Bringing Adam Home (39 page)

When he handed over the report to Wagner, he stressed the importance of the FDLE crime scene photos he’d had developed for the first time. Wagner was curious as to why such evidence had not been examined before, but Matthews couldn’t explain that one. He had had the devil’s own time even getting hold of the photos, he told Wagner, explaining that when he’d found them missing from the Hollywood file, he’d had to go to the FDLE himself to find the film and get the prints developed.

Why didn’t Sergeant Lyle Bean get these prints added to the department file? Wagner wanted to know. But again, Matthews couldn’t answer. Bean had claimed he’d requested the photos several times from the FDLE and was told that the photos did not exist, that’s all Matthews knew for sure. He tapped his report. “In the end, we got what we needed.”

“That may be so,” Wagner said. “But I’ll find out why it took so long to get those photos, rest assured of that.”

Whatever the upshot of any conversations with Bean regarding the matter, Wagner did not share it with Matthews, though the irony that it took an outsider to accomplish what no detective had in twenty-five years was clearly not lost on the chief. Matthews took the opportunity to point out that while he had gone back through the tool marking test procedures regarding the machete to no avail, DNA testing on that clearly blood-soaked handle had never been performed. Matthews could not authorize such testing, but the weapon was still in possession of the Hollywood PD, and the chief surely could.

And he would, Wagner assured Matthews. The day following, Matthews got a phone call from Sergeant Lyle Bean. The chief wanted that machete tested for DNA, Bean explained, and he was calling to talk about the matter with Matthews before he sent it out.

So far, Wagner had been as good as his word, Matthews thought. Matthews then explained to Bean that he’d spoken to a forensic geneticist after he’d seen the luminol indications on the wooden handle of the machete. That specialist suggested that the handle be drilled for samples, and not scraped as was normally done, based on the assumption that the blood had soaked into the wood over time. Matthews would never learn whether or not Bean passed his expert’s suggestions along, and furthermore, the results seemed to take forever in coming back. It was not until October 14 that Chief Wagner called Matthews to let him know the disappointing findings. The results were, in a word, “inconclusive.” Not negative. Not positive. Just, maddeningly, “inconclusive.”

All the while, Matthews continued to pore over the files, wondering if he might have missed something that, however small, or seemingly unimportant, might lead him to an unexpected find. He was reviewing the phone and e-mail tips that had come in to
America’s Most Wanted
following the airing of the episode on Adam in 1996, when one phone intake sheet caught his eye. On September 21, at 11:10 p.m., a call had come from someone named Wendy Sapp, identifying herself to an operator as a niece of Toole’s. The operator had noted, “In 1982 Ottis told caller and relatives that he killed Adam.” Matthews racked his brain, trying to remember. He’d talked to Sarah Patterson and to Joel Cockerman at some length, but as to a Wendy Sapp, he was drawing nothing but blanks.

There was certainly nothing in the file to suggest that anyone at Hollywood PD had followed up on this or any of the other tips
AMW
had supplied, but he could certainly talk to her now. He picked up the phone and launched into a series of calls, until finally he found himself talking to one Wendy Sapp Fralick. And, yes, her mother had been previously married to a man named Dickie McHenry, who, she believed, was a cousin of Ottis Toole.

“Uncle Ottis” had often babysat for her and her sisters, Fralick said, and she remembered quite clearly that one night he had told her that he killed Adam Walsh. She was a bit hazy on any details that he might have given, for that was a long time ago. Besides, she told Matthews, she was only eight at the time and didn’t truly comprehend the magnitude of his statements.

However, Fralick said, about four years ago she had spent some time with her cousin Erica Toole, the daughter of Howard and Georgia Toole, from whom Ottis had stolen the truck back in June 1981. During that 2004 visit, Fralick brought up the subject of Adam Walsh, and Erica replied that her father Howard, Ottis’s brother, had told her that Ottis did in fact murder Adam.

