Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [117]
As Matthews worked his way through the case documentation, he eventually came to a mention of the polygraph examination that he had administered to Jimmy Campbell during the early hours of August 8, 1981. Following that examination Matthews had his first conversation with Detective Hoffman regarding his polygraph examination of Campbell. Prior to that conversation, Hoffman had not even known Campbell’s name, but within moments, the Hollywood detective was declaring his virtual certainty that Campbell was the perpetrator. And following the heated exchange with Detective Matthews, Hoffman tracked down and interviewed Campbell as to his alibi for the time of the kidnapping.
All that was clear in Matthews’s memory. However, as he studied Hoffman’s files more carefully, Matthews discovered something dumbfounding: Hoffman had filed a report claiming that he had interviewed Jimmy Campbell on Friday, August 7—the day before Matthews had alerted Hoffman to Campbell’s very existence. Nor was there mention of the fact that Matthews had already conducted a polygraph examination that cleared Campbell of any guilty knowledge concerning the crime. The report suggested that Hoffman had tracked down Jimmy Campbell on his own, and then ordered Matthews to call Campbell in for a polygraph exam the following week.
Furthermore, while Hoffman had assiduously recorded all other interviews he conducted in the course of his investigation, the one with Campbell was not recorded. That was for one simple reason, Matthews theorized: the date recorded on the tape would have determined when the interview actually took place. Most disturbing to Matthews, however, was a supplemental report that Hoffman filed on August 8, where he falsely stated that the results of Matthews’s polygraph examination of Campbell were “inconclusive.”
To Matthews, all this was evidence that from the beginning Hoffman had seen Jimmy Campbell as the perfect suspect and had set about constructing a scenario where he would seem a supersleuth for having deduced things about the case that no one else had. By switching the dates of his interview with Campbell, Hoffman made it seem that he had smoked Campbell out, then ordered Matthews to administer a test that incriminated him.
Later that evening, as Matthews made a visit to the unmarked grave site of Toole’s mother, a call came from Vinetta Syphurs, Toole’s sister and the owner of the Japanese bayonet that Broward County detectives had questioned her about a decade before. Matthews had left a message for her earlier that day that he was hoping to talk with her about the matter.
She was suffering from cancer, Vinetta told Matthews—in fact she was dying. Her husband Rodney had recently died as well, and somehow the timing of Matthews’s phone call, after all this time, suggested to her that it was a message from the grave, her Rodney suggesting that she tell police the truth about the things she knew.
She told Matthews that she and Ottis were the closest of all the nine children, especially after their mother died, and that he often confided to her about some of the things he’d done. She had visited Ottis in prison—a fact noted by Toole in one of his letters to John Reaves Jr.—and during that visit he told her, without expressing remorse, that he had murdered Adam Walsh. This confession had so disgusted her that she disowned her brother and refused to visit or correspond afterward. She had lied to Broward detectives when she’d told them she had that bayonet mounted above her mantel, she told Matthews. She wasn’t even sure where it had come from or when she got it. It had just been stuck on a shelf somewhere.
If Ottis had taken the bayonet and replaced it some time later on, she would have never known. She’d been trying to protect her brother at the time she spoke to detectives, but when she asked him point-blank and he admitted the killing, she’d been sickened. She wanted Matthews to pass on what she’d told him to the Walshes.