Bringing Adam Home (4 page)

As the hours passed and the store began to prepare for closing, the reality of Adam’s disappearance heightened for the Walshes. It was almost as if as long as the lights in the aisles burned brightly, Adam might somehow come around the corner of one of the aisles, smiling, with his arms outstretched. He’d just been hiding, nothing bad had happened. But once the store closed, and all was dark, what then?

John rushed home and returned to the lot where Revé waited by the family car. He’d brought blankets and some of Adam’s favorite books and toys. Together they made up a little bed in the big backseat of the family car, a converted Checker taxi. Revé folded Adam’s favorite blue blanket up to make a pillow. They left the doors unlocked and left a note on the dashboard that could be read through the window: “Adam, stay in the car. Mommy and Daddy are looking for you.”

And finally, some time after the lights of Sears had blinked out and the parking lot had emptied except for the hulking shadow of the Checker, the two of them got in John’s car and drove home.

A
ny thought of rest, however, was impossible. Shortly after they’d pulled into the drive and consulted briefly with the family and friends who had gathered, Revé mounted her bicycle and was pedaling up and down the streets of their suburban neighborhood, calling her son’s name. She returned to circle the shuttered Sears store, peering through the darkened windows for any sign of Adam, and even made her way up a set of fire stairs to the roof, where she called for him down the building’s ventilator shafts.

As Revé searched, John joined with a team of friends and neighbors to form a human chain that swept the nearby Hollywood Golf Course. A group of Crime Watch volunteers organized a walking search of the city, aided by a police helicopter that swept the streets with its spotlight.

At one point late in the night, John Walsh hailed a cruiser driving through his neighborhood. “How’s the hunt going?”

The patrolman behind the wheel was a rookie named Mark Smith, who pointed to a photo of Adam pinned to his visor. “We’re all looking for him,” Smith said. “Don’t worry.”

But still there was nothing. By morning, the news had hit the local papers, with the local
Hollywood Sun-Tattler
running a front-page banner: “Massive Search Launched for Boy, 6—Adam Walsh Disappeared from Sears Monday Afternoon.” A piece in the
Miami News
quoted Hollywood police as saying that while six-year-old Adam Walsh had indeed gone missing, “kidnapping is not suspected.” And in fact, there was little concrete reason at that moment to believe that an abduction had taken place. There was no ransom note, no disgruntled parent held at arm’s length by divorce, none of the “logical” reasons for a child to be taken.

John Walsh, however, could not shake the feeling that someone who had recently lost a child to some tragic circumstance might have taken his son. Yet even that scenario was preferable to the most logical explanation for many a missing child case in South Florida. The spidery network of drainage canals that intersect the narrow strip of habitable land between the Everglades and the Atlantic—the crackpot work of developers such as Henry Flagler and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward—had claimed more than their fair share of children over the years. It is hard to drive a mile in South Florida without encountering one of the deeply chiseled, rock-walled channels meant to turn the Everglades into homesites, few of them fenced, many of them abutting parks, bike paths, and heavily traveled thoroughfares. If Adam had tumbled into one of those canals . . . well, it was a prospect John Walsh did not want to contemplate.

And despite the efforts of the local police and news media, there was the distressing possibility that Adam and his abductor were long gone from the area. In 1981, there were none of the regional and national alert systems and shared databases that the public and the law enforcement community take for granted today. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of children went missing each year, the world had simply not recognized the need for such measures. Most kids “showed up,” right? Such disappearances were ordinarily treated by law enforcement as local matters.

But by now it seemed to the Walshes that Adam was not simply going to “show up.” And if he had indeed been taken, and his abductor had slipped them outside the local network of cops and media alarum, who would even notice?

