The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh - 1
PART 1: Intro and Episode 1: The Adam Walsh TV movies
Welcome. Before we start, let me introduce the first episode – and myself:
I’ve been reporting on the Adam Walsh murder story since 1995. You must be asking, What about a true crime story could possibly have taken 30 years to write?
It’s a sad, famous case, and if you know anything about it, you know that the police closed it in 2008, accusing drifter Ottis Toole of the murder. Adam’s father, TV host John Walsh, agreed, although the case didn’t go to trial because Toole had since died. So what else is left to say?
Well, as you’re about to find out, 30 years worth of reporting:
On a summer day in 1981 in suburban Hollywood, Florida, Mrs. Walsh took 6-year-old Adam to the Sears department store in a mall about a mile from where they lived. Passing the video games display, she let him stay there, by himself. When she came back minutes later he was gone.
A huge search began, and two weeks later, by chance, two men fishing in a drainage canal upstate, in orange grove country, found a child’s head, floating, which was identified as Adam.
After a period of grieving, Adam’s parents channeled their energy into creating awareness that children in America were at unacceptably high risk of similar abductions and murder. In 1987, John Walsh was asked to become the real-life, angry-man host of a new crime-fighting television show called America’s Most Wanted, which under one title or another, has never gone off the air.
If you’ve followed the story, you may have heard all of that.
But here are some questions that you may not have heard asked:
Did Mrs. Walsh leave Adam alone at Sears only for the few minutes that she said?
A medical examiner declared the child’s head found in the canal was Adam. An autopsy was done on the remains. So why is there, nowhere, an autopsy report nor the documents used to make the identification, which would have underpinned a murder trial – had one ever happened?
The Walshes and others repeatedly told America that 50,000 American children a year were kidnapped by strangers, and thousands of them were murdered. They panicked parents, children, and lawmakers. Was that anywhere close to the real numbers?
If Ottis Toole did grab and kill Adam, as he confessed – and then recanted his confession in numerous successions – where was the physical evidence to prove it? And why did police wait to conclude that he did it – with no new evidence – until 25 years after his confessions, which was also a dozen years after his death, which ensured it could never be tested at trial?
The case has these problems and a lot more. There is also another, much better suspect of who took Adam who the police dismissed way too early and wouldn’t revisit, even after seeing other evidence they hadn’t gotten themselves.
And now you’re thinking to ask me, What does John Walsh say about any of this?
Well, I’d like to know, too, because over the years he’s refused or ducked every interview request either I or my news editors and producers have made to him. Meanwhile, with others over the years, John Walsh has done countless interviews about the case.
But mostly I’d like to ask him, and have wanted to ever since I published in The Miami Herald that no autopsy report exists on his son’s remains – Doesn’t that bother you? How do you know for sure that the child found that day is absolutely Adam?
Because other evidence strongly suggests that it isn’t.
DNA, now you’re going to ask me. In 1981, no forensic DNA comparison was done. Fingerprints? The remains were only a head. Visual ID by the parents? The Walshes didn’t go to the morgue when the ID was made, they sent a close friend. Adam’s dental records? Yes, they were used, and documents show the police and two medical examiners offices handled them. They must be in their files – except they’re not. I looked, then asked and asked and asked, and finally got admissions that they weren’t there. No one would say why.
When the police closed the case at their live, nationally-televised news conference in 2008, they didn’t say that the autopsy report and dental records were missing. Did they not know? I’d like to know that, too. Because neither the police, the medical examiner who did the autopsy, nor John Walsh have responded to me.
No one in the press or public had questioned the ID or even thought to check it. Even if the child was Adam, why is that evidence missing? At a murder trial, its absence would have been impossible to get around – it would have killed the case, right upfront. At a trial, when Smith is accused of killing Jones, it’s pro forma to prove that the victim is Jones – and not somebody else. But knowing the proof wasn’t there, no prosecutor would have taken Smith to trial. Or anybody else.
Maybe some of you, as you read through the series, will have more success in getting answers than I’ve had.
Is this enough to get you to start reading?
This story is local to me. I came to Hollywood, Florida, in 1978 to report for its now long-since defunct daily newspaper. It took me another ten years before I started writing about crime here. Not statistics, not police reports, but stories of investigation. We have great public records laws in Florida; it’s called Government in the Sunshine. In other states these kinds of stories could not be done as well.
Just for the asking, for closed police cases, there are troves of material available, but nobody else I know of takes advantage quite the way I do. I also collect all the published news stories about them, yet all that’s just my baseline. From there I do my own investigations, going in some different directions than detectives and reporters did. And then I make more records requests, targeted, in other places.
I don’t work for defense attorneys or the police or even a news organization, just for myself. When I have a story that can make news, I publish it somewhere – newspapers, magazines, TV show segments, in books, and online. I make a lot of friends – and the opposite of friends, it kind of goes with the territory. If I’m wrong about something, I’m always open to anyone who can convince me. And then I’ll change it.
But when you slam the door in my face – that doesn’t change my mind. Instead, you’ve called attention to yourself and challenged me to find another way inside the door.
