Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [118]
It was a score for Matthews, one more suggestion that the original investigators had been more intent on proving Ottis Toole’s innocence than his guilt, but he would have to keep going until he’d picked through the case file from top to bottom and—if possible—found that elusive piece of evidence that had so consumed his predecessors.
On Saturday, March 18, Matthews met with retired Brevard County sheriff deputy Steve Kendrick, the first police officer to whom Toole had confessed. Kendrick took Matthews back through his initial interview with Toole and the chance confusion with Broward County that had set twenty-five years of history into motion.
Thank God the dumb bastard couldn’t spell, Kendrick said, or else the whole thing might never have come out. When Matthews reminded him that actually the thing had not yet “come out,” Kendrick nodded in commiseration. Still there was not a doubt in his mind. Toole wasn’t the kind of guy who would have seen any value in confessing to such an awful thing unbidden. He’d confessed the crime to him twice, offering details that Kendrick realized—once the Hollywood police finally shared their information with him—only the killer could have known at the time.
In the weeks that followed, Matthews continued to pore through the voluminous file, and in late May he began to work back through an analysis of the physical evidence. In 1986, while still with the Miami Beach Police, Matthews had supervised the investigation of a case that stymied detectives until he ordered a tool marking analysis comparing a knife found in possession of a suspect and the wound in the deceased’s chest. As a result, the killer was convicted, among the first to be solved by such means.
Accordingly, on Thursday, May 25, he coordinated a reexamination of Adam’s skull for tool markings by the Miami Dade crime lab and the Broward County medical examiner’s office. Once again, however, though the markings showed “some similarities,” the results were inconclusive.
That same day, Matthews asked that Hollywood Police turn over certain evidence that it appeared they had not yet shared with him: Matthews wanted to examine copies of the photos taken by the FDLE, specifically those of the search and analysis of Ottis Toole’s Cadillac. Sergeant Lyle Bean, the Hollywood officer in charge of the file, checked, but then told Matthews that there were no such photos to be found.
Well, Matthews told Bean, FDLE reports indicated that five rolls of film had been shot documenting the search. If in fact the photos were not in Hollywood’s files, perhaps Bean would be willing to call the FDLE and find out what had happened to them.
Bean told Matthews he would place the call, and Matthews waited a week to follow up. On June 1, he called back. “They haven’t found them yet, but they’re still looking,” Bean said.
On June 19, Matthews placed yet another call to Bean, asking for an update on the status of those misplaced photographs. The FDLE had told him that no such photos existed in their files, Bean said.
Matthews hung up and sat pondering the situation for a moment. Twenty-three years had passed. Witnesses had died, the likely killer of Adam Walsh had died, and a great deal of evidence had disappeared as well. If the bloody carpet samples had vanished, along with the 4,200-pound automobile from which they’d come, why couldn’t five rolls worth of photographs have vaporized as well? Still, Matthews was not the sort to leave stones unturned. If you were a good cop, you turned them all over. And sometimes, if you were lucky, you found exactly what you were looking for.
He reached for the phone then and called the FDLE crime lab himself. He’d have to speak to someone in the photo lab, a voice told him, and Matthews waited patiently while he was transferred. When an attendant answered, he explained that he was simply following up on the request of Sergeant Bean from Hollywood PD. Were they absolutely certain that no copies of the photographs taken of Ottis Toole’s