Bringing Adam Home, page 1
Bringing
Adam
Home
The Abduction That Changed America
Les Standiford
with Detective Sergeant Joe Matthews
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Alexander Standiford, 1991–2009;
to Mama Margaret Matthews, 1914–2008;
and, of course, to Adam Walsh, 1974–1981,
as well as all the other sons and daughters
taken long before their time.
After the first death, there is no other.
—DYLAN THOMAS
Map of Florida
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Map of Florida
Chapter One
In the Beginning
Chapter Two
Blood of the Lamb
Chapter Three
World of Hurt
Photo Insert
Chapter Four
Through the Boneyard
Chapter Five
As Evil Does
Chapter Six
Thunder from Heaven
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters
About the Author
Also by Les Standiford
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
In the Beginning
Hollywood, Florida—July 27, 1981
Shortly after lunch on what seemed an ordinary summer afternoon, a young South Florida housewife set out on a shopping trip with her six-year-old son in tow. It was the sort of outing that millions of other mothers all across the country might have taken on any given day. Her husband, a sales and marketing manager for a local hotel company, had noticed an ad in that morning’s newspaper and called home to say that the brass barrel lamps they had been looking for had just gone on sale at the local Sears store. Maybe she ought to run over and take a look.
She was happy to do it—they’d been wanting the lamps, and the chance to save a few dollars seemed too good to pass up. She freshened herself up, dressed her son in shorts, a polo shirt, flip-flops, and his favorite way-big boat captain’s hat, and set out for the store.
It was a Monday, typical ninety-degree weather with humidity just as high, but that was July in South Florida for you. Come January, when the rest of the country was in a deep freeze, Floridians would have payback. Besides, traffic in their suburban town of Hollywood was light that early afternoon, and it was less than a two-mile drive to the Sears Mall. As a bonus, the parking space she liked to use—near the receiving dock, on the building’s north side, where the whole family could remember it—was open.
Just inside the doors, at the entrance to the toy department, her son spotted a video display with a demo of the new Asteroids game running, and he begged his mother to let him play.
She hesitated, but home furnishings was just a couple of aisles away, and besides, the world had not yet turned upside down. She pointed out to her son where she was going and told him she’d be back in a few minutes to pick him up. She gave her son a kiss, then, and hurried off to see about those lamps.
She would relive the moment a hundred—perhaps a million—times. Had she just said no to him, “Stay with me”; had she simply returned to the game display a minute sooner; had any one of a thousand things happened differently in the slightest—as it is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can form a tsunami in a distant time and place—perhaps what occurred might not have occurred at all.
But there is no changing what did happen that day. The mother found a salesperson in home furnishings easily, but there was a bit of a problem: they searched up and down the bright aisles but could find none of the barrel lamps on display. The clerk was happy to check in the back, of course—it would only take a moment. Which turned into something more.
When the clerk finally returned, her downcast expression said it all. The store had not received any of the advertised lamps, but they would be happy to call the moment they came in. The mother quickly gave her name and number and hurried back to where she’d left her son.
She could hear the clamor of spaceships and cannon fire tearing the air as she hurried down the aisle, and smiled at her son’s passion for such games. But when she rounded the corner, she stopped short. The game was running, but its stations were deserted, the sounds issuing mechanically from the demo loop. She glanced about, puzzled, hoping she would see her son browsing in the nearby toy department, or ambling toward her from where she had been. But she did not.
She fought the surge of panic that every mother feels when she turns and finds her child suddenly lost from sight. The ripples on the surface of the nearby pond are all menace. The sounds of distant traffic suggest catastrophe and grief and guilt.
But she would not panic foolishly, this mother. She would retrace her steps. She would have the store announce her son’s name, and that he should find a clerk and report himself. While store personnel stood ready, she would return to the place she had left her car. He would be waiting there, or he would come to her, or she would find him. She would not panic. She would find her son. Surely, she would find her son.
Washington, D.C.—February 13, 2006
At a Capitol Hill press conference, a reporter stood to ask a final question of John Walsh, leading proponent for the about-to-be-debated Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Walsh, a private citizen, had become perhaps America’s most recognizable crime fighter owing to his work as executive producer and host of the long-running television program America’s Most Wanted. But also, in the wake of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of his son Adam, he and his wife, Revé, had dedicated much of their lives’ energies to raising awareness of the problem and the plight of missing children in America.
As a result of the Walshes’ work had come the passage of the 1982 Missing Children Act, the establishment of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984, and the national AMBER Alert program of 2003. Walsh considered the new bill that was about to go before Congress the capstone of a life’s work removing impediments to the recovery of the nearly 800,000 children who are reported missing in the United States each year.
