Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [11]
Meanwhile, certainly no one had given up the search. Twenty-two Hollywood police officers had volunteered their unpaid overtime to keep looking for Adam. Influenced by the Hollywood PIO’s grisly reminder that gases inside a decomposing body would by now have sent it floating to the surface of the water, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission donated one of their helicopters for use in searching area waterways. Seven wildlife officers volunteered their time to conduct a ground search in the nearby Florida Everglades.
Revé, desperate for anything that might help, agreed to undergo hypnosis, in the hopes that she might have blocked some detail, however small, of her activities that Monday. But the account she gave of her activities under hypnosis was depressingly similar to that of her conscious recollections. Her memory of the timing of events matched to the minute, and she had seen nothing out of the ordinary and no one suspicious on her way into the store that day.
Meantime, the press had set up camp outside the Walshes’ more-than-modest Hollywood home, eagerly trumpeting any tidbit they picked up off their police frequency scanners. They had taken to describing John Walsh as a “marketing executive” in their stories, and somehow the converted Checker cab had become a “custom car.” While the reward was bumped up to $25,000 and ultimately $100,000 through the donations of friends, the Walshes had begun to fear that they were being painted as millionaires, the type of people who might be targeted for a colossal ransom.
And then, late on Thursday, came a phone call that finally gave Hollywood Police some reason to hope. A woman named Marilyn Pottenberg phoned, explaining that her ten-year-old son Timothy told her that he had noticed something suspicious during their visit to the Sears store the afternoon that Adam Walsh disappeared. She herself had not witnessed it, Mrs. Pottenberg said, but her son told her that he had seen Adam—or someone who looked like Adam—being pulled into a dark blue van in the parking lot. Mrs. Pottenberg was not eager to have her son interviewed by police, because he suffered from severe migraine headaches. She would have to speak with Timothy’s doctor before she could allow that. She would get back to them.
Though there were certain inconsistencies in the tip, including the suggestion that Timothy had witnessed this event long after the time that Revé Walsh had raised the alarm for her missing son, Lieutenant Hynds appeared before reporters on Saturday, August 1, to announce that his force was following up on “the first solid lead” they had uncovered to date—and he put out the call to anyone in the community who might have seen such a suspicious vehicle.
The local Crime Stoppers staged a reenactment of an Adam look-alike being snatched through the doors of a blue van by a white male perpetrator, and the footage was aired on every local television station. Tips flooded in from everywhere, and hundreds of vans of every shade of blue were stopped and searched by cops in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties. Florida highway troopers were doing the same across the entire state.
But by the following Tuesday, eight days after Adam had disappeared, even Lieutenant Hynds was backpedaling. He’d come to have “some misgivings” about the veracity of the Pottenberg tip, he told the press. And, too, he was a bit concerned about inconveniencing innocent citizens, some of whom had been stopped and searched twice.
So this was where he had come in, Joe Matthews thought, dropping the last of the case files on his desk. Beyond the “blue van” lead, which seemed about as consequential to him as