Bringing Adam Home (12 page)

Though by now it seemed a waste of time, Hoffman and Hickman arranged for the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department to administer a polygraph examination to Green. When the examiner was finished, what already seemed apparent to the detectives was confirmed. Mary Green might be a hapless loser, but she had nothing to do with the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh.

It was as if the trip to St. Lucie County had sapped the last energies of the Hollywood PD. An internal supplemental report dated October 5, 1981, gave a terse, if somewhat inelegant, statement of the obvious: “As of this date this agency has not received any substantial leads that would implicate anyone to the crime.”

Nine days later Detectives Hoffman and Hickman, acting on a tip, interviewed a man named Charles Elchwartzle, the owner of a blue Ford van, but, as it turned out, being in possession of such a vehicle in South Florida at the time was Elchwartzle’s only misstep. On October 22, Hoffman and Hickman called in Jimmy Campbell to cover “areas possibly not covered in the previous interview . . . conducted by Mr. Joe Matthews,” but that came to nothing as well. For all intents and purposes, and less than two months after the incident, the active investigation of the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh was at a standstill.

Jacksonville, Florida—July 28, 1981

W
hen Ottis Toole returned to Jacksonville following his late July 1981 foray into South Florida, his life resumed without a hitch. He returned the Cadillac he had “borrowed” from the Reaves Roofing compound without anyone having noticed it missing. And though his brother Howard and his sister-in-law Georgia had tried to file charges against Ottis for the theft of their pickup truck that was abandoned in Delaware, the Florida state attorney’s office found the case too shaky to prosecute.

With his mother’s house a charred ruin, Toole needed a new place to live, so he rented a room in a blue-collar rooming house owned by a woman named Betty Goodyear. Toole then reconnected with his erstwhile wife, Rita, and convinced her to move in with him on July 31.

At about 4:00 p.m. the following day, Rita—twenty-four years Toole’s senior—glanced out the window of their room to see a familiar-looking man striding up the sidewalk. “Hey, looks like your brother Howard’s here,” Rita said, turning. But Ottis was in full flight out the back door.

Howard was about to knock, but when he heard the back door bang, he realized it would be a waste of time. He vaulted off the porch and lit out after Ottis, who was running down Market Street for all he was worth. Ottis made it as far as the entrance to a Little Champ convenience store on the corner before his brother caught up with him.

“Someone’s going to shoot me,” Ottis cried to the clerk as he burst through the door.

“Go ahead and call the cops,” Howard added as he ran in on Ottis’s heels. He snatched Ottis by the collar and began slapping him. “This son of a bitch stole my truck.”

The encounter might have given Howard Toole some minor satisfaction, but as the cops who arrived to quell the disturbance soon pointed out, there were no grounds upon which they could take Ottis into custody. For his part, Ottis had no interest in pressing assault charges against his brother, and the matter ended for the time being with Howard skulking off and Ottis figuring he’d taken his rightful lumps.

In the days that followed, Toole got by doing yard work for Goodyear at her various properties and helped out as best he could in her office, though the fact that he could not read well limited his usefulness there. He also found employment at the modest parish of the Church of God on Ramona Boulevard, where pastor Cecil Wiggins paid him $17.50 for lawn maintenance one day late in August and another $22.75 on the next.

In the meantime, Betty Goodyear’s son James Redwine had returned home from some kicking around in Miami of his own, and he and Ottis were soon hanging out together, sometimes cruising the streets in an older-model Cadillac. One evening Toole showed Redwine a .22-caliber pistol that he pulled from under the seat of the Caddy. He told Redwine he was thinking of using the pistol to kill a couple of drifters who had been hanging around a local park. Redwine, who had also seen a large wooden-handled knife under the seat of the Caddy, didn’t know if Ottis was serious about killing anyone, but he did see him fire a shot over the head of one of Goodyear’s tenants shortly thereafter.

“What was that all about?” Redwine asked Toole as the tenant hightailed it in terror down the street.