Reporting and researching this story for 30 years, I could never anticipate what would come next or in which new direction it would spin me, nearly everything that happened was an utter surprise. Shaking my head, rolling my eyes, and finally laughter happened involuntarily, often. It’s no different than in comedy; simply, punch lines get you because you’re not expecting them. And comedy can accelerate to the absurd, which is something you’re not expecting – on steroids.
The Adam Walsh story is True Crime on steroids.
This is a documentary but not in video. You’ll see actual documents and photos and drawings I’ve collected during all this time from public records, and clips of published material mostly in newspapers. I narrate to and through these documents, so you can see and read what I’ve seen.
I think that’s more convincing than just quoting from them.
Now get ready for a long haul. This is not a short story – it’s a long story, told in a series of short stories. I’ve broken it up into (what at this moment is) 58 episodes, to be delivered once a week, on Sunday mornings. They’re each long, until you finish them and then they’ll have seemed short.
So like I have, you’re going to live in this story.
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Now, a few words of wisdom about True Crime (from 35 years of writing it):
The Allure
Death fascinates us. But talking about it is a taboo.
Instead, everything else we talk about is a distraction.
In murder cases – that is, unnatural deaths – the police need to know, Who? – Who did it?
I’m different, I’m a journalist and a storyteller. I need to know –
Why? Why did death have to come when it did?
The Process
True Crime stories are huge puzzles, but the puzzle box never comes with a picture or all the puzzle pieces.
The challenge for investigators – and audiences – is to evaluate each piece and decide how it might fit. But investigators also look for pieces the box didn’t come with. Finding them can mean that all the other pieces may no longer fit where they thought they did.
The biggest danger is when investigators say they’ve got enough of the pieces and stop looking for more. Because when they get more anyway, they may realize their conclusion was wrong.
And then what? Do they just shut the door?
Because in every true crime book and story I’ve written – that’s what they’ve done.
If you like puzzles, there’s nothing like a good True Crime story.
A really good True Crime story.
Ready? Let’s do it!
This one, The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child – doesn’t start with a bang:
Part 1: In war, and perhaps True Crime, the first casualty is the truth
Episode One: The Adam Walsh TV movies
In 1981, 6-year-old Adam Walsh’s mom took him to a mall. He disappeared, a huge police and community search didn’t find him, and she and his dad and everyone who knew him never saw him alive again.
But is any other conclusion in this story actually true?
This is a 30-year deep dive investigation that no one closely involved in the story seems to want you to know.
Hmmmm
In 1983, two years later, NBC aired a tug-at-the-heartstrings, based-on-the-true-story dramatized movie of the week simply titled “Adam.” It wasn’t about Adam’s inner life or his childhood triumphs, or hardly anything at all about who he was. He was off-screen long before the end of the first act. It was about his shocking murder:
38 million on-air viewers saw it. At its core, it was about fear. Adam’s mom said she left him alone for just a few minutes in the toy department in Sears, a mile from their home in Hollywood, Florida. He knew the store – they’d been there countless times before.
If a place like Sears wasn’t safe for a child – was anywhere in America safe?
In the week before the premiere air date, the network ran a 20-second promo:
At home, dad John Walsh playfully lifts Adam as mom Reve prepares breakfast.
Voiceover: “They were a loving, happy family until their son disappeared.”
In a mall, Reve, now panicked and breathless, runs toward a distracted security guard.
Reve: “I’ve searched the whole mall and I can’t find him.”
Voiceover: “Every parent’s fear becomes the movie you must see.”
In the deepening dusk, John calls, “Adam!”
A card shows the movie’s title and air date.
Two weeks after Adam disappeared, after an all-out police and community search, a human child’s head was seen floating in a remote highway-side drainage canal, upstate. It was just a head, it had been severed and was decomposing in the August Florida heat. For the two men who saw it, by complete happenstance, it must have been a grotesque and unreal sight. The chances of it being spotted were maybe one in a million; it hadn’t been up for long, there were no bugs or lice on it, so it was likely that their boat motor had stirred the water and raised it to the surface.
Just as likely, had they not seen it, it wouldn’t have stayed on the surface much longer, instead dropping to the murky canal bottom, never to be suspected.
Police divers searched for the rest of the body but never found it, so no fingerprint match could be done. As this was 1981, forensic DNA comparisons were not yet available. Instead, the child was identified from pediatric dental records and a visual identification based on a new, just-erupted adult top front tooth in its mouth.
It was Adam.
You saw the baseball cap in the movie poster. In the Spring before he disappeared, Adam played in an organized T-ball league for 6- and 7-year-olds. This is the real Adam’s posed photograph, taken by a studio photographer who came out to the field after a game. You may recognize it:
Notice his sweaty hair; it was a hot early summer day in South Florida. In the late afternoon the sky behind him had turned dark, a thunderstorm was coming, and the photographer remembered he had to move the camera setup under a canopy.
He wears the team T-shirt – white with blue, teal, and orange – mostly Miami Dolphins colors – and a matching orange cap with a C on it. Look really close and see an orange wristband.
