Bringing Adam Home (11 page)

Almost certainly, Reisner said, this individual had abducted or attempted to abduct other children in the past. And Reisner was equally certain that he had sexually assaulted other children and had very likely been arrested and imprisoned for such acts. Perhaps most distressing was one of Reisner’s final observations, that the decapitation and disposal of the head indicated that there had been sexual contact with the boy—the perpetrator ridding himself of the principal locus of the shame, as it were.

While all this might have proven of interest to investigators, there was little that matched up with any of the individuals in the known orbit of the Walsh family’s lives. Certainly, Reisner’s profile dovetailed with Lieutenant Hynd’s statement that only a psychopath could have done what was done to Adam, but as to the identity of that individual or suggestions as to how he might be found, there was not much to go on.

On Tuesday, August 18, lead detective Hoffman called Revé Walsh to Hollywood PD headquarters, where he and partner Hickman led her through a painstaking re-creation of her activities on the day that Adam disappeared. Her account was virtually identical to that which she had provided before, however, leaving the detectives stymied. By August 27, the baffled department issued a statement to the press that the investigation had been scaled back to three detectives. As Detective Hoffman explained, “It can’t go on forever. The manpower is needed in other places.”

On August 28, Hoffman met with Adam Walsh’s first-grade teacher, Christine Bernard, who assured the detective that Adam was a good student, but a shy and somewhat timid boy who had never wandered off during recess or school outings. Following that interview, Hoffman returned to the Sears store to interview the clerk who had waited on Revé Walsh the day of Adam’s disappearance. The clerk recalled Revé, obviously, and remembered her returning in distress to the lamp department looking for Adam, but she had nothing useful to add. On the following day, a UP story carried a statement that seemed provocative enough: an investigator with the Broward County medical examiner’s office told reporters that they knew what kind of weapon had been used to decapitate Adam Walsh but were keeping the information secret so that they could discount the claims of “wackos who want to claim responsibility.”

There appeared to be no surplus of such wackos lining up, however. Hollywood PD public information officer Fred Barbetta admitted to reporters that the investigation seemed to have hit a dead end. “We have nothing to go on,” he said. “Nothing whatsoever.”

The only solid lead that had come their way—the supposed sighting of Adam being dragged into a blue Ford van—had resulted in nothing but frustration for officers and area drivers alike. Police had checked a list of nearly seven thousand such vehicles sold in South Florida over the past three years, Barbetta said, but nothing had come of it. Though twenty-five detectives had originally been assigned to the case, only Hoffman and Hickman now remained, and scarcely a month had gone by.

On September 2, Detective Hoffman for the first time interviewed Sears security guard Kathy Shaffer, the first person at the store to whom Revé had gone for help when she discovered Adam missing. Though Shaffer had told Revé that she had not seen her son that day, her story to Detective Hoffman was somewhat different. She said that in fact she had witnessed a bit of a disturbance at the Atari PlayStation display at around 12:30 on the day of the disappearance. Two white male children and two black male children appeared to be arguing over the game, and as she approached them to see what was going on, one of the black kids slapped one of the white kids, a child whom she judged to be ten or so. One of the black children spoke impertinently to Shaffer, she said, and she told them all to leave the store.

The two black children left via the south doors, Shaffer told Hoffman, and the two white children left through the north doors. When the detective asked her to describe the second white child, Shaffer said that he was probably about seven, and had been wearing green shorts and a white shirt. At that point, Hoffman produced several photographs of Adam and asked if that was the boy she was talking about. Shaffer studied the photographs and then glanced up at Hoffman. She simply was not sure, she told him, and with that, Hoffman concluded their interview.

Two days later, on September 4, Hoffman’s partner Hickman reinterviewed Marilyn Pottenberg, mother of the young boy who reported seeing Adam being dragged into “a blue van.” With Mrs. Pottenberg and her son Timothy on that day was Timothy’s grandmother Carolyn Hudson, and the two women pieced together the details of their shopping trip to Sears on the day of the abduction. They had arrived at the store about 11:45 a.m., they recalled, and left to have lunch at about 12:35 p.m. As they were leaving the store, Hudson recalls, they heard the page for a missing child. They all had lunch together, and at about 1:25, nearly an hour later, as they were walking through the parking lot toward their car, Timothy witnessed the incident with “the blue van.”

