Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [127]
During the interview an avuncular Ranger draws Toole out about his typical modus operandi for murder, and Toole rattles on readily—almost cheerfully—about the thrill of shooting old ladies hanging out laundry and garroting unsuspecting drag queens. But when the questioning turns to the case of Adam Walsh, Matthews points out, everything in Toole’s demeanor suddenly changes.
“You can see it in his body language,” Matthews says, and indeed the signs are apparent to anyone. As Toole (who had offered few specifics in many of the other cases brought up that day) leads the Ranger through the details—the kidnapping and the beating and the effort involved in the decapitation, the wrapping of Adam’s head in his shirt and its disposal and the disposal of the body—his shoulders tense and round inward, the cadences of his speech slow, his tone becomes serious, even plaintive, his gaze is suddenly evasive. What Matthews wouldn’t have given to be able to climb into the frame and attach Toole to his polygraph instrument!
At one point, when the Ranger interrupts Toole to ask if he had done anything to Adam’s body before he began to burn it, Toole’s response is electric. “Oh no,” he says, as his eyes roll and his head snaps in emphatic negative.
In place of needles dancing across a polygraph scroll, Matthews had to be content with the reaction of the Ranger. Following the conclusion of Toole’s account of eating a few of Adam’s ribs before scattering the charred remains, the burly veteran turned away, his disgust scarcely concealed: “Well, that’s pretty stout.”
As far as his report, Matthews felt that he had done everything he could under the circumstances, and in his opinion, it was far more than enough. His opinion was not the one that mattered any longer, though. He could only wait and see what the response of Chad Wagner might be. If his report was deemed sufficiently convincing, then Wagner might carry it to the Broward state attorney and recommend that Ottis Toole be charged with the crime. But Wagner might not do that, no matter what he thought of the quality of the report.
The new chief seemed a decent man, but he was also the preeminent representative of an entire police force, and—by extension and association—of the governing structure of an entire community. If he swept aside Matthews’s report, he would only be doing what many before him had seemingly chosen to do. In weighing the good to be done by naming a killer against the harm it would do to the very institution one was hired to champion, they had all apparently decided in kind: such a blow to the established order could not be justified by the closure it might provide to a family or the vague sense of justice it might provide to the world at large.
In any case, Matthews thought, it was not his call. He could only sit and wait. If Wagner didn’t want to proceed on the basis of what he’d presented, maybe there was a way he could get it straight to the state attorney’s office himself.
On Friday, November 14, 2008, Adam Walsh’s thirty-fourth birthday passed, and, then, six days later, on November 20, Matthews realized that he would not have to worry about moving things forward himself: Chief Wagner had called a meeting at the Broward County State Attorney’s Office.
Present on that day with Wagner were second-in-command state attorney Chuck Morton, assistant chief of Hollywood PD Louis Granteed, Captain Mark Smith, and Hollywood Police legal adviser Joel Cantor. Also present were John and Revé Walsh, their attorney, former Broward prosecutor Kelly Hancock, and Detective Sergeant Joe Matthews.
Wagner had called the meeting to discuss the report compiled by Sergeant Matthews, he explained. Would anyone in the room, Wagner wanted to know, object to the conclusions in the report that Matthews had placed before them? Bits and pieces were familiar to many in the room,