Bringing Adam Home (14 page)

“What kid are you talking about?” Via asked.

Toole pulled his knees up to his chest and began to weep. It was the “kid” he got from the Sears store, he explained.

Via was genuinely puzzled. He’d just been baiting Toole, and he’d certainly heard nothing of any child murder case in Florida—in fact, his conversations with Detective Terry of Jacksonville had been confined to the Alford case connecting Toole and Henry Lee Lucas. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Via told Toole.

By this time, Toole was racked with sobs. He thought Via wanted to know about the kid he’d grabbed from the Sears store, the one whose head he’d cut off, Toole said.

At that point, Via went to the door of the interview room and called to Buddy Terry, who was standing down the hallway talking with Lieutenant Joe Cummings of the Monroe Police Department, who had come over with Via to interview Toole. “You better come in here,” Via told Terry and Cummings. “He’s just confessed to killing a child in South Florida.”

While Terry quickly realized what Toole must have been talking to Via about, there was no point in getting into a discussion with him at the moment. He simply followed Via and Cummings back into the interview room and listened as Via asked Toole to explain exactly what he was referring to.

Toole replied that he had traveled to South Florida in a black-over-white Cadillac to find a “kid” to keep for his own. After driving around for some time, he spotted a mall parking lot, pulled in, and saw a young white boy standing outside a Sears store. Toole told the officers that he forced the child into his Cadillac, pulled out of the lot, and ended up on a highway. When the child would not stop screaming and crying, Toole said, he backhanded him in the face with a closed fist and then struck him again in the stomach, at which point the child slumped down in the seat, unconscious.

Toole was relieved that the child had stopped making noise, but it was not long before he began to think that he had actually killed the child and that he would have to dispose of the body. He traveled some distance on the “freeway,” Toole said, exiting a couple of times before he ended up in a remote swampy area.

He parked, took the child out of the car, and laid him facedown over a log. He took a long-bladed knife—maybe a machete—from the trunk of the Cadillac and went back to where he had left the boy . . . and cut off his head.

It took several blows to accomplish the decapitation, Toole said, and after that, he used the blade to dismember the rest of the body and scatter it about the swamp. As he described his actions to Via, Terry, and Cummings, Toole took care to illustrate how he’d used his knuckles to backhand the boy in the face and his closed fist to hit him in the stomach. He also pantomimed removing the child from the seat of the Cadillac and laying him gently against a log.

Crying now, he told the detectives how he decided to keep the child’s head at first, tossing it onto the backseat floorboard of the Cadillac. After he had driven a bit, he began to think better of this notion, however, and he pulled over to toss the decapitated head into a drainage ditch or canal of some kind. And after that, Toole said, he drove back to Jacksonville.

At the conclusion of the statement, the three detectives stepped out into the hallway, and it was only then that Buddy Terry told Via and Cummings that it sounded to him like Toole had just repeated—albeit in far more grisly detail—a confession he’d made the previous week, the killing of a child named Adam Walsh, who had been abducted from a Sears store two summers previously. Adam’s head had been found floating in a canal a couple of weeks after his disappearance, Terry explained, but his body had never been found, and the killer was still on the loose.

Via shook his head and glanced back through the window of the interview room, where a shaken Toole still sat. He’d never heard of the case, Via told Terry. But whatever terrible things had happened, it sure seemed as if they’d found the party responsible.

It seemed that way to Buddy Terry, too. But both he and Via were reasonable men. And what developed with Toole from that point on would have little to do with reason.

Jacksonville, Florida—October 19, 1983

A
ccording to a Hollywood PD supplemental report, eight days went by before Lieutenant Hynds passed along word to lead case detective Jack Hoffman that Buddy Terry of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had called with information pertaining to the disappearance and murder of Adam Walsh. Hoffman notes that he returned Terry’s call at 3:10 p.m. on Wednesday, October 19, and by 9:00 p.m., he and his partner Hickman were in Jacksonville to interview Ottis Toole.

