Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [57]
Early on Friday morning, as Toole was being escorted by Detective Terry toward an interview room in the Duval County Jail, where yet another team of out-of-state homicide detectives were waiting to interview him regarding a set of unsolved cases, Toole glanced down the hallway to see Detectives Hoffman and Hickman conversing with each other, and he called out to them. He’d remembered this church where he used to work back in 1981. It was out off Lane Avenue, near I-10, Toole told them, near a Days Inn. Maybe they could track it down and find out exactly what days he was working, Toole told the detectives.
Detective Terry suspected that Toole’s attorney wouldn’t be happy with his client’s offer of such information, but since Toole had initiated the conversation, it did not violate counsel’s dictates that no interview be scheduled independently. Certainly, Terry made no move to intervene. Hoffman and Hickman made a note of Toole’s information and told him they’d look into it.
First, though, the two Hollywood detectives followed up with Betty Goodyear, to see if they could confirm the date when Toole had moved into one of her houses with his erstwhile wife Rita. As was the case with employment records, any piece of evidence that would place Toole in Jacksonville on July 27, 1981, would render all of his statements regarding Adam Walsh null and void.
But Goodyear insisted that if she did nothing else, she kept accurate records. She produced a pair of receipt books for the period in question, the first of which showed that she had rented a room to Ottis Toole on July 31, 1981. She also showed them another book with a copy of a receipt made out to V. Toole on August 7. Toole did have a brother named Vernon, but as to why his name was in her book, Goodyear did not know.
From there, Hoffman and Hickman traveled to University Hospital, where Ottis’s wife Rita was a patient. When they asked her about Betty Goodyear’s records, Rita cleared the mystery up quickly. She’d moved out of living with Ottis shortly after they’d reunited there at the end of July, and moved in with his brother Vernon for a week. Since he paid the rent, that’s why his name was on the receipt. As for her time together with Ottis during that period, it began the day she moved into the Goodyear Apartments on July 31. She’d been staying with a woman named Nancy Jackson for seven or eight months before that, and she hadn’t seen Ottis at all during that time.
The two detectives left University Hospital to follow up on Toole’s recollection that he had done some work for a church around the time of Adam Walsh’s murder. After some digging, they finally found a Church of God next to a Days Inn just south of I-10, about fifteen minutes west of downtown. The church’s pastor, Reverend Cecil Wiggins, didn’t recall anyone named Toole ever working for him, but, prodded by the detectives, he agreed to consult his records. Somewhat to his surprise, the good reverend discovered that the church had in fact paid Toole for lawn maintenance work on two separate occasions in 1981: $17.50 on August 27, and $22.75 on August 28.
Hoffman and Hickman could only stare at each other. After all their digging, they had been able to place Ottis Toole in Jacksonville on July 25, when he’d arrived from Virginia on a Greyhound bus. And they knew that he was back again on July 31, when he’d rented a room for himself and his wife from Betty Goodyear. But as to where he was during the time in between, and especially on the afternoon and evening of July 27, when Adam Walsh was kidnapped and murdered, they had only the sighting reported by Heidi and Arlene Mayer and the word of Toole to go on.
Given the amount of time that Hoffman had spent in Jacksonville talking to Toole’s family