Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [104]
Justice, John and Revé Walsh might have answered. And the right of any victim for the chance to know what had happened. An end to the feeling of helplessness. An end to the rage over the actions of a police force that had bungled this investigation from the beginning and now seemed intent on forgetting that the murder of Adam Walsh had ever happened.
Furthermore, the Walshes had spent fifteen years dedicating their lives to the cause of victimized children and their parents everywhere. To simply throw up their hands in the pursuit of justice for their own child’s death would make a mockery of everything they’d been fighting for.
In this light, and though it might seem strange to say so, his own death might be the most provocative action a killer could take to elude responsibility for his crime. One can imagine Toole leering from his grave, “You’ll never catch me now.”
And were those who had pursued him for so many years any less driven, that imagined taunt might have proven true.
Even though the man himself had died, the evil that he had wrought had a way of living on. Not quite a week after Toole was buried, on September 25, 1996, an Associated Press reporter published an interview with Henry Lee Lucas in which Lucas told the writer that he was certain that Toole was responsible for the killing—he had seen blood all over the car after Toole used it. Lucas also said that a couple of months after Adam’s death, he and Toole were back in South Florida one day when Ottis decided to drive him over to the Sears Mall and show him where he had picked “that kid” up. At that time, Lucas said, Toole took him through a step-by-step re-creation of the abduction and the killing.
From his cell in Texas, Lucas told a reporter that he had actually seen Adam’s body in the shallow grave where Toole had buried it. “He kicked it uncovered and showed it to me,” Lucas said. “I got sick about it. I said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ I left. I never heard no more about it until ’83.”
That interview, startling as it was, prompted no action from law enforcement despite what seemed a compelling offer from Lucas. “If they want to talk to me and take me down there, I’ll show them where it’s at,” he said. He described the burial site as being located in an isolated area off a freeway. “We got to an old foundation in there, either a barn or a house. There was nothing there, just a foundation. There was an old oak tree or pine tree and that’s where the body was at.”
At the time, Hollywood spokesperson Todd DeAngelis told reporters, “None of it is news to us,” but there is no mention of Lucas’s claims anywhere in the case file. Furthermore, it would mark the last significant public mention of the case for a very long time.
In fact, were it not for the simple axiom that the truth has a way of making itself known when someone wants to find it badly enough, the case of Adam Walsh—its files laid bare for anyone to see, the only suspect of substance to have surfaced in fifteen years now dead—might have also been laid to rest forever.
Chapter Six
Thunder from Heaven
Q: So you admit that you’re a cannibal?
A: I have eaten some parts of them. And the skin.
Q: Did you eat them raw?
A: Oh no. You can’t eat that without cooking it. Are you crazy?
—Ottis Toole, with Texas Rangers,
March 24, 1984
Hollywood, Florida—October 1, 1996
In early 1996, following an acrimonious investigation into irregularities in the department’s hiring practices, Hollywood police chief Richard Witt was fired by city manager Sam Finz. “Just say I’m leaving due to health reasons,” was Witt’s parting shot. “The city manager is sick of me.”
Finz appointed deputy chief Mike Ignasiak as interim chief while a national search was conducted for