Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [41]
As to why he was making this confession, Toole told the detectives that he wanted to get it out of his mind.
Hoffman next showed Toole the photo of Adam that the family had reproduced on the missing person’s flyer, but Toole wasn’t sure that it was the same boy that he and Lucas took. When Hoffman showed Toole a second photo in which Adam’s hair was wet from swimming, Toole nodded. He believed that the second photo did resemble the boy he killed, he said.
With that, Detectives Hoffman and Hickman concluded their interview and left the room, leaving Detective Terry and Ottis Toole alone.
“Why are you jerking them around?” Terry asked Toole, his arms folded.
“What are you talking about?” Toole replied.
“You know as well as I do that Henry Lee Lucas was in jail in Maryland when all this happened. What are you trying to pull?”
Toole looked away and stared at the wall for a few moments. Finally he turned back to Terry. Yes, he’d lied about Lucas being involved. “Tell them detectives I want to talk to them again,” he said to Terry, who shook his head and went to look for Hoffman and Hickman.
It was well past midnight when the two detectives from Hollywood came back into the interview room and Toole announced that he hadn’t explained things exactly right the first time around and would like to correct his statement. Hoffman gave Terry a skeptical glance, but nonetheless he and Hoffman sat down and began to take a second recorded statement from Toole.
The biggest thing he had to correct was that Henry Lee Lucas hadn’t been involved in the crime, Toole told them. Then he set out to explain how things had really happened. Early in July of 1981, he and Lucas had borrowed Toole’s brother’s 1972 Ford pickup, supposedly to haul some scrap iron to the Jacksonville dump and sell it. In truth, Toole and Lucas lit out of Jacksonville immediately, accompanied by Toole’s niece Frieda Powell, thirteen at the time, and his nephew Frank Powell, twelve. They’d abandoned the truck in Maryland about a week later, and on the fifteenth of July, Toole’s sister-in-law Georgia reported the truck stolen to the Jacksonville sheriff. Toole had gotten separated from Lucas and his niece and nephew and, after a brief hospital stay, had returned to Florida by himself. Meantime, Lucas had been arrested by Delaware police on charges of vehicular theft and remained in jail there well into October.
Toole had traveled to South Florida alone, he told Hoffman and Hickman, and ran into Adam Walsh coming out of the Hollywood Sears store on the west side of the building. He enticed the boy into his Cadillac with the promise of candy and toys, then quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Though the engine on the Cadillac had been giving him a little trouble (“It wasn’t runnin’ right. It would just roll off”), he got it started and pulled out of the parking lot, with Adam now asking about the toys and the candy. It took him about ten minutes to get from the store parking lot to Florida’s Turnpike, Toole said, and by the time he went through the tollbooth to get a ticket, he had to start slapping and hitting the boy to get him to quiet down.
“The kid was getting on my nerves,” Toole said. “I hit him quite a bit of times in the car. I think I did knock him out. I’m pretty sure that I knocked that kid out.”
The rest of his account matched closely with what Toole had already told Detective Kendrick from Brevard County and Detective Via from Louisiana. He pulled off the turnpike onto a dirt road to kill the child. The child was unconscious when he carried him from the car and laid him facedown on the ground. And it took him four or five blows to sever the child’s head.
“He was unconscious, so I didn’t have a hard time chopping his head off,” Toole said. “I laid him facedown and I did it.”
Hoffman glanced up at Toole and asked whether he was right-handed or left-handed.
“Right-handed,” Toole answered.
“And you said you kept the head for a while,” Hoffman continued. “Just