Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [29]
The two black children left via the south doors, Shaffer told Hoffman, and the two white children left through the north doors. When the detective asked her to describe the second white child, Shaffer said that he was probably about seven, and had been wearing green shorts and a white shirt. At that point, Hoffman produced several photographs of Adam and asked if that was the boy she was talking about. Shaffer studied the photographs and then glanced up at Hoffman. She simply was not sure, she told him, and with that, Hoffman concluded their interview.
Two days later, on September 4, Hoffman’s partner Hickman reinterviewed Marilyn Pottenberg, mother of the young boy who reported seeing Adam being dragged into “a blue van.” With Mrs. Pottenberg and her son Timothy on that day was Timothy’s grandmother Carolyn Hudson, and the two women pieced together the details of their shopping trip to Sears on the day of the abduction. They had arrived at the store about 11:45 a.m., they recalled, and left to have lunch at about 12:35 p.m. As they were leaving the store, Hudson recalls, they heard the page for a missing child. They all had lunch together, and at about 1:25, nearly an hour later, as they were walking through the parking lot toward their car, Timothy witnessed the incident with “the blue van.”
If Hickman sighed as he recorded the details given him by Mrs. Pottenberg and her mother, he doesn’t say so in his notes. But the information he’d just been given was the death knell for the “blue van” theory. Who knows what Timothy Pottenberg had actually seen that day? But it certainly wasn’t Adam Walsh being dragged into a van, not almost an hour after his mother had begun her frantic search for him. “It appears that the incident that Timothy Pottenberg witnessed is unrelated to the Adam Walsh abduction,” Hickman concluded.
With that lead gone, Hollywood PD was reduced to grasping at straws. Joe Matthews was asked to schedule a polygraph examination with Revé Walsh, to confirm that her unwavering account of Adam’s disappearance could be trusted, and Matthews arranged it for Thursday, September 10, at police headquarters.
At about nine on the morning of September 10, as Matthews traveled down Flamingo Road in western Broward County, on his way to meet with Revé, he found himself stuck behind a sedan traveling maybe fifteen miles an hour. Matthews pulled into the opposite lane to pass, but realized that the wise-guy driver on his right had suddenly sped up. Worse yet, a dump truck was now approaching from the opposite direction, and the driver he was trying to pass showed no signs of letting him by. Trapped now, Matthews floored his Plymouth and managed to squeeze past, only an instant before the roaring dump truck could pulverize him.
A bullet dodged, he was thinking, but then the real nightmare began.
What happened next was a blur. His wheels dropped off the pavement, digging into the gravel shoulder, and in the next instant the Plymouth was airborne. To anyone watching, it would have seemed like a spectacular scene from a car chase in an action film. The Plymouth soared out over the broad drainage canal that paralleled the highway, twisted over, then pancaked top-down onto the water’s surface.
The impact rendered Matthews momentarily unconscious. When he came to, he found himself under several feet of water, still behind the wheel, the Plymouth sinking steadily toward the canal’s muddy bottom. People and their vehicles ended up in these canals on an almost daily basis, and helicopter shots of bystanders gaping as cars and vans—often bearing their unfortunate passengers—were winched