“Mr. Walsh,” the reporter began. “You’ve done much good work on behalf of children and families everywhere, and you’ve brought any number of heinous criminals to justice with your television show. But I’m wondering if it ever bothers you that you have been unable, in all these years, to find out who killed your own son?”
It was a question asked out of ignorance, the sort of thing that made several in the room wince. Walsh managed to respond without losing his composure, but following the incident, he and Revé contacted longtime associate and America’s Most Wanted investigator Joe Matthews to set up a meeting that would prove to be momentous. As a veteran homicide detective for the Miami Beach Police Department, Matthews had supervised and conducted more than 20,000 criminal investigations and over 2,000 death and homicide investigations, and had obtained confessions and convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including Miami’s infamous Baby Lollipops torture-murder, that of Washington State’s spree killer Chad Daniel Roberts, and Canada’s University of Waterloo serial rapist Christopher Meyer.
But more important, Matthews, a widely recognized polygraph expert, had been involved in the investigation of Adam Walsh’s disappearance and murder from the very beginning, twenty-five years before. His skill and tireless efforts to bring mistakes and overlooked evidence to the attention of those in charge of that still-unresolved investigation had earned him the respect and the friendship of the Walshes over the years, and following his retirement from the Miami Beach force, Matthews had gone to work as a lead investigator for America’s Most Wanted, where he was quickly credited with solving the program’s first cold case investigation, the killing of a former high school wrestling champ by four football players at Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania.
Matthews was well aware that for all the good work that the Walshes had accomplished over the years, there still existed a great void in their lives. Adam was gone, and though both they and he had expended vast resources and energy trying to do what the authorities had been unable to do, the person responsible had never been brought to justice. And for all the effrontery of the reporter’s question, it was scarcely the first time it had been asked: the Walshes had been asking virtually the same thing of themselves—if only privately—nearly every day for a quarter century.
On this day, however, Matthews could see that something different had taken over the Walshes’ demeanor. Perhaps it was the pain of such a jab coming in a context of seeming triumph with the passage of the Child Protection and Safety Act. Or perhaps the Walshes had simply heard one insensitive question too many. Whatever, Matthews thought as he waited for the Walshes’ words, he’d walk through fire for John and Revé Walsh.
Normally, it was John who did most of the talking, but on this day, Revé took over before her husband could get started.
“Joe,” she told Matthews in no uncertain terms, “I’m begging you. I know it’s asking a lot, but I want you to go back through everything we’ve all tried to show the cops over the years. I want you to
Matthews had made his decision before Revé was finished. He was honored that she’d even ask, he told her. He was an investigator through and through, and he had witnessed her suffering and that of her husband from the beginning of their ordeal. In truth, he had been aching for much of his adult life to do the very thing that she had just asked of him. He took her hands in his and nodded. He would give it his best shot, and he would start at once.
Chapter Two
Blood of the Lamb
Q: Do you remember if she was a hitchhiker?
A: Yeah, I think she was.
Q: Did she have a name?
A: I wouldn’t know.
Q: Didn’t you ask her name when you picked her up?
A: I suppose so. I didn’t pay much attention to stuff like that.
—Ottis Toole, to an investigator,
Jacksonville County Jail, December 28, 1983
Miami Beach, Florida—July 31, 1981
When veteran Miami Beach PD homicide detective Joe Matthews got the call on Friday from captain of Hollywood detectives Steve Davis, asking that Matthews assist his department in the investigation of the disappearance of six-year-old Adam Walsh, Matthews was more than willing to join in. He was well aware of the anguish that had gripped the entire South Florida community since the boy had vanished earlier in the week. The reward offered for Adam’s safe return had risen to $100,000, the highest ever for a missing child in the United States, and the case, which would be likened to the Lindbergh kidnapping, had attracted the attention of news media, not to mention cops, across the region.
Four days had passed since Adam had gone missing from the Sears store in Hollywood, and though twenty-five officers assigned to the Hollywood PD detective bureau had worked the case full-time, along with assistance from officers from Broward and other South Florida counties, what scant leads they’d uncovered had come to nothing. There was no reason to suspect that Adam had simply run away or wandered off; there were no disaffected family members who might be suspected of abducting him; nor had there been any ransom note or report of anything unusual spotted at the Sears store that day. In short, there had been nothing, and in the days long before AMBER Alerts, children’s faces on milk cartons, and national databases that linked police departments in missing children cases, the Hollywood PD was up against a wall.
Furthermore, there was good reason for Captain Davis to contact Matthews. Matthews, thirty-five, had been employed by the City of Miami Beach since 1967, and had quickly risen through the ranks, promoted after only a year and a half as a patrolman to detective for the Criminal Investigations Division. In 1973, shortly after he married his wife, Ginny, he was promoted to the rank of detective sergeant. At about the same time, Matthews—always skilled at interrogation—had enrolled in a state-certified program for polygraph examiners, figuring the training would make him a better cop and, quite frankly, expand his prospects. He and Ginny had plans to start a family, and making do on a cop’s salary was always a challenge.
