Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [53]
At the same time, Hoffman was at the offices of Southeast Color Coat in Jacksonville, where clerk Ilene Knight dug out records to show that Ottis Toole had been employed by the company from 1976 through June 4, 1981. She did find that Toole had returned for work at the company after that, but it was only for a single day, in December of 1981. Toole had not worked for the company since, Knight was certain.
Next, Hoffman tracked down Georgia Toole, Ottis’s sister-in-law, who confirmed that she had in fact tried to have him arrested for stealing her pickup truck, just as the sheriff’s records showed. She also told Hoffman where he could find Norvella “Rita” Toole, Ottis’s wife. Rita told Hoffman that she had married Toole on January 14, 1977, and that in fact they were still married to that day. “But,” she told Hoffman, “he was always running me off, and I couldn’t figure it out, and one day I got thinking, I said, well, what would a man tell his wife to leave all the time for, unless there’s something wrong?”
Rita told Hoffman that she was away from Ottis so much that there wasn’t really a lot she could tell him. “The only thing, Ottis was good to me, and that’s all I know, he never mistreated me. He never beat me, he always called me baby, and I was kinda shocked when I heard all this.”
Following his interview with Rita, Hoffman met briefly with Vernon Toole, Ottis’s brother, and then with Mack Caulder, a foreman for the roofing company, but obtained little of use from either. A bit after 3:00 p.m. that Friday, Hoffman interviewed John Reaves Sr., the owner of Reaves Roofing. He confirmed that Toole had worked for him at times and was responsible for cleaning the compound and had access to the company gas pump and keys. He also told Hoffman that owing to a number of thefts on company property, he had all the locks changed back in 1982, some time after Toole had left his employment. Reaves remembered that Faye McNett had sold her Cadillac to Toole, and he assured Hoffman that indeed his company kept a number of tools on the property, including crowbars, shovels, and the like.
When Hoffman asked if they had any machetes, Reaves thought about it. “I believe we got one or two of them too,” he said. “It had a wood handle, I’d say about 10 or 12 inches, but I don’t remember seeing it lately.” At the conclusion of their interview, Reaves Sr. took Hoffman out to the company tool shed to look around for the machete, but they had no luck.
For all his work in Jacksonville, Hoffman had developed little of value. On the one hand, he had ruled out any possibility that Toole had been working for his old employers on Monday, July 27, 1981, the day that Adam was abducted, but on the other, he had found no one who could place Ottis Toole in any specific location—particularly Hollywood—between July 26 and July 30. This makes the failure to corroborate Toole’s encounter with Heidi Mayer all the more confounding.
In any case, while Hoffman had been busy with his interviews, Buddy Terry had set to work on actually finding the Cadillac that Toole claimed he had used during the abduction and murder, and which Faye McNett had long since sold. Terry finally tracked the then-twelve-year-old vehicle to an outfit called Wells Brothers Used Cars, at 4334 Brentwood Avenue in Jacksonville, and found that indeed it was a black-over-white four-door model with a black leatherlike interior, a black dashboard, black carpeting, and power window and door locks that could be controlled by a master panel in the driver’s armrest.
On Monday, October 31, technicians from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were dispatched to pick up the Cadillac from the Wells Brothers lot and take it to the FDLE crime lab on Platen Road in Jacksonville, where it was to be examined for fingerprints, blood, and fibers. That same day, public defender Schwartz met with his client for the first time, and on Tuesday the attorney announced to reporters in Tallahassee that