Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [38]
With notification having been made to the Hollywood PD, there was nothing more for Detectives Kendrick or Terry to do regarding the Adam Walsh case. Kendrick returned to his office in Brevard County, and Terry went off to Louisiana to confer with authorities there pertaining to Henry Lee Lucas and his own investigation of the murder of George Sonnenberg.
As a result of the information shared during Terry’s trip to Monroe, three detectives from Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, traveled back to Jacksonville with him to interview Toole regarding the murder of sixteen-year-old Sherry Alford in Monroe. On Tuesday, October 18, 1983, Detective Jay Via, who’d been among the first to question Henry Lee Lucas following his arrest, began his pre-interview conversation with Ottis Toole while Toole was eating his lunch.
Via casually asked Toole when he was going to start talking about all the blacks that Henry Lee Lucas claimed the two of them had killed. Toole broke off from eating to smile his Alfred E. Neuman–like smile. Surely Via understood why he wasn’t about to start talking about that subject, Toole told the detective. The population of the Duval County Jail was about 90 percent black. How long did Via think Toole would last if he started bragging about killing “brothers”?
Via nodded in appreciation of Toole’s wisdom. But he’d also heard some rumors that Toole had killed a bunch of kids during his travels across the country, he said. Kid killers weren’t very popular in prison either. Were those rumors true? Via wondered.
At that, Via recalls, Toole’s manner suddenly changed. He stopped in mid-bite and put down his chicken leg. “You talking about the kid that got his head cut off around West Palm Beach, Florida?” Toole said, guardedly.
Via checked his watch, noting that it was 3:20 in the afternoon. Toole had become a different person, instantaneously. For the first time, he made direct eye contact with Via and inquired again in a somber voice whether or not he was talking about the “kid” he had killed in South Florida.
“What kid are you talking about?” Via asked.
Toole pulled his knees up to his chest and began to weep. It was the “kid” he got from the Sears store, he explained.
Via was genuinely puzzled. He’d just been baiting Toole, and he’d certainly heard nothing of any child murder case in Florida—in fact, his conversations with Detective Terry of Jacksonville had been confined to the Alford case connecting Toole and Henry Lee Lucas. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Via told Toole.
By this time, Toole was racked with sobs. He thought Via wanted to know about the kid he’d grabbed from the Sears store, the one whose head he’d cut off, Toole said.
At that point, Via went to the door of the interview room and called to Buddy Terry, who was standing down the hallway talking with Lieutenant Joe Cummings of the Monroe Police Department, who had come over with Via to interview Toole. “You better come in here,” Via told Terry and Cummings. “He’s just confessed to killing a child in South Florida.”
While Terry quickly realized what Toole must have been talking to Via about, there was no point in getting into a discussion with him at the moment. He simply followed Via and Cummings back into the interview room and listened as Via asked Toole to explain exactly what he was referring to.
Toole replied that he had traveled to South Florida in a black-over-white Cadillac to find a “kid” to keep for his own. After driving around for some time, he spotted a mall parking lot, pulled in, and saw a young white boy standing outside a Sears store. Toole told the officers that he forced the child into his Cadillac, pulled out of the lot, and ended up on a highway. When the child would not stop screaming and crying, Toole said, he backhanded him in the face with a closed fist and then struck him again in the stomach, at which point the child slumped down in the seat, unconscious.
Toole was relieved that the child had stopped making noise, but it was not long before he began to think that he had actually