Bringing Adam Home (32 page)

Jones’s statement might have had greater impact were it not for the inconsistency suggested by the dates he gave Mundy. Company records indicate that the last day of Toole’s employment at Reaves Roofing was June 4, 1981, several weeks before the killing. Furthermore, he drew only one day’s pay from Southeast Color Coat in December.

Of course, fourteen or fifteen years had passed, and Jones might have been mistaken about exactly when he’d heard all this from Toole. The conversation could have taken place when they were incarcerated together in 1983. And there was no doubt that many details of Toole’s confession had been recounted by the media when the case files had been opened earlier that year. Still, if Jones was being truthful—if he’d heard about it from Toole at work in December 1982, or simply as they chatted on the streets or in a bar—it would mean that Toole had begun talking to others about killing Adam Walsh long before he first admitted it to police in 1983.

Meanwhile, John Walsh had decided to take matters into his own hands, even if it was a stinging blow that led him to do so. In May 1996, as he was on his way to a Washington, D.C., gathering of missing children who had been reunited with their families as a result of
America’s Most Wanted
, Walsh received an unexpected call on his car phone. He didn’t have to bother coming to New York next week to talk about next year’s episodes, a spokesman explained. After eight years, the Fox network had abruptly decided to cancel the show. He’d be kept on contract as a consultant and producer, but the decision was final:
America’s Most Wanted
was finished.

Though stunned at the news, Walsh had little choice in the matter. And after it had finally sunk in, he realized that the appropriate way to close the program was with an episode on the one case they had never featured: that of Adam Walsh.

The program, which ran on September 21, 1996, was put together by John Turchin, a reporter for WSVN, Channel 7, the Fox affiliate in Miami, and was based on information and tips gathered by Joe Matthews and Mark Smith, the detective with whom Matthews had worked the cold case investigation at Hollywood PD. Turchin interviewed Sears security guard Kathy Shaffer, who spoke candidly for the first time about her role in the incident back in 1981. She’d just started the job, she told Turchin, and when she realized that big trouble had indeed unfolded on that day, she was overwhelmed. While she had said otherwise, shortly after Revé Walsh showed her the pictures of her son she realized that Adam had in fact been in the store that day. It was also true that she had made him leave, along with all the other kids who were causing a fuss at the video game display. But she hadn’t wanted to admit it—after all, if she hadn’t sent him outside, he might still be alive.

Turchin also brought up the fact that the cops had recovered the car that was thought to have been used to abduct Adam, but sadly, it had been scrapped. And he pointed out that the cops had seized bloodstained carpeting from that car, as well—also lost, unfortunately.

Turchin also interviewed William Mistler, who recounted testimony that he had provided to the Hollywood police five years previously: he had seen a scruffy-looking man leading a little boy to a white Cadillac parked outside a Sears store on July 27, 1981. Mistler identified the boy as Adam Walsh, and the man who’d kidnapped him as Ottis Toole. The program concluded with some footage the Walshes had stumbled across by accident a few weeks before: six-year-old Adam Walsh in his baseball uniform, full of life, mugging at the camera, swinging his bat, getting a hit, rounding the bases. The stuff of which heartbreak is made.

Shortly after the show aired, Walsh received a call from Peter Roth, president of the Fox Entertainment Group. Hundreds of thousands of letters had been pouring in. Fifty-five members of Congress had complained, as had thirty-seven governors and every attorney general in the fifty states. The FBI had written as well. The network had reconsidered, Roth told Walsh.
America’s Most Wanted
—the show that had resulted in the capture of some four hundred fugitives, including eleven on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the show that had recovered twenty missing children and led to the apprehension of scores of child molesters—was going to remain on the air.

Washington, D.C.—September 23, 1996

J
ohn Walsh was heartened by the news from Fox, and he was proud of the way the program on Adam had turned out. How could anyone who had seen it doubt what had really happened? he thought. He and Revé had not yet found closure in a court of law, perhaps, but this was damned close. And as for bringing Ottis Toole to justice, he had plans for that as well.

He’d received word from sources that Ottis Toole had been diagnosed with hepatitis and AIDS by prison doctors at Lake Butler. Toole knew he was dying, Walsh was told, and it was suggested that the convict might be willing to talk to the right person. Walsh, who knew of the calamitous outcome of Mark Smith’s visit to Toole the previous year, thought he had the “right person” for the task in the person of Joe Matthews, who had retired from Miami Beach PD in the spring and had volunteered to help Walsh on the case in any way he possibly could.

And by this point, Walsh had formed a substantial network of friends in law enforcement, including the FBI and the FDLE. He was going to stop mincing around and use some of his influence to get Joe Matthews in to talk with Ottis Toole, once and for all. If Matthews could get a deathbed confession out of Toole, then he and Revé could rest with that, Walsh thought. Certainly, the prospect was worth using every favor he might call in.

W
ord that
America’s Most Wanted
would live on was not the only news that arrived in the wake of the September 21 program featuring Adam’s case. A number of tips were phoned in that suggested that Walsh and Joe Matthews were right about the killer’s identity.

While Matthews followed up most of the leads at Walsh’s request, one tip bypassed
AMW
entirely and went straight to the Hollywood PD: the caller’s name was Mary Hagan, she told police, and though she now resided in a retirement community in upstate Florida, she had been living in Hollywood not far from the Walshes at the time of Adam’s murder. She had seen things inside the Sears store that day he disappeared, she explained, and hadn’t realized until she’d seen that TV segment on Adam that police still hadn’t caught the killer. Perhaps what she had to tell them would help.

