Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [87]
Toole told Hoffman there wasn’t any reason for him to be withholding information at this time, not when he was already facing multiple life sentences. Hoffman, without bothering to bring up the fact that there might be several reasons for an incarcerated felon not to confess to the abuse and murder of a six-year-old child, took Toole’s word on the matter. “Based on the interview with Ottis Toole,” he wrote in summary, “it is this detective’s opinion that Ottis Toole was being truthful and sincere about his noninvolvement in the Adam Walsh homicide.”
And Haggerty, the retired agent who had witnessed this most recent exchange between Hoffman and Toole, agreed, or so he told Matthews that afternoon when he returned from Starke. “Ottis is telling the truth.”
“Oh yeah?” said Matthews, who could hold his tongue no longer. “Would that have been today he was telling the truth, or the twenty-one other times when he said he did it?”
For Matthews, it wasn’t an accusation, but an honest question. The two of them were in Tallahassee to instruct other detectives in proper investigative methods. Matthews believed that it was vital to understand the difference between listening passively to a statement and a proactive investigative interview, where the questioner, not the subject, controls the agenda. Left to his own devices, a suspect might change his story concerning a crime for any number of reasons.
Jack Hoffman had not found physical evidence that tied Toole to the crime, but there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence that did, and Hoffman had certainly not found any evidence that excluded him from the crime. In the end, it seemed to Matthew, he had simply “decided” that Toole was not involved.
Matthews, on the other hand, felt certain that if Toole were properly interviewed and his responses subjected to polygraph examination, the question of his involvement could be determined once and for all. Not to have done so in all this time seemed simply unfathomable.
Which begged the question as to why Hoffman seemed so dead set against allowing Matthews access to Toole. If Matthews discovered that Toole was in fact being deceptive when he spoke of matters related to the crime, it would only support what Hoffman had apparently chosen to believe long ago. But if Matthews found good reason to believe that Toole was being truthful when he spoke of killing Adam Walsh, it would mean the virtual ruin of a detective who had been unable to make any headway on the most celebrated crime his department had ever encountered. He had staked his career on his steadfast refusal to arrest the only viable suspect who had surfaced during his ten-plus years of investigation, and he still had his job. Why on earth take any chances? Meantime, Adam Walsh’s seventeenth birthday passed in November 1991 without further progress on the case.
As evidence that he was still on the job and willing to pursue any lead, Detective Hoffman at the request of John Walsh traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, in the late summer of 1992, where he interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer, who had been arrested for a series of gruesome murders the previous year. While most of the seventeen killings Dahmer was charged with took place between 1987 and 1991, he had taken his first victim in 1977. Some of his victims were as young as fourteen, and many had been spectacularly tortured, abused, and dismembered. Moreover, when he’d been discharged from the army for alcoholism in 1981, Dahmer had spent some time in Miami Beach. It seemed, at the very least, a lead worth pursuing.
Accordingly, Hoffman interviewed Dahmer in his Wisconsin prison on August 13, 1992. At that time, Dahmer assured Hoffman that he was not involved in the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh. No polygraph examination was administered to Dahmer regarding the case. Hoffman returned to South Florida, advised John Walsh as to what he had found, and recorded the