By 1976 Matthews had become the chief polygraph examiner for the Miami Beach Police Department and had started his own state-certified school for polygraph examiners—a sideline that became more and more profitable as word of Matthews’s skills as both an investigator and an instructor spread throughout the South Florida law enforcement community. The burly, avuncular Matthews was regarded as a tough but fair cop by his colleagues, and his meticulous style of interviewing subjects prior to the actual polygraph exam itself had proven to be most effective. As he was fond of reminding his students, “How can you know what kind of questions to ask if you don’t know the person you are asking them of?”
Among those many students he had trained over the years was Steve Davis, who had even gone on to intern under Matthews at his Southern Institute of Polygraph. And while Davis considered himself an able polygraph examiner, along with others who performed the same duties within the Hollywood police department—many of them also trained by Matthews—in this case he wanted the best. Matthews was not only a top polygraph examiner, he was a highly regarded cop and investigator.
“We need you up here,” Davis told Matthews, who needed little convincing. When he had heard the initial news bulletins late on the afternoon that Adam had disappeared, Matthews’s initial reaction was one of sadness, mixed with some resignation. He was an experienced police officer, after all, and the world was a hard place. Maybe the Walsh boy had just wandered away and gotten lost. Hopefully, he hadn’t fallen into one of the many canals that stitched the narrow habitable strip of South Florida land between the Everglades and the Atlantic. Hopefully, he would turn up safe somewhere.
But shortly after Matthews got home that evening, his feelings began to change. Ginny met him just inside the door, the kids’ pj’s tucked under her arm, wondering if he’d heard the news. He had heard, Matthews assured her.
“My God, Joe,” she told him, then. “I was on my way to that same Sears this afternoon. But Joey got sick, and I had to turn around. It could have happened to us, that’s what I keep thinking.”
Matthews stopped, staring back at her, feeling goose bumps prickle even his thick skin. They lived in the unincorporated area known as Southwest Ranches, then a sparsely populated area of Broward County a few miles from the fringes of real civilization and the Hollywood store where Adam had gone missing. The houses there sat on lots of an acre or more, and some neighbors still kept horses. The urban centers of Fort Lauderdale and Miami were nearby, and if you wanted a dose of the city, you could easily get it. But out here you could pretend you were still part of an old-time Florida, where foxes and raccoons and possums roamed, and if you were talking about predators, you meant the eagles and hawks and ospreys that still cut the skies overhead.
Matthews glanced into the family room, where his brood—four kids in five years—were raising their usual clamor in front of the TV set while Scooby-Doo hightailed it from a make-believe monster. His oldest son Joey was almost exactly the same age as Adam Walsh, born one day before him, on November 13, 1974. After Joey, there had come two more sons, Greg and Michael, and in 1979, just two weeks before Joey’s fifth birthday, their daughter Christina was born. The things you take for granted, he found himself thinking, a wave of dread drifting over him.
It was a feeling that only increased over the course of the week, as reporters continued to chronicle the lack of results in the search for Adam Walsh. By the time Davis called to issue his plea, Matthews was more than primed to help. “Anything I can do,” he assured Davis, who immediately put in a call to Emmit Miller, Miami Beach police chief, asking that his former instructor be loaned to HPD to conduct interviews and polygraph examinations.
“We need all the help we can get,” an anxious Davis told Chief Miller, and the deal was done.
Miami Beach, Florida—August 5, 1981
In truth, the Miami Beach that Sergeant Matthews set out from to meet with his Hollywood PD counterparts the following Wednesday bore very little resemblance to the high-octane, pretty-peopled playground of today. Nor had it yet become the drug-fueled, money-laundering center of exotic crime mirrored in Miami Vice, where Crockett and Tubbs donned unstructured suits and chased swarthy miscreants in cigarette boats and Ferraris.
There was crime in Miami Beach to be sure, but it was still largely the old-fashioned variety that made its own kind of sense. From the 1930s, mob money had fueled the glittering beachfront resorts where big-name talent performed and movers and shakers cavorted, but much of that was about providing willing customers with what they craved: babes, booze, cards, and dice. Victimless crime, as it used to be called, and hardly a thing that outraged anyone, unless you happened to be standing behind a pulpit on Sunday morning. Besides, by 1981, most of the gambling action had moved on to Las Vegas and other climes, and the Eden Rocs, the Fontainebleaus, and their paler cousins up the Beach were already sliding toward irrelevance.