If Hickman sighed as he recorded the details given him by Mrs. Pottenberg and her mother, he doesn’t say so in his notes. But the information he’d just been given was the death knell for the “blue van” theory. Who knows what Timothy Pottenberg had actually seen that day? But it certainly wasn’t Adam Walsh being dragged into a van, not almost an hour after his mother had begun her frantic search for him. “It appears that the incident that Timothy Pottenberg witnessed is unrelated to the Adam Walsh abduction,” Hickman concluded.

With that lead gone, Hollywood PD was reduced to grasping at straws. Joe Matthews was asked to schedule a polygraph examination with Revé Walsh, to confirm that her unwavering account of Adam’s disappearance could be trusted, and Matthews arranged it for Thursday, September 10, at police headquarters.

A
t about nine on the morning of September 10, as Matthews traveled down Flamingo Road in western Broward County, on his way to meet with Revé, he found himself stuck behind a sedan traveling maybe fifteen miles an hour. Matthews pulled into the opposite lane to pass, but realized that the wise-guy driver on his right had suddenly sped up. Worse yet, a dump truck was now approaching from the opposite direction, and the driver he was trying to pass showed no signs of letting him by. Trapped now, Matthews floored his Plymouth and managed to squeeze past, only an instant before the roaring dump truck could pulverize him.

A bullet dodged, he was thinking, but then the real nightmare began.

What happened next was a blur. His wheels dropped off the pavement, digging into the gravel shoulder, and in the next instant the Plymouth was airborne. To anyone watching, it would have seemed like a spectacular scene from a car chase in an action film. The Plymouth soared out over the broad drainage canal that paralleled the highway, twisted over, then pancaked top-down onto the water’s surface.

The impact rendered Matthews momentarily unconscious. When he came to, he found himself under several feet of water, still behind the wheel, the Plymouth sinking steadily toward the canal’s muddy bottom. People and their vehicles ended up in these canals on an almost daily basis, and helicopter shots of bystanders gaping as cars and vans—often bearing their unfortunate passengers—were winched out were a staple of South Florida television news. Matthews had seen it a hundred times and had always marveled at the spectacular misfortune of the victims.

He’d rather go head-on into a bridge piling than sink to a watery grave, but somehow he had ended up in just that place, and goddamn Napoleon Bonaparte Broward anyway for thinking he had the right to drain the Everglades just so he could line his pockets. . . .

It’s the sort of thinking that passes in a millisecond during a crash. In the next moment, Matthews had already forgotten about bad luck and greed, one hand groping for the door lever, the other flailing about for the precious possession beside him. He snatched his polygraph instrument by its case handle, managed to wrench his door open, then kicked himself free of the sinking car and burst to the surface of the murky water, gasping. Already, there was a highway patrolman clambering down the steep bank to help him out.

The cop took the case and helped Matthews up the rocky, debris-laden slope. At the top he regarded Matthews for a moment, then reached into the trunk of his cruiser and handed him a towel. “You better hold this on your head until the ambulance gets here,” he said.

Matthews stared back at the cop, uncomprehending. “Why would I need to do that?”

“Just hold it right here,” the cop said, pressing the towel to Matthews’s head.

At the hospital, several hundred stitches to his laid-open skull later, Matthews gradually came to realize how badly he’d been hurt. Furthermore, he recalled, he’d been on his way to an important appointment, and managed to convince his doctors that he had to make a phone call. Only after he’d spoken to someone at Hollywood PD, then managed to reach his brother to tell him what had happened, did he give in to the doctors and the sedatives.

When he woke the next day, there was something nagging at Matthews, but he was still groggy from the concussion he’d suffered, and a severely dislocated shoulder was causing him immense pain. He simply couldn’t put his finger on what was gnawing at him.

