Bringing Adam Home (3 page)

In the de facto retirement village of South Beach, you had your room, and your hot plate, and after some soup for supper, you could walker yourself to the elevator, jigger it down to the lobby, don your plastic nose protector and a pair of those wrap-around sunglasses the size of windshield heat reflectors, and go out to join your fellow pensioners on the hotel porch. You’d sit there in an aluminum chair welded to the next and the next—maybe there’d be room for twenty cheek by jowl on either side of the lobby door—and you’d stare out at the lovely Atlantic through sunglasses dark enough to keep Dracula safe from disintegration, hundreds of you on all those porches up and down Ocean Drive, like members of some strange white-beaked, dark-banded species waiting for the arrival of a ship on the darkening ocean, like you might be ready to step on board that ship and head off somewhere far, far away.

It was to one such establishment—the Shoreham—that Joe Matthews and his team had been called. Matthews was at the time still a young beat cop who had been selected as part of a crime-fighting task force formed by legendary Beach PD chief Rocky Pomerance. An informant in Chicago had passed along a tip that was relayed to the Miami Beach PD that a gang from Chicago that had knocked over some other hotels was headed south and had the Shoreham in its sights as a robbery target. It was the kind of crime that police departments were well equipped to fight, and accordingly a dozen or so cops were hidden on the premises for the first couple of nights: they posed as guests and night clerks, jammed into closets and anterooms, itching for action, but as more and more evenings passed without incident, the size of the detail was trimmed.

Finally, only Matthews and two others were left to the assignment, and as yet more evenings passed uneventfully, his companions gradually became more focused on the nightly card game they set up in one of the anterooms off the lobby and the boozing that went along with it. Matthews was no teetotaler, but he was not a drunk, either. He’d have a drink or two, and play some cards, but invariably he’d be the last man standing by 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., left to keep an eye out on a deserted lobby while the others slept until sunup and time to go home.

He’d almost fallen asleep himself the night things turned all the way around. He heard the lobby door open about 4:15 a.m., and glanced through the curtains of the anteroom where he was stationed to see that three men wearing ski masks and carrying pistols had entered the lobby. Matthews gripped the shoulder of the partner slumped facedown on the table next to him. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “They’re here. Wake up.”

The answer was a muttered curse, followed by a racketing snore. As for the third member of the team, he was fast asleep in another room. Meantime, one of the bandits already had a pistol at the back of the head of the night clerk—an actual civilian who had unluckily returned to the job—and was marching him toward the safe deposit boxes.

History suggested to Matthews what would happen next. The minute the boxes were open, the clerk was likely to be shot. If some bewildered pensioner stumbled onto the scene, whether drawn by the commotion or simply wandering into the lobby thinking he’d found the bathroom down the hall from his room, his fate was likely to be the same.

From the start, in fact, the stakeout team—Matthews among them—had been agreed as to strategy. It was a simpler time in law enforcement. These were bad people they’d been sent to deal with. The thugs would be given a chance to surrender, but if one of them tried anything stupid—and they might well be afforded the chance to—there’d be justice dispensed on the spot. “Whatever it takes” was the task force’s watchword. Chief Pomerance had made that much clear.

However, any previous thoughts of strategy were gone from Matthews’s mind now. It was him versus three. Even though he’d recently gone through the FBI’s SWAT and sniper training academy in Quantico, he knew that a shoot-out would not work in his favor. At the same time, he was not going to hide out in an anteroom and hope that just this once, the gang would be content to empty a safe and leave a potential witness behind unharmed.

Matthews offered up an unspoken prayer, hoisted the shotgun leaning against the wall nearby, and eased silently out the door of the anteroom into the lobby. He carried about 185 pounds on his big-boned five-foot-ten frame, but he wasn’t counting on his size to accomplish anything. Instead, he racked a shell into the chamber of the shotgun, a sound that rarely fails to gain a criminal’s attention.

