Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [31]
There was plenty on his own plate. He had a full-time job in Miami Beach, and he was being called in as an outside polygraph expert on a regular basis by other agencies as well, including Canada’s Crown Counsel, the equivalent to the office of the U.S. attorney general. Also, there was his thriving technical school, the Southern Institute of Polygraph, to manage. In the end, Matthews could only wish Hollywood PD well, offer his help on the Walsh case at any time, and, for the time being, anyway, go back to work.
As Hoffman had suggested to Matthews, it seemed the beginning of the end of any serious search for Adam’s killer at Hollywood PD. When Revé Walsh showed up for her scheduled examination with Matthews, she was questioned briefly about her activities on the day that Adam was taken. She was told that her polygraph would have to be rescheduled, and on the following Monday, September 14, an examiner from the Broward County State Attorney’s Office conducted the exam. Once again, Revé recounted the events of the day that her son disappeared, and the examiner confirmed that she had passed—there were no signs of deception anywhere in her account.
A few days later, detectives returned to the Sears store to reinterview the employees who had been working the day of Adam’s kidnapping, but the results were fruitless. On September 22, there was a brief flurry of excitement when a St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department detective phoned Hoffman to relay a tip that a Fort Pierce woman named Mary Green was involved in the kidnapping of Adam Walsh. According to the tipster, Green had knowledge as to who had actually killed the boy.
It took Hoffman and Hickman a few days, but on September 30, the two traveled to Fort Pierce in St. Lucie County, just south of the spot where Adam’s severed head was pulled from the canal. They spoke with St. Lucie County detectives and then interviewed Mary Green and her live-in lover J. A. Childress, whom local authorities identified as the source of the tip.
Green admitted to the detectives that she was a chronic alcoholic—in fact she had spent a couple of nights in the Fort Pierce detox center shortly before the time of Adam’s disappearance. Like everyone else, she had heard all about the crime, but she certainly had no involvement in the matter, nor did she know anyone who did. She explained to Hoffman and Hickman that Childress, the man who had turned her in, was also a drunk and prone to all sorts of deception. He was upset with her at the time, and simply decided to tell people she’d been involved in the kidnapping.
Though by now it seemed a waste of time, Hoffman and Hickman arranged for the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department to administer a polygraph examination to Green. When the examiner was finished, what already seemed apparent to the detectives was confirmed. Mary Green might be a hapless loser, but she had nothing to do with the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh.
It was as if the trip to St. Lucie County had sapped the last energies of the Hollywood PD. An internal supplemental report dated October 5, 1981, gave a terse, if somewhat inelegant, statement of the obvious: “As of this date this agency has not received any substantial leads that would implicate anyone to the crime.”
Nine days later Detectives Hoffman and Hickman, acting on a tip, interviewed a man named Charles Elchwartzle, the owner of a blue Ford van, but, as it turned out, being in possession of such a vehicle in South Florida at the time was Elchwartzle’s only misstep. On October 22, Hoffman and Hickman called in Jimmy Campbell to cover “areas possibly not covered in the previous interview . . . conducted by Mr. Joe Matthews,” but that came to nothing as well. For all intents and purposes, and less than two months after the incident, the active investigation of the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh was at a standstill.
Jacksonville, Florida—July 28, 1981
When Ottis Toole returned to Jacksonville following his late July