Bringing Adam Home (7 page)

If indeed it was the love of Sarah Toole that enabled Ottis to cope, it was a tenuous form of coping by any standards. He’d been booked at seventeen for loitering, and for petty larceny the year after. In 1968, at the age of twenty-one, he was arrested for vagrancy and a few months later for prowling. The next year he was again charged with vagrancy. In 1972, he was apprehended while carrying a concealed weapon, a four-inch hunting knife. He’d been arrested for loitering in a bus station in 1975, for lewd and lascivious behavior in an adult theater in 1976, and later that year for public intoxication. In 1977, he was arrested for making obscene phone calls, window-peeping, cross-dressing, and exposing himself in public.

Yet Toole had still managed to weather all this, to make his way through a sad facsimile of life, because—in his mind, at least—he had his mother, and she loved him, right up to the last day of her life, which was May 16, 1981. And that is when things truly began to fall apart.

A
t the time of his mother’s death, Toole, then thirty-four, was living at home with her and his stepfather, Robert Harley, and the three young children of his sister Druscilla: Frieda, Frank, and Sarah Powell. Also living in the home at 708 Day Avenue was Toole’s lover, Henry Lee Lucas, forty-five, a slightly built, glass-eyed drifter he had met at a Jacksonville soup kitchen three years earlier. While photographs taken of Lucas around the time depict him as marginally presentable, it is difficult to imagine what he might have found attractive in the gangly, slump-shouldered, gap-toothed Toole, who generally sported several days’ growth of grizzled facial hair, his sandy hair thinning and generally unkempt, his clothing characteristically rumpled and rank from days of wear.

Still, indifference to style and hygiene are not always barriers to love, nor to gainful employment. In fact, Toole was working as a laborer for a man named John Reaves, who owned a couple of roofing businesses in Jacksonville. Toole took his mother’s death hard, Reaves recalls. He’d go out to the Evergreen Cemetery where she had been buried and lie down on her grave. To Toole, the ground above her coffin seemed inexplicably warm, and he was convinced that at times he could feel it move beneath his body.

Toole, who was becoming more despondent by the day, confided that he began to hear voices suggesting that he should kill himself and “go to rest” with his mother. Sometime he heard the voices in his sleep, and other times he was wide awake. It could have been his mind, he thought. Or it could have been the devil.

Not surprisingly, Toole’s appearances at Reaves Roofing company became less and less frequent, and on Friday, June 5, 1981, they ceased altogether. Meantime, Robert Harley reported the theft of several items, including jewelry and furniture, from the house he had shared with Toole’s mother. He suspected Toole and Lucas, but he had no idea where the two of them might have gone. Harley was alone in the house now, since Toole’s older brother Howard had agreed to take custody of the younger children. And then, on June 23, 1981, while Harley was away, the home at 708 Day Avenue was set ablaze, an apparent case of arson.

Police might have talked to Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas about the thefts and the fire, but the two were nowhere to be found. As it turned out, they had borrowed a Ford pickup truck from Toole’s sister-in-law Georgia, telling her they were going to haul a load of scrap iron to the Jacksonville dump. In truth, they were on their way up the East Coast to Maryland, intending to make “a fresh start,” and taking with them Ottis’s twelve-year-old nephew Frank and his 13-year-old niece Frieda “Becky” Powell.

On July 8, the truck was found abandoned in Wellington, Delaware, and police contacted Georgia, telling her she had thirty days to reclaim it before it would be sold at auction. Georgia quickly filed a report with the Jacksonville sheriff, accusing Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas of the theft of her truck, and on July 22, 1981, after an APB was issued, Maryland state troopers spotted Henry Lee Lucas in the town of Pikesville. Lucas was arrested on charges of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and taken immediately to jail. The children, who were with him at the time, were placed in the hands of Child Protective Services to be sent back to Florida.

Toole, meantime, was not involved, because he had wandered off from the others during a hard night of drinking the night before in Newport News, Virginia. Convinced that Lucas (an admitted bisexual) had fallen in love with thirteen-year-old Frieda and run off without him, Toole swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and collapsed on the streets.