Phil Mundy, the investigator for the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, followed up with Hagan, seventy-six at the time. She told him that on the morning of July 27, 1981, she had noticed an ad for a lamp sale at Sears, and decided to go have a look. She entered the store through the garden department entrance and passed the video game display, where several kids were gathered, including Adam, whom she recognized from the neighborhood. Also standing there talking with the boys, said Hagan, was a “rancid-smelling” man who seemed out of place to her. He was filthy, and she could smell him—“overpowering, like beer and onions”—from several feet away.

The guy had to step out of her way so she could get past, Hagan said, and when he did, he smiled at her, a goofy-looking expression that exposed a big gap in his front teeth. She hurried on past, she said, and checked out the lamp section, where she couldn’t find anything she liked. There wasn’t a clerk around—only one customer, an attractive younger woman who seemed to be waiting on something—so Hagan decided to leave. As she passed the video display on the way out, she noted that it was deserted.

She explained to Mundy that she had thought about coming forward when she later learned what had happened to Adam, but wasn’t sure what good it would do. By that time, there was all that news about people who’d seen Adam being dragged into a “blue van,” so what she had seen didn’t seem all that important. “Leave it alone,” her husband Lou told her. “Let the police do their job.”

And she assumed that is just what happened, she told Mundy, until she watched the episode of
America’s Most Wanted
and saw the picture of Ottis Toole displayed on-screen. Oh my God, she thought, You mean he’s still alive—they never got him?

To Mundy, Hagan’s story was provocative. True, she might have pieced together much of what she’d told him from various reports. But there was one thing that had never been included in any account of Toole’s involvement with the crime, and that was his terrible, overpowering body odor. No one who had ever been in Toole’s presence for a moment failed to mention just how bad the guy smelled—as if there was something rotting inside him, bursting to get out.

A
nother particularly provocative call came directly to the
AMW
hotline, from a young woman named Sarah Patterson, the individual listed as “next of kin” on prison records. Patterson was the recipient of Toole’s few personal effects: his prison-issued Bible, some letters, and a few photographs.

In years past, she’d also received a lot more from Toole, though most of it was an unwelcome legacy. As she explained to Joe Matthews, she was Ottis Toole’s niece, the older sister of Frieda “Becky” Powell, who had been murdered by Henry Lee Lucas.

After her mother’s death, she had been raised by her grandmother and by Ottis Toole, if “raising” was what you could call it. Uncle Ottis, as Sarah called him, favored her younger sister, treating Becky like a daughter and Sarah “more like a friend,” though a curious friendship it seemed.

He taught her to drink and smoke dope and they partied hard together. “By the time I was ten, I was a whore,” Sarah told Matthews, “and I still am a whore. Back then, Uncle Ottis would turn me out to his friends for $10. He’d watch me fuck them and give them head and beat off while I was doing it.”

She never had sex with Ottis, however, because he was as queer as anyone could be, she explained. He shaved his legs, wore stockings, panties, and a bra. He dressed in drag, got shots “for boobs,” Sarah said, and wore a wig. That was the way he liked to dress “when he hustled other fags,” she said.

He could get mad, Sarah recalled, but he had a good side, too. Even if he only had enough money for one six-pack, he was always willing to share it. And when she got married at age seventeen, Ottis came to the wedding dressed as her bridesmaid.

As to the matter of Adam Walsh, Sarah had some pertinent information for Matthews. Some time around Christmas in 1995, she heard that Ottis was pretty sick and went to see him in prison. During that visit, she said, she asked him directly, “Uncle Ottis, are you the one that killed Adam Walsh?”

“Yeah,” he told Sarah. “I killed the little boy. And I always felt kinda bad about it, too.” As to why he hadn’t confessed to authorities, he told her that he had talked enough about the murder of Adam Walsh and he just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

When Matthews asked Sarah if she believed it, Sarah gave a bitter laugh. She had no doubt about it. “I know my uncle too well,” she said.

The
AMW
segment also resulted in a call from a young South Florida man named Joel Cockerman. Cockerman explained that until he had seen the show, he did not realize it—but he was calling now to report that he had actually witnessed the kidnapping of Adam Walsh.

As he later explained to Joe Matthews, Cockerman, eight at the time, was in the Sears store and was the other boy playing Asteroids with Adam Walsh when the trouble started with the kids who wanted to take the controllers away. When the security guard heard the commotion, she kicked them all out of the store, Cockerman said. Shortly after they made their way outside, Cockerman’s mother came and picked up him and his sister, Mia, nine at the time. Cockerman told his mother that he wanted to stay with his little friend until his parents came for him. In all likelihood, it is Cockerman and his mother and sister whom Bill Mistler had witnessed standing on the sidewalk when he viewed the same scene from his vehicle.

But his mother said it wasn’t necessary for them to wait. “Look,” she told Cockerman, “his dad is there now.” She pointed to where a disheveled-looking man was leading Adam from the curb and into the parking lot. When they saw the photograph of Ottis Toole flash on the screen, during the
AMW
segment, Cockerman’s sister clapped her hand to her mouth. “That’s him,” she told Cockerman. “He had more hair then, but that’s him.”

Neither Cockerman nor his sister had reported the incident before. They simply did not realize the importance of what they had witnessed until the program aired.

All of this seemed to Walsh and Matthews like fuel that might possibly reignite the investigation, until
AMW
producers fielded yet another call on the Monday following the segment. Just how stupid were they? a caller wanted to know. When asked what he was talking about, the caller passed along what no one at
AMW
had realized until that moment. “Ottis Toole is dead and already in the ground at Raiford Prison, down there in Florida.”

A
s it happened, Barry Gemelli, the health services administrator at the Union Correctional Institution, had been in his office at the prison infirmary one day the previous week, completing the paperwork necessary for the transfer of patient Ottis Toole to the nearby hospital unit at Lake Butler, when he got a summons from an aide. Ottis Toole had taken a sudden turn for the worse. The aide thought Gemelli ought to have a look.