Bringing Adam Home (13 page)

While Toole told the doctor that he thought his memory was “poor” and that he “had trouble thinking,” Miller adjudged that his basic cognitive functions were intact and that he exhibited only minor memory problems related to immediate recall. “Can tell time and is of average native intelligence,” Miller said. “Is able to register, store, and retrieve data fairly well.”

The doctor’s clinical impression was that Toole exhibited borderline character disorder and that while he was a “severely disturbed man,” he was nonetheless competent to stand trial. Meanwhile, Miller recommended that Toole receive treatment for “psychosexual conflicts, pyromania and alcoholism-drug dependency.”

While Toole received no formal treatment for his problems, he was awarded a speedy trial where he was summarily convicted of the two May arsons he confessed to in his Springfield neighborhood. He received a fifteen-year sentence for one fire and a five-year sentence for the second, with the terms to run consecutively. On Thursday, August 11, 1983, he was received at the Union Correctional Institution at Raiford, Florida. At the age of thirty-six, and with a lifetime of bad news behind him, the tide of Ottis Toole’s fortunes had finally begun to turn.

A
t the same time that Toole arrived at Raiford, his former partner Henry Lee Lucas was facing serious difficulties of his own in Texas, where he and Becky Powell had gone when they’d fled Jacksonville back in 1982. Lucas had been arrested in Stoneberg, a hamlet northwest of Fort Worth, near the Oklahoma border, on June 11, 1983, suspected in the murder of a woman named Catherine Powell. Powell had been discovered in her rural home outside Tyler, Texas, the previous summer, sexually abused and shot once in the head. In addition, Lucas had been questioned by Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, detective Jay Via about a series of unsolved murders in the county seat of Monroe and elsewhere in the area.

Finally, Lucas began to crack. He admitted that he had killed Catherine Powell the previous August, and he also said that he had killed Ottis Toole’s niece Becky, then fifteen, in Denton, Texas, a few days later. Lucas would eventually claim responsibility for more than two hundred murders, though he also told police that he had been assisted in several of the crimes by a man from Jacksonville, Florida, named Ottis Toole. While authorities were uncertain as to just how much credit to give these claims, police with dead-end cases from around the South were soon on their way to Texas to speak with Lucas.

One such detective was Buddy Terry, from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide unit. On Thursday, August 11, during an interview with Terry, Henry Lee Lucas confessed to the murder of eight women in Jacksonville between 1979 and 1981. Lucas also recounted another crime to Terry, one that involved Ottis Toole.

He’d been with Toole when he set fire to one of Betty Goodyear’s rooming houses, Lucas told Terry. Toole was upset with several of the men who lived in that particular house because they would not respond to his sexual advances, Lucas said. While Lucas watched, Toole took a can of gasoline from the trunk of his car, made his way into a vacant back bedroom of the house, doused the room with the fuel, and lit it with a match.

Lucas told Terry that the two of them drove around the block several times, watching as the flames built, firemen responded, and residents leaped from windows. Lucas said that they also watched as EMS technicians dragged resident George Sonnenberg to the front porch and worked desperately to revive him. From Toole’s point of view, Lucas assured Terry, things could simply not have turned out better.

Jacksonville, Florida—August 30, 1983

F
ollowing his interview with Henry Lee Lucas in Texas, Detective Terry returned to Jacksonville and made arrangements with Florida prison authorities to interview Ottis Toole at Raiford. Understandably, Terry was eager to learn whether Toole had in fact been complicit in the various crimes as Lucas claimed, or whether the convicted arsonist might simply be a convenient scapegoat for a guilty man to use in easing his own burden.

On August 30, 1983, Terry met with Toole at the prison’s Reception and Medical Center. There, Toole confirmed that he had known Lucas since 1979 and that he had in fact been in love with him. He and Lucas had shared a homosexual relationship, Toole said, and the two of them had traveled together to several parts of the country.

