The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh - 9
Episode 9: Well, if you’re ever going to prosecute a homicide, having an autopsy report does kind of matter
Or start at the series beginning and binge from there: (Link to Episode 1)
In 2014, after viewing the Adam Walsh case file in the District 19 Medical Examiner’s office (which included Indian River County), I asked the then-current Chief M.E., Dr. Roger Mittleman, to confirm that his agency didn’t have Adam’s dental records. I also asked if he would do what Dr. Perper in Broward wouldn’t: reach out to Dr. Berger to see whether he still had the records.
In two email responses he wrote:
Couldn’t Dr. Berger have just said that to David Smiley and me, rather than refusing to even listen to our questions and hanging up?
Next, on the suggestion of one of my go-to guys, a former Florida assistant medical examiner, I filed a rather detailed complaint to the state Medical Examiners Commission alleging that their guidelines were violated because the Walsh files in both the Broward and Indian River M.E. offices did not have an autopsy report. By state statute the current chief medical examiner of each office is the formal custodian of records, so I asked if they might be in violation if indeed the autopsy report was absent. I added, however, that neither current chief medical examiner had seemed to have actively done anything wrong, it seemed they’d inherited the problem.
The Medical Examiners Commission assigned an investigator. He looked but couldn’t find it, either, in either file:
The investigator told me on the phone, in fifteen years of doing this, he’d never before had an issue with an autopsy report not being present.
This isn’t a matter of a file simply missing something. At a homicide trial, before the state can attempt to prove who killed the victim, they have to prove who the victim is. They do that by calling the medical examiner to testify. Usually this is not a big deal. In fact, it’s almost never a big deal.
But had anyone been tried for killing Adam – Ottis Toole, Jeffrey Dahmer, or someone associated with either – or anybody else – it would have been a big deal. In cross-examination, Dr. Wright would have had to explain the absence of a report.
It wouldn’t have gone well. In fact, it would have killed the case.
Which, in fact, the state had never brought.
So this is what they did, in 2008:
The Hollywood Police chief, with the approval of the Broward State Attorney and John Walsh, declared that Ottis Toole killed Adam Walsh. Toole was dead by 2008, so no trial, no proof presented to a grand jury or trial jury, just take our word for it. No need to prove the identification, either, which no one in the public at the time had thought was an issue.
So later, I became the only person out there who asked this question:
Was that child who was found and identified as Adam – really Adam?
In a story full of surprising uncertainties, this is certain:
In the absence of either document or other potentially supporting material either uncollected or not generated, the identification of the found child as Adam cannot be proven.
At the very least, the identification is inconclusive.
Although the manner of death – homicide – is certain, the cause of death has not been proven. Dr. Wright wrote it was asphyxiation but presented no evidence for his conclusion.
The cause of death is actually indeterminate.
And with the evidence missing without explanation and considering attempts to find it elsewhere, the weight of assumption must be that the found child’s teeth did not match Adam’s records.
And therefore the identification is no good.
No bueno.
Was it a mere mistake or overlook that the autopsy report is missing or was never written, and that the dental records are not in evidence?
Anybody buy that?
Further, by not filing an examination report he was supposed to (if not obligated to), Dr. Wright’s official actions suggest that he did not support the identification of the child as Adam.
It also suggests he didn’t seem to want anyone not in the know – to know that.
And who knows who was in the know?
But for the next 27 years, the Hollywood Police spent money and great energy investigating the murder of Adam Walsh, a case they could never bring to trial.
In 1983, anticipating that Toole would be charged with killing Adam Walsh, the Public Defender in Florida’s Nineteenth Judicial Circuit, which included Indian River County, had asked a judge there to appoint him as Toole’s defense counsel. The judge did. Chief Assistant Public Defender Robin Frierson, who handled the office’s capital murder cases, became Toole’s lead attorney.
Frierson and the office investigator spent three days in Jacksonville interviewing Toole.
“I’m almost positive Ottis Toole did not kill that kid,” he told me. “His story changed every day. I remember coming away that this was a winning case for the defense.” When he heard that Hollywood had closed the case, he said to himself, “Got the wrong guy, somebody else killed the kid.”
