked down Jimmy Campbell on his own, and
then
ordered Matthews to call Campbell in for a polygraph exam the following week.