Of Guilt and Innocence (3 page)

 

As Jim and Dan left the Wooten's neighborhood they felt the pressure that came with an investigation like this. They knew that it was very rare to find a missing child alive after forty eight hours had passed. For now, they still had time on their side.

They spoke with the officers doing the door-to-door canvass of the street and the officers driving the area looking for any signs of Ashley, but no one could offer any useful information. They were able to speak with the community property manager on their way out. He provided no positive information, only that there were no security cameras anywhere on the grounds and no one had called him about any suspicious activity today.

 

 

Two hours had now passed and Tom and Lisa still sat in their kitchen in disbelief. The hysteria that gripped them both in different ways had subsided a bit, but the worry and longing still had a hold on them. As crime scene technicians continued processing each room of the house, Lisa's tears gave way to anger and rage.

“Why are they looking inside the house? I told them she never came inside, someone took her from outside. Why are they wasting time in here?” Lisa's voice was a combination of desperation, anger, and annoyance as she glared at Sergeant Stokes and waited for an answer.

“We need to cover all our bases. We have officers all over right now looking for your daughter. Having crime scene look for clues inside your house isn't taking anyone away from looking for her. We just want to be thorough, that's all.” Sergeant Stokes gave Lisa the same sheepish smile he had been giving since his arrival in the house. It was what he did when he was nervous. His response seemed to defuse Lisa's anger for the time being as she just nodded she understood and began sobbing again.  

While Lisa, Tom, and Sergeant Stokes sat on the three barstools that lined the kitchen counter, sometimes making small talk, sometimes saying nothing at all, a knock on the front door came that made all three spring to their feet. Lisa tore off toward it, screaming “Ashley, baby, are you there?” Tom and the Sergeant followed close behind. Lisa opened the door and much to her dismay did not find her daughter standing there. Instead, a deputy holding the leash of a blood hound that sat at his feet stood before her. “I'm losing it!” She screamed and ran into the master bedroom crying hysterically.

The deputy looked heartbroken as he remained in the doorway. “I'm sorry,” he said to Tom. “I know I'm not the one you were hoping to see. But Ranger and I are going to do our best to find your little girl. If you could just get me an article of her clothing, something she may have worn recently, we can get started.” Tom turned and walked to Ashley's room's closed door. He stood in front of it for a few seconds with his eyes closed. He knew what torture it would be to go back in there again, but he knew he had to. He slowly crept in and grabbed the first thing that he saw.  Quickly, he darted out of the room and shut the door behind him. He handed the K-9 officer a small pink blanket.

“She, uhhh . . .” His breathing quickened, “she uhh . . . slept with it . . . every night.”  Tom's voice became high pitched at the end as his hand rose to his eyes as he finished the statement.  

“Great, thank you, I will get this back to you shortly.” The officer placed the blanket in front of the dog's nose and gave some commands and words of encouragement to his four-legged partner.

The dog turned away from the front door and began a steady trot toward the mailbox. It then made a sharp left turn and began heading down the street toward an intersection. At the intersection, the dog and his handler turned left again and made their way to the front gate of the property. After getting the gate open the dog went to the end of the community's entrance way and made a right turn, heading south on State Road 441. After trotting a short distance southbound along the roadway, he lost the scent.  

 

Jim and Dan were in the police department's substation within the Boca Towne Center Mall when Jim received the report of the police dog's findings. “She left the complex and headed south on 441,” he whispered to Dan. “Looks like this one's legit.”  

“Great,” Dan said aloud as he watched the security supervisor fumble with the controls to the closed circuit television in front of him.  

  The camera system at the mall encompassed both the interior and exterior and allowed for security footage to be pinpointed by time of day on each camera. Footage of set intervals of time could then be burned to a DVD. The detectives requested footage from every camera between the hours of ten a.m. and two p.m. All in all there were forty cameras between the common areas and parking areas, and there were even more they had yet to get information on from the individual stores Lisa and Ashley had entered.

After providing the detectives with the DVDs, the security supervisor also gave them the name of an individual who had caused problems at the mall in the past. He could not say for certain if the man was at the mall that day, but he had been there the previous weekend and had been reported to security by two women who felt he was following them. The individual had been ejected from the mall when he refused to obey any commands given by the crime prevention officers, and the actual police officers assigned to patrol the mall that day were called to assist in his removal.  

The detectives made stops in each store Lisa had told Dan she and Ashley had gone in, and were able to obtain security DVDs from two of them. No one they spoke to at the mall gave any indication that they had observed Lisa and Ashley being followed, nor did they advise that they knew of any problems occurring at the mall that day.

 

Lisa returned from the bedroom and resumed her position with Tom and Sergeant Stokes at the kitchen counter. As the Crime Scene Unit finished their work and began packing up to leave, Sergeant Stokes stood up to accompany them out. “All right, I'm going to get going. If anything comes up at all, please call us. I gave you my card before, and it has the main phone number to the department. You also have the detectives' cards. Do not hesitate to call. If you notice or remember anything at all that might be important or if someone tries to contact you in reference to your daughter, no matter what they say, call immediately.”

Tom acknowledged that they would and shook the Sergeant's hand and walked to the front door. As the door opened, a fair amount of people standing on the sidewalk across the street perked up. Several boom mics and cameras maneuvered for better angles.

“Damn it. And don't hesitate to call if these idiots start harassing you either,” Sergeant Stokes said gruffly to Tom.   The sergeant had placed one of his patrol officers in the front of the house while the crime scene techs worked. Because the early indications were that Ashley may have been abducted from the area of the mailbox in front of the house, that area needed to be left undisturbed until it could be processed, and so the officer had put up yellow crime scene tape that spanned the perimeter of the Wooten's property and all the way across the patch of road directly in front of their house. The media that had begun funneling in as the hours passed were told sternly to stay back from the tape and stay off of everyone's property, which left them relegated to the small strip of sidewalk.  

