Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [42]
Toole shrugged. “I say I switched it different times. I had it in the back one time on the floorboard and I ended up putting it in the front floorboard.”
After the decapitation, Toole said that he dismembered and scattered the body parts, then got back onto the turnpike and drove another ten minutes or so northward before he began to think better of keeping the head. When he spotted a bridge railing up ahead, he told Hoffman, “I stopped the car and got out and I throwed the head over in the canal.”
How about the boy’s clothes? Hoffman asked. “Oh his clothes were in the car,” Tool said. While he was stopped, he used the clothes to wipe up some of the blood off the seat and then tossed the clothes out. Or maybe he had thrown the clothes away in a Dumpster in one of the roadside rest stops, Toole said, for that is what he remembered doing with his own blood-soaked clothes. “I throwed them in the Dumpster.”
And all this blood on his clothes had come from the child? Hoffman wanted to be sure.
Not only on his clothes but on his shoes as well, Toole assured the detective. “I throwed my shoes away too and put on another pair.”
He’d then driven on back to Jacksonville and junked the car at a yard on Holloway Avenue, Toole said, and that was pretty much the end of that story.
But why had he lied to them and implicated Henry Lee Lucas in his first statement? Hoffman wanted to know. “Because I figured I could tie him up in it and get even with his ass,” Toole said.
“And you also said that Henry Lee got a blow job from the head,” Hoffman continued, looking up from his notes. “Was that really you that got the blow job from the head?”
Toole shook his head at the question. “No,” he said, dismissively, “I didn’t even fuck it.”
Hoffman then withdrew a third photograph of Adam and laid it beside the other two he’d already shown Toole. Was this the boy he was talking about? the detective asked. Toole studied the third photograph briefly, then glanced at Hoffman, “The other pictures, the other pictures look more like him than that one does,” Toole said, but still there seemed no doubt in his mind. “Yes, I’d say. Yes, that’s him.”
It was almost two in the morning by the time Hoffman and Hickman wound up their second interview with Toole. “If we take you back down to South Florida with us, can you show us the places you’ve been talking about. This Sears store, the place where you decapitated the child, and where you threw his head in the canal?”
“I guess so,” Toole said.
“We’ll let you know,” Hoffman said, and with that the interview was finished.
Once again, it might seem to any sentient observer that every element was in hand for a swift delivery of justice, or as swift as one is permitted in a system as full of checks and balances as our own. An individual with a history of violent behavior has made three unbidden confessions of murder to law officers from three different jurisdictions, providing details obviously known previously only to the medical examiners and the detectives in charge of the case. Surely justice was about to be dispensed. How could it possibly not be?
Jacksonville, Florida—October 21, 1983
In the early hours following his second conversation with Toole, Detective Hoffman—whether or not he was miffed that his theory about Jimmy Campbell had been discredited, or simply that someone other than he and his partner Hickman had found Ottis Toole and extracted a confession from him—went quickly to work securing an order from a Duval County circuit judge allowing the two of them and Detective Terry to transport Toole to Hollywood for the purposes of identifying the purported crime scenes he had described. Meanwhile, Toole returned to his cell in the county lockup, where he began to pace and mutter, waking his cellmate James Collins.
What was the matter? Collins asked. He was trying to get some sleep.
Toole glanced around the cell nervously, then leaned close. What did Collins suppose other inmates would do to someone who had murdered children? Toole wondered, his voice low. Collins