Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [66]
The entire period from October 1983, when Toole made his first confession to the murder of Adam Walsh, to the following January 1984, during which Toole made at least seven more confessions to the crime, must have seemed very much a time of “one step forward, two steps back” for Detective Hoffman and the Hollywood PD. After two years with essentially nothing, a man already convicted of another senseless murder and implicated in dozens of others around the country had come forward to claim responsibility for the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh.
Yet despite the repeated confessions and the offering up of detail of the crime that it seemed only the killer could have carried with him, Hoffman could find no evidence linking Toole directly to the crime. It must have been a period of intense frustration for Hoffman, and one senses from a pattern of dogged, repetitive inquiries down the same oft-tracked trails a desperation in his actions.
But whatever degree of frustration Hoffman may have felt or whatever adjective one might employ to describe the tenor of his investigation, it seemed that he was weary of whatever Ottis Toole had brought to the table. As evidence, consider what happened next.
Jacksonville, Florida—January 6, 1984
Though there is no indication as to who called for the meeting between Detective Jack Hoffman and Ottis Toole on the first Friday of the new year of 1984, there is certainly no reason for Hoffman to have requested it. He already had seven sworn statements from Toole confessing to the killing of Adam Walsh, and, if Hollywood PIO Tony Alderson is to be believed, most everyone at Hollywood PD “believed Toole from the beginning.”
In any case, at 9:56 on Friday morning, January 6, Hoffman, accompanied by fellow Hollywood PD detectives Smith, Naylon, and Banks, entered the interview room at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and once again sat down with Ottis Toole.
“What is the reason that you are giving us this statement regarding Adam Walsh?” Hoffman began.
Toole fumbled a bit, but he seemed clear enough, ultimately. “Ah, I didn’t, ah, I didn’t kill Adam Walsh.”
Hoffman glanced at his fellow officers, then back at Toole. “You didn’t kill Adam Walsh?”
Toole shook his head. “No.”
Hoffman’s next question had an odd ring to it. Instead of asking Toole who or what had motivated him to call them in to say such a thing, Hoffman took more of a petulant tack. “Then why have you stuck with your confession all these months, from the first time I met you?” Hoffman asked. “Can you tell me why you stuck to your story all this time?”
Though there may seem a certain relevance to the question, it also seems that Hoffman had been prepared for what he was going to hear during the interview. In any case, Toole managed an answer for the detective, lame as it may have sounded:
“Ah, I was trying to hang Henry Lucas at first, but I found out he was in jail.”
Another interviewer might have pointed out to Toole that he had known for months that Lucas was in jail, and then gone to work on Toole, trying to determine just who had drawn up the scenario for the present morning’s meeting. But Hoffman did none of those things, and by 10:06, ten minutes after it had begun, the lead detective on the case signaled to his associates that the interview was over.
Hoffman then asked Buddy Terry to hand over the green shorts and yellow rubber zori that had been recovered during the excavation of the property where Toole’s mother’s house had stood, and Terry complied. Hoffman took the shorts and flip-flop back to Hollywood with him that evening, and placed them in the PD evidence room, where—rather than being shown to John and Revé Walsh for purposes of identification—the items inexplicably remained unexamined for more than thirteen years.
For all intents and purposes, Jack Hoffman’s investigation of Ottis Toole as a suspect in the murder of Adam Walsh was over. For whatever reason—his innate