Not until he was released and on his way home several days later did he remember once again the polygraph exam that he had scheduled with Revé Walsh. The moment he made his way through the door of his house, he called Jack Hoffman at Hollywood PD. “I’m sorry about the exam, but I had a pretty bad accident—,” Matthews began, but Hoffman cut him off.

“Yeah, we heard,” the detective said. “Don’t worry. We got somebody else to do it.”

“Really?” Matthews said, taken aback. Matthews wasn’t even sure how Hoffman knew he’d been hurt, for he had no recollection of making the call to Hollywood PD from the hospital. And while he couldn’t blame Hoffman for going ahead without him, it was still a bit disconcerting—it would have been better for consistency’s sake to have the same person conducting all the polygraph exams. What Hoffman said next, however, took him completely by surprise.

“Fact is, I’m glad you called,” Hoffman continued. “I wanted to let you know we won’t be needing you any longer.”

Matthews felt his jaw sag as Hoffman continued. The investigation was winding down, the detective explained. If the need for any other testing arose, the department could take care of it themselves. Matthews could go on back to Miami Beach.

Matthews stared at the phone, as the connection broke, incensed at Hoffman and dismayed at the prospects for the investigation. From the beginning, he had pegged Hoffman as a turf-protecting blowhard if there ever was one, but he had dealt with those types before. What was truly disheartening was the response he’d received from Lieutenant Hynds when he’d tried to point out how the investigation seemed to be going awry.

From the moment that Hynds had put him off, he’d sensed that he was battling a prevailing current of face-saving at Hollywood PD, but what could he do besides perform the job he’d been called in for and hope that his results would have some effect? And, he supposed, his efforts had achieved something. If not for his work, it was possible that a hapless Jimmy Campbell could be in custody right now, desperately trying to proclaim his innocence.

There was plenty on his own plate. He had a full-time job in Miami Beach, and he was being called in as an outside polygraph expert on a regular basis by other agencies as well, including Canada’s Crown Counsel, the equivalent to the office of the U.S. attorney general. Also, there was his thriving technical school, the Southern Institute of Polygraph, to manage. In the end, Matthews could only wish Hollywood PD well, offer his help on the Walsh case at any time, and, for the time being, anyway, go back to work.

A
s Hoffman had suggested to Matthews, it seemed the beginning of the end of any serious search for Adam’s killer at Hollywood PD. When Revé Walsh showed up for her scheduled examination with Matthews, she was questioned briefly about her activities on the day that Adam was taken. She was told that her polygraph would have to be rescheduled, and on the following Monday, September 14, an examiner from the Broward County State Attorney’s Office conducted the exam. Once again, Revé recounted the events of the day that her son disappeared, and the examiner confirmed that she had passed—there were no signs of deception anywhere in her account.

A few days later, detectives returned to the Sears store to reinterview the employees who had been working the day of Adam’s kidnapping, but the results were fruitless. On September 22, there was a brief flurry of excitement when a St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department detective phoned Hoffman to relay a tip that a Fort Pierce woman named Mary Green was involved in the kidnapping of Adam Walsh. According to the tipster, Green had knowledge as to who had actually killed the boy.

It took Hoffman and Hickman a few days, but on September 30, the two traveled to Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County, just south of the spot where Adam’s severed head was pulled from the canal. They spoke with St. Lucie County detectives and then interviewed Mary Green and her live-in lover J. A. Childress, whom local authorities identified as the source of the tip.

Green admitted to the detectives that she was a chronic alcoholic—in fact she had spent a couple of nights in the Fort Pierce detox center shortly before the time of Adam’s disappearance. Like everyone else, she had heard all about the crime, but she certainly had no involvement in the matter, nor did she know anyone who did. She explained to Hoffman and Hickman that Childress, the man who had turned her in, was also a drunk and prone to all sorts of deception. He was upset with her at the time, and simply decided to tell people she’d been involved in the kidnapping.