Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [13]
Matthews and Walsh did get around to a discussion of college, though it took a while. He was an English major at the University of Buffalo in New York when he met Revé, though he’d been stunned to discover she was still in high school at the time. Even though she was five years younger than he was, he’d found her so poised, and so intelligent. From the moment they met there had been no one else for him, Walsh told Matthews. They’d been married for ten years, since July 1971.
Walsh also told Matthews a story from his days as a pool manager and lifeguard at the Diplomat Hotel out on Hollywood Beach. He was keeping watch at the pool one afternoon when he saw a group of kids rushing toward him from the nearby jetty. Frantic, they told him that one of their friends was in trouble out by the jetty’s end, where a massive discharge pipe emptied runoff water into the ocean. They’d been playing near the mouth of the pipe when the tide shifted in and trapped their pal, lodging him in a crevice against the rocks. The boys had tried, but they couldn’t get him out. The force of the incoming tide was just too strong.
John ran out to the end of the jetty and scrambled down the rocks to find matters just as the boys said. Indeed there was a kid lodged between the rocks and the mouth of the pipe, the waters rising inexorably toward his chin. And as if it could be worse, he realized that he knew this child. It was John Monahan Jr., son of the Diplomat’s chief executive, trapped there in the rising waters. He’d given the boy a series of scuba lessons earlier that summer.
He managed to get young John calmed somewhat, then tried pulling him out of the crevice by the arms, but it wasn’t working. The water was close to the boy’s chin when John called to the kids watching from the top of the jetty for help, but they couldn’t understand what he wanted.
“You’ve got to hang on,” he said, turning to young Monahan. “I’m coming right back.” Then he bounded up the rocks and back to the pool storage shack, where the diving equipment was stored. He kicked the door open, found a tank, mask, and regulator, and raced back along the jetty to Monahan. “We’re going to do it just like we did it in the pool a hundred times,” he assured the boy, helping him into the gear as the waters rose over his head.
Once the boy had been reassured and was breathing in a passable way, Walsh slipped under the water and put his arms around Monahan’s chest. He pushed hard with his feet, levering against the rocks, and suddenly, as if a cork had popped from a bottle, the boy was free.
Needless to say, the incident made John Walsh far more than a trusted employee at the Diplomat. When Walsh and Revé got married, Monahan’s father insisted on paying for a honeymoon trip to Europe for the couple, and the Walshes and the Monahans had remained friends ever since.
It was a captivating story, but it was the sort of thing that Matthews encouraged for other reasons. “You get someone talking about emotional things they haven’t thought about in ten or twenty years, you establish a good baseline,” he says. “When you finally get around to asking about some crime they may or may not have been involved in just the other day, you can judge any little changes in body language, in rate of speech or eagerness to respond and so on, and know you may be onto something.”
As for the polygraph instrument itself, Matthews says, “It’s not infallible. It’s just a tool that helps validate the information that is gathered during the interview. The polygraph can indicate deception, but only a confession establishes guilt.”
At the end of his time with Walsh, and following the administration of the polygraph exam itself, Matthews felt he had his unequivocal answer, however. “It is the examiner’s opinion that Mr. Walsh was not criminally involved nor has he guilty knowledge as to who is responsible for the abduction of his son Adam.”
On the other hand, Matthews did come across one item of interest during his interview,