Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [59]
Despite the fact that he had killed her, Lucas assured Toole that Becky had been his life: “I loved her more than anything else,” he said, and then, having dispensed with that matter, went on to ask Toole for help in piecing together the details of the many crimes they had committed together, “so we can get the [w]hole thing out in the open.” Lucas had not yet implicated Toole in anything, he said, but he had found considerable peace in coming clean, and he was writing now to find out if Toole as well might be willing to talk about their various misdeeds.
On Monday, November 14, Lucas followed up with a phone call, one that was being tape-recorded by the Texas Rangers, a fact that Lucas passed along to Toole at the beginning of their conversation. Certainly the warning did not deter Toole from being forthright.
“Remember that one time I said I wanted me some ribs?” Toole asked Lucas. “Did that make me a cannibal?”
“You wasn’t a cannibal,” Lucas assured him. “It’s the force of the devil, something forced on us that we can’t change. There’s no denying what we become,” he added. “We know what we are.”
Toole seemed quick to pick up on Lucas’s theme. “Remember how I liked to pour some blood out of them?”
Once again, Lucas—whose first murder victim was his own mother, in 1960—seemed compassionate and reasoned. “Ottis, you and I have something people look on as an animal. There’s no way of changing what we done, but we can stop it and not allow other people to become what we have. And the only way to do that is by honesty.”
Apparently Lucas had achieved some sense of salvation by baring his soul to investigators about his many misdeeds (quite a few of them fanciful, as it turned out), and it seemed as if his words had some effect on Toole. The following day, Tuesday, November 15, Toole was interviewed by Calcasieu Parish chief of detectives Donny Fittz about the murder of twenty-year-old Catherine Martin back in 1982, near Lake Charles, Louisiana. She’d been stabbed sixteen times with a screwdriver. Yeah, he had done it, Toole said. And his account of the crime reflected that he saw nothing unusual in his choice of weapons. If you had a hammer, you’d use a hammer. If there was a knife, use a knife. What was so different between a knife and a screwdriver anyway?
As he was winding up his interview with Toole, Fittz casually tossed out something he’d heard in the hallway.
“We understand you say you really didn’t kill Adam Walsh,” Fittz said to Toole, who seemed surprised by the statement.
“Oh no, I killed him too, there’s no doubt about that,” Toole replied. “It was like the kid, he wouldn’t shut up. I was driving him in the car. I slapped him. I hit him several times.”
Fittz gave an interview to reporters concerning his own investigation of the murder of Catherine Martin, but thought enough of what he’d heard from Toole about the Walsh case to pass that information along as well. Thus, in a story published on November 23 in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the public was assured once again by Toole that he was the man responsible.
Meanwhile, Detective Hoffman had returned to Jacksonville yet again, looking for something that would pin down Toole’s whereabouts between July 25 and July 31, 1981. On Thursday morning, November 17, Hoffman went to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide unit to meet with Buddy Terry. Toole was in the unit as well on this day, being interviewed by detectives from agencies near Houston and others from Colorado.
The door to the interview room was open, and when Toole glanced up to see Hoffman walking by, he called out after the detective. “Hey, Jack,” he said, “I need to speak with you.”
Hoffman grudgingly stopped to acknowledge Toole. “So where’s Detective Hickman?” Toole wanted to know.
Hoffman glanced at his two colleagues. “He’s back