Frierson said he’d never seen Wright’s autopsy report or the dental records because Toole was never prosecuted for the crime. But yes, had there had been charges, Frierson would have noticed had those documents been absent or incomplete and demanded their production.
What was his opinion of Dr. Cox as a medical examiner?
“The quality of the M.E. office then was poor,” he said. “It was common to bring in another pathologist because they didn’t want to rely on Cox.” Often that was Dr. Wright, in Broward.
I explained to him the problems of Cox’s identification of the found child.
“Oh yeah, sounds like Cox. The office had no rigid protocols. The M.E. would frequently go out of his expertise to give opinions. It doesn’t surprise me. That’s what you got from the M.E. in the Nineteenth Circuit back in the Eighties.” It was a smaller-town place back then, he said.
He was surprised that neither Wright nor Cox had consulted a forensic dentist, or at least that nothing in the files showed it.
“It’s incredible that in a case like this they would not have called a forensic dentist. That’s the only way to ID a decomposed body like that. You’ve got no fingerprints – the case is based on dental records.” It would have taken only an hour to do so, he said.
Frierson, in private practice in western North Carolina when I spoke to him, said he knew Wright well and had even since hired him on cases. He said Wright was the best forensic pathologist he knew and called him “meticulous” and “brilliant.” I’d heard that from others, too.
Another of my go-to guys in this story, who’d also become a friend, is Bob Foley, who in 1981 was the head of the crime-scene unit at the Broward Sheriff’s Office. He said Dr. Wright had called him on the afternoon of the autopsy, to witness it. It was the Hollywood detectives’ responsibility to be there but with everything else going on that day, and that they’d already been at the Vero Beach morgue, they didn’t come. Bob couldn’t go that day, either, he was tied up in another case.
He’s told me he’s since regretted that decision.
When I told Bob that the files were missing autopsy photos, Wright’s autopsy report narrative, Adam’s pediatric dental records, and there was no forensic dental report, he said, “That’s ridiculous. That’s a lot of mistakes.” I told him that in answering my query about the missing narrative report Wright had said he didn’t write it because it was District Nineteen’s case, although he had done the autopsy.
“That’s stupid,” he said.
Before the Miami Herald ran the Missing Autopsy story, we also tried to reach John Walsh. He didn’t return our calls. After the story ran and was reprinted in newspapers up the Florida east coast, we wondered if Walsh would react then. Wouldn’t a parent of a murdered child have raised holy hell after reading there was no autopsy report? Or just dispute the story and say, Of course there’s an autopsy report, we saw it, you’re just wrong.
John and Reve Walsh said…
Nothing.
Nor did Dr. Wright or the Hollywood police chief.
The lead of my Herald stories that Sunday was a comparison of the evidence against Toole versus Dahmer.
A year later, a book co-authored by John Walsh’s investigator insisted that the stronger evidence still pointed to Toole. He also wrote:
A 1986 review of Adam: His Song Continues also had this:
This is also another scene in the sequel, this near the end:
John and his younger brother Joe are relaxing in the backyard of John’s home. Behind them, that’s apparently Reve taking care of infant Callahan:
John: Remember the day we taught Adam to play football?
Joe: How could I possibly forget that? We took him out to the park. With his father, his uncle.
John: I hit him high, you hit him low. Gave him a bloody nose and knocked out a loose tooth in the front of his mouth. (laughing, his eyes closed) He was so excited when he got home. He ran to Reve and screamed with delight, I got a bloody nose and I lost a tooth!
I’ve never found this anecdote elsewhere in the story. Not in Tears of Rage or any interviews John gave over the years.
They were playing with him so roughly that they bloodied his nose and knocked out a front baby tooth? And it was John, who hit him high, in the face, who knocked out the tooth?
Again, what is this scene doing in this movie?
It calls attention to Adam’s front teeth. Is this another breadcrumb – Look at his missing top front teeth. Compare them to the remains – which in 1986 couldn’t be done by anyone outside of law enforcement. Or at that point, maybe ever, had the police photos of the remains never been made a public record.
