Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [37]
Toole nodded.
“You get into something in Fort Lauderdale?” the detective prompted.
“Yeah, I did,” Toole said.
Given that the man in front of him had readily identified himself as a serial killer, Kendrick might not have thought too much of the exchange, were it not for the sudden shift in Toole’s behavior. He was gripping the sides of his chair tightly now, shifting uneasily from side to side, his gaze dropping abruptly from Kendrick’s to the floor and back again. As his case notes make clear, Kendrick sensed that he had stumbled onto something big: “Reporting agent felt that for a man to admit involvement in sixty five (65) murders, but get upset about Ft. Lauderdale, it had to be something appalling.”
Kendrick sat back down across from Toole and folded his hands in front of him. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” the detective said. And Toole began to do just that.
He had found a little boy at a Sears store, Toole said, and told the boy that he had some candy and wanted to talk to him and convinced him to get in his Cadillac out in the parking lot. Toole told Kendrick that he was intending to take the boy back to Jacksonville and raise him as his own son, but it all changed when this Adam started crying and saying he wanted to get out of the car. The boy’s behavior made him mad, Toole explained, and so he hit him in the face to shut him up. And then he turned off the highway onto a dirt road that had a fork at the end of it. And that was where he murdered this Adam and cut off his head and threw it into a pond somewhere along the side of the road.
In hindsight, one might wonder why such a statement did not mark the end of the hunt for the killer of Adam Walsh then and there. True, Detective Kendrick was from another jurisdiction and was only vaguely familiar with the case, and there would understandably be a bit of time for sorting out just what Ottis Toole was talking about . . . but surely, one might think, a speedy resolution of the matter was at hand. As the old saw goes, however, that is the trouble with assumptions. In truth, the trouble was just getting under way.
When Kendrick left the room after his second interview with Toole, he was a man on a mission. He found Detective Buddy Terry in his office and quickly shared the news. “He’s talking about killing a child down in Broward County,” Kendrick told Terry. “He says he cut him up and left the body in two different places. This is all out of the clear blue sky.”
Terry remembers the moment well, though at the time he was not familiar with any child-killing case in South Florida (if nothing else, Terry’s obliviousness speaks volumes about how times have changed). Still, based on Kendrick’s certainty that Toole was confessing to a gruesome crime that he had in fact committed, he began calling various agencies in Broward County.
“I finally got hold of the Hollywood Police Department,” Terry recalls, “and they told me that it sounded like the Adam Walsh case.” Terry had no idea what Hollywood was talking about, but once it had been explained to him, he hurried to Kendrick with the news.
The following morning, October 11, Kendrick reached someone in the homicide division at Hollywood PD and gave a brief account of what he’d come across. “I identified myself as an investigator for the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office,” he says, “and said that I had just interviewed an individual pertaining to a homicide I was investigating. During the interview with the individual, he said a number of things that led me to believe that he is in fact the one who killed Adam Walsh.”
Whomever Kendrick spoke to took the information and said that someone would be back in touch immediately. But “immediately” seemed to have a relative meaning. “Probably a week after that,” Kendrick says, “I got a call from someone and we spoke briefly about my conversation with Ottis Toole about Adam. I don’t believe I had any additional contact with them [the Hollywood PD] after that. I think