“The guy just pissed me off,” Ottis said.

Early in October, with the car theft charges dropped, Ottis Toole’s former lover Henry Lee Lucas was finally released by Pikeville, Maryland, authorities. Lucas made his way back to Jacksonville, and before long found Ottis and was able to explain where he’d been all this time. Lucas had not abandoned Ottis for his niece Frieda. The separation was just bad luck, and once he’d been thrown in jail, there was no way for him to get in touch.

As to Frieda and nephew Frank, they were now in foster care somewhere in Polk County, down by Tampa. The children’s mother had died of a drug overdose that might have been a suicide, and they’d spent a few weeks in the custody of their stepfather, A. J. Carr, until Frieda told Child Protective Services that Carr was physically abusing her. When a polygraph exam confirmed Frieda’s story, Health Rehabilitation Services had stepped in to take custody of the children. All grim news by most standards, but in the world of Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas, it was just the ordinary stuff of life.

Ottis was happy to know that Lucas had not forsaken him, of course. Things had not worked out so well between him and Rita, and before long he and Lucas had moved into another of Betty Goodyear’s rooming houses. He and Lucas worked together for Reaves Roofing for one day right before Christmas, and then Ottis managed to get Goodyear to hire Lucas as a fellow maintenance worker. Indeed, five months after they’d split up and Toole had gone to South Florida on his little fling, things seemed to be working out for the two of them.

There was a troubling incident at one of Goodyear’s properties right after the New Year, however. At about ten o’clock on the night of January 4, 1982, a fire broke out in one of the bedrooms of a house she owned at 117 East Second Street, near downtown Jacksonville. When firefighters responded, they found sixty-five-year-old George Sonnenberg unconscious in the room next to the vacant quarters where the fire had broken out, second- and third-degree burns covering most of his body. Another tenant had suffered burns to his hands while trying to escape through a blazing door, and a third had broken his leg jumping from an upstairs window. Sonnenberg lingered in the hospital for a week before dying on January 11. Fire marshals ruled it an accident.

About the same time, James Redwine, Betty Goodyear’s son, overheard Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas cooking up a plan that seemed sure to land them in serious trouble. They’d discovered the whereabouts of “Becky” Powell, now living with foster parents in Auburndale, a small town about halfway between Tampa and Orlando, two or three hours from where they sat. “Me and Henry Lee’ll go on down to Auburndale,” Ottis explained to Redwine, “and we’ll bring Becky on back.”

But what if the foster parents she was living with objected? Redwine wondered.

Toole smiled at Henry Lee before he answered. “What do you think, you dumbass? Anyone tries to stop us, we’ll just kill ’em.”

Redwine tried to talk the pair out of the plan, but they were resolute. As Toole explained to Redwine, he and Henry Lee had pulled off far more difficult things in the past. A few days later, as they were about to get in Ottis’s car and head out for Auburndale, the front door of their rooming house on East Seventh Street flew open, and Redwine heard a female voice shouting, “Uncle Ottis! Henry Lee!”

It was fourteen-year-old Frieda “Becky” Powell with her arms outstretched, overjoyed to see Uncle Ottis and Henry Lee again.

To Redwine it seemed a miracle, but authorities in Auburndale were well aware of Frieda’s history with Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas, and it was not long before investigators were nosing around Betty Goodyear’s office, wondering if anyone had seen a young woman matching Frieda’s description.

If Toole wasn’t sure what to do next, Frieda and Henry Lee had no difficulty making their decision. According to Redwine the pair had been gone from Jacksonville for two days before Toole realized that they had skipped out on him once again.

Toole, whose only real loves in life were his mother, his niece, and Henry Lee, took it hard. He paced his room for days, muttering to himself, and then, after buying a white-on-white two-door Cadillac from Spencer’s Motors in Jacksonville, he disappeared.

