Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [103]
When Matthews asked Sarah if she believed it, Sarah gave a bitter laugh. She had no doubt about it. “I know my uncle too well,” she said.
The AMW segment also resulted in a call from a young South Florida man named Joel Cockerman. Cockerman explained that until he had seen the show, he did not realize it—but he was calling now to report that he had actually witnessed the kidnapping of Adam Walsh.
As he later explained to Joe Matthews, Cockerman, eight at the time, was in the Sears store and was the other boy playing Asteroids with Adam Walsh when the trouble started with the kids who wanted to take the controllers away. When the security guard heard the commotion, she kicked them all out of the store, Cockerman said. Shortly after they made their way outside, Cockerman’s mother came and picked up him and his sister, Mia, nine at the time. Cockerman told his mother that he wanted to stay with his little friend until his parents came for him. In all likelihood, it is Cockerman and his mother and sister whom Bill Mistler had witnessed standing on the sidewalk when he viewed the same scene from his vehicle.
But his mother said it wasn’t necessary for them to wait. “Look,” she told Cockerman, “his dad is there now.” She pointed to where a disheveled-looking man was leading Adam from the curb and into the parking lot. When they saw the photograph of Ottis Toole flash on the screen, during the AMW segment, Cockerman’s sister clapped her hand to her mouth. “That’s him,” she told Cockerman. “He had more hair then, but that’s him.”
Neither Cockerman nor his sister had reported the incident before. They simply did not realize the importance of what they had witnessed until the program aired.
All of this seemed to Walsh and Matthews like fuel that might possibly reignite the investigation, until AMW producers fielded yet another call on the Monday following the segment. Just how stupid were they? a caller wanted to know. When asked what he was talking about, the caller passed along what no one at AMW had realized until that moment. “Ottis Toole is dead and already in the ground at Raiford Prison, down there in Florida.”
As it happened, Barry Gemelli, the health services administrator at the Union Correctional Institution, had been in his office at the prison infirmary one day the previous week, completing the paperwork necessary for the transfer of patient Ottis Toole to the nearby hospital unit at Lake Butler, when he got a summons from an aide. Ottis Toole had taken a sudden turn for the worse. The aide thought Gemelli ought to have a look.
Gemelli hurried to find Toole raving in his bed, begging God to forgive the many bad things he had done in his life. Gemelli had witnessed such scenes before—he knew there were no atheists in foxholes, and it was his experience that even the most hardened of criminals find salvation as the end approaches. But Toole caught Gemelli’s attention when he began to tell God about the worst thing he’d ever done. He had killed that little boy named Adam Walsh down in Broward County, Toole said, and he was very, very sorry that he did it.
After Toole had been stabilized and was transferred to the hospital unit, Gemelli notified the prison’s investigative unit of what he heard Toole say about killing Adam Walsh, and a report of the matter was entered into prison files. Though Joe Matthews had urged Mark Smith to make his own foray to Lake Butler in the hopes of obtaining a deathbed confession, Smith never followed through. As far as deathbed confessions, what Gemelli heard that day would have to suffice.
On September 15, 1996, Ottis Ellwood Toole, a three-times convicted killer, died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-nine, in Lake Butler Prison Hospital. His body was unclaimed, and four days later—unbeknownst to John and Revé Walsh, Joe Matthews, or anyone at America’s Most Wanted—Toole was buried, in a cloth-covered casket, on prison grounds.
John Walsh was stunned by the news. Over the years,