“If any of you move, you’re dead,” he called to the three, the Browning braced at his shoulder. At least
some
of you will be, he was thinking. “Put your guns down,
now
,” he added. “And put your hands behind your heads.”

Put down your guns and hold up your hands
, Matthews heard the mocking echo of his own words in his head. Oh, sure, he thought, preparing himself for the fusillade to come next.

But amazingly, that is exactly what the three men did, and Matthews had handcuffed them all by the time anyone else came to.

I
t is the kind of story that cops love, and just one more reason why Steve Davis wanted Matthews’s help on what was by far the most challenging case his department had ever faced. The Hollywood PD was considered one of the most efficiently run in Broward County, but as the days rolled by without any trace of Adam Walsh, and public scrutiny intensified, it was becoming clear that what was essentially a small-town force (the 1980 population of the city was just over 120,000) was in well over its head.

The department had a new building, a data-crunching computer paid for by federal funds, a Citizens’ Crime Watch with more than 4,000 volunteers, and an active, visible chief in Sam D. Martin, proud of such accomplishments as Operation Reindeer, which had been successful in driving down the number of shopping mall robberies at holiday time. But the truth was that Hollywood, Florida, despite its proximity to the glamour towns of South Florida, was an outpost of Mom and Pop America. Drive a couple of miles inland from the beach, and you might as well be cruising the strip mall barrens of Dubuque or Des Moines.

Yet if the place was ordinary, it was becoming clear by the hour that the Adam Walsh case was anything but. According to FBI figures, somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 children under the age of eighteen are reported missing in the United States each year—an average of more than 2,000 a day. Of these, the vast majority are runaways or young children who wander off and are quickly found. Another 250,000 or so turn out to have been taken by a feuding spouse or family member, or a friend involved in a family dispute. A very few missing children turn out to have met with some tragic accident.

Fewest of all are the victims of what statisticians call “stereotypical” kidnapping, where a child is taken by someone he does not know, or knows only slightly: someone who holds the child overnight, transports him more than fifty miles, demands a ransom or intends to keep the child forever, or—woe upon woe—someone who kills the child.

Only about one hundred children a year are the victims of such a kidnapping, making the odds of losing a child to illness or accident far greater. But parents have been programmed from the beginning of time to cope with the specter of a fatal illness or accident, no matter how tragic. Terrible as such losses are, they at least occur within the bounds of reason.

In contrast, the concept that another human being might have taken one’s son or daughter is simply not part of the rational equation of parenthood—or at least it was not in 1981. Yet with every day that passed in the case of Adam’s disappearance, the odds increased exponentially that no good end would come.

And still, for all that, and for all the assurances that Steve Davis had given Joe Matthews about how much they needed him on board, it didn’t take Matthews long to discover that his association with the Hollywood PD was going to be something other than a honeymoon. Matthews was familiar with the spacious new headquarters building at 3250 Hollywood Boulevard, having been called there several times in the past to lecture on interrogation methods and polygraph examination techniques. But moments after he parked his unmarked Plymouth sedan and entered the building on this go-around, he encountered the first in what would be a long series of challenges to his involvement in the case.

Inside the building, Matthews reported to Lieutenant Dick Hynds, who worked under Steve Davis in supervising the detective bureau. All went smoothly enough at first. Hynds, whom Matthews had never met, was a heavyset old-timer who carried maybe 240 pounds on his six-foot frame—the kind of guy Central Casting would send over if you called and asked for “a cop.” The two exchanged a few pleasantries, then Hynds walked him down a corridor to the desk of Detective Jack Hoffman, lead investigator on the Adam Walsh case.

Hynds explained to Hoffman that Matthews had come up from Miami Beach to lend a hand in interviewing and polygraph examinations. Hoffman glanced up impatiently from a report in front of him. He was a heavyset, dark-haired guy with a bushy mustache that accentuated the droop of his lips. He looked like a guy who disapproved of most things on general principle, Matthews thought.

