Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [67]
Shortly thereafter, the last vestiges of Detective Hoffman’s investigation of Toole were wrapped up without fanfare: in late January, the Tallahassee lab reported that hairs found in Toole’s Cadillac—vacuumed from the seats, headrest, and carpet—did not belong to Adam Walsh. Subsequently, according to an FDLE memo, all the evidentiary items examined by both the Tallahassee and Jacksonville labs were returned either to the Hollywood PD by registered mail or directly to Detective Terry of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
Ottis Toole’s difficulties with the law were scarcely over, to be sure. Just two weeks later, at the end of a three-day conference in Monroe, Louisiana, hosted by the Ouachita Parish Homicide Task Force, law enforcement officers from nineteen states issued a joint announcement that Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole had been positively linked to 81 murders out of the 150 or more that they claimed to have committed.
During his various interviews with those agents, Toole explained that quite often, after Henry Lee had sex with some of the female victims, he would turn them over to Toole to be killed. Toole, inflamed with anger and jealousy, was only too happy to comply. A number of the victims had suffered extensively, with multiple stab wounds and deep—though not fatal—cuts along the arms, thighs, and lower legs. Several had been disemboweled, and a number had been doused with diesel fuel—stolen by Lucas and Toole during erstwhile stints on roofing crews—then set afire.
In Jacksonville, Buddy Terry had enjoyed far more success with his own investigation of the arson case in which Toole had caused the death of Betty Goodyear’s tenant George Sonnenberg. Toole went to trial on those charges in late April and somewhat predictably testified that he did not in fact set the fire that he had on numerous occasions previously confessed to. The defense introduced Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, a psychiatrist, who testified that Toole was a pyromaniac, his intelligence on the borderline of retardation. He was childlike and impulsive, Dr. Sanchez said, subject to bouts of “overwhelming tension” that had to be relieved. “Setting fires is one of the ways he does it,” Sanchez said, and in such terms it might sound almost rational.
Whatever the jury thought of Dr. Sanchez’s explanations, they seemed far more compelled by the evidence presented. On Friday, May 11, that body took thirty-five minutes to reach its verdict: Ottis Toole was guilty of the arson murder of George Sonnenberg, and the recommended penalty was death.
As he was being led from the courtroom, a furious Toole whirled on Detective Terry, who had supplied much of the evidence during the trial. “Friends don’t testify against friends,” Toole shouted at Terry. “I’m going to fuck you.”
Toole, who had been formally charged with nine other murders in Texas, Colorado, and Louisiana by that time, was sentenced to death for the murder of Sonnenberg and was finally transferred back into the State of Florida prison system at Lake Butler on May 18, 1984. Shortly after his arrival at Lake Butler, Toole granted an interview to Jacksonville Times-Union reporter Mickie Valente, during which he repeated his confession to the murder of Adam Walsh.
He took Valente through the details of the abduction, explaining once again that he had done it to “keep him for myself,” and the decapitation—“I put both hands on it [the machete] and I chopped his head off.” And he included the information that he had given Hoffman about what he had actually done with Adam’s body, though he had a grisly coda to add.
He had taken the body back to Jacksonville and stuffed him into a discarded “icebox” on his mother’s property, Toole told Valente. And then he said, “I took that machete and I cut out some of his side and I ate some of it.” And following that, he burned the corpse and tossed the remains into a Jacksonville