Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [131]
Furthermore, when Wagner said to reporters, “If you’re looking for that magic wand or that hidden document that just appeared, it’s not there,” his intent was likely to defuse the sort of “Perry Mason” effect engendered by years of exposure to manufactured drama. Still, while neither Wagner nor anyone else wanted any part of a trial by media on that day, one might speculate as to what the effect would have been had he filled a screen with the images of Ottis Toole’s bloody footprints glowing on the floorboards of his Cadillac or the rendering of a silent scream from a young boy’s severed head.
Along with reminders of how important the Walshes’ good works had been—“If people hold their kids a little bit closer in crowded stores these days, thank the Walshes,” one writer said—there were also, predictably, a few doubters who surfaced in the wake of Chief Wagner’s announcement. A Miami Herald story published on December 28, 2008, quoted a Washington criminal profiler as being “appalled” by the decision to close the case without more proof. The story rehashed the reluctance of Hollywood police to charge Toole at the time of his first series of confessions, and also quoted Ron Hickman’s 2001 statement to reporter de Vise, “I spent 100 hours with that individual. I’ll tell you right now: He didn’t do it.”
There was “no new evidence” presented, the Herald story said, suggesting that either the reporter had not bothered to read the same evidence file that Joe Matthews and Chief Wagner had, or he was simply longing for that “magic wand” that Wagner referred to. The story referenced the various inconsistencies in Toole’s own confessions—including his erstwhile claims that Henry Lee Lucas had taken part, and his varying reports of where he’d disposed of Adam’s body. And it also quoted a Broward assistant state attorney as saying that while his office had indeed supported the closing of the case, all the mistakes made by police would have made a successful prosecution difficult were Toole still alive.
Joe Matthews might have agreed, though he might have also pointed back to the successful prosecution of Dieter Reichmann, where prosecutors had even less physical evidence and two dozen fewer confessions on the part of the perpetrator. While any prosecutor might like to have a videotape of a killer in the act to carry into court, the truth is that many celebrated cases have resulted in convictions based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence—from which jurors must infer a perpetrator’s guilt.
Despite any public perception to the contrary, the U.S. Supreme Court long ago established the precept that “circumstantial evidence is intrinsically no different from testimonial [direct] evidence” (Holland v. United States, 1954). As any competent prosecutor knows, the distinction between direct testimony and circumstantial evidence has little practical effect in the presentation or admissibility of evidence in trials. And while the so-called CSI effect might suggest that anything less than a mountain of forensic evidence tying a killer to the crime is insufficient, a number of recent studies have shown that jurors have not changed—even if prosecutors may feel the need to introduce high-tech data, juries remain as likely to be persuaded by logical argument as anything else.
In another piece published soon after the announcement, a veteran South Florida columnist expressed his own doubts about Hollywood PD’s willingness to put an end to the matter. He’d been one of the reporters who had trooped to the multijurisdictional press conference called in Monroe, Louisiana, back in 1983, where authorities