When he awakened in the Riverside Hospital in Newport News on July 23, Toole was willing to talk with doctors concerning his depression over the death of his mother, but he denied that he had attempted suicide. He said that he had been drifting around the country, sleeping on the streets, and now wanted only to return to Jacksonville, where there was a job waiting for him with a roofing company. Adjudged no threat to himself or to others, he was discharged from the hospital, and on the afternoon of July 24, Ottis Toole was given a check by the Newport News Salvation Army, made out payable to the Greyhound Bus Company in the amount of $71.93.

Toole walked the two miles from Salvation Army headquarters to the Greyhound station, where he exchanged the check for a one-way ticket to Jacksonville, and at 6:30 p.m. he was on board. It would take somewhere between sixteen and twenty hours for the bus to make its way from Virginia to Florida, and as every mile clicked by, Ottis Toole thought of his mother, and of the lover who had betrayed him, and listened to the voices in his head.

Jacksonville, Florida—July 25, 1981

I
t was around eleven on Saturday morning when Ottis Toole stepped off his bus at the Greyhound terminal in Jacksonville. Some individuals might have been exhausted by a twenty-hour bus ride across five states, but Toole was not. Compared to sleeping on the seat of a pickup truck carrying four passengers, or on a sidewalk, or in a jail cell, or in a hospital psychiatric ward with lunatics screaming and doctors and nurses poking and prodding, to Toole all those hours in the broad reclining seat of a Greyhound bus was an interlude in paradise.

He stretched, undaunted by the humid blanket of Florida summer heat, and began the seven-mile walk to Reaves Roofing, the company owned by John Reaves Sr. There wouldn’t be anyone there on a Saturday morning, but that was fine by Toole. Despite what he’d told the doctors and the people at the Salvation Army in Newport News, he had no intention of going back to work firing up tar pots and hoisting heavy rolls of one-ply asphalt up to scalding rooftops. There were easier ways to make money and better places than Jacksonville to do it in.

It took him about two hours to reach Reaves Roofing. As he expected, the compound was deserted, and his key to the gate still worked. There by the gas pumps, just where it was the last time he’d been in the yard, sat the black-over-white ’71 Cadillac he’d purchased back in January from Faye Reaves McNett, the aunt of his boss.

Technically, the car was no longer his, since he’d long since fallen behind on the weekly payments of $25 he’d agreed to make. He’d returned the car to McNett some months ago, but she stored it in the company compound, and Toole, using the spare keys he had for the place and those he had made for the car, had “borrowed” the Caddy on more than one occasion since.

Toole filled the Caddy with gas from the company tanks, locked the gate behind him, and drove the few miles to what was left of his mother’s house. He’d forgotten something that day that he’d set the place on fire, but he was fairly certain it was still there.

He kept a number of tools in the Caddy, and it did not take him long to unearth the coffee tin full of cash that constituted his “bank,” buried underneath the still-standing front porch. Toole stuffed $300 worth of bills in his pocket, tossed the can into the charred rubble of the house, and set out on the five-hour drive down I-95 to South Florida.

It was his intention to hit the gay parks up and down Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, where he could fatten his bankroll by anywhere from $20 to $50 a trick, and even more by jack-rolling the defenseless among his clientele. But by the time he passed through Fort Lauderdale, a half hour north of his target, it seemed a bit early for such goings-on.

Still, he thought, there were ways he might amuse himself in the meantime. Accordingly, at the Hollywood Exit, he swung the Cadillac off I-95 and cruised along the boulevard until he spotted a Kmart up ahead. Toole pulled into the crowded lot, nodding with satisfaction at all the cars. He didn’t need to buy a single thing, it was true, but there were other attractions at a place like this.

A
rlene Mayer remembers that it was about seven in the evening when she and her husband, Wayne, arrived at the Hollywood Kmart. They had their twelve-year-old daughter Heidi in tow and were set on picking up a few things for the house. If Heidi kept her promise to be good, she might get that toy Arlene had been promising.

