Bringing Adam Home (6 page)

It was a waste of time, Matthews thought, but if it would put the matter to an end, he supposed he could do it. “Okay,” he told Hoffman. “I’ll call him back in.”

“You do that,” Hoffman said, satisfied. “Meantime, I’ll check out this so-called alibi of his.”

T
hus, a weary Matthews reluctantly called Campbell, who agreed to appear at Hollywood PD at 10:00 a.m. on Monday for a follow-up exam. And later that Saturday, Hoffman took another detective with him to the Gold Strand Motel on Collins Avenue in far north Dade County, where Campbell had been running a boat rental concession for about seven months.

At the Gold Strand, Hoffman spoke with the hotel manager, Carroll Shannon, who confirmed that Campbell indeed worked there, but as to his whereabouts on the Monday that Adam Walsh disappeared, she had no idea. Maybe they should talk to Louis Munoz, her assistant pool manager. When Hoffman and his partner found Munoz, he remembered the day well. Munoz told them that Jimmy Campbell had arrived at about ten thirty that morning, excited about getting his sailboats cleaned up for a TV commercial that would be filmed at the hotel later in the afternoon. He noticed Jimmy puttering about throughout the day, Munoz said. When Joe Walsh, John’s brother, came by looking for Jimmy at around three thirty, he was out on the ocean on one of his boats.

From the Gold Strand, Hoffman and his partner went to Jimmy Campbell’s home, where they interviewed him regarding his association with the Walsh family and his whereabouts on July 27, the day Adam disappeared. As he had told Matthews, Campbell explained that he had known John Walsh for nine years and that he had lived with the family for about four years. He did various chores around the place, and sometimes babysat for Adam, whom he had come to love. He took the boy on outings to the beach, the zoo, and baseball games. He’d even served as Adam’s T-ball coach this past year.

He’d been at work the day of Adam’s disappearance, leaving only briefly to go to the nearby Thunderbird Motel boat concession to see if he could borrow two clean sails for his upcoming shoot, but the person in charge wasn’t around, so he returned to the Golden Strand. As to who might have been responsible for Adam’s disappearance, Campbell told the detectives that he had not the slightest idea. Hoffman took it all down in the form of notes, for some reason failing to record the interview as he had all the others he had conducted during his investigation. At the end of the interview, Hoffman noted that he asked the subject to voluntarily submit to a polygraph examination, as if Matthews hadn’t already conducted one. It would be a long time before the reason for that odd statement—and Hoffman’s failure to record his interview—came to light.

Hollywood, Florida—August 10, 1981

O
n Monday, Joe Matthews was back at Hollywood police headquarters bright and early, preparing to reexamine Jimmy Campbell. Matthews was convinced it was a waste of time, but if it might somehow put Hoffman’s suspicions concerning Campbell to rest, then he would do it.

When the appointed hour of 10:00 a.m. came and went without Jimmy Campbell’s appearance, however, Matthews became concerned. By 11:00, he decided to walk down to Hoffman’s desk and let the detective know that Campbell was a no-show. Maybe the kid was scared, he thought. Maybe he’d overslept. But he wasn’t involved in Adam’s disappearance. That much he was sure of.

Hoffman, however, was not at his desk. When Matthews asked the detective bureau’s secretary where Hoffman was, she told him Hoffman was in the interview room. He and his partner Ron Hickman had been grilling a suspect since seven that morning. What suspect? Matthews wondered. He hadn’t heard anything about a suspect.

“Some guy named Campbell,” was the secretary’s answer.

Matthews couldn’t believe it. He hurried down to the interrogation room—where the “Interview in Progress” sign had been left unlighted, he noted—and yanked open the door. Some “interview,” he was thinking. He had heard Hoffman screaming, “You lying piece of shit,” all the way down the hall. Sure enough, inside the room, he found an ashen Jimmy Campbell on the other side of a table from a livid Hoffman and Hickman.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Matthews asked.

“We’re interviewing a suspect,” Hoffman managed. His bravado seemed to have faltered. Even Hickman was avoiding Matthews’s gaze.

“The hell you are,” Matthews replied. “He’s supposed to be with me right now. I can’t fucking believe it,” and with that he pulled Campbell from the room and back to his own desk. There wasn’t even a murmur of protest from Hoffman and Hickman.

“Why are they treating me so rough?” Campbell asked when they were finally settled. “They seem to think I’m responsible for Adam being missing. They’re making all kinds of accusations.” Matthews did his best to get Campbell calmed down so that he could be productively examined, all the while thinking that it was just one more screwup on the part of Hoffman. No way on earth could you accuse a suspect of a crime minutes before administering a polygraph exam and expect to get anything usable out of it. Hoffman simply seemed oblivious to standard police procedures.

After a bit of time in Matthews’s presence, Campbell finally began to breathe again. “I know I’ve got to calm down,” he told Matthews. “I’ve got to calm down and convince myself not to let the barbarians get to me.” Still, as he confided to Matthews, it was more than difficult to be accused of doing harm to a child whom he loved. “I
do
take it personally. It’s very upsetting.”

To get Campbell relaxed, Matthews took him out to lunch, then brought him back to the station, where they went back over the events they’d discussed two nights earlier. Finally, early that evening, Matthews deemed Campbell ready, and he began the testing once again.

They were nearing the conclusion of this second exam when the door to the room flew open and Matthews saw an obviously agitated assistant chief of police Leroy Hessler beckoning him outside. Matthews told Campbell to hold on for a moment and went to join Hessler in the hallway.

