Murder of Adam Walsh

Adam John Walsh was an American boy who was abducted from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida, on July 27, 1981. His severed head was found two weeks later in a drainage canal off of the Florida Turnpike. His death earned national publicity. His story was made into the 1983 television film Adam, seen by 38 million people in its original airing. His father, John Walsh, became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and the host of the television program America's Most Wanted. Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam's murder, but was never convicted for this specific crime due to loss of evidence and a recanted confession. Toole died in prison of liver failure on September 15, 1996. Although no new evidence has come forth, on December 16, 2008, police announced that the Walsh case was closed as they were satisfied that Toole was the murderer. Case history- Kidnapping and murder: On the afternoon of July 27, 1981, Revé, Adam's mother, took him shopping with her to the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida (26°00′46″N 80°10′30″W). They went together to the Sears store and entered via the north entrance. Revé intended to inquire about a lamp which was on sale, and left Adam at a kiosk with Atari 2600 video games on display where several other boys were taking turns playing games. Revé completed her business in the lamp department at approximately 12:15 pm. She said that she returned to find that Adam and the other boys had disappeared. A store manager informed her that a scuffle had broken out over whose turn it was at the kiosk and a security guard demanded that they leave the store. The security guard asked the older ones if their parents were there, and they said that they were not. It was later conjectured by Adam's parents that he was too shy to speak to the security guard, who presumed that he was in the company of the other boys, and as such the security guard made him leave by the same door as them (which was the Sears west entrance). His parents believe that after the other boys dispersed, Adam was left alone outside the store, at an exit unfamiliar to him. Meanwhile, unable to find Adam in the toy department after returning from the lamp department, Revé had Adam paged over the Sears public address system and continued to look for him throughout the store. She eventually by coincidence ran into Adam's grandmother Jean inside the store, who helped her search for her son. After more than 90 minutes of fruitless searching and public address pages which failed to turn up Adam, she called the Hollywood Police at 1:55 pm. Two weeks after his disappearance, Adam's severed head was found on the evening of August 10, 1981. It was discovered by two fishermen in a drainage canal alongside the Florida Turnpike near Vero Beach, Florida (27°33′35″N 80°39′47″W), almost 130 miles from Hollywood. The Florida Highway Patrol was informed of the discovery at 7:30 pm on August 10. Indian River County and St. Lucie County divers searched the canal. On the morning of August 11, as Hollywood, Florida police rushed dental records to Vero Beach to compare them to the found remains, John and Revé Walsh appeared on the national news program Good Morning America. On the program, the Walshes said that they were still clinging to hope that their son was alive; a $100,000 reward had been posted for his safe return. The recovered remains were positively identified as those of Adam Walsh shortly after the Walshs' Good Morning America appearance, and the confirmation made national news headlines. Using the recovered head, the coroner ruled that the cause of Adam Walsh's death was asphyxiation and that the decapitation had occurred after death, perhaps to render his remains unidentifiable. The state of the remains suggested that Adam's death had occurred several days before the discovery of his head. The rest of Adam Walsh's body has never been recovered. Investigation: John and Revé Walsh personally believed that the Hollywood police department botched the treatment of their son's disappearance, first the missing persons investigation, then the investigation into his murder. After some investigation, police eventually concluded that Adam was abducted by a drifter named Ottis Toole near the front exterior of the Sears that afternoon, after being instructed to leave by a security guard. He lured Adam into his white 1971 Cadillac with a damaged right bumper with promises of toys and candy, then proceeded to drive north on Interstate 95 toward his home in Jacksonville. Adam, at first docile and compliant, began to panic as they drove on. Toole punched him in the face, but as this just made the situation worse, he then "walloped him unconscious". While Adam was knocked out, Toole drove north on the Florida Turnpike to a deserted service road just north of the Radebaugh Road overpass in northwest St. Lucia County (27°32′07″N 80°36′35″W),[12] and raped him for around two hours. When Toole realized Adam was still breathing, he strangled him to death with a seat belt, dragged him out of the car, and decapitated him with a machete. Toole later claimed to have disposed of Adam's body by incinerating it in an old refrigerator when he returned to Jacksonville. He drove around with Adam's severed head in his car for a few days until remembering it was in there, and then threw it into a canal, just north of where he said he killed Adam. He claimed that he wanted to make Adam his adopted son, but given the close relationship he had with loving parents, this was not very feasible. The police ultimately lost the bloodstained carpet from Toole's Cadillac, the machete used to decapitate Adam, and eventually, the car itself. DNA testing was in a rudimentary state in the early 1980s and it was not possible then to determine the source of the blood found in the Cadillac. Toole, allegedly a confidant of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, repeatedly confessed and then retracted accounts of his involvement. Toole was never charged in the Walsh case, although he provided seemingly accurate descriptions as to how he committed the crime. Several witnesses also placed him