Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [101]
Turchin also brought up the fact that the cops had recovered the car that was thought to have been used to abduct Adam, but sadly, it had been scrapped. And he pointed out that the cops had seized bloodstained carpeting from that car, as well—also lost, unfortunately.
Turchin also interviewed William Mistler, who recounted testimony that he had provided to the Hollywood police five years previously: he had seen a scruffy-looking man leading a little boy to a white Cadillac parked outside a Sears store on July 27, 1981. Mistler identified the boy as Adam Walsh, and the man who’d kidnapped him as Ottis Toole. The program concluded with some footage the Walshes had stumbled across by accident a few weeks before: six-year-old Adam Walsh in his baseball uniform, full of life, mugging at the camera, swinging his bat, getting a hit, rounding the bases. The stuff of which heartbreak is made.
Shortly after the show aired, Walsh received a call from Peter Roth, president of the Fox Entertainment Group. Hundreds of thousands of letters had been pouring in. Fifty-five members of Congress had complained, as had thirty-seven governors and every attorney general in the fifty states. The FBI had written as well. The network had reconsidered, Roth told Walsh. America’s Most Wanted—the show that had resulted in the capture of some four hundred fugitives, including eleven on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list, the show that had recovered twenty missing children and led to the apprehension of scores of child molesters—was going to remain on the air.
Washington, D.C.—September 23, 1996
John Walsh was heartened by the news from Fox, and he was proud of the way the program on Adam had turned out. How could anyone who had seen it doubt what had really happened? he thought. He and Revé had not yet found closure in a court of law, perhaps, but this was damned close. And as for bringing Ottis Toole to justice, he had plans for that as well.
He’d received word from sources that Ottis Toole had been diagnosed with hepatitis and AIDS by prison doctors at Lake Butler. Toole knew he was dying, Walsh was told, and it was suggested that the convict might be willing to talk to the right person. Walsh, who knew of the calamitous outcome of Mark Smith’s visit to Toole the previous year, thought he had the “right person” for the task in the person of Joe Matthews, who had retired from Miami Beach PD in the spring and had volunteered to help Walsh on the case in any way he possibly could.
And by this point, Walsh had formed a substantial network of friends in law enforcement, including the FBI and the FDLE. He was going to stop mincing around and use some of his influence to get Joe Matthews in to talk with Ottis Toole, once and for all. If Matthews could get a deathbed confession out of Toole, then he and Revé could rest with that, Walsh thought. Certainly, the prospect was worth using every favor he might call in.
Word that America’s Most Wanted would live on was not the only news that arrived in the wake of the September 21 program featuring Adam’s case. A number of tips were phoned in that suggested that Walsh and Joe Matthews were right about the killer’s identity.
While Matthews followed up most of the leads at Walsh’s request, one tip bypassed AMW entirely and went straight to the Hollywood PD: the caller’s name was Mary Hagan, she told police, and though she now resided in a retirement community in upstate Florida, she had been living in Hollywood not far from the Walshes at the time of Adam’s murder. She had seen things inside the Sears store that day he disappeared, she explained, and hadn’t realized until she’d seen that TV segment on Adam that police still hadn’t caught the killer. Perhaps what she had to tell them would help.
Phil Mundy, the investigator for the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, followed up with Hagan, seventy-six at the time. She told him that on the morning of July 27, 1981, she had noticed an ad for a lamp sale at Sears, and decided to go have a look. She entered the store through the garden