Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [100]
Whatever the validity of the various claims and counterclaims of the agencies involved, anyone who read the various accounts published in the wake of the release of the case files could be forgiven for assuming that the matter was finished. Propriety and impropriety of procedures aside, it simply looked as if police would never find out who had kidnapped and murdered Adam Walsh.
And yet, even with Hollywood PD apparently at a standstill and Joe Matthews retired from Miami Beach PD, there was still desultory work on the case. In September, investigator Philip Mundy of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office took the sworn statement of Bobby Lee Jones, a former cellmate of Toole’s in the Duval County Jail, who claimed to have worked with Ottis Toole at Reaves Roofing in 1982. In late July of that year, Jones said, Toole began to talk to him about various crimes he had committed, including the killing of a little boy. Jones recalled Toole telling him he’d lured the child into his car, and had intended to take him home and “be his father.” But it had not worked out, Jones said. Toole told him he’d cut the boy’s head off and tossed it into a creek, then cut up the body and burned it.
Jones’s statement might have had greater impact were it not for the inconsistency suggested by the dates he gave Mundy. Company records indicate that the last day of Toole’s employment at Reaves Roofing was June 4, 1981, several weeks before the killing. Furthermore, he drew only one day’s pay from Southeast Color Coat in December.
Of course, fourteen or fifteen years had passed, and Jones might have been mistaken about exactly when he’d heard all this from Toole. The conversation could have taken place when they were incarcerated together in 1983. And there was no doubt that many details of Toole’s confession had been recounted by the media when the case files had been opened earlier that year. Still, if Jones was being truthful—if he’d heard about it from Toole at work in December 1982, or simply as they chatted on the streets or in a bar—it would mean that Toole had begun talking to others about killing Adam Walsh long before he first admitted it to police in 1983.
Meanwhile, John Walsh had decided to take matters into his own hands, even if it was a stinging blow that led him to do so. In May 1996, as he was on his way to a Washington, D.C., gathering of missing children who had been reunited with their families as a result of America’s Most Wanted, Walsh received an unexpected call on his car phone. He didn’t have to bother coming to New York next week to talk about next year’s episodes, a spokesman explained. After eight years, the Fox network had abruptly decided to cancel the show. He’d be kept on contract as a consultant and producer, but the decision was final: America’s Most Wanted was finished.
Though stunned at the news, Walsh had little choice in the matter. And after it had finally sunk in, he realized that the appropriate way to close the program was with an episode on the one case they had never featured: that of Adam Walsh.
The program, which ran on September 21, 1996, was put together by John Turchin, a reporter for WSVN, Channel 7, the Fox affiliate in Miami, and was based on information and tips gathered by Joe Matthews and Mark Smith, the detective with whom Matthews had worked the cold case investigation at Hollywood PD. Turchin interviewed Sears security guard Kathy Shaffer, who spoke candidly for the first time about her role in the incident back in 1981. She’d just started the job, she told Turchin, and when she realized that big trouble had indeed unfolded on that day, she was overwhelmed. While she had said otherwise, shortly after Revé Walsh showed her the pictures of her son she realized that Adam had in fact been in the store that day. It was also true that she had made him leave, along with all the other kids who were causing a fuss at the video game display. But she hadn’t wanted to admit it—after all, if she hadn’t sent him outside,