With Fralick’s help, Matthews then tracked down her mother Linda, who was by then remarried to a man name Gerald Orand. It was Orand who answered the phone, explaining that his wife was recuperating from a stroke. She had difficulty being understood at times, but she very much wanted to communicate with Matthews, presuming he was who he claimed to be, that is.

After Orand called
America’s Most Wanted
to verify Matthews’s identity, he got back to the detective, along with his wife Linda. Linda explained a bit of the family tree at the outset of the conversation. She had first been married to a man named Willie Sapp, the father of Wendy. After divorcing Sapp, she married Dickie McHenry, the brother of Georgia Toole, who was married to Ottis’s brother Howard.

As to the things that Wendy had told Matthews about Ottis and Adam Walsh, Linda did have a few things she would like to add. On an early winter afternoon in 1981 or 1982, she said, she and Dickie took her kids over to Howard and Georgia’s for a visit. Ottis happened to be there that day, and was sitting out in the backyard, drinking beer. While Georgia stayed inside to feed the kids and Howard took a bath, Linda and Dickie went out to the yard to sit with Ottis. He offered them both a beer, she told Matthews, but neither one of them felt like drinking that day, and they declined.

Ottis started talking about how he missed his niece Becky Powell, Linda said. He told them that both he and Henry Lee Lucas liked to fuck her, but Henry Lee had run off with her. After contemplating that dismal fact for a bit, Linda recalls that Ottis then announced to them that it was he who “took” Adam Walsh.

“Who is Adam Walsh?” Linda asked Ottis. She had never heard a thing about the matter at that time.

“The one who’s been missing,” he responded.

Linda told Matthews that Toole went on to recount how he kidnapped this little boy down in Broward County, fucked him in the butt, cut his head off, cut his body up in pieces, then put the pieces in plastic bags and dumped them. The descriptions were so vivid that Linda stood up and vomited into some nearby bushes.

Ottis watched her wiping her mouth and laughed. “You pregnant or something?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “You make me sick, that’s all.”

A bit later, Linda said, Ottis offered to take Wendy and her two sisters out for ice cream. “Here’s Ottis,” she said to Matthews, her outrage palpable still, “who just got through talking about raping Becky Powell and some little boy and then chopping him up in pieces, and he wants to take my kids out for ice cream?”

After that, she made sure her children were never left alone with Ottis Toole. And that is also why Howard and his wife moved up to Georgia soon after, to get away from Ottis. Everyone in the family knew Ottis had killed Adam Walsh, she said. It was simply common knowledge.

Then why on earth had she never told anyone about these things? Matthews asked. Linda didn’t miss a beat. “Because no one ever asked,” she said. “You’re the first that ever did.”

Matthews sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time after his conversation with Linda McHenry Orand. Common knowledge among the members of a family that one of their own had kidnapped and killed Adam Walsh. And because no one had ever asked, not one of them stepped forward to tell.

Matthews wrote up a summary of his interviews with Wendy Sapp Fralick and her mother Linda and added them to the list that had been with Chief Wagner for several months now. He also pointed out that the 1996 tip from Sapp had been passed along to the Hollywood PD at the time, just as every tip involving the case had been.

All the while, Matthews couldn’t help thinking about Ottis Toole’s reply to Linda’s question, “Who is Adam Walsh?”

“The one who’s been missing,” she claimed Toole told her. Not, “The one they found.”

Finally, it struck him. If Linda Orand had all her facts straight, if those were indeed Toole’s words, then this conversation had taken place
before
Adam’s remains had been found, less than two weeks after the killing. Of course Linda wouldn’t have heard about “Adam Walsh” all the way up in Jacksonville. At that point, before the fisherman had made their startling discovery, the Walshes were having a difficult time getting anyone outside Dade and Broward Counties to realize their son had been abducted. And there was Ottis Toole sitting in a lawn chair, swigging beer and calmly recounting to his own sister the details of the crime.

