Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [134]
“I am going to sue the little boy’s father, the one I cut his head off,” he advised Winterbaum. “And then I am going to kill him. He [meaning Walsh] is trying to pay me off, and I should have never signed the check.”
Given the other documents uncovered by Matthews, it might be theorized that an addled Toole had somehow confused John Walsh with John Reaves Jr., the man who’d paid him big bucks for the rights to his life story. But to Matthews, the explanation is much simpler than that. Just as Toole had explained away a previous inconsistency in his story to an investigator: “I just like fucking with the cops.”
In any event, it is hard to fathom that a police agency that had invested twenty-seven years in the hopes that the Adam Walsh case would somehow go away saw much to gain by admitting to the world the embarrassing truth as to “what had been in front of their faces” all those years, other than to see justice served, that is.
For Joe Matthews and John and Revé Walsh, justice has in fact been served in this case, and life goes on. Matthews continues as senior investigator at America’s Most Wanted, as a contributor at Fox News, as a motivational speaker, and as an investigative consultant to television programmers, media outlets, and the private sector. He regularly tours the United States as chairman of DNA LifePrint, promoting corporate sponsorships of events that provide biometric fingerprinting, digital photographic records, and DNA identification of children to communities. He often conducts seminars and lectures on homicide investigation, investigative interviewing, and polygraph procedures throughout the United States and Canada.
John Walsh, of course, carries on as executive producer and host of America’s Most Wanted, the longest-running show in Fox Network history—“The good guys do their thing Sunday through Friday,” he likes to say, “but on Saturday night, I kick ass.” He and Revé also continue their work on behalf of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as on behalf of any number of national and state initiatives related to the protection of children, a never-ending process. In a recent appearance on Oprah, Walsh pointed out that even though Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act in 2006, the legislation will as a practical matter cease to have any effect beyond 2010 unless government funding is reauthorized and provided.
And even if legislators are persuaded to authorize the dollars, the mere fact that juvenile sex offenders might register their addresses regularly is no guarantee of anything, as a recent New York Times story makes clear. For eighteen years following a rape conviction in California, Phillip Garrido reported his whereabouts to authorities in precise accordance with the schedule demanded of him. But that did not stop him from kidnapping and raping another young woman, fathering two children by her, and holding them all prisoner in the backyard of the home he dutifully kept registered all the while.
It is a chilling reminder that the threat of evil is ever-present and that all the noble deeds and intentions on earth cannot stamp out catastrophe and loss. Broward County medical examiner Dr. Ronald Wright spoke to John Walsh of such matters in the aftermath of the initial investigation, trying to give a grief-stricken parent something to cling to. In his profession, Wright had seen horror stacked on horror, plenty of evidence that there was no shortage of hell right here on earth. As to what had kept him sane in the face of all that he had witnessed, it was a simple sense of purpose. “It is that simple, John,” Wright said. “There is evil. And there is good.”
Once Adam Walsh stepped inside Ottis Toole’s Cadillac on that day, almost nothing, it seems, could have saved him. And when that car’s heavy door slammed shut, it seemed to mark the end of America’s innocence. Can there truly have been a time when audiences believed in The Brady Bunch? Was there really a time