Bringing Adam Home (15 page)

“He was unconscious, so I didn’t have a hard time chopping his head off,” Toole said. “I laid him facedown and I did it.”

Hoffman glanced up at Toole and asked whether he was right-handed or left-handed.

“Right-handed,” Toole answered.

“And you said you kept the head for a while,” Hoffman continued. “Just where in the car did you put it?”

Toole shrugged. “I say I switched it different times. I had it in the back one time on the floorboard and I ended up putting it in the front floorboard.”

After the decapitation, Toole said that he dismembered and scattered the body parts, then got back onto the turnpike and drove another ten minutes or so northward before he began to think better of keeping the head. When he spotted a bridge railing up ahead, he told Hoffman, “I stopped the car and got out and I throwed the head over in the canal.”

How about the boy’s clothes? Hoffman asked. “Oh his clothes were in the car,” Tool said. While he was stopped, he used the clothes to wipe up some of the blood off the seat and then tossed the clothes out. Or maybe he had thrown the clothes away in a Dumpster in one of the roadside rest stops, Toole said, for that is what he remembered doing with his own blood-soaked clothes. “I throwed them in the Dumpster.”

And all this blood on his clothes had come from the child? Hoffman wanted to be sure.

Not only on his clothes but on his shoes as well, Toole assured the detective. “I throwed my shoes away too and put on another pair.”

He’d then driven on back to Jacksonville and junked the car at a yard on Holloway Avenue, Toole said, and that was pretty much the end of that story.

But why had he lied to them and implicated Henry Lee Lucas in his first statement? Hoffman wanted to know. “Because I figured I could tie him up in it and get even with his ass,” Toole said.

“And you also said that Henry Lee got a blow job from the head,” Hoffman continued, looking up from his notes. “Was that really
you
that got the blow job from the head?”

Toole shook his head at the question. “No,” he said, dismissively, “I didn’t even fuck it.”

Hoffman then withdrew a third photograph of Adam and laid it beside the other two he’d already shown Toole. Was this the boy he was talking about? the detective asked. Toole studied the third photograph briefly, then glanced at Hoffman, “The other pictures, the other pictures look more like him than that one does,” Toole said, but still there seemed no doubt in his mind. “Yes, I’d say. Yes, that’s him.”

It was almost two in the morning by the time Hoffman and Hickman wound up their second interview with Toole. “If we take you back down to South Florida with us, can you show us the places you’ve been talking about. This Sears store, the place where you decapitated the child, and where you threw his head in the canal?”

“I guess so,” Toole said.

“We’ll let you know,” Hoffman said, and with that the interview was finished.

Once again, it might seem to any sentient observer that every element was in hand for a swift delivery of justice, or as swift as one is permitted in a system as full of checks and balances as our own. An individual with a history of violent behavior has made three unbidden confessions of murder to law officers from three different jurisdictions, providing details obviously known previously only to the medical examiners and the detectives in charge of the case. Surely justice was about to be dispensed. How could it possibly not be?

Jacksonville, Florida—October 21, 1983

I
n the early hours following his second conversation with Toole, Detective Hoffman—whether or not he was miffed that his theory about Jimmy Campbell had been discredited, or simply that someone other than he and his partner Hickman had found Ottis Toole and extracted a confession from him—went quickly to work securing an order from a Duval County circuit judge allowing the two of them and Detective Terry to transport Toole to Hollywood for the purposes of identifying the purported crime scenes he had described. Meanwhile, Toole returned to his cell in the county lockup, where he began to pace and mutter, waking his cellmate James Collins.

What was the matter? Collins asked. He was trying to get some sleep.

Toole glanced around the cell nervously, then leaned close. What did Collins suppose other inmates would do to someone who had murdered children? Toole wondered, his voice low. Collins wasn’t sure what might happen, but he did think that Toole was unusually agitated.

Toole went on to explain to Collins that the cops had found the head of this kid he’d killed, and that now they wanted him to go down to Fort Lauderdale and help them find the body. “I just hope it ain’t there,” Toole said, and then he went back to his pacing and muttering. Collins never told anyone whether he actually did get back to sleep that night. Ordinary people might have had great difficulty doing so. But if men believed everything they heard in prison, there’d be precious little sleep enjoyed there.

A
t nine on Friday morning, Toole was escorted by Detectives Hoffman and Terry from the Duval County Jail and flown by private plane to the North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines, not far from Hollywood. They were met at about eleven thirty by two other detectives from Hollywood PD and driven by van to the nearby sprawling Broward Mall, which contained a Sears store.

This was definitely not the place, Toole said, as they pulled into the huge lot. The lot outside the store where he’d taken the boy was much smaller, and the mall had been a single-story structure, not a two-story like this one.

From the Broward Mall, they drove next to a Sears store that sat just off Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, but again, Toole shook his head. This was not the place.

Detective Larry Hoisington of the Hollywood PD, who been assigned to drive the team, was behind the wheel. Hoisington next drove to I-95 and piloted them the few miles south toward Hollywood. As they pulled off the exit ramp at Hollywood Boulevard, Toole gazed intently out the van windows. “This looks like the road I got off on,” he told the detectives. As they passed the train station that abuts the boulevard there, Toole noted that the area looked familiar to him. “I think the store is up there,” he said, pointing to the right.

Hoisington glanced in the rearview mirror to be sure which way Toole was directing them. Owing to his various deficiencies, Toole never used such words as
left
or
right
,
north
or
south
,
east
or
west
—just hand motions and phrases like “over there” and “down that way.” Hoisington followed Toole’s gesture and, a few blocks farther, pulled the van off Hollywood Boulevard and into the lot on the east side of the Sears store. He circled the store to the north, then turned along its west facade, where the garden shop was located. “This is it,” Toole said, pointing. “This is where I picked up the kid.”

