Link to Episode 31: 20 days before Adam disappeared, Jeffrey Dahmer found a dead body behind the dumpster where he worked in Miami Beach. What bad luck! Years later, for the police, he didn’t remember it. Except that, yeah, he did.
Or start at the series beginning and binge from there: (Link to Episode 1)
Geoff Martz and ABC correspondent Chris Cuomo interviewed Mark Smith. I wasn’t there, but Geoff told me what Smith said, including exchanges that eventually weren’t aired:
Smith said that Hollywood had re-interviewed Morgan and Bowen, but when Cuomo challenged him, Smith answered, “Well, maybe we didn’t.”
Cuomo asked, Did you tell John Walsh you fully re-investigated the Dahmer possibility after Art Harris gave you his information? Smith answered, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have said that.”
They did use this, when Cuomo showed Smith the Dahmer police report:
He hadn’t seen it before, even though I’d sent it to Chuck Morton.
“It’s interesting,” he said, “I mean, it’s quite ironic.”
Oh, the irony. As in, possibly, it’s ironic that all these leads go to Jeffrey Dahmer, who we know didn’t do it because we’ve long ago eliminated him as a suspect.
Well, we hadn’t actually eliminated him, Smith sort of backtracked, but he still wasn’t impressed enough to want to go inside the meter room for himself. Not even after they played him tape of us inside the room.
By the last week of July, ABC set the show to run on Tuesday, August 7, with network promos to begin on August 1 or 2. Geoff was expecting that on the morning of August 7 I would appear on Good Morning America, and ABC-affiliate local news shows that evening would also get a promo tie-in package.
What had been saved for last was an interview with John Walsh. But Walsh said he first wanted to speak with Joe Matthews.
On July 28, a Saturday, Geoff spoke to Matthews. He said he’d worked the last year for America’s Most Wanted and can prove that Ottis Toole killed Adam. He wouldn’t detail what he had, but said he could prove that Toole had been in South Florida.
I thought back to this quote from Mark Smith a year before:
And as well, Geoff told me, during Smith’s on-camera interview with Chris Cuomo, he said he couldn’t rule out either Toole or Dahmer.
On Sunday night, Geoff told me that Walsh had agreed to do an interview – on the condition that Joe Matthews would also be interviewed and would present the Toole theory.
We discussed it. Apparently Matthews and Walsh hadn’t gone to Hollywood Police to present their information, or it hadn’t convinced them, but they wanted to break at least some of it on ABC. I said, they’re willing to tell it now, on the occasion of the airing of competing evidence?
Besides, Walsh wasn’t asking about what we had. Was this about ownership of a story – or what had happened to a little boy, long ago?
On Monday, July 30, while Geoff was editing the final version of the show, I sent him a long email outlining the case against Toole. Then I presented questions to ask Matthews:
That is, did Matthews in his own investigation have something Hollywood didn’t have?
I mean, I had a ton of stuff Hollywood didn’t have – or think they had.
Had Matthews somehow found the carpet, had it retested, and gotten a confirmed positive match with Adam? That would be spectacular – no, fucking spectacular – and I would then concede that the killer was Toole.
A parking ticket; that wouldn’t be fucking spectacular but still good corroborating evidence. In 1983 Jack Hoffman had checked all sorts of agencies to trace whether Toole had been here, but his notes about parking enforcement records were incomplete. In 1997 I’d asked Hoffman about it – he hadn’t found any tickets.
I’d already written a magazine cover story that Phil Mundy believed that Mary H. (Mary Hagan) as a witness at the mall was definitive proof that Toole was there. But by the end of my interviews with him, even Mundy had to agree that her statements weren’t that good.
Geoff wrote back:
The next day, Tuesday, July 31, Geoff told me that Joe Matthews was on a plane for New York but after he took off, Walsh canceled his interview.
He said he’d spent six hours pre-interviewing Matthews. His proof that Toole did it was:
The Hollywood KMart sighting by Heidi Mayer and her mother;
William Mistler;
The details Toole knew without prompting, such as which Sears it was after police showed him a different one;
And – you already know the rest, I went over all that earlier. Oddly enough, he didn’t like Mary H. Maybe my story ten years before had convinced him.
Matthews discounted the blue van. He said that police had “cynically” searched for it even though they had discounted it because they didn’t know what else to do. Geoff told me that Matthews said there was a rumor among the police that “We’re searching for this fucking blue van but the higher-ups know it doesn’t exist.”