Toole spent some time out west, made a few brief acquaintances in Louisiana, then finally turned up again in Jacksonville, where he was arrested on September 22, 1982, for driving without a valid driver’s license. On November 1, he was arrested again by sheriff’s deputies on the same charge, giving his address as 217 East Third Street and the name of his employer as Betty Goodyear.

Toole was through with wandering. He rekindled his relationship with Goodyear’s son James Redwine and picked up his threadbare existence in Jacksonville where he’d left it a year before, though still without Lucas and “Becky” at his side. It is hard to say how long he might have carried on as it appeared he always had, just one more figure on the margins of life, managing somehow to stay afloat.

But the truth beneath the surface of Toole’s dismal existence was far darker than anyone might have suspected.
Rotten teeth, unkempt hair, rank breath, and filthy clothes
—check!
Borderline intelligence, a bad attitude, poor coping skills
—on the mark.
Friends
—none.
Acquaintances
—few.
Skills
—nonexistent.
Prospects
—nil.

All dismal enough, perhaps, but what Toole had hiding in the wings made those attributes seem the stuff of a Disney hero in comparison. And if he hadn’t finally had a little truly bad luck, the horror-show side of Ottis Toole might never have been known.

Jacksonville, Florida—May 31, 1983

U
ntil the passage of the Uniform Holidays Bill in 1968, Memorial Day was always celebrated on May 30, a time set aside to honor U.S. men and women who died while engaged in military service. As John Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, wrote in his 1868 general order, the purpose of “Decoration Day,” as it was originally known, was to fly the flag and strew graves with garlands in proud memory of all those heroes who had “made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe.”

Over time, Memorial Day has become a somewhat trivialized occasion, its luster dimmed by a series of unpopular wars over the past half century and its date now shifting year by year to coincide with the last Monday in May. Perhaps a weary workforce and school population now welcome a three-day weekend as an unofficial kickoff to the summer season, but surely the holiday achieves little to instill the sense of honor, duty, and sacrifice it was designed for.

Certainly there was no such apparent effect on James Redwine, Ottis Toole’s sometime companion, and pal Charles Hammock, two juveniles picked up by police the afternoon following the holiday’s observance in Jacksonville in 1983. That morning, Redwine and Hammock had expressed their own holiday passions by setting fire to an unoccupied house at 1203 Hubbard Street.

Tipped off by an informant, police tracked down the pair, who quickly admitted setting fire to both the Hubbard Street house and another unoccupied house in the same neighborhood of Springfield a week earlier. However, Redwine told officers, they had help in these arsons. A man named Ottis Toole, an erstwhile boarder in his mother’s various rooming houses, had convinced them that burning down houses could be great fun, and they had gone along.

Accordingly, officers set out looking for Toole, who offered no resistance when they finally picked him up the following Monday, June 6. In fact, Toole not only confessed to the two arsons in question but told police that he had set dozens of fires in Jacksonville over the past twenty years, most of them in vacant buildings. He rode along with officers through a series of downtrodden neighborhoods, identifying thirty-six such sites where arson had been suspected, including his mother’s house at 708 Day Street. He’d been setting fires since he was nine, he told police, doing it “to keep blacks out of the neighborhood” and also because it turned him on sexually.

During a court-ordered psychological examination, Toole told Dr. Ernest Miller that setting fires allowed him to “fantasize sex,” and that he would characteristically watch the blazes from a distance and masturbate. He told the doctor that he was a homosexual, but claimed that while he enjoyed the company of children, he had never consummated a sexual relationship with a child. He also told the doctor that he’d been suffering seizures from the time in his childhood when he’d been struck in the head with a rock. He’d been taking Dilantin for years, he said, and was accustomed to drinking a little whiskey each night—“about half a pint”—plus several six-packs.

He told Miller that he had been suffering from depression for more than two years since the death of his mother and admitted that the overdose of pills that had landed him in the hospital in Newport News was in fact a suicide attempt. “At times he fancies he hears voices saying he should kill himself and ‘go to rest,’ ” Miller wrote, adding that Toole was unclear as to whether the voices came from his own mind or from the devil.