Bringing Adam Home (16 page)

Detective Hoffman, who was well aware that they were standing near the spot where Adam’s head had been discovered by fishermen more than two years previously, said nothing to his colleagues. It was after 6:00 p.m. by this time, and Toole said he was hungry and wondered if there was anything to eat. Detective Hoisington handed Toole one of the sandwiches they’d brought along, but another detective swatted it out of Toole’s hand.

“You don’t need to do this guy any favors,” Hoffman told Hoisington. “He’s just jerking us around.”

Toole glanced at the sandwich that had landed in the dirt. “Fuck you,” he said to Hoffman.

“No,” Hoffman replied. “Fuck
you
.”

At that point, they all got into the van and drove home.

B
ack at Hollywood PD, Hoffman took another recorded statement from Ottis Toole in which he yet again formally confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh, and provided a detailed account of the circumstances under which he had committed the act. Toole broke into tears several times during this statement, claiming that he liked the little boy and had only wanted to take him home to raise him to be his own child. He had to kill Adam, though, because he realized the boy was very smart and could probably identify him as his kidnapper. When asked why this, of all the killings he had confessed to, bothered him so much, Toole said, “Because that was the youngest person I ever killed.”

While that interview was taking place, Detective Hoisington ran into deputy chief Leroy Hessler in a hallway. “So how’d it go?” Hessler asked.

Hoisington hesitated but decided he should give the chief an honest answer. This was a pretty important matter, and he wasn’t so sure things were running as they should. He explained to Hessler that he was surprised that Toole was cooperating at all, given Hoffman’s treatment of the man, and also shared with Hessler some of the details that Toole had told him about the crime when Hoffman was out of earshot. Hessler listened patiently, then asked Hoisington if there was some point to all this.

Hoisington hesitated. He wasn’t assigned as an investigator to this case, as Hessler well knew, but he was a detective, after all. “I just thought maybe I should write a supplemental report, or at least give Detective Hoffman a formal statement for his files,” Hoisington said, still taken by Toole’s offhand ghoulishness. “If what Toole told me independently corroborates or contradicts something he’s said elsewhere, that might be useful.”

Hessler stared at Hoisington for a moment. “You understand that this is Detective Hoffman’s case, right?”

“Yes sir,” Hoisington responded.

“Then you go talk to Hoffman about all this,” Hessler said and walked away.

Hoisington made an effort to do what Hessler ordered, but by the time Hoffman and his partner Hickman had finished with Toole, it was past ten thirty at night. When Hoisington caught Hoffman coming out of the interview room, the lead detective warned him to make it quick. Chief Martin had already called a press conference for eleven, and was waiting on Hoffman in his office.

Hoisington had hardly begun his explanation when Hoffman cut him off. “I thought I told you not to talk to that asshole,” he said, pointing inside the interview room where Toole still sat.

“He was talking to
me
,” Hoisington protested, “and some of those things he said—”

Hoffman held up a hand impatiently. “I heard you. I’ll include it in my report,” he said; then he hurried down the hall to confer with Martin.

At 11:00 p.m. during a hastily arranged press conference, Hollywood chief of police Sam Martin made the momentous announcement. They had found the man who killed Adam Walsh, and on Monday, Ottis Toole would be officially charged with the crime.

Toole was a confessed serial killer, Martin told reporters, though of the thirty-five to fifty murders he had committed, Adam’s was the only one over which he had expressed any regret. “Listening to him talk about the things he’s done makes Charles Manson sound like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn,” Martin said. And Assistant Chief Hessler added his own opinion that Toole’s stories were “grisly and heinous beyond belief.” But as to the murder of Adam Walsh, Hessler said, there could be no doubt. “There are certain details only he could know. He did it.”

Hessler assured reporters that his detectives had been grilling Toole ten to twenty hours a day for two days solid, and that he had finally broken down earlier Friday evening. As to the confessions that Toole had made to Detective Kendrick on October 10 and to Detectives Via and Terry on October 18, Hessler was curiously—or not so curiously—silent. As far as the outside world was concerned, then, Jack Hoffman and the Hollywood PD had cracked this case without assistance.

Indeed, Martin assured those gathered, they had finally found their man. Ottis Toole, already convicted of another crime in Jacksonville, would be returned to that city this night or the following morning, but soon he would face justice for the murder of Adam Walsh.

Any reasonable individual would have been inclined to take Martin’s assertions as fact. An unhinged psychopath, finally snagged by a system through whose cracks he had tumbled for most of his miscreant’s life, had confessed details of a heinous crime only he could have known. It might have been a shame for the murdered boy’s family that so much time had passed, and it might be galling if it was learned that his apprehension was almost accidental, and perhaps it was annoying that a public defender would have to be engaged at the taxpayers’ expense, along with a costly trial to be followed—were a death penalty handed down—by any number of appeals based on what would be surely specious ground . . .

But despite all that, a grievous wrong could now be righted, and some shred of society’s order might be restored.

Hollywood, Florida—October 22, 1983

T
he news of the break in the case was trumpeted across the region on Saturday, and any viewer, listener, or reader who caught it might have assumed that though it had been two long and agonizing years for John and Revé Walsh, the grieving parents were about to see justice done. John Walsh’s stirring response upon being given the news was replayed again and again on network and local outlets: “Just give me three minutes alone in a room with this guy.” Finally, it seemed, the long-suffering parents would find some measure of relief.

