Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [126]
All the while, Matthews couldn’t help thinking about Ottis Toole’s reply to Linda’s question, “Who is Adam Walsh?”
“The one who’s been missing,” she claimed Toole told her. Not, “The one they found.”
Finally, it struck him. If Linda Orand had all her facts straight, if those were indeed Toole’s words, then this conversation had taken place before Adam’s remains had been found, less than two weeks after the killing. Of course Linda wouldn’t have heard about “Adam Walsh” all the way up in Jacksonville. At that point, before the fisherman had made their startling discovery, the Walshes were having a difficult time getting anyone outside Dade and Broward Counties to realize their son had been abducted. And there was Ottis Toole sitting in a lawn chair, swigging beer and calmly recounting to his own sister the details of the crime.
Two years before, in a newspaper article commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime, criminologist Vernon Geberth had a rhetorical-sounding response for reporters who wanted to know if he believed the Adam Walsh case could ever be solved: “A relative of the killer who knows about the crime may want to finally unburden himself.” Or themselves, Matthews thought.
The statement might have been only Vernon Geberth’s wishful thinking at the time, but Wendy Sapp Fralick and her mother Linda Orand had just become an investigator’s wish come true.
Linda McHenry Orand’s statement—along with the extortion letter Toole had sent John Walsh and the damning images developed from the FDLE negatives—might have seemed yet another finding upon which a successful prosecution could have been based all by itself, but as Matthews well knew, there is a vast difference between real life and film and television drama, where justice is served up in a moment—one witness breaks down in racking sobs or a single, searing image is produced.
Nowhere had that distinction been made more clear than in the long history of this matter. If it was as simple as dropping one bombshell, then this case would have been closed long ago. Of course, charges are filed readily when an officer catches a perpetrator in the act, or when a suspect is apprehended and confesses. In this instance, however—where a suspect already in custody had confessed to the crime—the state attorney’s office asked accordingly that evidence corroborating that confession be presented by police in a form that would suggest any charge as well founded. And no one in law enforcement had ever gone to the trouble of such a submission.
For that reason, Matthews did not for a moment contemplate fashioning a report that did not take into account every shred of evidence that had accumulated concerning the matter. The bombshells would have to take their places in the long chain of evidence, items both great and small. This wasn’t a movie, this was life . . . and death.
Accordingly, for two years and nine months Matthews labored on his review of the 10,000-page case file. He reexamined all the taped interviews conducted with Toole and others and conducted his own independent searches, interviews, and analyses of materials pertinent. He found new evidence, and with all the disparate pieces assembled in narrative order for the first time—the many materials upon which this account is based—everything pointed to an inescapable conclusion: Ottis Toole was the man who’d committed the crime.
Certainly, Joe Matthews had long suspected Toole, and it was to his everlasting dismay that he had not been given the opportunity to conduct his own interview with the man and extract and nail down Toole’s confession himself. One of the most powerful pieces of evidence that he’d come across in the course of his investigation came from a former Texas Ranger who sent Matthews a videotaped interview conducted with Toole by a former colleague who—shortly after Henry Lee Lucas was arrested—had flown