To try and cover such bases, the Walshes designed a poster offering a reward of $5,000—no questions asked—for Adam’s safe return. It featured a photograph taken only a week before—a gap-toothed little boy in a baseball cap, holding a bat—and assured anyone who might have taken Adam, “D
O
N
OT
F
EAR
R
EVENGE
! We will not prosecute. We only want our son.” They printed 150,000 of the posters, and they did a thing unheard of at the time: through friends with connections to Delta Airlines, copies were given to every passenger who passed through the airline’s busy Atlanta hub. Copies, including those translated into Spanish, were distributed on every outgoing flight at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Eastern Airlines followed suit, and soon the posters were being issued to their passengers at every airport in the United States.

By Wednesday, forty-eight hours after Adam’s disappearance, it seemed almost certain there would be no simple resolution to the case. “Probes Yield No Clues to Missing Boy,” the headlines read. “Reward Rises as Police Probe Any, Every Clue.”

Fred Barbetta, public information officer for the Hollywood PD, assured reporters that the cops had spared no effort. “We’ve got the whole Detective Bureau on this one,” he told reporters, “the whole patrol, everybody.” But then he added a grimmer assessment, one that reflected what many inside the department had come to think: “It’s time we hit the waterways hard. If he’s in the water, this is when he’d come up.” As a result, those same volunteers who’d scoured the streets and combed the parks and playgrounds and golf courses began to walk the banks of the dark canals.

On Thursday, lead detective Hoffman made his first public statement on the case, telling reporters that Adam’s disappearance might possibly have been an abduction after all. “This is not the type of child to just walk off,” he explained. He’d had considerable discussion with the parents, and they had convinced him that Adam was a well-behaved and happy little boy. “But we don’t have any clues whatsoever what the motive would be. It’s extremely frustrating,” Hoffman added. “We’ve got no clues, no leads, no evidence and no motives.” Hoffman reiterated his department’s plea for anyone who might have witnessed anything out of the ordinary that day at the Sears Mall to come forward.

Meanwhile, certainly no one had given up the search. Twenty-two Hollywood police officers had volunteered their unpaid overtime to keep looking for Adam. Influenced by the Hollywood PIO’s grisly reminder that gases inside a decomposing body would by now have sent it floating to the surface of the water, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission donated one of their helicopters for use in searching area waterways. Seven wildlife officers volunteered their time to conduct a ground search in the nearby Florida Everglades.

Revé, desperate for anything that might help, agreed to undergo hypnosis, in the hopes that she might have blocked some detail, however small, of her activities that Monday. But the account she gave of her activities under hypnosis was depressingly similar to that of her conscious recollections. Her memory of the timing of events matched to the minute, and she had seen nothing out of the ordinary and no one suspicious on her way into the store that day.

Meantime, the press had set up camp outside the Walshes’ more-than-modest Hollywood home, eagerly trumpeting any tidbit they picked up off their police frequency scanners. They had taken to describing John Walsh as a “marketing executive” in their stories, and somehow the converted Checker cab had become a “custom car.” While the reward was bumped up to $25,000 and ultimately $100,000 through the donations of friends, the Walshes had begun to fear that they were being painted as millionaires, the type of people who might be targeted for a colossal ransom.

And then, late on Thursday, came a phone call that finally gave Hollywood Police some reason to hope. A woman named Marilyn Pottenberg phoned, explaining that her ten-year-old son Timothy told her that he had noticed something suspicious during their visit to the Sears store the afternoon that Adam Walsh disappeared. She herself had not witnessed it, Mrs. Pottenberg said, but her son told her that he had seen Adam—or someone who looked like Adam—being pulled into a dark blue van in the parking lot. Mrs. Pottenberg was not eager to have her son interviewed by police, because he suffered from severe migraine headaches. She would have to speak with Timothy’s doctor before she could allow that. She would get back to them.

Though there were certain inconsistencies in the tip, including the suggestion that Timothy had witnessed this event long after the time that Revé Walsh had raised the alarm for her missing son, Lieutenant Hynds appeared before reporters on Saturday, August 1, to announce that his force was following up on “the first solid lead” they had uncovered to date—and he put out the call to anyone in the community who might have seen such a suspicious vehicle.

