Bringing Adam Home (33 page)

Gemelli hurried to find Toole raving in his bed, begging God to forgive the many bad things he had done in his life. Gemelli had witnessed such scenes before—he knew there were no atheists in foxholes, and it was his experience that even the most hardened of criminals find salvation as the end approaches. But Toole caught Gemelli’s attention when he began to tell God about the worst thing he’d ever done. He had killed that little boy named Adam Walsh down in Broward County, Toole said, and he was very, very sorry that he did it.

After Toole had been stabilized and was transferred to the hospital unit, Gemelli notified the prison’s investigative unit of what he heard Toole say about killing Adam Walsh, and a report of the matter was entered into prison files. Though Joe Matthews had urged Mark Smith to make his own foray to Lake Butler in the hopes of obtaining a deathbed confession, Smith never followed through. As far as deathbed confessions, what Gemelli heard that day would have to suffice.

On September 15, 1996, Ottis Ellwood Toole, a three-times convicted killer, died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-nine, in Lake Butler Prison Hospital. His body was unclaimed, and four days later—unbeknownst to John and Revé Walsh, Joe Matthews, or anyone at
America’s Most Wanted
—Toole was buried, in a cloth-covered casket, on prison grounds.

J
ohn Walsh was stunned by the news. Over the years, one piece of evidence after another that might have helped link Toole to the crime had somehow disappeared, and now even the perpetrator himself was no more. Some might have theorized that Toole’s death would have marked the end of the matter once and for all. The guy who did it is dead. What’s left?

Justice, John and Revé Walsh might have answered. And the right of any victim for the chance to know what had happened. An end to the feeling of helplessness. An end to the rage over the actions of a police force that had bungled this investigation from the beginning and now seemed intent on forgetting that the murder of Adam Walsh had ever happened.

Furthermore, the Walshes had spent fifteen years dedicating their lives to the cause of victimized children and their parents everywhere. To simply throw up their hands in the pursuit of justice for their own child’s death would make a mockery of everything they’d been fighting for.

In this light, and though it might seem strange to say so, his own death might be the most provocative action a killer could take to elude responsibility for his crime. One can imagine Toole leering from his grave, “You’ll never catch me now.”

And were those who had pursued him for so many years any less driven, that imagined taunt might have proven true.

E
ven though the man himself had died, the evil that he had wrought had a way of living on. Not quite a week after Toole was buried, on September 25, 1996, an Associated Press reporter published an interview with Henry Lee Lucas in which Lucas told the writer that he was certain that Toole was responsible for the killing—he had seen blood all over the car after Toole used it. Lucas also said that a couple of months after Adam’s death, he and Toole were back in South Florida one day when Ottis decided to drive him over to the Sears Mall and show him where he had picked “that kid” up. At that time, Lucas said, Toole took him through a step-by-step re-creation of the abduction and the killing.

From his cell in Texas, Lucas told a reporter that he had actually seen Adam’s body in the shallow grave where Toole had buried it. “He kicked it uncovered and showed it to me,” Lucas said. “I got sick about it. I said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ I left. I never heard no more about it until ’83.”

That interview, startling as it was, prompted no action from law enforcement despite what seemed a compelling offer from Lucas. “If they want to talk to me and take me down there, I’ll show them where it’s at,” he said. He described the burial site as being located in an isolated area off a freeway. “We got to an old foundation in there, either a barn or a house. There was nothing there, just a foundation. There was an old oak tree or pine tree and that’s where the body was at.”

At the time, Hollywood spokesperson Todd DeAngelis told reporters, “None of it is news to us,” but there is no mention of Lucas’s claims anywhere in the case file. Furthermore, it would mark the last significant public mention of the case for a very long time.

In fact, were it not for the simple axiom that the truth has a way of making itself known when someone wants to find it badly enough, the case of Adam Walsh—its files laid bare for anyone to see, the only suspect of substance to have surfaced in fifteen years now dead—might have also been laid to rest forever.

Chapter Six

Thunder from Heaven

Q:
So you admit that you’re a cannibal?

A:
I have eaten some parts of them. And the skin.

Q:
Did you eat them raw?

A:
Oh no. You can’t eat that without cooking it. Are you crazy?

—Ottis Toole, with Texas Rangers,

March 24, 1984

Hollywood, Florida—October 1, 1996

I
n early 1996, following an acrimonious investigation into irregularities in the department’s hiring practices, Hollywood police chief Richard Witt was fired by city manager Sam Finz. “Just say I’m leaving due to health reasons,” was Witt’s parting shot. “The city manager is sick of me.”

Finz appointed deputy chief Mike Ignasiak as interim chief while a national search was conducted for a permanent replacement for Witt. On October 1, the city hired Rick Stone, a veteran cop from Dallas who had recently retired as a chief with the Wichita, Kansas, PD.

Soon after Stone came on board, in early February 1997, former chief Sam Martin died of a heart attack, and in the story that accompanied that news was a reminder of how profound the impact of one case had been: “Although his 11-year tenure as chief was marked by rapid modernization and a raising of educational standards on the force,” the
Herald
reporter noted, “it was marred by a still-unsolved crime that shocked and horrified the nation: the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh.”

Nor was Chief Stone immune from reminders that his department had failed in the matter. In September 1997, stung by charges of “laziness, stupidity and arrogance” against his department made by John Walsh in his own recently published chronicle of the case,
Tears of Rage
, Stone told reporters, “I’d like to go back and start from scratch, but none of us can do that.” While he would not acknowledge that the department had made mistakes in the investigation of the case, he did assert that with contemporary technology and the “professional team I have today, it’s possible things could have turned out much differently.”

