Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [119]
There was a pause on the other end. No one in the office seemed to know what Matthews was talking about. There’d been no request for any photos from anyone at Hollywood PD.
Matthews nodded and hung up. He’d played this game before. Except the last time around, the joker on the other side of the table had been a guy named Jack Hoffman.
In the end, Matthews spoke to an FDLE public information officer, Sharon Gogerty, who checked the files in reference to Hollywood PD case #81-56073. Yes, she told Matthews, they had ninety-eight photo negatives pertaining to the processing of suspect Ottis Toole’s vehicle.
Well then, Matthews asked, would it be possible for him to obtain copies of the prints? Gogerty paused, then said a surprising thing. There were no prints, she told Matthews. The film had been processed into negatives for the purposes of storage—standard operating procedure at FDLE—but never in twenty-three years had any prints been developed.
Matthews paused. In other words, he asked, no detective has ever requested or looked at the photos taken of Ottis Toole’s Cadillac?
“That would seem to be the case,” Gogerty replied brightly. “But you can be the first.”
On Tuesday, June 27, 2006, an FDLE regional legal adviser, John Kenner, sent ninety-eight photographs copied from lab case file 831043357 to Matthews at America’s Most Wanted, where staffers in turn forwarded them to his offices in Davie, a few miles northwest of Hollywood. Matthews, who had come in early that Wednesday to work on his report, glanced up as his longtime secretary Mary Alvarez came through his door with a hefty UPS envelope in hand. “Were you expecting something in the overnight?” she asked.
Indeed he was, Matthews assured her. He set his coffee aside and quickly spread out the thick sheaf of three-by-five-inch prints on his desk, trying all the while to keep his expectations under control. He was excited to have unearthed the photographs, but he had suffered his share of setbacks on this case before—in all honesty, it wouldn’t have surprised him to find he’d been sent a series of shots of an FDLE employee’s birthday party.
This time, though, he’d hit pay dirt. He was looking at the outset for any shots of the rear bumper of the Cadillac. When he quickly found three that depicted the sizable dent described by both William Mistler and Bobby Lee Jones, Toole’s coworker from Jacksonville, Matthews nodded with satisfaction. It was confirmation that indeed it was Toole’s car that Mistler had seen in the Sears parking lot the day that Adam had been taken.
“Good, good, good” is Matthews’ characteristic way of expressing enthusiasm, and that is what he murmured as he turned to see what other treasures might have come his way. There were other shots of the Cadillac’s exterior, dashboard, and seats, but he expected nothing of real import there. Of far more interest were a series of dark shots that resembled negatives, dotted here and there by objects that glowed a psychedelic blue.
In fact, these were a set of specially processed shots taken by FDLE crime scene investigators using luminol technology to identify or enhance the presence of blood traces on items of evidence. In this process, ordinary photographs are taken of objects, then chemicals that become luminescent when in contact with blood are applied to those objects, and the photographs taken again. The second series of photos are shot in darkness, with a wide aperture setting and the lens open for a minute or more. The only images that appear are special luminescent markers that orient the viewer and any part of the item where blood residue—invisible to the naked eye—might exist. Anything that retains the presence of blood will show up in a ghostly metallic blue.
Matthews first went about arranging a comparison of a set of photos taken of the front driver’s-side floorboards. Given all the disappointments of the past quarter-century, he expected little. But now he sat staring in disbelief at what was laid out before him.
The pictures of the front