Bringing Adam Home (41 page)

And if anyone present chose to assume that it was Chad Wagner and his men who’d finally put two and two together, that was okay, too. Wagner was, in Matthews’s eyes, deserving of plenty of credit. There were surely many of the chief’s own men who would have preferred that he simply do as all his predecessors had done. But Chad Wagner was a stand-up cop.

Furthermore, John and Revé Walsh knew how this day had come to be, as did Matthews’s own family and all his friends in law enforcement, and that was fine by him. Most important, Matthews felt the presence of his mother in the room, gazing at him with pride, nodding her approval. He’d done his job, banging away at the case for twenty-seven years, and justice had prevailed.

So now, he’d go down to the beach, treat himself to a good cigar, and watch the waves roll in and out. He’d earned it.

A
s John Walsh made the rounds of the talk shows in the following days, he was quick to point out that were it not for Joe Matthews, he would not be having those conversations, and he reiterated his praise for the retired homicide detective at the close of the year-end episode of
America’s Most Wanted
. But even there, it was hardly possible to explain what was really a twenty-seven-year process. Chief Wagner gave hints at the news conference, alluding to the fact that much of the evidence that prompted the closing of the case had been available all along; but he did not go on to add the obvious—“available had anyone competent been in charge of the search and the effort to put a case together.”

Furthermore, when Wagner said to reporters, “If you’re looking for that magic wand or that hidden document that just appeared, it’s not there,” his intent was likely to defuse the sort of “Perry Mason” effect engendered by years of exposure to manufactured drama. Still, while neither Wagner nor anyone else wanted any part of a trial by media on that day, one might speculate as to what the effect would have been had he filled a screen with the images of Ottis Toole’s bloody footprints glowing on the floorboards of his Cadillac or the rendering of a silent scream from a young boy’s severed head.

A
long with reminders of how important the Walshes’ good works had been—“If people hold their kids a little bit closer in crowded stores these days, thank the Walshes,” one writer said—there were also, predictably, a few doubters who surfaced in the wake of Chief Wagner’s announcement. A
Miami Herald
story published on December 28, 2008, quoted a Washington criminal profiler as being “appalled” by the decision to close the case without more proof. The story rehashed the reluctance of Hollywood police to charge Toole at the time of his first series of confessions, and also quoted Ron Hickman’s 2001 statement to reporter de Vise, “I spent 100 hours with that individual. I’ll tell you right now: He didn’t do it.”

There was “no new evidence” presented, the
Herald
story said, suggesting that either the reporter had not bothered to read the same evidence file that Joe Matthews and Chief Wagner had, or he was simply longing for that “magic wand” that Wagner referred to. The story referenced the various inconsistencies in Toole’s own confessions—including his erstwhile claims that Henry Lee Lucas had taken part, and his varying reports of where he’d disposed of Adam’s body. And it also quoted a Broward assistant state attorney as saying that while his office had indeed supported the closing of the case, all the mistakes made by police would have made a successful prosecution difficult were Toole still alive.

Joe Matthews might have agreed, though he might have also pointed back to the successful prosecution of Dieter Reichmann, where prosecutors had even less physical evidence and two dozen fewer confessions on the part of the perpetrator. While any prosecutor might like to have a videotape of a killer in the act to carry into court, the truth is that many celebrated cases have resulted in convictions based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence—from which jurors must
infer
a perpetrator’s guilt.

Despite any public perception to the contrary, the U.S. Supreme Court long ago established the precept that “circumstantial evidence is intrinsically no different from testimonial [direct] evidence” (
Holland v. United States
, 1954). As any competent prosecutor knows, the distinction between direct testimony and circumstantial evidence has little practical effect in the presentation or admissibility of evidence in trials. And while the so-called
CSI
effect might suggest that anything less than a mountain of forensic evidence tying a killer to the crime is insufficient, a number of recent studies have shown that jurors have not changed—even if prosecutors may feel the need to introduce high-tech data, juries remain as likely to be persuaded by logical argument as anything else.

In another piece published soon after the announcement, a veteran South Florida columnist expressed his own doubts about Hollywood PD’s willingness to put an end to the matter. He’d been one of the reporters who had trooped to the multijurisdictional press conference called in Monroe, Louisiana, back in 1983, where authorities were quick to attribute a raft of unsolved killings to Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. The columnist said that he and his colleagues had been too eager to believe cops back then, when they blamed Lucas and Toole for various crimes that were later attributed to others or which were never successfully prosecuted. Thus, why after all this time believe that police had finally found the killer of Adam Walsh? “It was like a miracle, conjured up with hardly anything in the way of new evidence,” the column concluded, ignoring the fact that “old” evidence, even twenty-seven-year-old evidence, becomes “new” when it is finally given a logical context.

Of course, successful prosecutions are always difficult, even when the physical evidence seems ironclad—just ask those who went after O. J. And while one Broward County state attorney may have forecast a difficult time proving the case, another prominent former prosecutor interviewed by a
Sun-Sentinel
reporter weighed in that he had gone to court on several instances with much less.

In fact, FBI findings disclosed just weeks before the press conference, in the case of Caylee Anthony, the two-year-old Orlando girl thought to have been murdered by her mother, Casey, would support Matthews’s analysis of the images he had found on the carpets of Toole’s car. A September 30, 2008, e-mail from FBI intelligence analyst Karen B. Cowan to a fellow agency employee identified a bodily fluids outline lifted from the trunk liner of Casey Anthony’s car using essentially the same methodology. “If you look closely at this photo, there appears to be the outline or silhouette of a child in the fetal position,” Cowan wrote. Shortly thereafter, Casey Anthony was arrested and charged with the crime.

