Adam John Walsh (November 14,1974 – July 27, 1981) was an American boy who was abducted from aSears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida,on July 27, 1981. His severed head was found two weeks later in adrainage canal alongside Highway 60/Yeehaw Junction in rural IndianRiver County, Florida. His death garnered national interest and wasmade into the 1983 television film Adam, seen by 38 million people inits original airing. His father, John Walsh, became an advocate forvictims of violent crimes and was the host of the television programAmerica's Most Wanted and currently, In Pursuit with John Walsh. Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam's murder butwas never convicted for this specific crime due to loss of evidenceand a recanted confession. Toole died in prison of liver failure onSeptember 15, 1996. No new evidence has come to light since then,and police announced on December 16, 2008, that the Walsh case wasclosed, as they were satisfied that Toole was the killer.
Case history
Kidnapping and murder
On the afternoon of July 27, 1981,Adam's mother, Revé, took him shopping with her to the HollywoodMall in Hollywood, Florida (26°00′46″N 80°10′30″W). Theywent together to Sears and entered through the north entrance. Revéintended to inquire about a lamp which was on sale, and left Adam ata kiosk with Atari 2600 video games on display, where several otherboys were taking turns playing them. Revé completed her business inthe lamp department around 12:15 pm. She said that she returned tofind that Adam and the other boys had disappeared. A store managerinformed her that a scuffle had broken out over whose turn it was atthe kiosk, and a security guard demanded that they leave the store. The security guard asked the older boys if their parents were there,and they said that they were not. Adam's parents later conjecturedthat he was too shy to speak to the security guard, who presumed thathe was in the company of the other boys, and as such, the securityguard made him leave by the same door by which the boys entered(which was the Sears west entrance). His parents believe that afterthe other boys dispersed, he was left alone outside the store, at anexit unfamiliar to him. Meanwhile, unable to find Adam in the toydepartment, Revé had him paged over the public-address system andcontinued to look for him throughout the store. By coincidence sheran into his paternal grandmother, Jean, who helped her search forhim. After more than 90 minutes of searching and public-addresspages which failed to locate him, she called the Hollywood Police at1:55 pm.
On August 10, a severed head was foundin a drainage canal alongside the Florida Turnpike near Vero Beach,almost 130 miles from Hollywood, by Detective Ralph E. Latimer Jr.and an unidentified Deputy of Indian River County Sheriff Office. Indian River County and St. Lucie County divers searched the canal. On the morning of August 11, John and Revé appeared on nationaltelevision saying they still hoped that Adam was alive; a $100,000reward had been posted for his safe return. Soon after, therecovered remains were identified as Adam's.
The coroner ruled that the cause ofAdam's death was asphyxiation. The state of the remains suggestedAdam had died several days before the discovery of his head. The restof his body was never recovered.
Investigation
John and Revé personally believed thatthe Hollywood police department botched the treatment of Adam'sdisappearance, first the missing-persons investigation, then theinvestigation into his murder.
After some investigation, policeeventually concluded that Adam was abducted by a drifter named OttisToole near the front exterior of Sears that afternoon, after beinginstructed to leave by a security guard. According to Toole, he luredhim into his white 1971 Cadillac with a damaged right bumper withpromises of toys and candy, then proceeded to drive north onInterstate 95 toward his home in Jacksonville. Adam, at first docileand compliant, began to panic as they drove on. Toole punched him inthe face, but as this just made the situation worse, he then"walloped him unconscious." While he wasunconscious, Toole drove north on the Florida Turnpike to a desertedservice road just north of the Radebaugh Road overpass in northwestSt. Lucie County (27°32′07″N 80°36′35″W). When Toolerealized Adam was still breathing, he strangled him to death with aseat belt, dragged him out of the car, and decapitated him with amachete. Toole also claimed to have disposed of his body byincinerating it in an old refrigerator when he returned toJacksonville. He claimed that he wanted to make him his adopted son,but given the close relationship he had with loving parents, this wasnot very feasible. Determining the source of the blood found in thecar was not possible. The police ultimately lost the bloodstainedcarpet from the car, the machete said to be used to decapitate Adam,and eventually, the car itself. Toole, a confidant of convictedserial killer Henry Lee Lucas, repeatedly confessed and thenretracted accounts of his involvement.
Toole was never charged in Adam's case,although he provided seemingly accurate descriptions as to how hecommitted the crime. Several witnesses also placed him in theHollywood area in the days leading up to Adam's disappearance. InSeptember 1996, he died in prison, aged 49, of cirrhosis whileserving a life sentence for other crimes. Afterwards, his niece toldJohn that he made a deathbed confession to Adam's murder. Hisconfession was viewed as unreliable, since Lucas and he confessed toor implicated themselves in more than 200 different homicides. Mostof Lucas' confessions were later revealed to have been false, havingbeen coerced by the Texas Rangers.