When they arrived, Terry advised the two that Toole was just finishing up another interview with Detective Via, from Louisiana. Via was the investigator who had extracted the most specific information from Toole, he explained, and they would likely want to confer with him before talking with Toole themselves. Yes, they did want to talk to Via, Hoffman told Terry, and with that, the two Hollywood detectives sat tight-lipped until Via came out of the interview room and Terry made introductions around.

It didn’t take Hoffman long to set the tone for their interchange. He fixed Via with his disdainful stare, then delivered a jaw-dropping accusation. “So you’re the one who’s been feeding Toole details of my investigation?”

Via stared at the pair across from him, incredulous. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Via managed finally, glancing at Terry to make sure he hadn’t misheard. “I was interviewing Ottis Toole about a murder in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, when, out of nowhere, he started talking about killing some ‘kid’ in South Florida.”

Via had the distinct impression that nothing he was saying mattered in the slightest to Hoffman, but still he continued. “I got Detective Terry in the room along with my colleague Joe Cummings from Monroe, and asked this Toole to take us through his story from the beginning. When he was finished, I still didn’t know who he was talking about. We left Toole in the interview room and went out in the hall to talk, and that’s when Detective Terry told me that it sounded like Toole was talking about killing Adam Walsh. That’s the first time in my life I even heard the name.”

Hoffman glanced at Terry then, as if he had just spotted someone else to blame for meddling in his investigation. “I’m going to need a written report on this,” he said to Via, skepticism saturating his tone.

“You can read my notes any time you want to,” Via said. “Furthermore, I don’t appreciate your attitude, my friend. I’m trying to do you a favor, and you come in here insinuating I’m leaking information to some douchebag like Ottis Toole? Where the hell would I even get it?”

Apart from another sidelong glance at Terry, there was no response. “Can we have him now?” Hoffman said, waving toward the interview room.

“He’s all yours,” Terry said. “You won’t mind if I sit in, though, will you?”

The look Hoffman gave Terry told him that Hoffman very much minded, but there was little the Hollywood detective could do to keep Terry out. “He’s your prisoner,” Hoffman told Terry tersely, and the three moved inside the interview room with Toole.

Hoffman introduced himself and his partner Hickman and told Toole that they were from the Hollywood, Florida, Police Department. He offered a standard rights form for Toole to sign, but Toole waved it away. He understood his rights, he told Hoffman, and he understood that he was waiving his right to have an attorney present during the questioning that was about to take place. He didn’t read all that well, he told Hoffman, indicating the form on the table before him. He’d only gone through the seventh grade, but he understood the English language well enough and he understood exactly what they were saying about his rights.

With that established, Hoffman asked Toole to give him a statement about what he claimed he’d done down in South Florida, and Toole readily agreed. It was a couple of years ago, he began, when he and his partner Henry Lee Lucas drove down to Fort Lauderdale in a 1973 black-over-white Cadillac that Toole had purchased from a woman in Jacksonville named Faye McNett. Buddy Terry lifted an eyebrow as he heard the mention of Lucas in the matter for the first time, but he said nothing.

Toole explained to Hoffman and Hickman that he had been depressed over the death of his mother that May, and that he and Lucas had been traveling around the country, as far as Texas and California, with his niece and nephew Frieda and Frank Powell. He told Hoffman that he and Lucas had returned to Jacksonville some time in June, and that before they set out on the trip to South Florida, he’d taken a Pennsylvania license tag from a car on the street and switched the plate on the Caddy.

The two of them had snatched a kid from outside a Sears store in a shopping mall, he told Hoffman, who then asked how Toole could be sure it was a Sears. Toole looked at Hoffman as if he were the barely functioning individual in the room. “ ’Cause I know a Sears when I see a Sears,” he said, as if explaining it to an idiot. He didn’t remember actually going inside the Sears, though he may have, he told Hoffman. He was just window shopping and remembered having passed a wig shop when he saw the boy.

