Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [52]
Vero Beach, Florida—October 27, 1983
The following Thursday morning, Judge Trowbridge of the Nineteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida, which includes Indian River County, where the crime was presumed to have occurred, ordered the appointment of a temporary public defender for Toole. Before a local defender could be appointed, however, Elton H. Schwartz, an attorney practicing in Miami, drawn by the publicity inherent in the case, offered his services to Toole free of charge. Subsequently, the court—now absolved of any expense in the matter—approved the arrangement.
While that was going on, Detective Hoffman set out on his rounds about Jacksonville, trying to substantiate the details of Toole’s story. First, Hoffman tracked down Faye McNett, who in fact recalled selling a 1971 Cadillac to Toole. It was a white car, with a black vinyl top, a four-door, McNett said, and while Toole wanted it badly, he didn’t have enough money to pay for it. He gave her a few dollars down, she recalls, and agreed to have her take $20 or $25 a week out of his paycheck until the balance was satisfied. Ultimately, he told her he couldn’t keep up the payments and would have to return the car, which she then kept in the roofing company’s compound.
If he had an extra set of keys to the car and was prone to “borrowing” it, she hadn’t known about it, but sure, she supposed it was possible. Lots of people had keys to the yard fence, McNett said. That was just how it was.
After he spoke with McNett, Hoffman interviewed John Reaves Jr., owner of Southeast Color Coat and the son of John Reaves Sr., owner of Reaves Roofing, where Toole had also worked occasionally. The last day Toole had received any pay for either company was June 4, 1981, Reaves said after a check of his records. Furthermore, Reaves did remember getting a phone call from the Salvation Army in Newport News, Virginia. They’d wanted to confirm that Toole did have a job to return to in Jacksonville, and Reaves had vouched for him. Toole had never actually come back to work at either his company or his father’s, though, Reaves Jr. said. As to whether or not Toole had a set of keys to the company compound where McNett’s Cadillac was kept, Reaves thought it was possible—one of Toole’s responsibilities was to let employees and their trucks in and out of the gate.
Meantime, just off Florida’s Turnpike at mile marker 126 in Indian River County, FDLE technicians were using a front-end loader to excavate the area where their scans had indicated buried objects were to be found. The machine scraped off four inches of earth at a time in all seven spots, down to a depth of two feet, but no clothing or remains were found.
Also that afternoon, Hoffman received a call from a Detective Steve Upkirk of the Oklahoma City Police Department. Based on statements made by Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, his department had concluded that Toole was likely responsible for somewhere between four and six unsolved homicides in his jurisdiction, Upkirk said. In addition, there were other unsolved cases in other Oklahoma jurisdictions that Toole was probably responsible for as well. It wasn’t necessarily information that would help Hoffman in his own investigation, but it did seem to confirm that Ottis Toole was a very bad person indeed. With him in prison, the world was surely a better place.
On the following morning, Friday, October 28, Hoffman’s boss, Hollywood chief of police Sam Martin, found a letter from an attorney’s office in Miami waiting for him when he came to work. It was a notice from Elton Schwartz, Toole’s newly appointed public defender,