Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [132]
Of course, successful prosecutions are always difficult, even when the physical evidence seems ironclad—just ask those who went after O. J. And while one Broward County state attorney may have forecast a difficult time proving the case, another prominent former prosecutor interviewed by a Sun-Sentinel reporter weighed in that he had gone to court on several instances with much less.
In fact, FBI findings disclosed just weeks before the press conference, in the case of Caylee Anthony, the two-year-old Orlando girl thought to have been murdered by her mother, Casey, would support Matthews’s analysis of the images he had found on the carpets of Toole’s car. A September 30, 2008, e-mail from FBI intelligence analyst Karen B. Cowan to a fellow agency employee identified a bodily fluids outline lifted from the trunk liner of Casey Anthony’s car using essentially the same methodology. “If you look closely at this photo, there appears to be the outline or silhouette of a child in the fetal position,” Cowan wrote. Shortly thereafter, Casey Anthony was arrested and charged with the crime.
And as for “believing,” why believe anything, Plato might respond, when the very nature of reality is—like shadows flickering on a cave wall, twice removed from the source—such a subjective matter? Had there been a dozen witnesses present when Ottis Toole carried Adam Walsh from his car, laid him on the ground, and severed his head, there would have been a dozen different accounts as to just what had occurred.
Subjectivity, along with contrariness, is a part of human nature. And when it comes to newspaper adjudications of controversial cases, as the cigar-chomping editor is quick to remind the cub reporter, “Keep the trouble coming. Good news just doesn’t sell.”
In keeping with that notion, as recently as March 2010, more than fifteen months after the case was cleared by authorities, the Miami Herald published a front-page story suggesting that indeed it was Jeffrey Dahmer who had been responsible for the killing, asserting that two new witnesses had come forward claiming to have spotted a disheveled, disturbing-looking man in the vicinity of the Sears store the day that Adam Walsh disappeared. They’d only realized it was Jeffrey Dahmer, they said, after learning of Dahmer’s heinous activities a decade later in 1991.
A comparison of the mug shots of preppy-looking Dahmer—who by most accounts long eluded suspicion precisely because he appeared harmless—with those of Ottis Toole suggests the true identity of the frightening individual these new witnesses had actually seen that day in Sears. And most law enforcement officials interviewed for the story scoffed at the notion that Dahmer could have been charged, much less prosecuted, on the basis of such claims.
“The delayed Dahmer identifications certainly add intrigue and mystery to Adam Walsh’s tragic death,” Chief Assistant State Attorney Chuck Morton wrote in response to the questions of Herald reporters at the time. In his eyes, Morton said, such claims might even form the basis for the writing of a murder mystery novel, “but they do not come close to supporting the filing of criminal charges.”
As Morton went on to explain, eyewitness identifications made years after the commission of a crime are among the least reliable forms of argument in criminal prosecutions. “Such identifications would have to be corroborated by overwhelmingly credible evidence