As to the time of the abduction, however, Toole responded in a way that was typical of his tenuous grasp of matters that most take for granted. “It would have to have been . . . ah . . . the afternoon, afternoon, afternoon. I call afternoon around noontime and that.”

There’d been trouble with the boy in the car, Toole continued, and he’d had to slap and punch him to get him to quiet down. Eventually, he and Lucas had pulled off the turnpike, and Lucas had killed the boy by decapitating him “with an 18-inch bayonet” while Toole held Adam down on his stomach. He said Lucas had to hit the kid three or four times to get his head cut off. After that, they chopped the boy up and threw his body parts out the window along the turnpike. They’d kept the head for a while longer because Lucas wanted to have sex with it, Toole said.

As to why he was making this confession, Toole told the detectives that he wanted to get it out of his mind.

Hoffman next showed Toole the photo of Adam that the family had reproduced on the missing person’s flyer, but Toole wasn’t sure that it was the same boy that he and Lucas took. When Hoffman showed Toole a second photo in which Adam’s hair was wet from swimming, Toole nodded. He believed that the second photo did resemble the boy he killed, he said.

With that, Detectives Hoffman and Hickman concluded their interview and left the room, leaving Detective Terry and Ottis Toole alone.

“Why are you jerking them around?” Terry asked Toole, his arms folded.

“What are you talking about?” Toole replied.

“You know as well as I do that Henry Lee Lucas was in jail in Maryland when all this happened. What are you trying to pull?”

Toole looked away and stared at the wall for a few moments. Finally he turned back to Terry. Yes, he’d lied about Lucas being involved. “Tell them detectives I want to talk to them again,” he said to Terry, who shook his head and went to look for Hoffman and Hickman.

It was well past midnight when the two detectives from Hollywood came back into the interview room and Toole announced that he hadn’t explained things exactly right the first time around and would like to correct his statement. Hoffman gave Terry a skeptical glance, but nonetheless he and Hoffman sat down and began to take a second recorded statement from Toole.

The biggest thing he had to correct was that Henry Lee Lucas hadn’t been involved in the crime, Toole told them. Then he set out to explain how things had really happened. Early in July of 1981, he and Lucas had borrowed Toole’s brother’s 1972 Ford pickup, supposedly to haul some scrap iron to the Jacksonville dump and sell it. In truth, Toole and Lucas lit out of Jacksonville immediately, accompanied by Toole’s niece Frieda Powell, thirteen at the time, and his nephew Frank Powell, twelve. They’d abandoned the truck in Maryland about a week later, and on the fifteenth of July, Toole’s sister-in-law Georgia reported the truck stolen to the Jacksonville sheriff. Toole had gotten separated from Lucas and his niece and nephew and, after a brief hospital stay, had returned to Florida by himself. Meantime, Lucas had been arrested by Delaware police on charges of vehicular theft and remained in jail there well into October.

Toole had traveled to South Florida alone, he told Hoffman and Hickman, and ran into Adam Walsh coming out of the Hollywood Sears store on the west side of the building. He enticed the boy into his Cadillac with the promise of candy and toys, then quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Though the engine on the Cadillac had been giving him a little trouble (“It wasn’t runnin’ right. It would just roll off”), he got it started and pulled out of the parking lot, with Adam now asking about the toys and the candy. It took him about ten minutes to get from the store parking lot to Florida’s Turnpike, Toole said, and by the time he went through the tollbooth to get a ticket, he had to start slapping and hitting the boy to get him to quiet down.

“The kid was getting on my nerves,” Toole said. “I hit him quite a bit of times in the car. I think I did knock him out. I’m pretty sure that I knocked that kid out.”

The rest of his account matched closely with what Toole had already told Detective Kendrick from Brevard County and Detective Via from Louisiana. He pulled off the turnpike onto a dirt road to kill the child. The child was unconscious when he carried him from the car and laid him facedown on the ground. And it took him four or five blows to sever the child’s head.