And as for “believing,” why believe anything, Plato might respond, when the very nature of reality is—like shadows flickering on a cave wall, twice removed from the source—such a subjective matter? Had there been a dozen witnesses present when Ottis Toole carried Adam Walsh from his car, laid him on the ground, and severed his head, there would have been a dozen different accounts as to just what had occurred.

Subjectivity, along with contrariness, is a part of human nature. And when it comes to newspaper adjudications of controversial cases, as the cigar-chomping editor is quick to remind the cub reporter, “Keep the trouble coming. Good news just doesn’t sell.”

In keeping with that notion, as recently as March 2010, more than fifteen months after the case was cleared by authorities, the
Miami Herald
published a front-page story suggesting that indeed it was Jeffrey Dahmer who had been responsible for the killing, asserting that two new witnesses had come forward claiming to have spotted a disheveled, disturbing-looking man in the vicinity of the Sears store the day that Adam Walsh disappeared. They’d only realized it was Jeffrey Dahmer, they said, after learning of Dahmer’s heinous activities a decade later in 1991.

A comparison of the mug shots of preppy-looking Dahmer—who by most accounts long eluded suspicion precisely because he appeared harmless—with those of Ottis Toole suggests the true identity of the frightening individual these new witnesses had actually seen that day in Sears. And most law enforcement officials interviewed for the story scoffed at the notion that Dahmer could have been charged, much less prosecuted, on the basis of such claims.

“The delayed Dahmer identifications certainly add intrigue and mystery to Adam Walsh’s tragic death,” Chief Assistant State Attorney Chuck Morton wrote in response to the questions of
Herald
reporters at the time. In his eyes, Morton said, such claims might even form the basis for the writing of a murder mystery novel, “but they do not come close to supporting the filing of criminal charges.”

As Morton went on to explain, eyewitness identifications made years after the commission of a crime are among the least reliable forms of argument in criminal prosecutions. “Such identifications would have to be corroborated by overwhelmingly credible evidence in order to have ‘probable cause’ to prosecute the suspect for that crime—e.g., credible admissions by the suspect or credible and indisputable physical evidence that directly links the suspect to the criminal act.” Joe Matthews had finally pieced together such a web of corroborating evidence against Ottis Toole, one that had been validated by Assistant Police Chief Mark Smith and others at HPD, Morton pointed out to reporters. He reiterated his opinion that even though a successful prosecution of Toole might have been difficult, the thought of so much as filing charges against Dahmer was out of the question.

Very little of Morton’s response was printed, however, and soon the
Herald
story had prompted breathless headlines of the “Bigfoot” variety in various supermarket tabloids, one of which theorized that Adam Walsh was still alive somewhere, even providing a computer-generated rendition of what he would look like as an adult so that readers could keep an eye out. Such stories might seem outlandish, but they are also proof of how deeply the psyche of the entire nation has been affected by the Adam Walsh matter and by the time it took for a credible case to be built. Indeed, unless “old news” is of the caliber of the Kennedy assassination, the paranoia-fostering tabloid press simply doesn’t get involved.

When a rehash of the
Herald
story ran on a local Vero Beach station at the time, John Walsh turned to Revé and blurted, “For God’s sakes, aren’t the ghouls ever going to give up?”

Revé glanced at him. “Maybe not,” she said. “But at least you and I know the truth now.”

O
ne of the complaints made by those who have expressed doubt as to Toole’s guilt has to do with his penchant for changing the details of his story over time. But Joe Matthews sees that as a positive. Were no detail to vary in a killer’s various confessions, Matthews points out,
then
you might worry that you were hearing a tale memorized and scripted for some hidden purpose.

“It happens time and again,” Matthews explains to students in his classes on interrogation technique: “Stage one, you’ll ask the person about the crime and you get total denial. So you talk about other things for a while, and then you come back to the crime again. The second time around, the party might allow as how he knows who did the deed and implicate somebody else. When you circle back for a third time, the guy says, ‘Well, actually, I was there, but I was: (a) outside the bedroom where it all happened, (b) just driving the car, (c) didn’t realize what was going to take place.’ By stage four, you’ll get some admission, like ‘Well, actually I helped hold her down,’ or ‘Yeah, maybe I dug the grave.’ And by the time you get to stage five, there is no other person involved, and the perpetrator is sitting there telling you he is responsible for every last thing you’ve been talking about all this time.”

From the point at which a confession has been made, all you are likely to get from a perpetrator is damage control, Matthews says. Once a perpetrator realizes that the confession just delivered is a virtual death sentence, why wouldn’t he try and reverse the process? Recanting is simply common practice.

As for the incidental details that varied in the various confessions, Toole was not the brightest bulb in the array, and given the additional burden of a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, his memory was often in and out of focus. And as for issues such as having implicated Henry Lee Lucas in the crime initially, Toole had a perfectly plausible reason for that. As he himself admitted, he might have been a “retard,” but that did not mean he lacked cunning. Were he not street-smart, he could never have survived in the circles where he traveled for nearly as long as he did.

One of the documents that had not come to light before Matthews made his thorough search of the files, in fact, was a report filed by Deputy J. E. Winterbaum of the Duval County Sheriff’s Office back in October of 1983, shortly after Toole had initially confessed. As Winterbaum was making a routine check of the cell block, Toole called him close to share a few plans he had in mind once he got out of jail.

“I am going to sue the little boy’s father, the one I cut his head off,” he advised Winterbaum. “And then I am going to kill him. He [meaning Walsh] is trying to pay me off, and I should have never signed the check.”