In 1997, Hollywood Police Chief RickStone conducted an exhaustive review of Adam's case after the releaseof John's book. At the time, Stone was a 22-year veteran of theDallas, Texas, and Wichita, Kansas, police departments and had beenappointed Hollywood's chief of police in the previous year. Althoughthe crime happened 16 years before the time of his review, heprovided an analysis of the evidence, including reviewing tapedinterrogations of Toole by Hollywood Police Detective Mark Smith.Stone says his review found evidence "beyond a reasonabledoubt" that Toole murdered Adam. Both Toole and Lucas werenotorious, Stone noted, for confessing to crimes they committed, andthen recanting.
In 2007, allegations earned widespreadpublicity that Jeffrey Dahmer, arrested in Wisconsin in 1991 afterkilling more than a dozen men and boys, was also named as a suspectin Adam's murder. Lionel Dahmer, the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, calledthe AMW hotline not too long after his son's arrest. He said thatwhile his son was never convicted for it, he believed his son was apedophile. He was living in Miami Beach at the time, and twoeyewitnesses placed him at the mall on the day Adam was abducted. Oneclaimed to have seen a strange man walking into the toy department.The other said that he saw a young, blond man with a protruding chinthrow a struggling child into a blue van and speed off. Bothwitnesses recognized the man they had seen as Dahmer when pictures ofhim were released in the newspapers after his arrest. Reports showedthat the delivery shop where he worked had a blue van at the time. Hepreyed on young men and boys (the youngest being eight years olderthan Adam), and his modus operandi included severing his victims'heads. When interviewed about Adam in 1992, he repeatedly deniedinvolvement in the crime, even stating, "I've told youeverything—how I killed them, how I cooked them, who I ate. Whywouldn't I tell you if I did someone else?" After thisrumor surfaced, John stated that he had "seen no evidence"linking Adam's abduction and murder to Dahmer.
On December 16, 2008, Hollywood,Florida Police Chief Chad Wagner, a friend of John's, announced, withhim present, that the case was now closed. An external review of thecase had been conducted and police announced that they were satisfiedthat Toole was the murderer.
Legacy
Children found
The television film Adam premiered onOctober 10, 1983. The film was based on Walsh's kidnapping andmurder, and attracted 38 million viewers on its first airing. Eachof its three broadcasts in 1983, 1984 and 1985 were followed bypictures and descriptions of missing children. A hotline was alsocreated to take calls regarding them. The pictures and hotline wereultimately credited with finding a number of missing children. 13 ofthe 55 children shown in the 1983 broadcast were located. Americanrapper Bizzy Bone, who was abducted by his stepfather as a child, wasreunited with his mother after a neighbor recognized a photo of himshown at the end of the 1983 broadcast.
Laws and organizations for missingchildren
In 1984, the U.S. Congress passed theMissing Children's Assistance Act, owing in part to the advocacy ofthe Walshes and other parents of missing children. It allowed theformation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children(NCMEC).
The Code Adam program for helping lostchildren in department stores is named in Adam's memory. The U.S.Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act onJuly 25, 2006, and President Bush signed it into law on July 27. Thesigning ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House,attended by John and Revé. The bill institutes a national databaseof convicted child molesters, and increases penalties for sexual andviolent offenses against children. It also creates a RICO cause ofaction for child predators and those who conspire with them.
The Adam Walsh Reauthorization Act of2016, which provides budgetary allotments to continue programs passedin the 2006 Act, has as of August 2016 passed the U.S. Senate andawaits consideration by the House.
Societal and psychological effects
The publicity of Adam's case and thewidely watched television movie Adam also created what was describedas a mid-1980s panic over stranger abductions, one out of proportionto their numbers and one which has persisted for decades. RichardMoran, criminologist at Mount Holyoke College: "[The case]created a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents. Kids used tobe able to go out and organize a stickball game, and now allplaydates and the social lives of children are arranged andcontrolled by the parents...the fear still lingers today." Early estimates by the NCMEC would state that as many as 20,000children a year were abducted by strangers, and public service spotsrelayed the perceived danger. A 1985 Pulitzer Prize exposé discusseda "numbers gap" between the claimed number and otherstatistics, such as that the FBI investigated a total of 67abductions by total strangers in 1984. By 1988, even as the NCMEClowered annual estimates of stranger abductions by 80%, "earlyestimates had a life of their own". A 1990 study of childabductions found that 99% of them were family related. In the 15years between 2000 and 2015, the number of missing childrenultimately killed decreased in its own right, attributed partly tothe emergence of technologies such as mobile phones that allow callsfor help.