in the Hollywood area in the days leading up to Adam's disappearance. In September 1996, he died in prison, aged 49, of cirrhosis while serving a life sentence for other crimes. Afterwards, his niece told John that her uncle made a deathbed confession to the murder of Adam. His confession was viewed as reliable, since he and Lucas confessed to or implicated themselves in more than 200 different homicides, most of which they accurately described with details only the culprit would know. In 1997, Hollywood Police Chief Rick Stone conducted an exhaustive review of the Adam Walsh case after the release of John Walsh's book. At the time, Stone was a 22-year veteran of the Dallas, Texas, and Wichita, Kansas, police departments and had been appointed Hollywood's chief of police in the previous year. Although the crime was 16 years old at the time of Chief Stone's review, he provided an analysis of the evidence, including reviewing taped interrogations of Toole by Hollywood Police Detective Mark Smith. Stone says his review found evidence to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Toole murdered Adam. Both Toole and his close friend, convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, were notorious, Stone noted, for confessing to crimes they committed and recanting. In 2007, allegations earned widespread publicity that Jeffrey Dahmer, arrested in Wisconsin in 1991 after killing more than a dozen men and boys, was also named as a suspect in Adam's murder. He was living in Miami Beach at the time Adam was murdered, and two eyewitnesses placed him at the shopping mall on the day Adam was abducted. One of the witnesses claimed to have seen a strange man walking into the toy department where Adam was abducted. The other said that he saw a young, blond man with a protruding chin throw a struggling child into a blue van and speed off. Both witnesses recognized the man they had seen as Dahmer when pictures of him were released in the newspapers after his arrest. Reports showed that the delivery shop where he worked had a blue van at the time. He preyed on young men and boys (the youngest being eight years older than Adam), and his modus operandi included severing his victims' heads. When interviewed about Adam in the early 1990s, he repeatedly denied involvement in the crime, even stating; "I've told you everything—how I killed them, how I cooked them, who I ate. Why wouldn't I tell you if I did someone else?" After this rumor surfaced, John Walsh stated that he had "seen no evidence" linking his son's kidnapping and murder to Dahmer. On December 16, 2008, Hollywood, Florida, Police Chief Chad Wagner, a friend of John, announced, with him present, that the case was now closed. An external review of the case had been conducted and police announced that they were satisfied that Ottis Toole was the murderer. Legacy- Children found: The 1983 television film Adam was created based on Adam's story, and had 38 million viewers on its first airing. Each of its the three broadcasts (1983, 1984, 1985) were followed by pictures and descriptions of missing children. A hotline was also active to take calls regarding the children. The pictures and hotline was ultimately credited with finding at least 37 missing children. American rapper Bizzy Bone, who was abducted by his step-father as a child, was reunited with his mother after a neighbor recognized a photo of him shown at the end of the 1983 broadcast. Laws and organizations for missing children: In 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Missing Children's Assistance Act, owing in part to the advocacy of the Walshes and other parents of missing children. The act allowed the formation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The Code Adam program for helping lost children in department stores is named in Adam's memory. The U.S. Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act on July 25, 2006, and President Bush signed it into law on July 27. The signing ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House, attended by John and Revé. The bill institutes a national database of convicted child molesters, and increases penalties for sexual and violent offenses against children. It also creates a RICO cause of action for child predators and those who conspire with them. The Adam Walsh Reauthorization Act of 2016, which provides budgetary allotments to continue programs passed in the 2006 Act, has as of August 2016 passed the U.S. Senate and awaits consideration by the House. John Walsh: Adam's kidnapping and murder prompted John to become a long term advocate for victims' rights. As a result of his outspoken advocacy, John was approached to host the television program America's Most Wanted, which he did for 25 seasons. Walsh's work on the show has seen over 1,000 fugitives captured and imprisoned. Societal and psychological effects: The publicity of the Adam Walsh case and the widely watched television movie Adam also created what was described as a mid-1980s panic over stranger abductions, one out of proportion to their numbers and one which has persisted for decades. Richard Moran, criminologist at Mount Holyoke College: "The case created a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents. Kids used to be able to go out and organize a stickball game, and now all playdates and the social lives of children are arranged and controlled by the parents...the fear still lingers today." Early estimates by the NCMEC would state that as many as 20,000 children a year were abducted by strangers, and public service spots relayed the perceived danger. A 1985 Pulitzer Prize exposé discussed a "numbers gap" between the claimed number and other statistics, such as that the FBI investigated a total of 67 abductions by total strangers in 1984. By 1988, even as the NCMEC lowered annual estimates of stranger abductions by 80%, "early estimates had a life of their own". A 1990 study of child abductions found that 99% of them were family related. In the 10–15 years between 2000 and 2015, the number of missing children ultimately killed has been decreasing in its own right, attributed partly to new technologies like mobile phones that allow calls for help.