Sergeant Stokes walked slowly down the front sidewalk as Tom quickly closed the front door behind him. Sergeant Stokes told the officer to remove the yellow tape and reopen the road after he and the crime scene units left the area, but to make crystal clear to the media outlets that stayed that they were not to be on anyone's private property or they would be arrested. The officer agreed and the sergeant lumbered forward across the street and to the edge of the taped off perimeter.

“OK, folks,” he shouted, looking over the crowd. “We don't have a statement to make right now, but one will be forthcoming. I just want to remind you this family has been through a lot today and to give them the privacy they deserve in this trying time. Thank you.”

With that, Sergeant Stokes turned his back to the media personnel and began walking to his car, ignoring the questions shouted at him. Soon the yellow tape was taken down and the media made their descent on the house.  

As Tom walked back in the kitchen where Lisa still sat on a barstool, the cold truth suddenly hit him. They were alone. All alone. No police officers asking questions, no radios chirping. No technicians dusting for prints or looking for clues. More importantly, no child's laughter or constant questions. The eerie silence made the house seem lifeless and empty.  

Fear gripped him again, but not the same gut-wrenching fear that had originally engulfed him when they realized their only child was missing. This was a fear of not knowing what to do, or what they should do. It bordered on guilt, not knowing what the “protocol” was in this situation to try to get their child back. Who would they ask? Who should they compare themselves to? They certainly knew of no one who had been in this position. Were they to become the people they had seen on news programs throughout the years? The people who made impassioned pleas on
Good Morning America
? Was that how these things were supposed to go?

“We need to look for her ourselves,” Lisa said staring straight ahead, finally breaking the silence. “She's our baby, we need to be out there looking, not leaving it to the police.”

“We need to call our families . . . they should hear it from us first.”

“I don't care how they hear it, if I'm not out there looking, if I don't get out there to look today, I don't think I'll ever live with myself. I don't know how we sat here for so long without going out there and looking. What is wrong with us?” Her voice cracked again as her guilt again began to show.  

“All right, let's go.”

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

 

Earlier that morning, a little farther south, in the town of Davie, the inhabitant of a small, muddled studio apartment struggled to rise from his pullout couch bed. A portly man, Louis Bradford stood only five feet six inches tall, but weighed two hundred and thirty pounds. He lived alone in that studio apartment, which was located above his mother's garage, while she solely occupied the property's main house: a modest, two-story home.  

Louis staggered through the tiny apartment as he tried to shake off his slumber and prepare for the day ahead.  He had lived in the apartment or the main house nearly all of his thirty seven years. The only exception came in his early twenties, when he spent two years away from his sanctuary in a Florida state prison in the town of Raiford.  

In the main house his mother had been up for hours and was laboring to tidy up. At the age of sixty-seven Anne Bradford was worn down by life, both mentally and physically. She had very few personal indulgences or pleasures anymore. In fact, what made her most happy was still being able to take care of her only child. She had never resented Louis's refusal to work after his arrest, or that he had never shown an interest in moving out or starting his own family. She always turned a blind eye to his quirks, even as disturbing as they seemed. He stopped letting her come into his apartment years ago, saying he would clean it himself, though she knew he never did and at times the odors that would emanate from it were unbearable. She picked up on other things through the years she thought were odd but quickly suppressed those thoughts and move on. She never wanted to push him away.

His arrest and subsequent incarceration took a significant toll on her and continued still to have a profound impact on her life. People treated her differently because of it. Some blamed her openly for his behavior, while others who had been friends before his arrest avoided her all together after it.      

Feeling winded already, Anne broke off the morning cleaning early and plopped herself down in a kitchen chair to rest. She suffered from a variety of medical conditions, but what had been bothering her most recently was her right hip. She had a replacement put in over ten years ago, but it was apparently beginning to falter and the pain was becoming unbearable. She had taken a leave of absence from her job as an in-home nurse for a hospice care company and had been seeing her physician regularly, discussing the prospects of yet another hip replacement surgery. Despite the gradually intensifying pain, she still took the bus wherever she wanted to go most of the time, which required a three block walk to the bus stop. Between the two of them they had only one car, an old blue 1995 Buick Le Sabre. However, if Louis needed the car at any point in the day, Anne would yield it to him; even though he never really had anywhere important he needed to be or go to.    

 

The entrance to Louis's apartment was similar to that of an attic or crawlspace and Louis climbed down the wooden ladder that led from his apartment into the garage.  He pulled open the old wooden garage door, jumped in the Le Sabre, and quickly backed the old blue jalopy out of the driveway. He made his way to Boca Raton, where he had decided to spend the afternoon at the Boca Towne Center Mall. He liked to spend most of his time people watching and had been to every mall in the area to partake in this hobby countless times. Boca Raton, Boynton Beach, the various malls in the Ft. Lauderdale and Miami areas; he knew the layouts of them all.

Despite his general poor hygiene and relatively unattractive appearance, Louis always dressed well when he left the apartment. Today he was dressed in a nice pair of blue slacks and a button down white short sleeved shirt. His thinning black hair was slicked back and he was clean shaven. He bore a loose resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock, with bulldog-like cheeks and a long, thin nose. He had developed skills as a chameleon over time. He could look very presentable, very kind and unassuming when he desired to give that impression. However, he had the capability of changing in a second and radiating evil—something he had done often over the past thirteen years.