Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [51]
As to the moments when his plans began to fall apart, Toole was appallingly graphic. “He was crying more and getting a little bit louder. And so that’s when I really did slap the daylights out of him. I slapped him pretty . . . pretty darn hard. I slapped him dead in the face. Dead across the eyes.”
But it seemed not to be enough. “He kept getting a little bit wilder and I hit him real hard in his stomach and that would take the wind out of him. And I did punch him in the eyes a couple times . . . more . . . more than a couple of times.”
Finally, Toole said, “I really hit him hard in the stomach. I grabbed onto his throat and started choking him, with both hands. He was unconscious. He never . . . never gained consciousness.”
Toole took the detectives back through his account of finding a place to pull off the turnpike, of stopping the Cadillac at the fork he’d mentioned in the service road, and of carrying Adam’s body out. “I pulled the bayonet out from underneath the seat,” he said, repeating the use of that term for the weapon before he began once again to refer to it as a “machete.” And then Toole said, “Well, I done chopped him down. I chopped his head off. I had to come down real hard.”
After it was done, Toole said, “I pulled his shirt off, wrapped his head up in it and put it in the car.” When he finally decided that he should get rid of Adam’s head, he had been driving no more than five or ten minutes. That is when he spotted the canal and the wooden bridge and pulled over and threw the head into the water. He stood and watched to be sure it would sink, and then he turned and got back into the Cadillac. He drove to the next rest plaza, and pulled in beside the entrance to a gas station restroom, where he went in “to clean up and all . . . got all this blood off me.”
He filled his tank then and drove back to Jacksonville to the site of his mother’s burned-out house, where he parked and slept in the car through the night. In the morning, he woke and cleaned up the car and his tools, and that was pretty much that.
Detective Hoffman noted that it was 11:41 p.m. when he asked Toole his final question of the evening. Just why was it that Toole had lied to him earlier about not having killed Adam Walsh? Hoffman wanted to know.
Toole shrugged. “I couldn’t get my head together,” he told the detective, as if that ought to explain everything.
While it was surely a blow to Hoffman that Toole had briefly recanted his confession, a more experienced homicide investigator might have reassured the Hollywood detective that this was not out of the ordinary. According to Toole’s own words, the killing of “that little boy” was the worst thing that he had ever done. And while it is not out of the ordinary for a guilty person to confess in order to find some peace, neither is it unusual for that same person to later recant. The reasons are many: fear of reprisal, a wave of psychological denial that one has actually done the worst thing possible, and on and on. Furthermore, if one were looking for the model of rational behavior, you wouldn’t be searching among convicted killers in the first place. The fact remained that Ottis Toole had confessed to this killing on multiple occasions, citing details that only someone who’d been present could have known.
But Hoffman had not joined the Hollywood Police Department until late in 1975, and he served as a uniform patrolman for nearly three years before he was transferred to the Criminal Investigations Division as a detective. When he took over the investigation of the Adam Walsh case, he had less than three years of time in grade as an investigator, and no experience at all with a case of such magnitude and difficulty. If his reputation as a know-it-all was merited, such an individual would be especially prone to second-guessing himself in his heart of hearts.
Furthermore, one might wonder why on earth the detective did not take this opportunity to question Toole as to whether or not he’d had an encounter with a young girl in