Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [63]
He had also observed that Toole stayed at the house on several occasions after the fire, and he had often seen Toole digging up and burying various articles of trash in the backyard. Toole eked out a living by collecting junk, Hammond said, and often stored various items he’d found in his mother’s yard. He brought back discarded refrigerators, then hacked them apart for the aluminum he could sell at salvage yards. And he also used the gutted refrigerators as incinerators where he burned the insulation off wiring to expose the salable copper underneath. Hammond’s mother Sarah was present at the interview, and she too told Hoffman that she had seen Ottis Toole back at his mother’s house after the June 23 fire.
Hoffman next spoke with a man named Charles Lee Hardaman, who claimed to have known Toole for about three years. The two of them would ride around picking up junk like refrigerators, stoves, and furniture, and then bring it back to 708 Day Avenue, where they’d break it apart for whatever salvageable materials might be obtained—and yes, he had also seen Toole use the carcasses of refrigerators as incinerators.
When Hoffman asked if he ever knew Toole to carry weapons, Hardaman confirmed that there was a shotgun around sometimes. And how about any large knives? Hoffman wanted to know.
“I never seen him with knives,” Hardaman said first, but then corrected himself. “Well, he had one like they used in the old days.”
Just how large a knife was this? Hoffman asked.
“I don’t know,” Hardaman said. “I saw it,” he added, holding his hands a foot or more apart. Then he raised his thumb and forefinger, with perhaps a two-inch gap between them. “A blade about this wide.”
“What kind of case?” Hoffman asked.
“A steel case.”
“What color?”
Hardaman shrugged. “Rust,” he said, going on to explain to Hoffman that it was the kind of knife that you could fix onto a gun barrel.
“A bayonet?” Hoffman asked.
“Yeah,” Hardaman said.
In his first confession to Hoffman, Toole had begun his description of the decapitation by saying he’d used a bayonet. But Hoffman had responded by saying, “Like a machete?” and Toole had subsequently followed the detective’s lead in referring to the weapon he’d used as a machete. It could have been a simple misstatement, given the limitations of Toole’s intelligence, but then again, the matter was certainly worth pursuing.
“When did you see that knife?” Hoffman asked.
Hardaman gave him a look. “Well, it was mine,” he finally admitted. “I left it there at the house and told him to sharpen it.”
“And he kept it? Never returned it to you?”
“Right,” Hardaman said.
“When did you give it to him?” Hoffman next asked.
Hardaman thought. “It was when his momma was living, that much I know.”
“So that would have been before May 1981?”
“Yeah,” Hardaman said.
Following the conversation with Hardaman, Hoffman drove with Smith and Standley to Daytona Beach, about two hours south, where they met briefly with William O. Toole, another of Ottis’s brothers. William refused to speak with them in any detail about Ottis, however, and the trio drove home to Hollywood that evening.
It was on Wednesday of that week that the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel ran the story in which Louisiana detective Donny Fittz told reporters that Ottis Toole had confessed to the killing of Adam Walsh during an unrelated interview. When reporters called Hollywood PD for a comment on Fittz’s allegations, public information officer Tony Alderson dismissed it as nothing new. “We believed Toole the first time,” Alderson said.
Meantime, the FDLE lab in Jacksonville had concluded its examination of Toole’s Cadillac for Adam’s fingerprints. Alas, no latent prints of any value had been found.
Almost a week went by without any significant developments, though the treatment center in Hialeah where Betty Goodyear’s son John Redwine had stayed prior to meeting Toole did confirm to Hollywood PD that Redwine had gone on vacation from the facility on July 24, 1981, and had boarded a bus bound for Jacksonville at nine that morning. Conceivably, Redwine could