“Why do we need somebody from Miami Beach?” Hoffman asked Hynds brusquely. He hadn’t so much as glanced at Matthews. “We’ve got our own polygraph people.”

“This is the guy who
trained
our people,” Hynds offered, but Hoffman turned back to his report without a word.

Matthews thought it an unnecessary display of territory marking, but he’d been around a lot of cops. Some guys just seemed to think it necessary to protect their turf. Besides, he knew Hoffman was under considerable pressure, and after all, he’d come up from Miami Beach to help, not start trouble. He shrugged and followed Hynds out of the room without comment.

“Anyway, we want you to start with the father,” Hynds told Matthews as they walked back down the hall, and Matthews nodded. It was natural. Something goes wrong—a spouse is shot, a child goes missing—you begin by looking at the people closest to the situation. Law of averages.

Hynds suggested that they set up the polygraph exam for the day after tomorrow. Meantime, Matthews could familiarize himself with the case files and review what John Walsh seemed to know about his son’s disappearance. On Friday, Matthews would go to work on Walsh himself.

Hollywood, Florida—August 7, 1981

I
f they had in fact shown him everything, Matthews concluded after studying the files, then indeed the Hollywood PD did not have much to go on. According to her statement, Revé Walsh had run up and down the aisles of the Sears store for a few minutes after she’d returned and found her son gone, calling for Adam by his nickname, “Cooter, Cooter, where are you?”

Finally, she spotted a store security guard, seventeen-year-old Kathy Shaffer, and rushed to Shaffer to report that she had lost her child. Revé reached into her wallet and pulled out Adam’s first-grade picture to show it to Shaffer. “Look, he’s even wearing this same shirt,” Revé said, pointing at the red-and-white-striped shirt she’d dressed him in that morning. Shaffer studied the photograph for what seemed a maddening amount of time, then finally shook her head.

“We can page him, though,” Shaffer told Revé, who glanced at her watch. It was almost 12:45. She and Adam had entered the store almost forty-five minutes ago.

Revé waited nearby while Shaffer made a call, then listened as the announcement crackled over the store’s PA system. “Adam Walsh, please report to the information desk. Adam Walsh, your mother is waiting for you.”

“It was like I was drowning in a pool and couldn’t reach the edge,” Revé would say, trying to describe how unreal her world had suddenly become. “I was trying to reach my child, but he couldn’t hear me. I felt so helpless. I kept thinking that if I could just get everything to slow down for a minute, then I could catch my bearings and catch hold of everything. And then I could reach out and pull Adam back.”

The announcements were repeated again at 1:00 p.m. and every fifteen minutes thereafter, but Adam did not appear. Revé questioned every store employee she could find, but no one remembered seeing Adam, and worse yet, none seemed too concerned. By 1:55, two hours after Adam’s disappearance, Revé was nearing hysteria. Using a Sears phone, she called the Hollywood police to report that her son was missing. Then, fighting back tears, she called her husband John at work and told him what had happened.

By the time John Walsh arrived at the mall, it was almost 3:00 p.m., and a cluster of Hollywood police cruisers were nosed up to the curb outside the garden entrance to the Sears store, their flashers whirling. He parked quickly and ran inside to find a distraught Revé speaking intently with a policeman. When she turned, he saw the desperation in her face. As he put it, “For the first time in my life, I understood what real fear was.”

Still, Walsh did his best to calm Revé, and the two of them worked painstakingly to describe their son to the investigating officers, who had already put out word of a child gone missing at the Sears Mall. Local news station WINZ broadcast an announcement of Adam’s disappearance, and Miami television stations interrupted programming to run Adam’s photograph and a plea for any information. Friends and neighbors were standing by at the Walsh house little more than a mile from the store—they’d call if Adam wandered home.

Police were sympathetic, but there was little that they could do except broadcast the alarm. As the day wore on and the shadows lengthened, one cop pointed out the location of the police station, ironically located just a short walk across the mall’s vast parking lot. “We’re right over there,” he told the Walshes, as if the statement meant something.