Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [49]
Detective Hoffman had flown back to Jacksonville, in search of evidence that would prove Toole had been in South Florida at the time of Adam’s abduction. In discussing his movements in late July of 1981, Toole had told Hoffman that following his release from the hospital in Newport News, he received a check for $78 from the local Salvation Army to pay for a bus ticket back to Jacksonville. Hollywood detectives followed up, speaking to a Mrs. Hall in that Newport News agency. After a bit of rummaging about, Hall confirmed that in fact a check in the amount of $71.93, payable to the Greyhound Bus Corporation, had been given to someone named Ottis Toole by her agency on Friday, July 24, 1981. That was the amount the bus company had quoted for a one-way fare from Newport News to Jacksonville, she said.
When he arrived in Jacksonville, Hoffman met his counterpart Buddy Terry, who took him directly to the Duval County Jail, where Toole was being held. Terry was buoyed by the fact that a local judge had just declared Toole competent to stand trial in the boarding house arson that killed George Sonnenberg, but Hoffman couldn’t have cared less. He couldn’t wait to get to the county lockup, where he took Toole through another recounting of his movements in late July of 1981.
Toole told Hoffman that he’d taken the check from the Newport News Salvation Army and walked directly to the nearby bus station, where he’d had to wait for a couple of hours. He said it was “nighttime” when he finally boarded a bus bound for Jacksonville, and that he was not sure when he arrived back in the North Florida city, though bus schedules suggest it would have had to have been sometime early Saturday morning.
Nor was Toole exactly sure what he’d done the moment he stepped down from the air-conditioned bus into the cloying summer heat. Maybe he’d walked to Reaves Roofing to see if they might need him to work that day, or maybe he went instead to the residence of a Nancy Jackson over on Iona Street, where his wife Rita was staying at the time.
Probably he had gone to work and stayed in Jacksonville “a pretty good while,” he told Hoffman that evening, because he was broke, and his wife was getting tired of staying with this Jackson woman and wanted him to get them a place of their own. Everything was a little hazy in his mind, Toole said, but he did remember that he rented himself and Rita a place in one of Betty Goodyear’s rooming houses on East Second Street, and that is where his brother Howard came to beat him up for stealing his truck.
Hoffman left the matter of the chronology of Toole’s movements aside for a moment and returned to the details of the kidnapping and murder. When Hoffman asked what Toole had done with the machete and the shovel he’d used to bury the body, Toole told Hoffman that he had been wondering about that himself. With his mother’s house all burned up, he couldn’t have hidden those items there, now could he?
So what had he done with them? Hoffman wanted to know. And that is when Toole delivered a thunderbolt. “That’s why I’m trying to give you all these statements,” he told Hoffman. “I’m not really sure that I really did kill Adam Walsh.”
Hoffman took a deep breath. So Toole was now saying that he had stayed in Jacksonville to work after he got back on Saturday, July 25? He was broke and had to make some money before he took his trip to South Florida. Did Toole