Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [102]
The guy had to step out of her way so she could get past, Hagan said, and when he did, he smiled at her, a goofy-looking expression that exposed a big gap in his front teeth. She hurried on past, she said, and checked out the lamp section, where she couldn’t find anything she liked. There wasn’t a clerk around—only one customer, an attractive younger woman who seemed to be waiting on something—so Hagan decided to leave. As she passed the video display on the way out, she noted that it was deserted.
She explained to Mundy that she had thought about coming forward when she later learned what had happened to Adam, but wasn’t sure what good it would do. By that time, there was all that news about people who’d seen Adam being dragged into a “blue van,” so what she had seen didn’t seem all that important. “Leave it alone,” her husband Lou told her. “Let the police do their job.”
And she assumed that is just what happened, she told Mundy, until she watched the episode of America’s Most Wanted and saw the picture of Ottis Toole displayed on-screen. Oh my God, she thought, You mean he’s still alive—they never got him?
To Mundy, Hagan’s story was provocative. True, she might have pieced together much of what she’d told him from various reports. But there was one thing that had never been included in any account of Toole’s involvement with the crime, and that was his terrible, overpowering body odor. No one who had ever been in Toole’s presence for a moment failed to mention just how bad the guy smelled—as if there was something rotting inside him, bursting to get out.
Another particularly provocative call came directly to the AMW hotline, from a young woman named Sarah Patterson, the individual listed as “next of kin” on prison records. Patterson was the recipient of Toole’s few personal effects: his prison-issued Bible, some letters, and a few photographs.
In years past, she’d also received a lot more from Toole, though most of it was an unwelcome legacy. As she explained to Joe Matthews, she was Ottis Toole’s niece, the older sister of Frieda “Becky” Powell, who had been murdered by Henry Lee Lucas.
After her mother’s death, she had been raised by her grandmother and by Ottis Toole, if “raising” was what you could call it. Uncle Ottis, as Sarah called him, favored her younger sister, treating Becky like a daughter and Sarah “more like a friend,” though a curious friendship it seemed.
He taught her to drink and smoke dope and they partied hard together. “By the time I was ten, I was a whore,” Sarah told Matthews, “and I still am a whore. Back then, Uncle Ottis would turn me out to his friends for $10. He’d watch me fuck them and give them head and beat off while I was doing it.”
She never had sex with Ottis, however, because he was as queer as anyone could be, she explained. He shaved his legs, wore stockings, panties, and a bra. He dressed in drag, got shots “for boobs,” Sarah said, and wore a wig. That was the way he liked to dress “when he hustled other fags,” she said.
He could get mad, Sarah recalled, but he had a good side, too. Even if he only had enough money for one six-pack, he was always willing to share it. And when she got married at age seventeen, Ottis came to the wedding dressed as her bridesmaid.
As to the matter of Adam Walsh, Sarah had some pertinent information for Matthews. Some time around Christmas in 1995, she heard that Ottis was pretty sick and went to see him in prison. During that visit, she said, she asked him directly, “Uncle Ottis, are you the one that killed Adam Walsh?”
“Yeah,” he told Sarah. “I killed the little boy. And I always felt kinda bad about it, too.” As to why he hadn’t confessed to authorities, he told her that he had