Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [82]
On Sunday, July 28, the Miami Herald ran a ten-year anniversary piece on Adam’s murder and included an interview with Jack Hoffman during which he told a reporter that he still hadn’t “totally eliminated” Ottis Toole as a suspect. Whether or not it was Mistler’s phone call that had reawakened his interest in Toole is difficult to say. Nothing of note had been added to his case file since the day in late October 1984 when Hoffman assured reporters that Toole had been unequivocally eliminated as a suspect.
In any case, on Monday, July 29, 1991, Bill Mistler appeared as scheduled at the offices of Hollywood PD, where he met with Detective Hoffman to make a voluntary sworn statement. Mistler broke into tears on two different occasions during the interview, explaining that he felt tremendous guilt for not having reacted differently to what he witnessed that day outside Sears. If he had approached Toole, or if he had summoned security or called police, he might have prevented Adam’s death. Make no mistake about it, Mistler said. It was Ottis Toole he had seen leading Adam Walsh away from the Sears store that day, and he had lived and relived every moment in his mind ever since.
He arrived at the Sears lot via the northwest corner entrance near the garden shop, he told Hoffman. He was waiting for an older woman to park her car when he first saw Toole, driving past him in his Cadillac, headed the opposite direction. He recollected that the car was in good condition, other than what looked like rust stains from well water and a sizable dent in the right rear bumper. It was bearing a Florida license plate, and there were what appeared to be a number of gardening tools in the backseat.
Mistler said that he saw Toole stop his car in the opposite driving lane, get out of the driver’s door, and walk around the car toward the curb. He remembered that Toole appeared to be checking out his surroundings, glancing left and right, and that the two actually locked eyes for a few seconds. Toole was an odd-looking type, he said, around six feet tall, with a wandering eye and reddish brown hair. He was dressed shabbily, his T-shirt filthy—hardly the picture of the typical suburban Sears shopper.
Mistler said that he watched as Toole approached the curb outside the entrance to Sears, where a small boy—maybe five years old—was standing. Because he was so caught up in Toole’s idiosyncratic appearance, Mistler said, he didn’t pay as much attention as he might have to exactly how the child was dressed, though he thought he remembered that the boy was wearing a hat.
Mistler said that Toole knelt down in front of the boy and began to talk to him. On the sidewalk nearby, he recalled, was a woman with a boy of fourteen or so, apparently searching for something in her purse. To Mistler, there was something wrong with what he was seeing. Toole and the boy with whom he was talking simply did not seem to belong together, if for no other reason than the comparative condition of their clothing, a guy off the streets talking to a kid who obviously came from a suburban home.
“I made the wrong call,” Mistler said. “I kept looking for Adam to give me some sort of a signal . . .” But it never came.
Mistler watched in his rearview mirror as Toole took Adam by the arm, but he saw no signs of resistance there. The two walked past the front of the Cadillac, with Toole talking to Adam all the while. Toole opened the driver’s door to the Cadillac, and Adam crawled in and across the front seat. By this point, Mistler noted that the parking space he was waiting for had finally been vacated.
He parked his truck, got out, and walked toward the curb. He glanced at the spot where the Cadillac had been stopped, but by then it was gone.
Mistler picked up a few items for the family’s camping trip, but inevitably he hadn’t managed to get everything everyone wanted. At 3:00 p.m. or so, he was back at the