Wayne had just gotten off work, and since he considered himself too dirty to be seen, he told Arlene that he would just relax in the car while she and Heidi did the shopping. It presented no problem for Arlene. She reminded Heidi that she had better be good, and the two set out for the store.

As they walked past what Arlene remembers as a “large white car,” they noticed the driver’s door swinging open. He was white, in his mid-thirties, and was odd-looking to both of them, “like a bum.” Most distressing was the fact that Arlene could hear his footsteps dogging the two of them all the way across the parking lot. Why had she been so accommodating when Wayne said he wanted to sit tight? she wondered.

As they neared the building, the man hurried past them and approached a bank of pay phones by the entrance. He lifted the receiver of one of the phones and mimed dropping coins into the slot, Arlene recalls, even though it was obvious he had no money in his hand. The two of them were happy to get past this creep and into the safety of the brightly lit store.

They grabbed a shopping cart just inside the entrance, and to appease her daughter, Arlene took them straight to the toy department. “Go ahead and look around,” she told Heidi, then pointed to the nearby housewares section. “I’m running right over there for something. You keep the cart. I’ll be right back.”

Heidi was understandably delighted to be left alone in wonderland. But the moment her mother had disappeared and she turned her cart to head for the section where the dolls were stacked, she stopped short. Blocking the aisle before her was the man who’d followed them through the parking lot. In the bright Kmart lights, he looked like something out of a slasher film. Several days’ growth of beard pocked his cheeks, his hair was unkempt, one eye wandered aimlessly, and a lunatic smile exposed a set of yellowing teeth. Heidi could feel the wash of this man’s fetid breath and smell his ripe body odor from several feet away.

“Why don’t I give you a ride in that shopping cart?” he asked in a tone that was meant to be enticing.

Heidi had the good sense to scream.

T
oole was gone long before store security came looking for him. By the time the girl was able to stop crying and make herself understood to her mother, he had ambled away, into the shadows of the parking lot. As soon as things calmed down, he’d get into his Cadillac and drive away, just another departing Kmart shopper.

He would head on down to Miami now and spend the night as he had intended. And once that was over, he would find a place to park the Caddy, somewhere that he could sleep in peace. And tomorrow or the next day, he could try some shopping again.

That little girl he’d followed into the Kmart was about the same age as his niece Becky Powell, who’d dumped him and ran off with Henry Lee. This one hadn’t seemed too fond of him either, but that was okay. There were lots of young ones to talk to, and he knew that, eventually, he would find one who would listen. In these parts, there seemed no end of promising malls.

Hollywood, Florida—July 27, 1981

B
ill Mistler, owner of a local pest control company, is certain of what he saw outside the Sears store in Hollywood on the fateful Monday afternoon that the Walsh boy disappeared. Mistler was on his way to Sears to pick up some supplies for a camping trip he’d planned for his family the next day, and while he was waiting for an old lady to work her way into a parking space at the curb by the store entrance, he noticed a white Cadillac with a black top coming toward him from the opposite direction.

The Cadillac, which seemed to have a bunch of long-handled gardening tools in the backseat, stopped in the driving lane opposite, and Mistler watched as an odd-looking man with reddish brown hair and a wandering eye got out and started toward the store.

As Mistler waited, the man, who was wearing a filthy T-shirt, approached a neatly dressed boy of about five who was standing on the sidewalk by the curb. Nearby were a woman and another young boy and girl. Mistler assumed it was a mother and her three children at first, but when the odd-looking guy from the Cadillac bent down and began talking to the younger boy, the mother seemed to take no notice. After a moment, in fact, the woman gathered her two children and walked away.

Mistler looked again at the shabbily dressed man and the little boy. Though it seemed impossible that the two belonged together, the child did not seem afraid. After a moment, the man stood and took the boy’s arm and the two walked together toward the Cadillac. The man helped the boy into the front seat through the driver’s door, then got in after him.