Bringing Adam Home (37 page)

Furthermore, while Hoffman had assiduously recorded all other interviews he conducted in the course of his investigation, the one with Campbell was not recorded. That was for one simple reason, Matthews theorized: the date recorded on the tape would have determined when the interview actually took place. Most disturbing to Matthews, however, was a supplemental report that Hoffman filed on August 8, where he falsely stated that the results of Matthews’s polygraph examination of Campbell were “inconclusive.”

To Matthews, all this was evidence that from the beginning Hoffman had seen Jimmy Campbell as the perfect suspect and had set about constructing a scenario where he would seem a supersleuth for having deduced things about the case that no one else had. By switching the dates of his interview with Campbell, Hoffman made it seem that he had smoked Campbell out, then ordered Matthews to administer a test that incriminated him.

L
ater that evening, as Matthews made a visit to the unmarked grave site of Toole’s mother, a call came from Vinetta Syphurs, Toole’s sister and the owner of the Japanese bayonet that Broward County detectives had questioned her about a decade before. Matthews had left a message for her earlier that day that he was hoping to talk with her about the matter.

She was suffering from cancer, Vinetta told Matthews—in fact she was dying. Her husband Rodney had recently died as well, and somehow the timing of Matthews’s phone call, after all this time, suggested to her that it was a message from the grave, her Rodney suggesting that she tell police the truth about the things she knew.

She told Matthews that she and Ottis were the closest of all the nine children, especially after their mother died, and that he often confided to her about some of the things he’d done. She had visited Ottis in prison—a fact noted by Toole in one of his letters to John Reaves Jr.—and during that visit he told her, without expressing remorse, that he had murdered Adam Walsh. This confession had so disgusted her that she disowned her brother and refused to visit or correspond afterward. She had lied to Broward detectives when she’d told them she had that bayonet mounted above her mantel, she told Matthews. She wasn’t even sure where it had come from or when she got it. It had just been stuck on a shelf somewhere.

If Ottis had taken the bayonet and replaced it some time later on, she would have never known. She’d been trying to protect her brother at the time she spoke to detectives, but when she asked him point-blank and he admitted the killing, she’d been sickened. She wanted Matthews to pass on what she’d told him to the Walshes. She was sorry she had not come forward sooner, but now she felt at peace.

I
t was a score for Matthews, one more suggestion that the original investigators had been more intent on proving Ottis Toole’s innocence than his guilt, but he would have to keep going until he’d picked through the case file from top to bottom and—if possible—found that elusive piece of evidence that had so consumed his predecessors.

On Saturday, March 18, Matthews met with retired Brevard County sheriff deputy Steve Kendrick, the first police officer to whom Toole had confessed. Kendrick took Matthews back through his initial interview with Toole and the chance confusion with Broward County that had set twenty-five years of history into motion.

Thank God the dumb bastard couldn’t spell, Kendrick said, or else the whole thing might never have come out. When Matthews reminded him that actually the thing had not yet “come out,” Kendrick nodded in commiseration. Still there was not a doubt in his mind. Toole wasn’t the kind of guy who would have seen any value in confessing to such an awful thing unbidden. He’d confessed the crime to him twice, offering details that Kendrick realized—once the Hollywood police finally shared their information with him—only the killer could have known at the time.

I
n the weeks that followed, Matthews continued to pore through the voluminous file, and in late May he began to work back through an analysis of the physical evidence. In 1986, while still with the Miami Beach Police, Matthews had supervised the investigation of a case that stymied detectives until he ordered a tool marking analysis comparing a knife found in possession of a suspect and the wound in the deceased’s chest. As a result, the killer was convicted, among the first to be solved by such means.

Accordingly, on Thursday, May 25, he coordinated a reexamination of Adam’s skull for tool markings by the Miami Dade crime lab and the Broward County medical examiner’s office. Once again, however, though the markings showed “some similarities,” the results were inconclusive.

That same day, Matthews asked that Hollywood Police turn over certain evidence that it appeared they had not yet shared with him: Matthews wanted to examine copies of the photos taken by the FDLE, specifically those of the search and analysis of Ottis Toole’s Cadillac. Sergeant Lyle Bean, the Hollywood officer in charge of the file, checked, but then told Matthews that there were no such photos to be found.

Well, Matthews told Bean, FDLE reports indicated that five rolls of film had been shot documenting the search. If in fact the photos were not in Hollywood’s files, perhaps Bean would be willing to call the FDLE and find out what had happened to them.

Bean told Matthews he would place the call, and Matthews waited a week to follow up. On June 1, he called back. “They haven’t found them yet, but they’re still looking,” Bean said.

On June 19, Matthews placed yet another call to Bean, asking for an update on the status of those misplaced photographs. The FDLE had told him that no such photos existed in their files, Bean said.

Matthews hung up and sat pondering the situation for a moment. Twenty-three years had passed. Witnesses had died, the likely killer of Adam Walsh had died, and a great deal of evidence had disappeared as well. If the bloody carpet samples had vanished, along with the 4,200-pound automobile from which they’d come, why couldn’t five rolls worth of photographs have vaporized as well? Still, Matthews was not the sort to leave stones unturned. If you were a good cop, you turned them all over. And sometimes, if you were lucky, you found exactly what you were looking for.

He reached for the phone then and called the FDLE crime lab himself. He’d have to speak to someone in the photo lab, a voice told him, and Matthews waited patiently while he was transferred. When an attendant answered, he explained that he was simply following up on the request of Sergeant Bean from Hollywood PD. Were they absolutely certain that no copies of the photographs taken of Ottis Toole’s Cadillac back in 1983 existed in their files?

