Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [128]
• Toole’s knowledge of crime scene details only the killer could have known
• Dismissal of the theory that a “book contract” tainted Toole’s confessions
• Multiple eyewitness identifications of Toole taking Adam from Sears
• Arlene and Heidi Maier’s ID of Toole at Kmart the night before Adam was taken
• The damning extortion letter Toole wrote John Walsh offering to lead him to his son’s body
• Twenty-five independent confessions to the crime made by Ottis Toole, including that to family member Linda Fralick before Adam’s remains were found
• The never-before-seen luminol images of the bloody machete handle and footprints on the carpet of Toole’s Cadillac
• And the most damning image of them all . . . which had both haunted and sustained Matthews since the moment it had wavered into focus on his office desk months before, as powerful to him as the Shroud of Turin:
Traced in the blue glow of luminol was the outline of a familiar young boy’s face, a negative pressed into floorboard carpeting, eye sockets blackened blank cavities, mouth twisted in an oval of pain.
Ottis Toole had told detectives time and again. He’d hacked off Adam’s head and decided to keep it for a while. Perhaps he’d had sex with it, perhaps he hadn’t. He’d tossed it into the back of his car and driven up the turnpike, before it dawned on him that this might be a bad idea.
Why hadn’t the men in charge of the investigation taken Toole at his word? Matthews wondered as he stood among those gathered in the state’s attorney’s office and stared at the image once again. Why?
Still, as the ancients understood, truth has its implacable force. One of the most haunting of the tales told by the Brothers Grimm is that of the “Singing Flute,” in which a craven man kills his younger brother to steal his bounty and buries his body beneath a bridge. Years later, a shepherd discovers a snow-white little bone on the sand beneath the bridge and carves a flute out of it. But when the shepherd begins to play, what issues is not music. Instead it is the voice of the long-dead boy, thanking the shepherd and telling the truth at last. “Ah, friend, thou blowest upon my bone! Long have I lain beside the water; my brother slew me for the boar.”
What Joe Matthews had produced—the terrible image which he’d had to show to John and Revé and which everyone in the room around him now viewed as well—was no less powerful in its effect. The glowing blue image pressed into the carpet—the outline of Adam’s face, etched in his own blood—was as stark as any fragment of bone; and the cry that issued from his battered lips was as damning an indictment as anyone might ever hear. Poor Adam, friend Joe, the truth singing to the world at last.
Following the summary of Matthews’s findings, everyone in the room had the opportunity to respond. As to the image of Adam’s face branded into the floorboards of Toole’s Cadillac, it was an emotional haymaker, of course, but as he described in his report, Matthews had gone to some lengths to bolster its significance. Shortly after he’d made the discovery, Matthews met with Miami Dade crime lab analyst Detective Thomas Charles to discuss techniques of blood transfer that he might use to duplicate that final image he’d found in the FDLE photographs. As a result of that discussion, Matthews conducted a series of experiments using paint of various consistencies, plastic facial masks, and auto carpeting of the type that was in Toole’s Cadillac.
As he detailed, Matthews employed eight different means of transferring paint from saturated plastic face masks onto carpet. And each resulted in the transfer of images to the carpet that were remarkably similar to the one that Matthews had found on the rear floorboards of Toole’s car. So far as his research could determine, no crime scene investigator had confirmed such blood evidence previously.
After everyone in the room had delivered their estimations of all that Matthews had presented,