Something like this should have been in the movie: a measure of Adam’s life for himself, not just as an appendage of his family. The movie was dramatized, so I did the same here, but based on my reporting:
Sitting for his portrait, asked to smile, Adam reveals a six-year-old’s embarrassment: not one, but both his top front baby teeth are missing. After he steps away, his teammate and friend Frankie teases him, “If I were you, I wouldn’t smile so much.”
Which cracks Adam up.
On the field for the game, Adam is the smallest on the team. He’s playing right field, where coaches stick the kids who don’t know how to play, the furthest from the action so as to do the least damage. As he stands, bored, we can better see the team T-shirt’s logo: an outline of a sailboat. The sponsoring company’s name on the shirt is Campbell Rentals.
The bleacher benches are almost empty. Striking to our current sensibilities, parents haven’t come to see the game. They let the kids play alone and have a good time.
T-ball doesn’t have pitchers; the fielders are placed on the infield grass a little beyond the pitcher’s mound. The bases are also on the grass, it’s like a mini ball field within a ball field. Frankie plays third.
At home plate, a batter steps up to a plastic tee, where the umpire places the baseball so it’s in the hitter’s strike zone. A strong hitter takes a whack —
– and hits the ball hard, easily past the second baseman – and into (oh no!) right field —
– toward Adam, surprised, dreading, and confused as to what to do.
As by now we’re expecting, he makes an awful lunge at the ball, which passes him as he falls down.
Coach Jimmy Campbell watches: Ucch! Ucch!
Runners advance around the bases. Adam catches up to the ball, since stopped, and throws, meekly – towards nobody. Of course, the runners and the hitter score, and celebrate, at the expense of the team in the field.
Next inning, and Adam is up. He’s too short, and for him the tee is too high – it’s above his strike zone – and when he swings, wildly, he misses the ball but clubs the tee. The ball drops and dribbles, forward, at least. Adam is unsure what to do. The fielders are playing it – Frankie yells, Run, Adam!
So Adam does, chased by the catcher. Adam has enough head start so the catcher has to throw to first base, but the throw glances off Adam’s shoulder and rolls past the first baseman. Frankie yells, Keep running! But Adam freezes at first base.
Still, Adam is really pleased. He got a hit! Loosening, he calls, Drive me in, Frankie!
Frankie is the next hitter, and he’s a bigger boy. With a lot of confidence and a little knowledge of baseball mythology, as he approaches the tee he points high in the air to where he’s going to hit the ball – right field, same as where Adam had played. Adam calls back, Yeah, the right fielder stinks!
Home run! Frankie calls.
Yeah, Babe Ruth!, Adam teases.
Frankie does slug the ball, into the outfield.
Adam is slow to start running, and the bases are close together, so Frankie quickly catches up with him.
Run! Frankie urges. Adam is in front of him by only a step, Frankie trails, and they round second base as the ball is still being chased.
Go! Frankie is careful not to overtake Adam, and as they approach third, he yells, “It’s a home run! Keep going!”
Approaching home, Frankie yells, Slide! Adam does, too early. Slide again! He makes home plate, followed by Frankie, who slides into Adam, shoving him off the plate.
Safe! Calls the umpire.
Still on the dirt around home plate, Adam beams, I scored a run!
They’re both laughing, together.
As Adam stands up, brushing some of the dirt off his shorts and shirt, he tells Frankie, I’ll never be as good as you.
Frankie answers, You’ll hit home runs. You’ll get there.
Adam gives him a dubious look, We’ll see.
Another three years later, in 1986, NBC aired a movie sequel, Adam: His Song Continues, about how Adam’s parents John and Reve Walsh had channeled their shock and grief into creating national awareness that what had happened to Adam had also happened to other children and their parents in America. Largely through John’s force of will, reluctant legislators passed national and local laws to help other victims. Both movies, with well-known actors Daniel J. Travanti playing John and JoBeth Williams as Reve, lionize the courage of the couple.
But this documentary you are reading is not about that. The two movie stories, although about a murder, are not actually True Crime stories. They’re not based on journalism, they’re dramatizations based on the family’s story.
This documentary story is a True Crime story. It’s an investigation – of the investigation – into the murder of Adam Walsh.
And surprise, it’s not the story you’re expecting.
Next on The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child
Link to Episode 2:
In the movie sequel, after her husband had just called, Mrs. Walsh gets a call she wasn’t expecting:
Reve: Did you forget something?
Sincere-sounding mature female caller: Oh, no. We’re the family that’s raising Adam now.
What is that scene doing in this movie?
You gotta keep reading, right? We’re just getting started, there’s way more to come. To get new episodes, subscribe for FREE. To support my work, please consider a PAID plan.
#true crime, #truecrime, #cold case, #unsolved mystery, #unsolved murder, #missing children, #Jeffrey Dahmer
I backed up and decided to start from the beginning to get caught up . I will definitely take this to AI. It sounds very suspicious to me. I might have questions but will let you know if and when that time happens. The father seems really suspicious in this too. Looks like someone wanted $$$ a payday.