Adam John Walsh (November 14, 1974 – July 27, 1981) 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 alongside Highway 60 / Yeehaw Junction in rural Indian River County, Florida. His death garnered national interest and 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 was the host of the television program America’s Most Wanted and currently, In Pursuit with John Walsh. 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. No new evidence has come to light since then, and police announced on December 16, 2008, that the Walsh case was closed, as they were satisfied that Toole was the killer.
Case history
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Kidnapping and murder
On the afternoon of July 27, 1981, Adam’s mother, Revé, took him shopping with her to the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida (26°00′46″N 80°10′30″W). They went together to Sears and entered through 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 them. Revé completed her business in the lamp department around 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 boys if their parents were there, and they said that they were not. Adam’s parents later conjectured 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 by which the boys entered (which was the Sears west entrance). His parents believe that after the other boys dispersed, he was left alone outside the store, at an exit unfamiliar to him. Meanwhile, unable to find Adam in the toy department, Revé had him paged over the public-address system and continued to look for him throughout the store. By coincidence she ran into his paternal grandmother, Jean, who helped her search for him. After more than 90 minutes of searching and public-address pages which failed to locate him, she called the Hollywood Police at 1:55 pm.
On August 10, a severed head was found in 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 national television saying they still hoped that Adam was alive; a US$100,000 (equivalent to $281,223 in 2019) reward had been posted for his safe return. Soon after, the recovered remains were identified as Adam’s.
The coroner ruled that the cause of Adam’s death was asphyxiation. The state of the remains suggested Adam had died several days before the discovery of his head. The rest of his body was never recovered.
Investigation
John and Revé personally believed that the Hollywood police department botched the treatment of Adam’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 Sears that afternoon, after being instructed to leave by a security guard. According to Toole, he lured him 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 he was unconscious, Toole drove north on the Florida Turnpike to a deserted service road just north of the Radebaugh Road overpass in northwest St. Lucie County (27°32′07″N 80°36′35″W). 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 also claimed to have disposed of his body by incinerating it in an old refrigerator when he returned to Jacksonville. He claimed that he wanted to make him his adopted son, but given the close relationship he had with loving parents, this was not very feasible. Determining the source of the blood found in the car was not possible. The police ultimately lost the bloodstained carpet from the car, the machete said to be used to decapitate Adam, and eventually, the car itself. Toole, a confidant of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, repeatedly confessed and then retracted accounts of his involvement.
Toole was never charged in Adam’s 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 he made a deathbed confession to Adam’s murder. His confession was viewed as unreliable, since Lucas and he confessed to or implicated themselves in more than 200 different homicides. Most of Lucas’ confessions were later revealed to have been false, having been coerced by the Texas Rangers.
In 1997, Hollywood Police Chief Rick Stone conducted an exhaustive review of Adam’s case after the release of John’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 happened 16 years before the time of his 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 “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Toole murdered Adam. Both Toole and Lucas were notorious, Stone noted, for confessing to crimes they committed, and then 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. Lionel Dahmer, the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, called the AMW hotline not too long after his son’s arrest. He said that while his son was never convicted for it, he believed his son was a pedophile. He was living in Miami Beach at the time, and two eyewitnesses placed him at the mall on the day Adam was abducted. One claimed to have seen a strange man walking into the toy department. 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 1992, 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 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, 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 Toole was the murderer.
Legacy
Children found
The television film Adam premiered on October 10, 1983. The film was based on Walsh’s kidnapping and murder, and attracted 38 million viewers on its first airing. Each of its three broadcasts in 1983, 1984 and 1985 were followed by pictures and descriptions of missing children. A hotline was also created to take calls regarding them. The pictures and hotline were ultimately credited with finding a number of missing children. 13 of the 55 children shown in the 1983 broadcast were located. American rapper Bizzy Bone, who was abducted by his stepfather 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. It 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, was incorporated into H.R. 5578: Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act of 2016 and was enacted and signed by President Obama on October 7, 2016.
Societal and psychological effects
The publicity of Adam’s 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: ” 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 15 years between 2000 and 2015, the number of missing children ultimately killed decreased in its own right, attributed partly to the emergence of technologies such as mobile phones that allow calls for help.