Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [133]
Very little of Morton’s response was printed, however, and soon the Herald story had prompted breathless headlines of the “Bigfoot” variety in various supermarket tabloids, one of which theorized that Adam Walsh was still alive somewhere, even providing a computer-generated rendition of what he would look like as an adult so that readers could keep an eye out. Such stories might seem outlandish, but they are also proof of how deeply the psyche of the entire nation has been affected by the Adam Walsh matter and by the time it took for a credible case to be built. Indeed, unless “old news” is of the caliber of the Kennedy assassination, the paranoia-fostering tabloid press simply doesn’t get involved.
When a rehash of the Herald story ran on a local Vero Beach station at the time, John Walsh turned to Revé and blurted, “For God’s sakes, aren’t the ghouls ever going to give up?”
Revé glanced at him. “Maybe not,” she said. “But at least you and I know the truth now.”
One of the complaints made by those who have expressed doubt as to Toole’s guilt has to do with his penchant for changing the details of his story over time. But Joe Matthews sees that as a positive. Were no detail to vary in a killer’s various confessions, Matthews points out, then you might worry that you were hearing a tale memorized and scripted for some hidden purpose.
“It happens time and again,” Matthews explains to students in his classes on interrogation technique: “Stage one, you’ll ask the person about the crime and you get total denial. So you talk about other things for a while, and then you come back to the crime again. The second time around, the party might allow as how he knows who did the deed and implicate somebody else. When you circle back for a third time, the guy says, ‘Well, actually, I was there, but I was: (a) outside the bedroom where it all happened, (b) just driving the car, (c) didn’t realize what was going to take place.’ By stage four, you’ll get some admission, like ‘Well, actually I helped hold her down,’ or ‘Yeah, maybe I dug the grave.’ And by the time you get to stage five, there is no other person involved, and the perpetrator is sitting there telling you he is responsible for every last thing you’ve been talking about all this time.”
From the point at which a confession has been made, all you are likely to get from a perpetrator is damage control, Matthews says. Once a perpetrator realizes that the confession just delivered is a virtual death sentence, why wouldn’t he try and reverse the process? Recanting is simply common practice.
As for the incidental details that varied in the various confessions, Toole was not the brightest bulb in the array, and given the additional burden of a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, his memory was often in and out of focus. And as for issues such as having implicated Henry Lee Lucas in the crime initially, Toole had a perfectly plausible reason for that. As he himself admitted, he might have been a “retard,” but that did not mean he lacked cunning. Were he not street-smart, he could never have survived in the circles where he traveled for nearly as long as he did.
One of the documents that had not come to light before Matthews made his thorough search of the files, in fact, was a report filed by Deputy J. E. Winterbaum of the Duval County Sheriff’s Office back in October of 1983, shortly after Toole had initially confessed. As Winterbaum was making a routine check of the cell