Stone refused to address specific blunders Walsh pointed out in the investigation of the crime, choosing instead to focus on the fact that nothing could have saved Adam’s life: “The FBI didn’t kill Mr. Walsh’s son,” Stone said. “The media didn’t kill Mr. Walsh’s son. And the Hollywood Police Department didn’t kill Mr. Walsh’s son.” While true, it might have sounded a bit callous of the new chief, who was quoted in closing, “I’ve spoken with the few people who are still here who worked the case, and they feel they bent over backward to help the Walshes and investigate this case.”

Undeniably, “bending over backwards” and “doing one’s best” are admirable traits, but when it comes to assessing the quality of the investigation of a murder case, questions of capability are more germane. In any case, Stone would not last much longer at the top in Hollywood. He may have gotten along well with his own superiors, but before another year had passed he had begun to clash with the police union, and in late 1998 he was dismissed.

At that point, Finz approached Broward sheriff Ken Jenne for interim help, and Jenne assigned Major Al Lamberti as temporary chief while commissioners launched another search. Finally, in July 1999, they were successful in luring James Scarberry, assistant chief for the city of Miami Beach, to the position. Scarberry, a twenty-seven-year veteran with a reputation as a “cop’s cop,” was endorsed by the police union and was capable as an administrator as well.

Nor was Scarberry confronted in any meaningful way regarding the Adam Walsh case, though reminders of its enduring power continued to surface. The March 14, 2001, death of Henry Lee Lucas, serving a life term in a Texas prison, prompted a call to Hollywood PD for a comment on Lucas’s onetime role as a suspect in the case, but Detective Sergeant Mark Smith, by then in charge of the department’s homicide unit, reminded reporters that Lucas had been in a Maryland jail at the time of Adam’s disappearance. When questioned about the status of that investigation, Smith said simply, “It’s still an open case.”

In July 2001 the
Miami Herald
ran a pair of lengthy articles by staff writer Daniel de Vise concerning the case, concurrent with the twentieth anniversary of Adam’s disappearance. The first focused on the impact of the case on the nation’s attitudes, rewriting laws and redefining relationships between adults and children. Many tragic child murders had faded from the public consciousness, de Vise wrote, “but Adam Walsh’s endures.”

That was likely due to the indefatigable John Walsh, de Vise opined, who included in his piece criticism directed at Walsh by some experts. “In some ways, he’s taken his personal tragedy and inflicted it upon the nation,” a Mount Holyoke College sociologist was quoted as saying. “He’s made all kids afraid.” Noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock had also criticized the practice of placing the pictures of missing children on milk cartons, said to have begun at Chicago-area Hawthorn Mellody Farms and copied by legions of others across the country, including South Florida’s McArthur Dairy. While Spock understood the impetus behind such efforts, he worried that it turned breakfast into a ritual of terror for the young and impressionable.

But others, particularly the parents of children lost and missing, praised Walsh’s work in redefining a nation’s indifference to a significant problem. As a spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put it, “Before the Adam Walsh case, it was easier to locate a stolen car than a missing child.”

That first piece ended with a reprise of milestones to date in what de Vise referred to as the “missing-children movement,” including the FBI database established by the Missing Children Act of 1982, and the 1984 legislation establishing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Also referenced was “Megan’s Law” of 1996, named after Megan Kanka, a New Jersey seven-year-old raped and murdered by a child molester who had moved into the neighborhood unbeknownst to residents. That measure required the notification of communities when a freed sex offender moves into a neighborhood.

De Vise also cited the AMBER Alert system, named for Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old resident of Arlington, Texas, kidnapped while riding a bicycle near her home, her body later discarded in a ditch. It began as a grassroots movement in 1996 and has since been formalized nationwide, with bulletins interrupting radio programming and emblazoned on highway alert displays and elsewhere during the first hours following an abduction. Also mentioned was the Jimmy Ryce Act, the Florida measures named after a young Homestead boy taken and killed by a handyman, allowing law enforcement to publicize the identities of sexual offenders and extend the sentences of the most violent sexual predators.

On July 27, 2001, de Vise’s follow-up piece centered on the status of the long-stalled investigation. De Vise cataloged the emergence and dismissal of various individuals considered as suspects, including the quickly cleared John and Revé Walsh and Jimmy Campbell, who, de Vise pointed out, not only passed his polygraph examinations but also had an alibi. De Vise also rehashed the brief flurry caused in November 1981, when a drifter in a Broward County lockup claimed his cellmate Edward James had confessed to the crime. As it turned out, however, James, who passed a voice stress analysis test, was proven to be at work the day of the crime.

And in 1995 there were reports in an Alabama newspaper contending that Michael Monahan, the younger son of Walsh’s former boss John Monahan, might have murdered Adam Walsh as a favor to his pal Jimmy Campbell. After all, police records showed that just three days after Adam’s disappearance, the younger Monahan had slashed through a door of a Broward County home with a machete during a dispute over a stolen skateboard.

But that also came to nothing. Tests on the machete revealed no evidence, and Monahan had an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of Adam’s death. Once he passed a polygraph exam, police quickly cleared him as well.

Ottis Toole remained the most likely suspect, de Vise wrote, before adding the familiar saw, “But there is no hard evidence to support it.” For his story, de Vise tracked down former Hollywood police chief Richard Witt, who acknowledged in an interview that the department could have done a better job. Focusing on Jimmy Campbell had probably been a mistake, and, given their relative inexperience in such matters, they might have tried harder to get the FBI involved at the outset. “Within the first few months of this case,” Witt told de Vise, “it was really screwed up to the point where obtaining a conviction had been compromised.”