As to the rooming house fire, Toole told Detective Terry that not everything that Lucas had said was true. For instance, Toole wanted Terry to know that he had not doused that vacant bedroom with gasoline before setting it ablaze . . . given his experience in starting fires, he explained, there was no need for such trouble. He had set the fire, sure, but to get it going he had simply torn the cover off a foam mattress and set that highly flammable substance ablaze with a match. And while he was aware that several men lived in the building, he had no idea that anyone, including the unfortunate George Sonnenberg, was home at the time. It was simply Sonnenberg’s tough luck.

So if Toole hadn’t set out with the intention of harming Sonnenberg, Terry wondered, then why had he set the fire in the first place? The question brought a guileless smile to Toole’s face. Setting fires just made him feel good, he told Terry. He guessed he’d set a couple hundred of them around Jacksonville over the past few years.

Detective Terry nodded, finished up his notes, and gave Toole a smile of his own. “You’re under arrest for arson—,” he began, but Toole simply shrugged.

“I’m already here for that,” he said, indicating their spartan surroundings.

“—and for the murder of George Sonnenberg,” Terry concluded. The fool’s luck that Ottis Toole had enjoyed all his life had finally run its course.

N
ine days later, on Thursday, September 8, 1983, Toole was indicted in Jacksonville on charges of murder and arson, and on September 13 he was transferred from Raiford to the Duval County Jail to await trial. It is hard to know if Toole felt anything similar to the apprehension or fear that most individuals might experience at such heightening of circumstance, but judging from the conversations he had with some of his cellmates and other detectives drawn to interview him in his new quarters, it does not seem that he was guarded or fearful.

He seemed happy to discover that among his fellow prisoners in the Duval County lockup were two old friends from his days in the early 1980s at Reaves Roofing, Bobby Lee Jones and James Collins, a man who also used the alias of Julius Wilkes. Toole chatted freely with Jones and Collins/Wilkes about the circumstances that had finally led him to jail, and when a Brevard County detective named Steve Kendrick showed up to interview him about an unsolved homicide that had taken place in Cocoa Beach, some two and a half hours to the south, Toole was even more forthcoming.

During the interview, which took place on Monday, October 10, 1983, Toole readily confessed to Kendrick that he had probably committed or taken part in at least sixty-five murders, though he didn’t have any recollection of the Cocoa Beach case that Kendrick had come to talk about. After a half hour or so, Kendrick sensed that he was getting nothing useful regarding his own case out of Toole and turned his tape recorder off. As the detective was packing up to leave the interview room, some switch seemed to flip inside the man who had just a few moments before admitted to killing scores of people.

According to Kendrick, Toole suddenly straightened in his chair and looked up at him intently. “You’re from Fort Lauderdale, right?”

“No.” Kendrick shook his head. It occurred to him that Toole had confused Brevard County with Broward County, two hours farther south along the coast. But being an able cop, Kendrick was not about to let it drop. “Were you expecting someone from Fort Lauderdale?” he asked Toole.

Toole nodded.

“You get into something in Fort Lauderdale?” the detective prompted.

“Yeah, I did,” Toole said.

Given that the man in front of him had readily identified himself as a serial killer, Kendrick might not have thought too much of the exchange, were it not for the sudden shift in Toole’s behavior. He was gripping the sides of his chair tightly now, shifting uneasily from side to side, his gaze dropping abruptly from Kendrick’s to the floor and back again. As his case notes make clear, Kendrick sensed that he had stumbled onto something big: “Reporting agent felt that for a man to admit involvement in sixty five (65) murders, but get upset about Ft. Lauderdale, it had to be something appalling.”

Kendrick sat back down across from Toole and folded his hands in front of him. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” the detective said. And Toole began to do just that.

He had found a little boy at a Sears store, Toole said, and told the boy that he had some candy and wanted to talk to him and convinced him to get in his Cadillac out in the parking lot. Toole told Kendrick that he was intending to take the boy back to Jacksonville and raise him as his own son, but it all changed when this Adam started crying and saying he wanted to get out of the car. The boy’s behavior made him mad, Toole explained, and so he hit him in the face to shut him up. And then he turned off the highway onto a dirt road that had a fork at the end of it. And that was where he murdered this Adam and cut off his head and threw it into a pond somewhere along the side of the road.

