Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [86]
Things couldn’t have gone more smoothly, Matthews thought, until he began trying to set a date with Hoffman. He left several phone messages for the lead detective, all of which were ignored. Finally, Matthews drove back to Hollywood PD headquarters and confronted Hoffman at his desk. When were they going to go interview Toole? Matthews wanted to know. “Soon,” Hoffman assured him, but right now he was busy with a million things. He’d get back to Matthews as soon as he possibly could.
Matthews was frustrated, certainly, but since he wasn’t signing Hoffman’s paycheck, there was little he could do. Without the detective in charge of the case, Matthews had no access to Toole.
Toole, meantime, was convicted in late September of three more homicides in Florida’s Jackson County, a rural enclave bordering Alabama and Georgia, and had returned to Starke with yet another life sentence tacked onto his list. Other jurisdictions seemed happy to investigate, charge, and convict Toole of murders he had confessed to, Matthews thought. What was the problem at Hollywood? Why on earth wouldn’t you want to do anything you could to try and solve this case?
On October 16, 1991, Matthews was back in Tallahassee, team-teaching another course with Bill Haggerty, the retired FBI agent whose misguided notions had provoked him into making his request of Captain Frazier at Hollywood PD a couple of months before. During a break, Haggerty mentioned to Matthews that he might not be in class the following day—he’d promised to drive the two hours to Starke to help out on a case.
No problem, Matthews assured his counterpart. He could handle the class on his own. But just what was it that was calling the agent away?
Oh, just a pain in the ass, really, Haggerty replied. He’d received a call from Jack Hoffman down at Hollywood PD. Hoffman’s boss wanted Hoffman to reinterview Ottis Toole for some reason, and Hoffman had asked Haggerty to accompany him. “Big waste of time, if you ask me,” the agent told Matthews, “but hey, I’m always ready to lend a hand.”
Matthews listened, then excused himself to make a phone call. When he reached Hollywood PD, he asked to speak with Gil Frazier. He couldn’t believe what Hoffman was trying to pull, Matthews thought. But Frazier would put a stop to it. The captain had been 100 percent in support of his request, Matthews was certain of it.
Abruptly the connection went through, and Matthews took a breath, about to launch into the summary of what he had learned. “Captain Frazier is on vacation,” an assistant’s voice said before he got a word out. “He’ll be gone for the next six weeks.” Matthews replaced the phone and leaned back in his chair, releasing a pent-up breath. Unless everything he knew about cops was wrong, Matthews told himself, Hoffman had simply waited for his boss to go on vacation, then purposefully ignored his order to have Matthews interview Toole. Apparently, Hoffman was bound and determined to make sure nothing ever moved forward on this investigation.
“Told you so,” Matthews’s fellow instructor reported when he returned from Starke the following afternoon. He explained to Matthews that Toole had informed them that he hadn’t been involved in the Walsh kidnapping back in July 1981. He’d returned to Jacksonville from Virginia and had not left. As to why he’d told some people otherwise back in 1983, Toole said it was “for his own personal gain.” He got taken out of jail for a while, ate real food, got to smoke cigarettes.
He’d also been approached by another inmate, a guy named Gerald Schaffer who wanted to write a book about the killings that Toole and Henry Lee Lucas had been involved in. Schaffer was working with some author, Toole said, and this guy would funnel monthly payments to them both if Toole would sign over the rights to his story. That sounded fine and dandy to Toole, but, he claimed, he had told Schaffer at the time that he didn’t kill Adam Walsh. Toole omitted any reference to the letters that Schaffer