Bringing Adam Home, page 9
On August 30, 1983, Terry met with Toole at the prison’s Reception and Medical Center. There, Toole confirmed that he had known Lucas since 1979 and that he had in fact been in love with him. He and Lucas had shared a homosexual relationship, Toole said, and the two of them had traveled together to several parts of the country.
As to the rooming house fire, Toole told Detective Terry that not everything that Lucas had said was true. For instance, Toole wanted Terry to know that he had not doused that vacant bedroom with gasoline before setting it ablaze . . . given his experience in starting fires, he explained, there was no need for such trouble. He had set the fire, sure, but to get it going he had simply torn the cover off a foam mattress and set that highly flammable substance ablaze with a match. And while he was aware that several men lived in the building, he had no idea that anyone, including the unfortunate George Sonnenberg, was home at the time. It was simply Sonnenberg’s tough luck.
So if Toole hadn’t set out with the intention of harming Sonnenberg, Terry wondered, then why had he set the fire in the first place? The question brought a guileless smile to Toole’s face. Setting fires just made him feel good, he told Terry. He guessed he’d set a couple hundred of them around Jacksonville over the past few years.
Detective Terry nodded, finished up his notes, and gave Toole a smile of his own. “You’re under arrest for arson—,” he began, but Toole simply shrugged.
“I’m already here for that,” he said, indicating their spartan surroundings.
“—and for the murder of George Sonnenberg,” Terry concluded. The fool’s luck that Ottis Toole had enjoyed all his life had finally run its course.
Nine days later, on Thursday, September 8, 1983, Toole was indicted in Jacksonville on charges of murder and arson, and on September 13 he was transferred from Raiford to the Duval County Jail to await trial. It is hard to know if Toole felt anything similar to the apprehension or fear that most individuals might experience at such heightening of circumstance, but judging from the conversations he had with some of his cellmates and other detectives drawn to interview him in his new quarters, it does not seem that he was guarded or fearful.
He seemed happy to discover that among his fellow prisoners in the Duval County lockup were two old friends from his days in the early 1980s at Reaves Roofing, Bobby Lee Jones and James Collins, a man who also used the alias of Julius Wilkes. Toole chatted freely with Jones and Collins/Wilkes about the circumstances that had finally led him to jail, and when a Brevard County detective named Steve Kendrick showed up to interview him about an unsolved homicide that had taken place in Cocoa Beach, some two and a half hours to the south, Toole was even more forthcoming.
During the interview, which took place on Monday, October 10, 1983, Toole readily confessed to Kendrick that he had probably committed or taken part in at least sixty-five murders, though he didn’t have any recollection of the Cocoa Beach case that Kendrick had come to talk about. After a half hour or so, Kendrick sensed that he was getting nothing useful regarding his own case out of Toole and turned his tape recorder off. As the detective was packing up to leave the interview room, some switch seemed to flip inside the man who had just a few moments before admitted to killing scores of people.
According to Kendrick, Toole suddenly straightened in his chair and looked up at him intently. “You’re from Fort Lauderdale, right?”
“No.” Kendrick shook his head. It occurred to him that Toole had confused Brevard County with Broward County, two hours farther south along the coast. But being an able cop, Kendrick was not about to let it drop. “Were you expecting someone from Fort Lauderdale?” he asked Toole.
Toole nodded.
“You get into something in Fort Lauderdale?” the detective prompted.
“Yeah, I did,” Toole said.
Given that the man in front of him had readily identified himself as a serial killer, Kendrick might not have thought too much of the exchange, were it not for the sudden shift in Toole’s behavior. He was gripping the sides of his chair tightly now, shifting uneasily from side to side, his gaze dropping abruptly from Kendrick’s to the floor and back again. As his case notes make clear, Kendrick sensed that he had stumbled onto something big: “Reporting agent felt that for a man to admit involvement in sixty five (65) murders, but get upset about Ft. Lauderdale, it had to be something appalling.”
Kendrick sat back down across from Toole and folded his hands in front of him. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” the detective said. And Toole began to do just that.
