Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [46]
“He was talking to me,” Hoisington protested, “and some of those things he said—”
Hoffman held up a hand impatiently. “I heard you. I’ll include it in my report,” he said; then he hurried down the hall to confer with Martin.
At 11:00 p.m. during a hastily arranged press conference, Hollywood chief of police Sam Martin made the momentous announcement. They had found the man who killed Adam Walsh, and on Monday, Ottis Toole would be officially charged with the crime.
Toole was a confessed serial killer, Martin told reporters, though of the thirty-five to fifty murders he had committed, Adam’s was the only one over which he had expressed any regret. “Listening to him talk about the things he’s done makes Charles Manson sound like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn,” Martin said. And Assistant Chief Hessler added his own opinion that Toole’s stories were “grisly and heinous beyond belief.” But as to the murder of Adam Walsh, Hessler said, there could be no doubt. “There are certain details only he could know. He did it.”
Hessler assured reporters that his detectives had been grilling Toole ten to twenty hours a day for two days solid, and that he had finally broken down earlier Friday evening. As to the confessions that Toole had made to Detective Kendrick on October 10 and to Detectives Via and Terry on October 18, Hessler was curiously—or not so curiously—silent. As far as the outside world was concerned, then, Jack Hoffman and the Hollywood PD had cracked this case without assistance.
Indeed, Martin assured those gathered, they had finally found their man. Ottis Toole, already convicted of another crime in Jacksonville, would be returned to that city this night or the following morning, but soon he would face justice for the murder of Adam Walsh.
Any reasonable individual would have been inclined to take Martin’s assertions as fact. An unhinged psychopath, finally snagged by a system through whose cracks he had tumbled for most of his miscreant’s life, had confessed details of a heinous crime only he could have known. It might have been a shame for the murdered boy’s family that so much time had passed, and it might be galling if it was learned that his apprehension was almost accidental, and perhaps it was annoying that a public defender would have to be engaged at the taxpayers’ expense, along with a costly trial to be followed—were a death penalty handed down—by any number of appeals based on what would be surely specious ground . . .
But despite all that, a grievous wrong could now be righted, and some shred of society’s order might be restored.
Hollywood, Florida—October 22, 1983
The news of the break in the case was trumpeted across the region on Saturday, and any viewer, listener, or reader who caught it might have assumed that though it had been two long and agonizing years for John and Revé Walsh, the grieving parents were about to see justice done. John Walsh’s stirring response upon being given the news was replayed again and again on network and local outlets: “Just give me three minutes alone in a room with this guy.” Finally, it seemed, the long-suffering parents would find some measure of relief.
However, it was not necessarily the call of Chief Martin or Leroy Hessler as to whether or not Ottis Toole would in fact be charged. It is true that a police officer can arrest and charge a suspect at a crime scene or in the course of an investigation during which a suspect makes a confession. Following such an arrest there is an arraignment, normally held within twenty-four hours, at which the suspect pleads guilty or not guilty, where bail is set or denied, and at which a public defender is appointed if necessary. In most jurisdictions, the state attorney then has a set period of time—twenty-one days in Florida—in which to file formal charges or drop the case. In fact, it is not unusual for a case initiated as an arrest to be dropped or negotiated, owing to something overlooked or unknown during the relatively