Hoffman glanced around at his colleagues, then noted the time on his watch. He directed Hoisington to drive the few hundred yards to Hollywood PD for lunch before they started out for the turnpike.

After lunch, however, Toole asked if they could take one more look at the Sears lot, just so he could be sure. Hoisington took them back to the north entrance, where the catalog store was located, and parked the van. After a few moments, Toole nodded again. This was the place, he was more than sure of it. He pointed to a nearby bus bench located in the lot beneath an overhang. He’d been standing right there when he saw the boy come walking out of the doors by the garden department.

He repeated his story of luring Adam into the Cadillac with the promises of toys and candy and then showed the officers where he pulled out of the lot and made a right turn on Hollywood Boulevard, heading west toward Florida’s Turnpike. It took about ten minutes, Toole told them, recalling there was a “sharp bend” in the road somewhere along the way. When Hoisington took them around a traffic circle on Hollywood Boulevard, Toole glanced out at a school located there and confirmed that this was the road he remembered driving on.

To test Toole, Hoisington decided that he purposely would not exit the roundabout where Hollywood Boulevard continued west toward the turnpike. Instead, he continued on toward the south exit of the roundabout. Toole laughed at that. “I did the same thing you just did,” he told Hoisington. “You were supposed to turn back there.” Hoisington glanced at Hoffman, but if he expected any recognition of his cleverness, none was forthcoming.

“Take the right fucking turn, will you?” Hoffman growled.

At the northbound turnpike entrance Hoisington brought down the van window to take a toll ticket; Toole said that he remembered doing the same thing the day he had Adam in his car. As they passed through the second toll plaza on the route north, Toole told the detectives it was where he’d pulled over to “quiet the kid down.” Adam had been crying for his mother, Toole explained, and he had to beat him until he was unconscious to get him to stop.

By 3:30 p.m., as they clicked past mile marker 126 on the turnpike, well over an hour north of Hollywood, the van whisked beneath an overpass, and Toole pointed out the window toward the side of the road. “Hey, this is where I got off at,” he called.

Hoisington pulled the van to the shoulder of the turnpike and, just as Toole had when he overshot the nearly hidden exit, backed cautiously to the service road leading to a desolate construction staging area. “You can pull off into there,” Toole said, pointing. “This is where I stopped and killed the kid.”

Hoffman told Toole to direct them to the place where he’d left Adam’s body, and a shackled, handcuffed Toole gave it his best, even though he told them his memory was a little hazy—he’d been pretty intoxicated at the time, he said. He thought there was a fork in the road, to be quite honest, but there were no turnoffs to be found. Just a straight shot down the service road through the pine barrens to a spot where the road petered out at a guardrail blocking the road. “It was over in there someplace,” Toole said, and a dubious Hoffman led his men, along with Detective Terry, out for an inspection of the area.

While Hoffman and the others tramped about the desolate woods, Hoisington and Toole sat alone inside the van. Hoisington had been ordered by Hoffman not to speak with Toole—“You’re here for one reason, to drive the goddamned van, okay?”—and he was not about to start trouble. But Toole seemed agitated now, and the longer they sat together, the more restless he became.

“I killed a lot of people,” he blurted to Hoisington suddenly. “But of all I did, I wisht I hadn’t killed that little kid.”

Toole indicated the area where the others were walking with a nod of his head. Hoisington followed Toole’s gesture, but said nothing.

“It was right here,” Toole said, tears welling in his eyes. “I took him out of the car and carried him yonder in the woods, and I cut off his head with a machete I always carried.” He went on to explain how he’d dragged the body into the brush and covered it with leaves. He came back to the spot where he’d left Adam’s head and took it back to the car and tossed it on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

Hoisington knew that Toole was a suspect in the murder of Adam Walsh, of course, but he had no idea of the details of Toole’s confessions. Everything that Toole was recounting to him sounded like the stuff of a nightmare.

“Why did you keep the head?” Hoisington heard himself asking.

Toole glanced at him as if he were explaining why you’d duck under cover when it started to rain. He’d already sodomized Adam’s body, he told Hoisington. “I was going to have sex with the head later on.”

As a cop, Hoisington had heard his fair share, but Toole’s offhand declaration was enough to make his stomach heave. With great relief he saw an obviously irritated Hoffman leading his group back toward the van.

“We can’t see anything over there,” Hoffman grumbled as he climbed in, waving vaguely toward the tangle of vines and underbrush on the far side of the guardrail. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck, one of a cloud that followed him through the opened door. It had been more than two years, the hot and frustrated detectives reasoned, as they piled back into the van. A jungle could spring up around here in that amount of time. Heavy equipment would have to be brought in.

Meantime, Hoffman declared, Toole could show them where he’d disposed of the head. Sure, Toole assured them. It wasn’t far, no more than ten minutes from where they were parked.

Hoisington piloted them back down the rocky trail, then waited for a break in the traffic to pull back on the highway. It wasn’t like they’d pulled off into a paved rest area where there was some nicely banked reentry road. The very maneuver to regain the highway in a sluggish nine-passenger van was not without risk. Some hopped-up kid in a fast car comes up too quickly behind them, they’d all be toast. And all because of a scumbag like Toole? What a way to go.

Still, Hoisington managed it without incident, and had hardly got them back up to cruising speed when Toole called out again, this time near mile marker 130. The group exited the van at roadside this time, and Toole directed them a few yards eastward to the bank of a nearby canal, where a wooden dock jutted out over the water. He’d walked out onto the dock there and thrown the head into the water, Toole said.