The local Crime Stoppers staged a reenactment of an Adam look-alike being snatched through the doors of a blue van by a white male perpetrator, and the footage was aired on every local television station. Tips flooded in from everywhere, and hundreds of vans of every shade of blue were stopped and searched by cops in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties. Florida highway troopers were doing the same across the entire state.

But by the following Tuesday, eight days after Adam had disappeared, even Lieutenant Hynds was backpedaling. He’d come to have “some misgivings” about the veracity of the Pottenberg tip, he told the press. And, too, he was a bit concerned about inconveniencing innocent citizens, some of whom had been stopped and searched twice.

S
o this was where
he
had come in, Joe Matthews thought, dropping the last of the case files on his desk. Beyond the “blue van” lead, which seemed about as consequential to him as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, precious little had been developed over ten days and thousands of man-hours of police work. Furthermore, during the time that he had spent at Hollywood police headquarters, he’d noticed a few disconcerting things about the way the investigation was being handled in the offices around him.

While Matthews sat at a vacant desk, poring over the files that were rather grudgingly parceled out to him, the phones at other desks were ringing constantly. While some of the detectives seemed organized, others assigned to the case would answer incoming calls randomly, jot information given by tipsters on scraps of paper or napkins or whatever might be handy, then hurry out on unrelated assignments without bothering to log their calls.

Desks were shared, files piled and unpiled, scraps of paper sent fluttering, napkins balled and tossed and swept. To Matthews, it seemed impossibly chaotic. It wasn’t that the detectives seemed incompetent or unconcerned—there simply seemed to be no one in charge.

In his own department, all calls pertaining to a specific investigation went through one central logging station, and each lead, however lunatic or promising on the face of it, was assigned to someone for follow-up. After the leads were checked, reports were filed, and someone with authority over the case regularly reviewed the status of each and every inquiry, no matter how unimportant it might appear. Such organization seemed to Matthews the first principle of effective investigation technique, but when he mentioned the seeming disarray to Hoffman, he got only a raised eyebrow in return. If Hoffman had anything to say about it, Matthews wouldn’t be there to begin with, he was reminded.

Matthews was hardly surprised at Hoffman’s response, but he couldn’t have stopped himself from making his point. Ten days gone by and not a scrap of worthwhile information turned up, how could he keep his mouth shut? He even walked down the hallway to repeat his concerns to Lieutenant Hynds. Hynds gave him a look obviously meant to remind Matthews who was in charge. “I’ll look into it,” he told Matthews.

Matthew got the picture. He’d stick to what he could do, he thought, what he’d been authorized to do. And he would begin with the father of the missing boy.

M
atthews had formed no impression as to any involvement that John Walsh might have had in the crime that he’d been called to help investigate. Impressions only got in the way. What Matthews relied upon was his technique.

Before conducting a polygraph exam, any competent expert performs something of a pre-exam interview with a subject, but in Matthews’s case those interviews were anything but perfunctory. Though he has thought about the matter, he is not exactly certain where his ability to connect with people comes from, though he does recall that as a child growing up in a devout Catholic household, he’d thought he was going to become a priest. “When it got closer to the time to go away to the seminary, though, I wasn’t so sure. My mother knew I was upset and sat me down one day to tell me it was okay if I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have to be a priest just to please her, she told me.” He shrugs. “It was a big relief to me at the time. But sometimes I think being a cop is almost the same thing.”

In any event, when his subject on the day of August 7, 1981, sat down in the examining room, Matthews started by asking, “Tell me a little about yourself, John.” When Walsh began by telling Matthews where he’d gone to college and what his major had been, Matthews held up a hand. “No, I mean, tell me about how you grew up. About your mother and father. Like if I asked you to rate them on a scale of one to ten, with ten being tops, and why. That kind of thing.”