Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [83]
Later, as they were shopping for the things Mistler had forgotten, they heard an announcement on the store’s PA system, paging Adam Walsh. But again, Mistler did not connect the announcement with what he had witnessed in the parking lot more than two hours earlier. They simply picked up the things they needed, Mistler explained, and then they took their trip.
When they got back the following Sunday, one of his son’s friends came by the house and told them all about Adam’s abduction, Mistler said. At the time, he reminded his wife that they had seen Mrs. Walsh in the Sears store the previous Monday—that is why she had appeared so upset. Still, Mistler said, it did not occur to him to connect what he had witnessed in the parking lot earlier that day to Adam’s disappearance.
In fact, Mistler told Hoffman, it was not until a month to six weeks later, when he returned to Sears on yet another shopping trip, that a news story came on the radio and it suddenly hit him. He might in fact have witnessed Adam’s abduction. He actually turned his truck toward the nearby headquarters of the Hollywood PD right then and there, Mistler said, but that was the point at which the news was all about the search for the “blue van” that someone had seen Adam being pulled into. The story he’d been listening to closed on news of the search for that van at that very moment, Mistler said, and he decided that perhaps what he had to offer wasn’t that useful after all.
As to why he hadn’t come forward in 1983, when Ottis Toole’s picture was splashed across television and newspapers as the prime suspect in the case, Mistler told Hoffman that he thought other witnesses had come forward, or they wouldn’t have named Toole as the man responsible. Hoffman listened to Mistler’s account, then asked him if he would agree to take a polygraph exam and undergo hypnosis to see if those procedures would corroborate the truth of what he was claiming all these years later.
Mistler agreed without hesitation and returned to police headquarters the following day for the polygraph. While no record of the exam itself remains in the case file, a supplemental report filed by Detective Hoffman notes that the results of Mistler’s polygraph were “inconclusive.”
Three days later, on Friday, August 2, 1991, Mistler again reported to Hollywood PD, this time to be placed under hypnosis by a doctor attached to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office psychological services unit. However, during the prehypnosis interview, Mistler again became so upset regarding his recollections of the day that the physician adjudged him unfit to be hypnotized at the time. Instead, detectives drove him back to the west parking lot of the Sears Mall in hopes that revisiting the scene might jog Mistler’s memory as to what Adam had been wearing on the day of the kidnapping. But Mistler could simply not recall those details.
Finally, on Monday, September 2, Mistler returned again to police headquarters, where this time he successfully underwent hypnosis. During the session, he was able to recall that Toole had rotten, greenish teeth, a two-week beard, strange eyes, and was wearing dark pants and brown shoes. As far as Adam’s clothing went, Mistler said that the child was wearing a baseball hat.
Mistler, of course, was interested in what effects his decision to come forward would have on the long-stymied case. If the cops had not received proof that Toole had committed the crime, they now had an eyewitness who could give them exactly what they needed. Furthermore, during his initial interview with Hoffman, when he’d first begun to detail the sighting of Toole in the Cadillac that day at the Sears store, Hoffman suddenly snapped