The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh - 36
Episode 36: Joe Matthews’s Remarkable Case-Closing, Never-Seen-Before Evidence
Or start at the series beginning and binge from there: (Link to Episode 1)
For my 2010 Miami Herald set of stories, we made additional public records requests. One was for Joe Matthews’s report of his investigation, which Chief Wagner had trumpeted at the 2008 press conference. We wrote:
Months later, Willis Morgan sued Hollywood Police, the Broward State Attorney, and Matthews personally for their failure to produce the document. He wasn’t successful, but Wagner did make an affidavit. He hadn’t responded to the Herald’s request for an interview.
In January 2008, months after Primetime had aired, Wagner became interim chief of police. That month, he said he told John Walsh he planned to close the case, blaming Toole. Soon after, he said, Joe Matthews asked Wagner to meet with him and John Walsh:
Ah. So Matthews had, or expected, a publishing deal. If the Dahmer theory stood, his manuscript would be threatened. As in, trashed. So he had to disprove or at least oppose it, with the Walshes’ support.
Meanwhile, Wagner said he wasn’t interested in reading it, and put him off:
Wagner said it took almost a year before he relented and met with Matthews. It sounded like John Walsh had insisted. But even at their meeting, Wagner sounded rude:
But at the press conference, Wagner hadn’t said anything like that:
Parsing this closely, although Wagner gave Matthews a shout-out, he wasn’t crediting him with solving the case. And oh, and by the way, “the opinions of investigators past” – maybe that might have included Jack Hoffman and Ron Hickman, the case’s original lead investigators? They were not on board with Wagner’s decision.
Matthews, in his book Bringing Adam Home, published in 2011, had a rather different take. He said that in January 2008, at a policemens’ dinner event, he was introduced to Wagner. Matthews said he was hoping to present a finished report to him soon:
Matthews said they met months later:
So between Matthews in his book, and Wagner in his sworn affidavit, we have a discrepancy. Or, charitably, one with a poor memory.
For the news story, we’d also asked Chief Assistant Broward State Attorney Chuck Morton for an interview. He turned us down but sent us a two-page statement. Here he praises Matthews:
Here’s the top of Morton’s letter to us:
I’m just drinking up the snark, Chuck.
He continued by arguing that the Dahmer witnesses came forward long after the crime occurred. Actually, four of the six witnesses at Hollywood Mall said they did quickly go to the police with what they saw but police didn’t write down or at least save their information. Meanwhile, Morton and Matthews didn’t hold the Toole witnesses to the same standard.
What would have sealed the case against Dahmer, Morton implied, would have been his confession:
Come on, Chuck. You wrote this letter three days before the Herald story ran, which might have enlightened you as to some things you didn’t know about the Dahmer evidence. Or you could have sat for an interview, and we would have shown it to you.
And Dahmer had nothing to lose? How about the death penalty? Although John Walsh had agreed not to press for it if Dahmer would have confessed, in Dahmer’s interview transcript there’s no mention that Jack Hoffman had raised that.
Then again, he wasn’t saying that the case against Toole was a clear winner, either:
Yes, those dread concatenations of circumstances, the bane of police work…
It really sucked that Toole was dead in 2008, when Hollywood closed the case. Because if there had been a trial, Willis and I would have worked as closely as possible with Toole’s defense attorneys to disprove the state’s case.
And embarrass the hell out of them, for good measure.
Believe me, if Toole was alive then, there wouldn’t have been a trial.
Matthews’s book was co-written – lead-written, actually – by local author Les Standiford, a professor of creative writing at Florida International University. Dan Christiansen did a bit of fact-checking that Standiford may have neglected. Almost 30 years earlier, for the Fort Lauderdale News, Christiansen had reported on the flight of the DEA-tracked airplane that John Monahan had intended to be on, which crashed in Colorado in 1981. (More on that, later):
Crime scene photos with Adam’s image. What crime scene photos? Had I missed something?
At the end of 2010, I’d heard there were some pre-publication galley copies of Bringing Adam Home out there. In November, Matthews and Standiford did a presentation at the Miami Book Fair, which I went to and found a room where copies were given out, on request. I got two – the second for Willis. The photos had to be public record, and I immediately made a records request to FDLE, which quickly sent them to me.
I’ll show you them in a moment…
In promoting the book Matthews did some interviews:
“The actual image of Adam’s face.” An “indelible icon of certainty after endless police work.” How could FDLE have missed that? Matthews said they’d never printed it from their negatives.
The book said Matthews had found them in 2006. Was that the “actual evidence that no one will ever doubt, for certain,” that he’d told Geoff Martz he had?
I was actually close. I’d asked Geoff to ask Matthews if he’d found the carpet, had it retested, and it showed Adam’s DNA. It wasn’t that, Matthews had said.
Okay, you want to see it? But remember, you asked for it.
Here’s the shot that FDLE sent me:
Can you see it? It’s “as clear as the Shroud of Turin.”