Or had nobody in the public ever asked to see them.
In the autopsy report story, the Herald left the obvious unsaid. Why? I can speculate that they were already out on a limb with everything else that was in the story: Dahmer, not Toole. Crucial missing files. The Herald went really far, but they would go just so far.
It fell to a supermarket tabloid to say it:
God bless the tabloids. Well, sometimes.
Yeah, the headlines took some liberties, crediting “Experts” in small print, and love those exclamation marks – hey, it’s a tabloid! – but the lead paragraphs were actually on the money:
Now I’ll fill you in on another mystery:
While I was preparing the Herald stories, someone had found me and claimed something cray-cray, something that seemed impossible to prove, certainly not worth the time to do it, and what most anyone else would have brushed off and not responded to.
And in fact, when I told my Herald editor about it, he wouldn’t touch it – not even with a proverbial ten-foot pole. And although he didn’t speak it, his face read, We’re giving this guy (me) the top of a Sunday front page – the best real estate in the newspaper, we’ve checked out everything he’s said and presented so far, and he’s been in the paper before for other local crime story lengthy investigations he’s done – but we don’t really know him and he might be a fucking lunatic.
After the story ran, this accolade appeared in Miami New Times, the alternative weekly, where praise for anything the Herald did was rare (as in, never):
I hit up New Times’s editors for the next installment. I’d written cover crime stories for them, also, in the past, including on the Walsh story. They were about ready to give me the assignment when I said, okay, just so you know in advance, and dropped my cray-cray source.
That pretty much ended our phone call.
Now you see why I’m teasing you like this?
The person had found me on Facebook. It scared me, froze me. Remember the one-in-a-zillion chance that those two guys about to go fishing in the canal would see the head? Or the phone call to Reve in the movie sequel? This felt like that.
I asked my mom, who was then in her nineties and who I was caretaking, what to do. Because my first thought was not to respond. It seemed like trouble, big big trouble, and what did I need that for?
She didn’t flinch. She said, Call him.
Which gave me license to do it.
I did. After talking to him for days, much longer than I anticipated or should have, out of frustration I finally double-dog dared him. I said I’m going to go to the medical examiner’s office and that will prove you’re wrong.
He coolly said I would find a misidentification.
How could he possibly have known that?
My mom was a big reader of mystery detective stories. She raised me on Perry Mason – the original Erle Stanley Gardner books, less so the TV series. Probably to get me to go to law school, which I’m pleased to report, although I came frighteningly close and was accepted at a good one, I ducked at the last moment. (Surprisingly, I had to find Sherlock Holmes on my own.) I think she was thrilled that I was writing real detective stories and had become part of them, and I would talk them out with her. So when I agreed to meet my new friend from Facebook, it wasn’t even a thought that I wouldn’t bring her – she was quite mobile. Besides, I needed the protection.
I’m serious.
When we met him, he wasn’t expecting anyone else. The first thing was, he gave her a big hug. She beamed.
And so did I.
He was okay.
I knew his story would be toxic but I went ahead with it anyway because, as I soon came to realize, it was likely right although I’d probably never be able to prove it. I could prove a lot of things around it, but I’d have to present them really, really well, like with lots of documentation (that would not be easy to get).
Because otherwise, you’d never believe it.
Nor would I.
The first steps were about the identification of the child in the canal.
Do you see now why I was so painstaking about that?
I promise, I’ll tell you more.
But in due course. Later.
Next on Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child:
Part 2: The First Two Weeks
Episode 10: The Day They Found Adam
Keep reading, there’s lots more about this story you had no idea about. And we’re just ending Part 1 of 6. You can subscribe now for FREE to lock in every new episode. But please consider a PAID plan to support my work. (There’s three decades of reporting in here.)
Got to say, I enjoy your writing style!
Was anyone ever able to make a connection between the blue van and John or Reve Walsh? Had John or Reve ever met Toole or Dahmer, prior to the alleged murder of Adam?