Bringing Adam Home (31 page)

When his brother Pete, also a Miami Beach detective sergeant and supervisor of the department’s crimes against property unit, heard what had happened, he demanded a transfer back to uniform patrol as well. “You don’t need to do that,” Matthews protested to his brother, but Pete was having none of it. It was all bullshit, and everyone knew it.

Sure enough, when Matthews turned up at roll call on his first day back in uniform, the entire shift stood to give him a lengthy ovation. They all knew it wasn’t much, but it was the very least they could do.

Raiford, Florida—June 27, 1995

O
n Tuesday of the following week, Detective Smith did in fact travel to Raiford, Florida, with Detective Navarro, where they sought to interview Ottis Toole at the Union Correctional Institution. “Toole had no initial response to the introduction,” wrote Smith in his report, “until he was informed of the purpose of the interview.” Once he realized that the two were there to question him in regard to his involvement in the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh, Toole became “disturbed,” Smith said, “and stated that he had no involvement in this case or any other cases, including the ones of which he was convicted.”

Adam Walsh’s twenty-first birthday passed later that year, and then, less than a month later, on Tuesday, December 5, convicted serial killer Gerald Schaffer, former cellmate and erstwhile legal adviser of Ottis Toole, was found dead in his cell at Starke, stabbed several times in the eye, his throat slit. In an interview with the
Palm Beach Post
, Schaffer’s mother and sister said to reporters that he had told them that he was about to cooperate with detectives on the Adam Walsh case. He had agreed to testify in an upcoming proceeding, he confided to them, and explained that he hoped to gain early parole as a result. That explained why he’d been killed, the women told reporters.

If the bits and pieces of the case against Ottis Toole already seemed to be dissolving, what happened in early 1996 appeared to be the death knell for the matter altogether. In early May 1995, the
Mobile Press-Register
had filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, asking that the contents of the Hollywood Police Department file on Adam Walsh be made public.

As often happens in any missing child case, there had always been a certain amount of innuendo involving the parents. There was the scandal involving Revé’s short-lived affair with Jimmy Campbell, and the bizarre suggestion made by Hoffman’s partner Hickman that God would bring Adam back if Walsh would only repent for his misdeeds.

Also, as armchair theorists warmed to their work over the long history of the failed investigation, the notion was kicked around that John Walsh had become involved with the mob as a result of his work with an international hotel chain. He’d either screwed up some drug deal—or, more charitably, refused to partake in one—and the killing of Adam was payback.

The real reason that the case had failed to progress, such thinking went, was that Walsh had himself obstructed the investigation and pressured the Hollywood police to drag their feet. Conspiracy theorists everywhere were licking their chops at having the case files laid bare—all the dirt could finally be revealed. And what ace reporter would not dream of being the hero who finally revealed what police couldn’t or wouldn’t prove in this case of cases? In any event, and whatever they hoped to discover as a result, three other newspapers—the
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel,
the
Palm Beach Post
, and the
Miami Herald—
joined the
Mobile Press-Register
in its suit.

Walsh was dismayed at the prospect, for he knew what opening police files would mean to any serious ongoing investigation. Accordingly, he went directly to Chief Witt to press for assurances that the department would fight the request. Meantime, Walsh suggested, during a May 15 meeting at which Joe Matthews and Mark Smith were present, that perhaps Witt could issue a statement that suggested how ridiculous the rumors were that tied him to the Mafia. Witt seemed a bit befuddled at the request, however. As Joe Matthews and Walsh stared expectantly at Witt, the chief answered by saying that in his opinion anyone who frequented a certain well-known Fort Lauderdale restaurant for lunch—as Walsh did—“must have something to do with the Mafia.”

“With friends like Dick Witt,” Matthews told Walsh on the way out the door, “you don’t need any enemies.”

And then in December, the Walshes received more disturbing news from Hollywood police, when Mark Smith called to check on something. John Walsh listened patiently to a rambling preamble before finally asking the detective to get to the point.

“Well,” Smith said, “they did show you these green shorts and that sandal they found back in 1984, didn’t they?”

Walsh assured Smith that he had no idea what he was talking about, and Smith finally explained. An FDLE team had dug up the items on Ottis Toole’s property in Jacksonville, Smith told him. The shorts and a child’s yellow flip-flop had been sent to Hollywood PD, where they’d been in the evidence room ever since.

Walsh, as might be expected, went ballistic at the news. The “Missing” posters that were issued in the wake of Adam’s disappearance had described him as wearing green shorts and yellow flip-flops. Now Smith was saying that the detective in charge of the case had discovered such items on the property of the only serious suspect who had ever been identified and had not called him in to see if they belonged to Adam? How could such behavior be explained?

Smith, obviously, could not explain it, but he did arrange a meeting at which the Walshes could view the items. It took nearly a month, but finally, on January 16, 1996, John and Revé Walsh met with Detective Smith and Chief Witt in a conference room at Hollywood PD. Chief Witt began the meeting with a long-winded preamble in which he proclaimed the untiring efforts of his department to solve the case. No effort had been spared, the chief said, no tip had been ignored. Finally, he paused, holding up a large evidence envelope, and gave Revé a glance meant to be solicitous.

“Would you and John like to take a minute?” he asked.

Revé stared back, doubfounded.
Good lord
, she thought—they’d already been kept waiting for fifteen years.

“Just show us what you’ve got,” John said.

Witt seemed taken aback by Walsh’s tone, but he broke off to open up the envelope with a flourish. Revé took one look at the muddy shorts and the tiny shoe that was barely bigger than one an infant might wear and shook her head quickly. No way had these items come from Adam. “They’re not his,” she told John.

The collective disappointment in the room was palpable. Once again, it seemed, Ottis Toole had slipped from a snare.