However, it was not necessarily the call of Chief Martin or Leroy Hessler as to whether or not Ottis Toole would in fact be charged. It is true that a police officer can arrest and charge a suspect at a crime scene or in the course of an investigation during which a suspect makes a confession. Following such an arrest there is an arraignment, normally held within twenty-four hours, at which the suspect pleads guilty or not guilty, where bail is set or denied, and at which a public defender is appointed if necessary. In most jurisdictions, the state attorney then has a set period of time—twenty-one days in Florida—in which to file formal charges or drop the case. In fact, it is not unusual for a case initiated as an arrest to be dropped or negotiated, owing to something overlooked or unknown during the relatively hasty process of arrest.

In this instance, however, Toole was already in custody for other crimes, and there was no risk of him fleeing—and thus no reason for immediate arrest. Accordingly, the department took the alternative route toward charging a suspect: that of seeking a warrant for the suspect’s arrest on new charges from the state attorney for Broward County.

In most cases, a state attorney asks that as much evidence as possible be presented before issuing an arrest warrant, for obvious reasons. No reputable prosecutor wants to be involved in harassing innocent citizens, for one thing; but also, the more ironclad the evidence presented, the easier it is for a successful prosecution to be brought. It was common knowledge among police agencies in Dade County during Janet Reno’s tenure as head of the state attorney’s office that unless an arresting agency presented its case in fail-safe terms, no warrant would be forthcoming. As a result, Reno compiled a sterling record as a prosecutor, one that eventually vaulted her into the office of U.S. attorney general.

In the case of Ottis Toole, a prosecutor in Broward state attorney Michael Satz’s office advised Hollywood PD that the case would be bolstered considerably if physical evidence were obtained that placed Toole at the scene of the crime, or at least confirmed his presence in South Florida during the time that the crime took place.

If Hoffman and Hickman had done a more meticulous job of documenting the information revealed by Toole in his confessions to Detectives Kendrick and Via, and if they had presented the results of their own investigation in a way that made it seem they were independently corroborating what only the killer could have known about the crime, perhaps Satz would not have asked for more. But because Hoffman had not even mentioned the fact of the previous confessions, claiming that he had “broken” Toole after hours of relentless grilling, the state attorney’s request for corroborating physical evidence was not out of the ordinary.

For most who heard Chief Martin or Leroy Hessler trumpet the news of an impending charge on radio and television, however, all the fine points of arrests versus warrants were the stuff of “inside baseball.” What most ordinary citizens believed was that a suspect had confessed to the killing of Adam Walsh, and he would soon be tried and convicted and fried in the electric chair—good riddance to bad rubbish, on to better news ahead.

O
ne of those watching as the news concerning Ottis Toole was broadcast across South Florida was Bill Mistler, the man who had been on his way into Sears to pick up some supplies for a camping trip on that fateful day when he had seen a neatly dressed young boy go off into the parking lot with a disreputable-looking man who seemed all wrong for him. When Mistler heard the news anchor’s eager pronouncement that at long last a break had come in the Adam Walsh case, he glanced up at the television with an interest that soon grew into astonishment. As Chief Martin named the suspect in the case and a picture of Ottis Toole filled the screen, Mistler jumped straight from his bed.

At that moment, certainty filled his mind. The face he was staring at was that of the down-and-outer who’d led the young boy away from the Sears store that day. He had in fact witnessed the kidnapping of Adam Walsh, Mistler thought, a kind of awe filling him.

As other images connected with the story swirled across the screen, Mistler could do nothing but gape, his mind whirling. He thought about calling Hollywood police on the spot, to recount to them what he’d seen that day, but then he hesitated. As a teenager Mistler had spent a year in prison for his ill-advised participation in a robbery. He had put that all behind him, and he was now a respected businessman, the owner of a successful pest control company.

If he came forward and his name and face ended up in the newspapers or on television, who was to say some malcontent wouldn’t call in to dredge up his past mistakes? Besides, the cops made it sound like they had Toole dead to rights. There must have been other witnesses who’d seen what happened at Sears that day and had identified the kidnapper. Why else would there be all the hullabaloo? Finally, and though it pained him a bit to do so, Mistler convinced himself to let it go. His help wasn’t needed. Justice had prevailed.

Mistler switched off his television and lay back down to stare quietly up at his ceiling. And finally, he fell asleep.

T
he following Sunday morning, lead detective Hoffman was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that his men had not yet verified that Toole was in the area the day that Adam Walsh had been abducted, but that nonetheless the suspect knew details of the murder that only the killer could have known. Hoffman was not at liberty to discuss the evidence that the department had shared with the state attorney’s office, but he was confident that they had plenty to base a case on.

And, moreover, if Bill Mistler did not come forward to place Ottis Toole in South Florida at the time of the kidnapping, there was at least one other person who did. Arlene Mayer, the woman who had taken her daughter Heidi to Kmart for some household supplies less than forty-eight hours before Adam Walsh went missing, was having coffee at her kitchen table on Sunday morning after Chief Martin’s announcement, the newspaper trumpeting the news laid out beside her. She was about to take a sip when Heidi walked into the room and stopped dead.

“Mom—” She pointed at the picture on the front page. “That’s
him
.”

Arlene stared up at her daughter, who was already beginning to cry. “That’s the man who tried to get me that night in the Kmart.”

Arlene looked down at the photograph of Ottis Toole emblazoned there, then shook her head, fighting the chill that began to envelop her. “Now, Heidi, are you sure . . . ?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t sure,” Heidi said, her voice rising to a near shriek. “That’s the man who tried to get me!”

Arlene Mayer rose to comfort her daughter, and when she finally had Heidi calmed down, she picked up the phone and dialed the Hollywood police.

Shortly after 5:00 p.m. on Monday, Detectives Hoffman and Hickman conducted a formal interview with Heidi, who recounted her memory of the visit to Kmart the night she was accosted. Following the completion of her statement, the detectives presented her with a photo lineup to see if she recognized anyone.