He had found a little boy at a Sears store, Toole said, and told the boy that he had some candy and wanted to talk to him and convinced him to get in his Cadillac out in the parking lot. Toole told Kendrick that he was intending to take the boy back to Jacksonville and raise him as his own son, but it all changed when this Adam started crying and saying he wanted to get out of the car. The boy’s behavior made him mad, Toole explained, and so he hit him in the face to shut him up. And then he turned off the highway onto a dirt road that had a fork at the end of it. And that was where he murdered this Adam and cut off his head and threw it into a pond somewhere along the side of the road.
In hindsight, one might wonder why such a statement did not mark the end of the hunt for the killer of Adam Walsh then and there. True, Detective Kendrick was from another jurisdiction and was only vaguely familiar with the case, and there would understandably be a bit of time for sorting out just what Ottis Toole was talking about . . . but surely, one might think, a speedy resolution of the matter was at hand. As the old saw goes, however, that is the trouble with assumptions. In truth, the trouble was just getting under way.
When Kendrick left the room after his second interview with Toole, he was a man on a mission. He found Detective Buddy Terry in his office and quickly shared the news. “He’s talking about killing a child down in Broward County,” Kendrick told Terry. “He says he cut him up and left the body in two different places. This is all out of the clear blue sky.”
Terry remembers the moment well, though at the time he was not familiar with any child-killing case in South Florida (if nothing else, Terry’s obliviousness speaks volumes about how times have changed). Still, based on Kendrick’s certainty that Toole was confessing to a gruesome crime that he had in fact committed, he began calling various agencies in Broward County.
“I finally got hold of the Hollywood Police Department,” Terry recalls, “and they told me that it sounded like the Adam Walsh case.” Terry had no idea what Hollywood was talking about, but once it had been explained to him, he hurried to Kendrick with the news.
The following morning, October 11, Kendrick reached someone in the homicide division at Hollywood PD and gave a brief account of what he’d come across. “I identified myself as an investigator for the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office,” he says, “and said that I had just interviewed an individual pertaining to a homicide I was investigating. During the interview with the individual, he said a number of things that led me to believe that he is in fact the one who killed Adam Walsh.”
Whomever Kendrick spoke to took the information and said that someone would be back in touch immediately. But “immediately” seemed to have a relative meaning. “Probably a week after that,” Kendrick says, “I got a call from someone and we spoke briefly about my conversation with Ottis Toole about Adam. I don’t believe I had any additional contact with them [the Hollywood PD] after that. I think I only spoke to them once.”
With notification having been made to the Hollywood PD, there was nothing more for Detectives Kendrick or Terry to do regarding the Adam Walsh case. Kendrick returned to his office in Brevard County, and Terry went off to Louisiana to confer with authorities there pertaining to Henry Lee Lucas and his own investigation of the murder of George Sonnenberg.
As a result of the information shared during Terry’s trip to Monroe, three detectives from Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, traveled back to Jacksonville with him to interview Toole regarding the murder of sixteen-year-old Sherry Alford in Monroe. On Tuesday, October 18, 1983, Detective Jay Via, who’d been among the first to question Henry Lee Lucas following his arrest, began his pre-interview conversation with Ottis Toole while Toole was eating his lunch.
Via casually asked Toole when he was going to start talking about all the blacks that Henry Lee Lucas claimed the two of them had killed. Toole broke off from eating to smile his Alfred E. Neuman–like smile. Surely Via understood why he wasn’t about to start talking about that subject, Toole told the detective. The population of the Duval County Jail was about 90 percent black. How long did Via think Toole would last if he started bragging about killing “brothers”?
Via nodded in appreciation of Toole’s wisdom. But he’d also heard some rumors that Toole had killed a bunch of kids during his travels across the country, he said. Kid killers weren’t very popular in prison either. Were those rumors true? Via wondered.
At that, Via recalls, Toole’s manner suddenly changed. He stopped in mid-bite and put down his chicken leg. “You talking about the kid that got his head cut off around West Palm Beach, Florida?” Toole said, guardedly.
Via checked his watch, noting that it was 3:20 in the afternoon. Toole had become a different person, instantaneously. For the first time, he made direct eye contact with Via and inquired again in a somber voice whether or not he was talking about the “kid” he had killed in South Florida.
“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
According 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.