In hindsight, one might wonder why such a statement did not mark the end of the hunt for the killer of Adam Walsh then and there. True, Detective Kendrick was from another jurisdiction and was only vaguely familiar with the case, and there would understandably be a bit of time for sorting out just what Ottis Toole was talking about . . . but surely, one might think, a speedy resolution of the matter was at hand. As the old saw goes, however, that is the trouble with assumptions. In truth, the trouble was just getting under way.

W
hen Kendrick left the room after his second interview with Toole, he was a man on a mission. He found Detective Buddy Terry in his office and quickly shared the news. “He’s talking about killing a child down in Broward County,” Kendrick told Terry. “He says he cut him up and left the body in two different places. This is all out of the clear blue sky.”

Terry remembers the moment well, though at the time he was not familiar with any child-killing case in South Florida (if nothing else, Terry’s obliviousness speaks volumes about how times have changed). Still, based on Kendrick’s certainty that Toole was confessing to a gruesome crime that he had in fact committed, he began calling various agencies in Broward County.

“I finally got hold of the Hollywood Police Department,” Terry recalls, “and they told me that it sounded like the Adam Walsh case.” Terry had no idea what Hollywood was talking about, but once it had been explained to him, he hurried to Kendrick with the news.

The following morning, October 11, Kendrick reached someone in the homicide division at Hollywood PD and gave a brief account of what he’d come across. “I identified myself as an investigator for the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office,” he says, “and said that I had just interviewed an individual pertaining to a homicide I was investigating. During the interview with the individual, he said a number of things that led me to believe that he is in fact the one who killed Adam Walsh.”

Whomever Kendrick spoke to took the information and said that someone would be back in touch immediately. But “immediately” seemed to have a relative meaning. “Probably a week after that,” Kendrick says, “I got a call from someone and we spoke briefly about my conversation with Ottis Toole about Adam. I don’t believe I had any additional contact with them [the Hollywood PD] after that. I think I only spoke to them once.”

With notification having been made to the Hollywood PD, there was nothing more for Detectives Kendrick or Terry to do regarding the Adam Walsh case. Kendrick returned to his office in Brevard County, and Terry went off to Louisiana to confer with authorities there pertaining to Henry Lee Lucas and his own investigation of the murder of George Sonnenberg.

As a result of the information shared during Terry’s trip to Monroe, three detectives from Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, traveled back to Jacksonville with him to interview Toole regarding the murder of sixteen-year-old Sherry Alford in Monroe. On Tuesday, October 18, 1983, Detective Jay Via, who’d been among the first to question Henry Lee Lucas following his arrest, began his pre-interview conversation with Ottis Toole while Toole was eating his lunch.

Via casually asked Toole when he was going to start talking about all the blacks that Henry Lee Lucas claimed the two of them had killed. Toole broke off from eating to smile his Alfred E. Neuman–like smile. Surely Via understood why he wasn’t about to start talking about that subject, Toole told the detective. The population of the Duval County Jail was about 90 percent black. How long did Via think Toole would last if he started bragging about killing “brothers”?

Via nodded in appreciation of Toole’s wisdom. But he’d also heard some rumors that Toole had killed a bunch of kids during his travels across the country, he said. Kid killers weren’t very popular in prison either. Were those rumors true? Via wondered.

At that, Via recalls, Toole’s manner suddenly changed. He stopped in mid-bite and put down his chicken leg. “You talking about the kid that got his head cut off around West Palm Beach, Florida?” Toole said, guardedly.

Via checked his watch, noting that it was 3:20 in the afternoon. Toole had become a different person, instantaneously. For the first time, he made direct eye contact with Via and inquired again in a somber voice whether or not he was talking about the “kid” he had killed in South Florida.