Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [71]
If the Walshes thought it would mean anything in terms of progress on the case, however, they would be sadly disappointed. Witt had plenty to attend to without diverting his department’s resources down what was to him a dead-end road, and thus Adam’s twelfth birthday passed with no word, as did his thirteenth in 1987.
Then there arrived some news from a quarter the Walshes could scarcely have envisioned. A letter dated October 4, 1988, began:
Dear Walsh,
My name is Ottis Toole. I’m the person who snatched, raped, murdered, and cut up the little prick teaser, Adam Walsh and dumped his smelly ass into the canal. You know the story but you don’t know where his bones are. I do.
Now you are a rich fucker, money you made from the dead body of that little kid. OK, he was a sweet little piece of ass! I want to make a deal with you. Here’s my deal. You pay me money and I’ll tell you where the bones are so you can get him buried all decent and Christian.
Elsewhere in this despicable letter to John Walsh, Toole explained that he wanted $5,000 right away as “good faith money” and Walsh’s signed promise of $45,000 more once Toole had shown him Adam’s bones. Toole closed by telling Walsh that Adam had been crying for his mother as he sodomized him.
“If you send the police after me before we make a deal then you don’t get no bones and what’s left of Adam’s hot pussy can rot,” Toole warned. “Tell the cops and you don’t get shit.”
“Tell the cops,” of course, is exactly what John Walsh did. He immediately gave the letter, signed by Ottis E. Toole—in script that precisely matched Toole’s signature on various prison forms—to Detective Hoffman at Hollywood PD. Walsh had become aware that Hoffman was unwilling to believe that Toole was Adam’s murderer—it had gotten back to Walsh that Hoffman thought Toole was simply trying to draw attention to himself by claiming responsibility. And while Walsh was willing to accede to Hoffman’s claims that there was no physical evidence linking Toole to the crime, he was sure that this blood-boiling message would reignite the detective’s interest.
Walsh was wrong—Hoffman simply filed the letter away. As it turns out, it was not the only letter that Toole sent out at the time. On the same day, he had also written an extortion note to Sears, explaining that he had cut a deal with a magazine to tell the story of how he had kidnapped, raped, and murdered Adam Walsh, and now, he said, he was threatening to tell the world how easy it was to abduct and assault children at their stores. “I do my shopping for juicy little kiddies at Sears,” he said in his missive to the company. But for a “fast check,” Toole said, he was willing to omit any direct mention of the chain in his magazine account. “See you soon,” he closed. “Bring money.”
On the following day, Toole sent off another letter to the Orlando Sentinel: “Someone told my ear that a big paper” like theirs might pay a “nice amount” for his personal account of the murder of Adam Walsh. And maybe once he told the story, people would leave him alone about it, Toole explained. But there were conditions: “No cops, no lawyers. Just me and a reporter. Please make me your cash offer promptly.”
For its part, the Sentinel summarily forwarded the letter from Toole to Detective Hoffman. “Probably not anything new to you, but here it is for what it’s worth,” reporter Sean Holton said, before adding, “Let me know if anything comes of it.”
Toole sent a similar letter to the National Enquirer, which prompted reporter Charlie Montgomery to place a call directly to Jack Hoffman. His paper wasn’t about to offer Toole any money, Montgomery said, but it was his intention to write Toole back and ask what new