Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [99]
In the aftermath of this disclosure, an angry Walsh went immediately to Michael Satz, head of the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, to plead that Satz intervene. If the state attorney announced imminent plans to bring a suspect to trial, then it would be a good bet no judge would allow potential evidence to be revealed in public. Walsh begged Satz to review the case file, and asked for an explanation why no one in all this time had been willing to prosecute a case against Ottis Toole.
What Satz had to say in response floored Walsh. There was a simple reason why the case had not gone forward, Satz said. Since the day in 1983 when Chief Martin of the Hollywood Police Department had announced that Ottis Toole was their prime suspect in the case, not a shred of evidence had been presented to Satz’s office. In fact, the HPD hadn’t shared its full case file on the investigation until just five days ago, Satz said.
Walsh shook his head in disbelief. And what did Satz think about the extortion letter in that file—the one that Toole had sent to him, offering to lead Walsh to where Adam’s body had been buried for $50,000? Satz had no idea what Walsh was referring to—there was no such letter in the file that had recently been presented to him.
When Walsh showed Satz the letter that described his son as crying for his mother as Toole had sodomized him, the state attorney was stunned. He set the letter aside and stood to apologize to Walsh. Of course his office had been insistent that Hoffman and his team present evidence linking Toole to the crime back in the 1980s, but what he had just read was all a competent attorney needed, Satz said.
“I could get a jury conviction on the strength of this letter alone,” he told Walsh.
Furthermore, he said, his office would intervene immediately to prevent the opening of the case files to the media on the grounds that a prosecution against Ottis Toole was now imminent, and that opening the evidence to the public would compromise the prosecution’s ability to prove its case against Toole.
On February 16, 1996, a hearing was set on the matter, with Revé Walsh present to add a personal plea. But Judge Moe would not allow her to speak—he wanted no appeals to emotion in his court, he explained. And then, after listening to brief presentations by both sides, he issued his order. The case file would be released.
With every detail known to investigators—including all crime scene photos—now a part of the public record, the possibility of ever corroborating any future confession against matters known only to police ended.
Yet, whatever hopes the media might have had as to their own analysis of the case files, they came to very little. There was no “hidden” evidence concerning John Walsh’s ties to the Mafia, nor was there any suggestion that he had meddled with the investigation of the Hollywood police in any way, though the spectacular lack of progress might well have warranted it.
There was a brief flurry of indignation when reporters realized that key evidence—the bloody carpet samples taken from Toole’s Cadillac, as well as the car itself—had been lost. As to that matter, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was quick to deflect responsibility onto the Hollywood PD. No evidentiary hold had been placed upon the car by the principal investigators, the sheriff’s office said, so they were only following proper procedure in returning the car to its owner, Wells Brothers Used Cars. As far as the carpet samples were concerned, the sheriff admitted having destroyed them, but again, that was normal procedure for dealing with what were reclassified as “non-evidentiary materials”—since the original testing was inconclusive, no one had seen any point in keeping them. As to what had become of the sections of the floor carpets that had not been tested, no one could be