Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [114]
And besides, there was the matter of the book contract that he and Ottis had worked out, Reaves added.
Really? Matthews replied, blandly, trying to conceal his eagerness. Just what book contract was Reaves talking about?
It took Reaves, who was undergoing treatment for lymph node and prostate cancer, a bit of time to find the document in his files, but finally he came up with a copy for Matthews. Dated October 29, 1983, shortly after Ottis made his first confessions to detectives from four separate jurisdictions (Steve Kendrick of Brevard County, Jay Via from Louisiana, Buddy Terry of Jacksonville, and Jack Hoffman from Hollywood), the agreement gave John Reaves Jr. the exclusive rights to any film and book adaptation of the “life and deeds of Toole.” Ottis and Reaves would split any profits fifty-fifty, the contract stipulated, and even if something happened to Toole, his surviving brothers and sisters would reap the rewards. In return for affixing his signature at the end of the document, Toole received an immediate advance against earnings of $10.
So indeed there had been a book contract, Matthews realized. Reaves was just a businessman who’d recognized a good possibility when he’d seen one.
Matthews would never know why Hoffman was so reluctant to pursue Ottis Toole, but if it truly was his belief that Buddy Terry had struck a book deal with the killer, what a shame it was that he’d never taken the trouble to have a follow-up conversation with John Reaves Jr. It would have dispensed with the chief ostensible reason why Hollywood PD and others in law enforcement and the media were so reluctant to believe Toole’s account of the killing, and it very possibly could have changed the course of the investigation.
On the following day, March 16, 2006, Matthews interviewed Sarah Patterson, the woman who called America’s Most Wanted following the 1996 segment on Adam, indentifying herself as Toole’s niece and claiming that he had confessed the killing to her. Patterson, the last person to visit Toole in prison before his death, reiterated her account of her uncle’s confession during that visit. Nothing had changed in the ten years that had passed, she said. There was no doubt in her mind that he had done exactly what he said he did.
She did not mean to be unfaithful to her uncle, who had always been good to her, but Patterson simply felt that after Ottis’s mother died, he lost what tenuous grip he might have had on self-control. “When Grandma Sarah died,” Patterson said, “this whole family went to hell.”
There were some good moments, however. During his stay with her just prior to her wedding years ago, he had offered to bake a cake for the occasion, but then he’d dropped it right before the reception. Uncle Ottis had spent his last $20 to buy her another, she recalled. But right was right, and the parents of that poor boy down in Hollywood deserved to know the truth.
At the end of her interview with Matthews, Patterson said she wanted him to have something her uncle had given her the last day they’d talked. She handed over a sheet of paper and Matthews found himself studying a multicolored drawing signed by Toole.
It was a clown’s face, Patterson said, and a clown’s face should make you happy. But this clown’s face haunted her. Looking at its dark-circled, bulging eyes and its protruding tongue reminded her of what evil her uncle did by taking the life of Adam Walsh. As much as she had once loved her Uncle Ottis, she now wanted only to forget him.
Jacksonville, Florida—March 17, 2006
The day after his interview with Sarah Patterson, Matthews interviewed retired Jacksonville sheriff’s detective Jesse “Buddy” Terry. Terry had known Ottis Toole for nearly twenty years prior to his arrest for the murder of George Sonnenberg, Terry told Matthews. A lot of cops knew Ottis Toole—he had been a fringe dweller in Jacksonville from the time he was a kid. As an adult, Toole—openly gay, and prone to dressing in drag—had been picked up several times for prostitution and various petty offenses, and was a suspected