“We just got a call,” Hessler told Matthews, grimly. “They found a severed head in a drainage ditch beside the turnpike up in Indian River County. They think it’s the boy’s.”

He pointed at the door to the interview room where Campbell sat, oblivious. “We know he did it,” Hessler said to Matthews. “And I want a confession.”

Matthews paid little attention to Hessler’s demands, but at the same time he was numbed by the information that Hessler had delivered. Statistics might dictate that fewer than one hundred children are kidnapped and murdered in a year, but reassuring statistics are little comfort when you’re one of the exceptions. As for Hessler’s cockeyed demands that he extract a confession from Jimmy Campbell come hell or high water, Matthews considered any number of outraged responses, most of which would have accomplished little good.

“I’m in the middle of an examination,” he told Hessler finally, turning away. “I’ll bring my report down as soon as we’re finished in there.”

Back inside the room, Matthews apologized to Campbell for the interruption and managed to complete his examination, which indicated once again that his subject—despite everything he had been subjected to—clearly and positively had no idea of what might have happened to Adam Walsh. Matthews thanked Campbell for his cooperation and told him to go on home. He sat alone then for a moment, wondering if it was true—that the water had claimed Adam Walsh after all, if scarcely in a way that anyone might have imagined. Tragedy didn’t come any grimmer than that, he thought. Then he went to track down Hoffman.

He found the lead investigator in a back office where a crowd of somber-looking detectives had gathered, along with Assistant Chief Hessler. In the two hours that had passed since Hessler burst into Matthews’s examination room, the news had been confirmed. With the Walshes off in New York City to be interviewed about the search for Adam on
Good Morning America
, family friend John Monahan had been summoned by Indian River authorities to see if he could make an identification and confirm what dental records seemed to suggest.

Coincidentally, the canal where the gruesome find had been made bordered an orange grove recently treated by pesticides. The runoff had so drenched the canal with chemicals that nothing was alive to disturb the flesh on the severed head, despite all the time that had passed. There was not a doubt in the witness’s mind.

In the back office of the Hollywood PD, about a hundred miles south of where Monahan had made his identification, Hessler turned to Matthews and jabbed a finger angrily. “You don’t have the balls to call this Campbell deceptive.”

Matthews was astonished. No way on earth had Jimmy Campbell murdered Adam Walsh, then hacked off his head and dumped it in an upstate canal. Every fiber in his cop’s body was certain of it.

Jimmy Campbell had nothing to do with the crime and there was no way Matthews would be bullied into saying otherwise. Everyone else in the crowded room was quiet, looking at him expectantly. In other offices down the hall, phones rang, file doors creaked and slammed, voices rose and fell, all the humdrum sounds of daily cop business. In this room, Matthews thought, “ordinary” had lost its meaning, “procedure” had taken a hike.

Finally, Matthews spoke. “I’m nobody’s whore,” he told Hessler. “I call it the way I see it.”

Hessler regarded him for a moment, his face a mask of rage. Matthews wondered for a moment if the man might be about to take a swing at him, but the moment passed, and Hessler turned to take Hoffman by the arm, guiding him quickly out of the room. As the two disappeared down the hallway, Hessler fired his parting shot. “This one you called wrong, Matthews.”

Chapter Three

World of Hurt

Q:
How many killings would you say you’ve been involved in?

A:
I don’t know. Maybe a couple hundred.

Q:
Would you say more of those were women or more were men?

A:
A little bit of both.

Q:
And you say you did these killings because it gave you a high?

A:
That’s right.

Q:
And how long did that feeling last?

A:
Maybe a week, maybe a month.

Q:
And when the feeling went away?

A:
Then you go out and do it again.

—Ottis Toole, with Texas Rangers,

March 24, 1984

Jacksonville, Florida—May 16, 1981

I
f Ottis Toole had ever felt much sense of control over his life, the sensation was a fleeting one. He had an IQ of 75, considered the borderline for retardation in the adult population, just above the average intellect of a twelve-year-old child. According to the literature, adults in this category are considered “slow and simple,” and while they are capable of gainful employment, supervision must be constant. Such individuals are only marginally capable of coping in an adult world, and in the language of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, “need help from friends or family to manage life’s complications.”

In Toole’s case, about the only such help he ever received came from his mother, Sarah. He’d been born to her in March 1947, but he’d never known his father. A stepfather named Robert Harley arrived when Toole was ten, but he had never bonded with the man, who had alcohol problems. Perhaps the fact that Toole was “slow” helped keep them apart. Or it could have been the seizures that he had suffered since the day when a neighbor kid chucked a rock against Toole’s skull, intending to “kill the retard.”

He’d managed to struggle through seven years of special education classes and had even gotten to the point of being able to read and write, and also, to suffer when other kids ridiculed him. He was sexually molested by the husband of a neighbor when he was six, and once, during the several times he ran away from home, was picked up by cops who noticed that he had dressed himself as a girl. Gradually, he came to think of himself as a homosexual, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He had intimate relations with women as well, and even tried marriage, thinking it might help “change” him. The experiment hit its first serious obstacle after four days when Toole disappeared, and one of his older sisters informed his new bride that Toole was “queer as a three-dollar bill.”

Life had obviously been a continual struggle for Toole, but there was one constant, one source of comfort in his mind, and that was his certainty that his mother loved him. She herself suffered from bouts of mental illness, but when it came to Ottis, the youngest of her nine children, she seemed to understand that she was the only force standing between her son and an unimaginable bleak emptiness.