Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [84]
“Nobody knows about that Cadillac,” Hoffman told Mistler, then left the room to get photographs of the car for Mistler to identify.
When Hoffman originally asked Mistler to submit to a polygraph and to undergo hypnosis, he assumed that it meant that the cops were excited and interested in what he had to tell them.
But Mistler began to worry the day of his second hypnosis session, when he ventured to ask Hoffman what was going to happen with Toole now. Hoffman glanced away, Mistler says.
“I don’t know,” the detective said. “I don’t think this is going anywhere.”
Stunned, Mistler asked him what he meant.
Hoffman shrugged. “Well, the mother doesn’t want to go into court and listen to all the gory details about what happened to her child. And Ottis is already convicted of another murder . . .” The detective trailed off.
At that point, Mistler had the chilling sensation that his decision to come forward meant absolutely nothing to the lead investigator in the case, but he went ahead with his session nonetheless. How could he not?
A few days later, he called Hoffman to check on how he’d done. If the polygraph exam and the hypnosis supported his account of what he had seen, then surely the cops would go after Toole for the killing, he reasoned.
“So how’s it going with the case?” Mistler asked when Hoffman came on the line.
There was a pause, and the sounds of paper being shuffled in the background. “Ah, well,” Hoffman said, “I went up and talked to Ottis, and Ottis assured me he didn’t do it. He told me, ‘Why would I lie to ya, Jack, I’d tell ya if I killed this kid.’ ”
Mistler had to take a deep breath. “Let me get this straight,” he said to Hoffman. “You give me a polygraph exam, you hypnotize me twice, you interview me four times, and you go up and have a little chat with this psycho and you believe him and not me?”
When Hoffman didn’t respond, something occurred to Mistler. “Look, tell me the truth, tell me what’s going on. If the Walshes don’t want to go through with this, that’s one thing, but at least you have to tell me you told them about what I saw.”
“Oh, yeah,” Hoffman said. “I told the parents.”
The offhand tone in which he said it so angered Mistler that he hung up the phone and turned to his wife to explain what it was all about. “He’s lying,” Mistler told her. “He never said anything to the Walshes. I’m gonna go over there to the PD and make him look me in the eye and tell me the same lie.”
But Mistler’s wife had the last word on that score. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
Upon reflection, Mistler decided she was right. Instead of confronting Hoffman, he placed a call to the FBI, asking to speak with the agent assigned to work with the Hollywood police on the Adam Walsh case. After some delay, he was transferred to a Mrs. Grey or a Mrs. White—“some kind of color,” Mistler recalls—who asked him again why he was calling. Mistler explained that he had witnessed the abduction of Adam Walsh by Ottis Toole and that though he had come forward to Hollywood police, he was worried that Detective Hoffman was not taking him seriously.
The person to whom Mistler spoke took down the information and said that someone would get back to him, but no call ever came. To Mistler it meant that perhaps what Hoffman said about the Walshes wanting to bury the case was true. They must have been told that he had come forward, Mistler reasoned, or the FBI would have called him back. “So it’s okay,” he told himself. He’d done everything he could. “It’s over. It’s done.”
Tallahassee, Florida—August 14, 1991
At the same time the drama between Bill Mistler, Jack Hoffman, and the FBI was playing out, Joe Matthews was in Tallahassee conducting a three-day seminar on investigative interviewing and interrogation techniques for the University of North Florida’s Institute for Police Technology and Management.