There was a pause on the other end. No one in the office seemed to know what Matthews was talking about. There’d been no request for any photos from anyone at Hollywood PD.

Matthews nodded and hung up. He’d played this game before. Except the last time around, the joker on the other side of the table had been a guy named Jack Hoffman.

In the end, Matthews spoke to an FDLE public information officer, Sharon Gogerty, who checked the files in reference to Hollywood PD case #81-56073. Yes, she told Matthews, they had ninety-eight photo negatives pertaining to the processing of suspect Ottis Toole’s vehicle.

Well then, Matthews asked, would it be possible for him to obtain copies of the prints? Gogerty paused, then said a surprising thing. There were no prints, she told Matthews. The film had been processed into negatives for the purposes of storage—standard operating procedure at FDLE—but never in twenty-three years had any prints been developed.

Matthews paused. In other words, he asked, no detective has ever requested or looked at the photos taken of Ottis Toole’s Cadillac?

“That would seem to be the case,” Gogerty replied brightly. “But you can be the first.”

O
n Tuesday, June 27, 2006, an FDLE regional legal adviser, John Kenner, sent ninety-eight photographs copied from lab case file 831043357 to Matthews at
America’s Most Wanted
, where staffers in turn forwarded them to his offices in Davie, a few miles northwest of Hollywood. Matthews, who had come in early that Wednesday to work on his report, glanced up as his longtime secretary Mary Alvarez came through his door with a hefty UPS envelope in hand. “Were you expecting something in the overnight?” she asked.

Indeed he was, Matthews assured her. He set his coffee aside and quickly spread out the thick sheaf of three-by-five-inch prints on his desk, trying all the while to keep his expectations under control. He was excited to have unearthed the photographs, but he had suffered his share of setbacks on this case before—in all honesty, it wouldn’t have surprised him to find he’d been sent a series of shots of an FDLE employee’s birthday party.

This time, though, he’d hit pay dirt. He was looking at the outset for any shots of the rear bumper of the Cadillac. When he quickly found three that depicted the sizable dent described by both William Mistler and Bobby Lee Jones, Toole’s coworker from Jacksonville, Matthews nodded with satisfaction. It was confirmation that indeed it was Toole’s car that Mistler had seen in the Sears parking lot the day that Adam had been taken.

“Good, good, good” is Matthews’ characteristic way of expressing enthusiasm, and that is what he murmured as he turned to see what other treasures might have come his way. There were other shots of the Cadillac’s exterior, dashboard, and seats, but he expected nothing of real import there. Of far more interest were a series of dark shots that resembled negatives, dotted here and there by objects that glowed a psychedelic blue.

In fact, these were a set of specially processed shots taken by FDLE crime scene investigators using luminol technology to identify or enhance the presence of blood traces on items of evidence. In this process, ordinary photographs are taken of objects, then chemicals that become luminescent when in contact with blood are applied to those objects, and the photographs taken again. The second series of photos are shot in darkness, with a wide aperture setting and the lens open for a minute or more. The only images that appear are special luminescent markers that orient the viewer and any part of the item where blood residue—invisible to the naked eye—might exist. Anything that retains the presence of blood will show up in a ghostly metallic blue.

Matthews first went about arranging a comparison of a set of photos taken of the front driver’s-side floorboards. Given all the disappointments of the past quarter-century, he expected little. But now he sat staring in disbelief at what was laid out before him.

The pictures of the front floorboard carpeting shot in ordinary light showed nothing beyond the ordinary dirt and dings he might expect, except for the presence of the orienting marker the technician had placed along the edge of the carpet. But as Matthews placed the corresponding luminol-enhanced shot alongside the first, he could hear Ottis Toole’s reply to Jack Hoffman during his confession of October 20, 1983, ringing in his mind:

Hoffman:
Did you get blood all over you from the child?

Toole:
I got it on my shoes. I throwed my shoes away too, and I put another pair of shoes on.

So you did, Matthews murmured to himself, so you damned well did. There in the photograph before him glowed a blood-engendered image of a pair of shoeprints firmly planted on the driver’s floorboards.

Matthews set those images aside, well aware of the significance of the discovery. At long last, here was physical evidence tying Ottis Toole to the crime.

He set aside the images of the bloody footprints, and turned to another set of prints of the machete that Detective Terry had confiscated from Toole’s car-dealer associate in Jacksonville. In one of his confessions, Toole had mentioned wrapping tape around the handle of his machete to keep from getting blisters, and the luminol shot of the machete with its taped-up handle showed nothing.

But in a second image, taken after the tape had been removed from its handle, the wooden grips of the blade glowed from blood as if radioactive. Matthews studied the image, compared the location of the marker in the luminol image with that in the original again, then exhaled deeply and leaned back in his chair. There before him was a photograph of Ottis Toole’s machete, taken from his car, its handle soaked in blood.

Matthews turned back to what was left of the photographs, then, riffling through a set taken from the rear floorboards. At first he saw nothing of interest, just some streaky, vague imagery, nothing to compare with that bold set of footprints or that pulsing machete handle; then he stopped himself and looked closer at the photograph in his hand.

He studied the image for a moment, glanced away, then turned to look closely again, not sure whether to trust his eyes. He double-checked the markers to be certain—but indeed he was looking at a shot of the carpet directly behind the driver’s seat. The image taken in ordinary light revealed nothing. But as to the luminol-enhanced image . . .

In all his years as a cop, Matthews had never seen anything like it—though having been raised as a Catholic, he was more than familiar with similar images preserved by church fathers over the centuries. What he was looking at chilled him—but there was more to the feeling than that. From this image there emanated reassurance, and a strange kind of peace, and the blessed feeling that twenty-six years of effort had not gone in vain.

Unless he was just finding images in clouds, that is.