Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [93]
It was in that way, then, that Joe Matthews found himself plucked from the ranks of the beat cops to become part of a task force that one day would be dispatched to a stakeout at the Shoreham Hotel and from there to any number of other incidents that would propel him upward through the ranks. From task force, to detective bureau, to sergeant. From homicide investigator, to polygraph expert, to Dade County Cop of the Year, and ultimately to involvement with the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh. Flap, flap, flap.
Hollywood, Florida—August 16, 1994
Despite his “reservations” about the motives of Joe Matthews, Detective Smith proceeded with his work on the Adam Walsh case, albeit at a deliberate pace. He met with Harry O’Reilly, the retired NYPD homicide detective who had put the department back in touch with Matthews, and Smith and O’Reilly traveled to the spot off Florida’s Turnpike where Toole originally said he’d disposed of Adam’s head and body, to determine whether or not O’Reilly thought it might be worth conducting a second concerted search for remains. O’Reilly doubted that there was anything to be accomplished by such an undertaking, but he did return from the trip with a real concern: he called Joe Matthews to tell him about the foray, wondering why Smith had not asked Matthews to join them, a point at which Matthews realized that whatever might eventuate from his collaboration with Smith, the two were certainly not functioning as true partners.
Not until the following January did Smith take his next significant step, telephoning John Walsh to seek approval to get a DNA baseline sample using Adam’s mandible as a source. A few days later, Smith wrote a memo to his superiors indicating that it had been suggested that he send hair samples from the victim, along with the bloody machete and bloodstained sheath and a sample of the carpet taken from the Cadillac, for DNA comparison testing.
Smith then called the FDLE, looking for the carpet samples that they had tested a dozen years before. But those had been sent back to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office long ago, Smith was told, and accordingly, on January 17, 1995, he drove to Jacksonville to search the sheriff’s evidence room for the carpet samples and try and discover the whereabouts of the vehicle itself.
What he discovered was disheartening, to say the least. Records showed that the Cadillac’s floorboard carpets and the seven squares tested for blood had been received by the sheriff’s property room on May 24, 1984, signed for with the initial “J.” Whether the J stood for Jack Hoffman or Jacksonville, no one could say. Whatever had happened to the carpet samples once they arrived at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, only one thing was certain: eleven years later, they were nowhere to be found.
As for the car itself, Smith learned, it was sold to a dealer at auction, purchased by a man from St. Augustine, then—when it finally stopped running a half-dozen years or more before—towed to a junkyard and scrapped. Smith, distressed at such sloppy handling of key evidence in the case, filed a complaint with the FDLE, but it went nowhere.
As for the machete and its sheath, those items remained in the possession of the Hollywood PD, and Smith forwarded them for testing. Once again, the results were not what he or Matthews hoped for. Though testing on those items performed by FDLE serologist James Pollack in 1983 had confirmed the presence of small amounts of blood, the laboratory to which they were sent for DNA testing in 1995 could find no blood anywhere. “As a result of that, no additional comparisons were made,” the technician advised.
While that scarcely qualified as good news, Matthews moved forward. Following ten months of effort, he was finally able to arrange an interview with Ottis Toole, scheduled for June 20, 1995. Though by this time Toole had adopted a newly stated policy that he would not grant any interviews to law enforcement officials investigating