Come on, look again, a little closer. Squint. The blue color is from the spraying of the forensic chemical luminol, which lights up in the presence of blood.
Well, actually, not blood, but metal, like iron, which is a component of blood.
Bringing Adam Home published the picture this way, cropped, with a little orientation help in the corner:
Now you see it? It’s Adam!
In the rest of the package I got from FDLE were other photos. Below are two shots, taken in plain light, not showing the glow of luminol.
Note the two buttons. At bottom is a ruler. This is how I interpret the two shots: On the top is the car’s gray carpet. Below, the carpet has been removed, revealing a rubber scuff mat.
Here, below, is the first shot I showed you – but oriented the same as the two pictures above:
Looks different, no? But flip your screen 90 degrees to the left and you’ll see what Matthews saw. Except that Matthews had cropped it and inexplicably presented its mirror image.
So what did Matthews crop out?
Below is my more generous cropping, and re-orientation of the same image to match the natural light pictures of the foot area:
I see a boot print, heel and sole. The missing middle is the arch.
But maybe I’m just a stick-in-the-mud.
Or a stick-in-the-blood.
Or else it could be the forensic equivalent of a shroud impression of Adam Walsh’s face.
John and Reve wouldn’t speak on camera to ABC for the Primetime story about Dahmer, but four years later they spoke to the network’s Nightline show. The difference, of course, was that we did journalism, and the Walshes were doing book promotion. Reve said:
“To me, it was the one thing a mother knows, is that this is their child, that this picture is their child. This is the piece of evidence that ties everything together for me and I can go to my grave knowing that not only did I do everything I could but that I found my answers in that photo.”
Well, that makes me feel better!
Anybody remember that? A woman in Fort Lauderdale had taken a bite out of her sandwich – a slice of American cheese on white bread – when she realized an image of the blessed virgin mother. Years later, after taking it to casinos for luck – I mean, where else would you take a part-eaten stale grilled cheese sandwich that looked like the Virgin Mary? – she said she won $70,000. She put it up for sale on eBay and sold it for – wait for it – 28 grand! To a casino!
Ohmigod. I was in the room that day, and I can tell you that had the chief shown the press (and the live national TV audience) the “silent scream” image, there would have been a room full of dropped jaws.
And I’d asked Willis not to say anything…
Oh, yeah, and Standiford saw the footprint, too.
On the day both The Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel had published stories questioning Matthews’s book in advance of its publication, I called Ron Hickman and asked if he’d ever seen the Shroud of Turin-like image. It was the first he’d heard anything about it.
In fact, Hickman said, he was there when FDLE took photos of the Cadillac. And no, neither he nor anyone else there saw anything like what Matthews described, which Hickman called “pure conjecture.”
“He’s pulling this stuff out of his butt. This is all baloney, a way to make John Walsh feel good.”
Hickman also pointed out that when he and Hoffman found the Cadillac, it had been more than two years since Adam’s abduction, and the car had changed ownership.
Referring to Toole, he said, “The guy didn’t do it. We all know he didn’t do it.” And it was never more obvious than when Hollywood detectives took Toole to the crime scenes. He said Toole hemmed and hawed at the place where the head was found, and he couldn’t even identify the correct Sears store.
While I had him, I asked whether he’d ever seen Dr. Wright’s autopsy report. “We would have a copy of that” forwarded from the Medical Examiner’s office, he said. When I said it wasn’t in Hollywood’s file, I asked him again, had he ever seen it? No, he hadn’t, he said.
“We don’t think about that stuff in the beginning of the case.” But he added that it would be essential to a prosecution: “You can’t file a case without it.” It must be somewhere, he said, but then I told him it wasn’t in the Broward medical examiner’s file either, or anywhere else.
“That’s very unusual,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Had he seen Adam’s dental records? No.
One last kvetch: The book release was in 2011. It was one thing that Matthews, who’d done such a thorough re-investigation of this homicide case, hadn’t realized (or said) there was no autopsy report anywhere. Mark Smith had written that he couldn’t find it, but it must be in the file somewhere. But Matthews and Standiford had seen my Miami Herald reporting that began on the front page and said in an inside headline that the report was missing:
Say, might they have looked into it? Mentioned it in their book, which they said was the last word on the case? Or said something to the Walshes, who might have been interested?
Next on Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child:
Part 5. Episode 37: The Company You Keep
Three months after Adam disappeared – a mysterious fatal plane crash in the Rockies
Okay, finished now with Jeffrey Dahmer. Next, remember John Monahan? Who the Walshes sent to the morgue to see if he could visually identify Adam? Three months later he was at another morgue, this in Colorado, identifying bodies after a crash of a private plane that he was supposed to be on. FOLLOW, or SUBSCRIBE now for FREE and you won’t miss any new episode.
This story is one heck of a helter-skelter Art! The no autopsy part is what gets me the most. What did they do with it.