Despite the letdown, Detective Smith did his best to put a positive spin on matters for the Walshes. He and Sergeant Matthews had made very real progress on the cold case investigation, he insisted. He mentioned the fact that Sears security guard Kathy Shaffer had finally admitted sending Adam outside the store through the door where Toole claimed he’d picked the child up. And he also pointed to the significance of the fact that when Toole made his first confession, no news report had mentioned the site near mile marker 126 where Toole later took detectives. As further corroboration that he knew details that had never been reported in the press, Toole had spoken several times of driving no more than ten minutes farther north on the turnpike before disposing of the head in the canal. As Smith pointed out, the spot where fishermen had discovered the remains was four miles north, at mile marker 130—ten minutes was just how long it would take to turn around on that deserted service road, make your way back to the turnpike, and drive to the spot where Adam’s head had been found.

Smith then turned his attention to Witt. All these details that Toole had dropped into his multiple confessions were unknown to anyone outside the circle of law enforcement. If they were divulged publicly, however, that evidence would become readily available to any deranged soul who wanted to claim responsibility for the crime. Anyone could say, “Actually it was me who pulled off there at mile marker 130 and tossed that head in the canal.” Surely, Smith said, Witt understood the importance of standing up against the request to open the files.

Witt nodded, tenting his fingers thoughtfully. “I suppose you could look it that way,” he said, “but I think it is just as likely that opening up the case files would put pressure on Toole to break down and confess.”

Though no one in the room had the temerity to point out that Toole had already broken down and confessed on several occasions, one thing seemed clear: even though no ruling on the matter had been issued, Witt had already decided to release the files. As the meeting was winding down, in fact, Witt made the offhanded remark that he already had aides working to transfer the materials onto microfilm, all ten thousand pages of it.

In the aftermath of this disclosure, an angry Walsh went immediately to Michael Satz, head of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, to plead that Satz intervene. If the state attorney announced imminent plans to bring a suspect to trial, then it would be a good bet no judge would allow potential evidence to be revealed in public. Walsh begged Satz to review the case file, and asked for an explanation why no one in all this time had been willing to prosecute a case against Ottis Toole.

What Satz had to say in response floored Walsh. There was a simple reason why the case had not gone forward, Satz said. Since the day in 1983 when Chief Martin of the Hollywood Police Department had announced that Ottis Toole was their prime suspect in the case, not a shred of evidence had been presented to Satz’s office. In fact, the HPD hadn’t shared its full case file on the investigation until just five days ago, Satz said.

Walsh shook his head in disbelief. And what did Satz think about the extortion letter in that file—the one that Toole had sent to him, offering to lead Walsh to where Adam’s body had been buried for $50,000? Satz had no idea what Walsh was referring to—there was no such letter in the file that had recently been presented to him.

When Walsh showed Satz the letter that described his son as crying for his mother as Toole had sodomized him, the state attorney was stunned. He set the letter aside and stood to apologize to Walsh. Of course his office had been insistent that Hoffman and his team present evidence linking Toole to the crime back in the 1980s, but what he had just read was all a competent attorney needed, Satz said.

“I could get a jury conviction on the strength of this letter alone,” he told Walsh.

Furthermore, he said, his office
would
intervene immediately to prevent the opening of the case files to the media on the grounds that a prosecution against Ottis Toole was now imminent, and that opening the evidence to the public would compromise the prosecution’s ability to prove its case against Toole.

On February 16, 1996, a hearing was set on the matter, with Revé Walsh present to add a personal plea. But Judge Moe would not allow her to speak—he wanted no appeals to emotion in his court, he explained. And then, after listening to brief presentations by both sides, he issued his order. The case file would be released.

With every detail known to investigators—including all crime scene photos—now a part of the public record, the possibility of ever corroborating any future confession against matters known only to police ended.

Yet, whatever hopes the media might have had as to their own analysis of the case files, they came to very little. There was no “hidden” evidence concerning John Walsh’s ties to the Mafia, nor was there any suggestion that he had meddled with the investigation of the Hollywood police in any way, though the spectacular lack of progress might well have warranted it.

There was a brief flurry of indignation when reporters realized that key evidence—the bloody carpet samples taken from Toole’s Cadillac, as well as the car itself—had been lost. As to that matter, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was quick to deflect responsibility onto the Hollywood PD. No evidentiary hold had been placed upon the car by the principal investigators, the sheriff’s office said, so they were only following proper procedure in returning the car to its owner, Wells Brothers Used Cars. As far as the carpet samples were concerned, the sheriff admitted having destroyed them, but again, that was normal procedure for dealing with what were reclassified as “non-evidentiary materials”—since the original testing was inconclusive, no one had seen any point in keeping them. As to what had become of the sections of the floor carpets that had not been tested, no one could be sure . . . perhaps only the mysterious “J” who signed for them could say.

Whatever the validity of the various claims and counterclaims of the agencies involved, anyone who read the various accounts published in the wake of the release of the case files could be forgiven for assuming that the matter was finished. Propriety and impropriety of procedures aside, it simply looked as if police would never find out who had kidnapped and murdered Adam Walsh.

And yet, even with Hollywood PD apparently at a standstill and Joe Matthews retired from Miami Beach PD, there was still desultory work on the case. In September, investigator Philip Mundy of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office took the sworn statement of Bobby Lee Jones, a former cellmate of Toole’s in the Duval County Jail, who claimed to have worked with Ottis Toole at Reaves Roofing in 1982. In late July of that year, Jones said, Toole began to talk to him about various crimes he had committed, including the killing of a little boy. Jones recalled Toole telling him he’d lured the child into his car, and had intended to take him home and “be his father.” But it had not worked out, Jones said. Toole told him he’d cut the boy’s head off and tossed it into a creek, then cut up the body and burned it.