Two years before, in a newspaper article commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime, criminologist Vernon Geberth had a rhetorical-sounding response for reporters who wanted to know if he believed the Adam Walsh case could ever be solved: “A relative of the killer who knows about the crime may want to finally unburden himself.” Or
themselves
, Matthews thought.

The statement might have been only Vernon Geberth’s wishful thinking at the time, but Wendy Sapp Fralick and her mother Linda Orand had just become an investigator’s wish come true.

L
inda McHenry Orand’s statement—along with the extortion letter Toole had sent John Walsh and the damning images developed from the FDLE negatives—might have seemed yet another finding upon which a successful prosecution could have been based all by itself, but as Matthews well knew, there is a vast difference between real life and film and television drama, where justice is served up in a moment—one witness breaks down in racking sobs or a single, searing image is produced.

Nowhere had that distinction been made more clear than in the long history of this matter. If it was as simple as dropping one bombshell, then this case would have been closed long ago. Of course, charges are filed readily when an officer catches a perpetrator in the act, or when a suspect is apprehended and confesses. In this instance, however—where a suspect already in custody had confessed to the crime—the state attorney’s office asked accordingly that evidence corroborating that confession be presented by police in a form that would suggest any charge as well founded. And no one in law enforcement had ever gone to the trouble of such a submission.

For that reason, Matthews did not for a moment contemplate fashioning a report that did not take into account every shred of evidence that had accumulated concerning the matter. The bombshells would have to take their places in the long chain of evidence, items both great and small. This wasn’t a movie, this was life . . . and death.

Accordingly, for two years and nine months Matthews labored on his review of the 10,000-page case file. He reexamined all the taped interviews conducted with Toole and others and conducted his own independent searches, interviews, and analyses of materials pertinent. He found new evidence, and with all the disparate pieces assembled in narrative order for the first time—the many materials upon which this account is based—everything pointed to an inescapable conclusion: Ottis Toole was the man who’d committed the crime.

Certainly, Joe Matthews had long suspected Toole, and it was to his everlasting dismay that he had not been given the opportunity to conduct his own interview with the man and extract and nail down Toole’s confession himself. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence that he’d come across in the course of his investigation came from a former Texas Ranger who sent Matthews a videotaped interview conducted with Toole by a former colleague who—shortly after Henry Lee Lucas was arrested—had flown Toole out to that state to try and clear a murder case in their jurisdiction. The interview took place on March 26, 1984, several weeks after Jack Hoffman had accepted Toole’s recanting of his various confessions.

During the interview an avuncular Ranger draws Toole out about his typical modus operandi for murder, and Toole rattles on readily—almost cheerfully—about the thrill of shooting old ladies hanging out laundry and garroting unsuspecting drag queens. But when the questioning turns to the case of Adam Walsh, Matthews points out, everything in Toole’s demeanor suddenly changes.

“You can see it in his body language,” Matthews says, and indeed the signs are apparent to anyone. As Toole (who had offered few specifics in many of the other cases brought up that day) leads the Ranger through the details—the kidnapping and the beating and the effort involved in the decapitation, the wrapping of Adam’s head in his shirt and its disposal and the disposal of the body—his shoulders tense and round inward, the cadences of his speech slow, his tone becomes serious, even plaintive, his gaze is suddenly evasive. What Matthews wouldn’t have given to be able to climb into the frame and attach Toole to his polygraph instrument!

At one point, when the Ranger interrupts Toole to ask if he had done anything to Adam’s body before he began to burn it, Toole’s response is electric. “Oh no,” he says, as his eyes roll and his head snaps in emphatic negative.

In place of needles dancing across a polygraph scroll, Matthews had to be content with the reaction of the Ranger. Following the conclusion of Toole’s account of eating a few of Adam’s ribs before scattering the charred remains, the burly veteran turned away, his disgust scarcely concealed: “Well, that’s pretty stout.”