Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [55]
If all this seemed less than consequential, Hoffman had something of a more interesting conversation that evening at the Duval County Jail, where he interviewed Bobby Lee Jones, who not only had worked with Toole at Reaves Roofing and Southeast Color Coat, but had recently shared a cell with Toole for about a month.
In the days that the two of them had worked together, Jones told Hoffman, he knew that Toole had what he described as an “18-inch butcher knife” with a wooden handle under the driver’s seat of his car. Toole’s car was a white ’72 Cadillac with a dent in the right side of the rear bumper, Jones said. He remembered the dent clearly because he had put it there. “I ran into the back of him,” Jones said. “I never said anything about it, but I remember that dent.”
Jones said that Toole always carried a big ring of keys when he was working for the company and would often disappear from work for several days. He’d show up and explain that he’d been partying, Jones said, though Toole also claimed that he burned down houses for money.
As to their recent time together in the Duval County Jail, Jones told Hoffman that Toole had told him all about the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh. He said that Toole talked about driving up and talking to the boy and making friends with him, and then for some reason starting to beat him up and cutting him apart with a big knife. “I told him to shut up and lay down,” Jones said.
Following his conversation with Jones, Hoffman then interviewed James Collins, aka Julius Riley Wilkes, the other cellmate who had also worked with Toole at Southeast Color Coat. According to Collins, it was common knowledge that Toole was gay. Collins related an on-the-job incident at Southeast Color Coat where another worker was making deprecating remarks to Toole about his lover Henry Lee Lucas. According to Collins, Toole didn’t say much, but simply walked off the job abruptly. A few minutes later, Toole returned to work in his Cadillac with a shotgun under his arm. He approached the man who had been making fun of Lucas and pointed the barrel of the shotgun in the man’s face. “Just keep on talking and I’ll blow your brains out,” Collins reported Toole as saying.
When Hoffman asked Collins to describe the car that Toole was driving that day, he replied that it was either white or black, one of the two. In any case, Collins thought it looked like the Cadillac that was on the news just the other day. It was toward the end of this interview that Collins divulged the recent conversations he’d had with Toole in their cell about the fact that he was leaving jail to help the cops in Fort Lauderdale look for the body of a child he’d killed down there, and his fears as to what other inmates might do to a fellow convict known to have murdered children.
On the following morning, Thursday, November 3, Hoffman drove the forty miles to Raiford, where he interviewed a man named James Michael Poole, who’d shared a cell with Ottis Toole in the Butler Transient Unit back in July. Poole told Hoffman that Toole had made various strange statements about being in the “child repossession business.” Another time, he told Poole that he had “taken” his own son from Broward County and that somewhere on their way back to Jacksonville he had just dropped the boy off along the highway. Poole thought that odd because the boy was supposedly only seven or eight years old, but then again, people did strange things—especially the kind of people you meet in jail.
While at Raiford, Detective Hoffman also spoke with Boyd Earl Gilbert, another cellmate of Toole’s in the Butler Transient Unit. Gilbert told Hoffman that the two of them had met on August 31, some two months previously, and that at that time, Toole claimed that up until the time of his imprisonment, he had been earning a living burning down buildings for people who wanted to collect the insurance. Unfortunately, there’d been an old man sleeping in the last place he burned down, and the guy died.
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