He also said that Toole had recanted only because of Jack Hoffman.
Matthews said that Mrs. Walsh didn’t want John to do the interview with ABC. He said America’s Most Wanted would do its show, with Matthews’s proof, in September, during sweeps. Cover yourself, he warned, because after that, everything’s going to change.
He said he had actual evidence that no one will ever doubt, for certain. It’ll be front page around the world. He’d shown it to Hollywood, but didn’t make it sound like they were all that impressed. The State Attorney knows more, he said, implying that included Phil Mundy.
Geoff asked him some of my questions. Had he found the lost carpet samples from Toole’s car? No.
Did he have a parking ticket in South Florida for the car, or anything else that documented Toole being here? No.
Matthews said he did all of his own interviews because he didn’t trust Hollywood PD. My question back for Matthews was, then did he re-interview Willis Morgan and Bill Bowen?
On Wednesday, August 1, Geoff told me, the network had postponed the air date to Tuesday, August 14, a week later. But the network was anticipating that Walsh might make a statement about our show just after the promotion began.
The next day, August 2, Geoff told me that there had been discussion at the network whether to kill the show, “but that idea seems to be fading.” Meanwhile, Geoff was steadfast in the face of this storm: “Anyone who sees the piece will say, Holy cow!”
Later, he told me, his executive producer read the script and called it “incredibly compelling.”
I answered to Geoff, If Matthews’s proof is so good, and he’s been working with the State Attorney’s office, why would they sit on it?
Between Geoff, and the rebuttal information I gave him, he reported back to me after a meeting with higher-ups that they were less nervous. They liked the pages I’d sent Geoff of the transcripts of Toole’s interviews.
Later I spoke with Bill Bowen, who said, “Walsh has the air that he’s untouchable. He’s going to call us liars.
“Why is he complaining so much? There’s something else in this we don’t know involving John Walsh. The very people you’re trying to help are the people trying to scare you.
“Why?”
As the week went on, Geoff told me that the piece was unlikely to run for the full hour of the show, which meant that a lot of the argument we’d put together would not be seen.
On August 13, the day before airing, Geoff told Mark Smith that Matthews said he’s cracked the case.
“He hasn’t cracked the case,” Smith answered, as Geoff told me. “His new information is nothing new.”
Which is what I’d been saying. And Smith had said a year before.
“They were trying to scare us not to run the piece,” Geoff said. “I don’t know why.”
That night, Bowen talked to me about “the weirdness, the joyousness of being here and reliving my life” from that time. “I didn’t know how deep all the people were in all this.
“Holy shit, you guys really care.”
Bill said, quite accurately, the reason why ABC didn’t kill the story:
“Geoff Martz.”
On the morning after we’d taped him for the show, Bill told me that Geoff had left a message for him: “I really believe what you told me.”
“I really appreciate the journey you and I have been on,” Bill said to me. In 2007 it had already been five years. “You have your heart on your sleeve.
“This is us. You and I and Willis will be friends for life.”
Writing this in February 2025 brings a tear to my eye. Willis and I didn’t stay friends but Bill and I did. He died, unexpectedly, this month, no more than three days after I last spoke to him during yet another of our late-night laughing phone calls. We always went over the same stuff, but I always added something new that I’d just gotten or realized, that he didn’t know.
We’d stayed in close contact, just like he said. He kidded me, calling me “you little shit” because I hadn’t told him, until I had to, that I had another witness of Dahmer at the mall. I hadn’t told Willis, either; I hadn’t wanted them to share notes. They met for the first time when Primetime flew in Bill for the taping. It was a lot less lonely for both when they realized the other.
Bill said the three of us constituted the Nut Club, and we’d argued over who was the President of the Nut Club. I insisted it was him, he insisted it was me, and in our deadlock we compromised and agreed: two votes, a majority, it was Willis.
Geoff told me the piece would run 20 minutes long, less than he was hoping for. He wished he could have included more of the story’s nuances, including Billy’s story that Army MPs in Germany had found Dahmer masturbating in front of children at a park and merely returned him to their room, pants down and dragging on a freezing cold day. He also wanted to get into Toole’s confessions to something like a thousand murders.
He also regretted that it would give Joe Matthews a platform, “but that enabled us to put the piece on at all.” He said he offered Chris Cuomo a bet that Walsh wouldn’t air Matthews’s show on AMW. Cuomo wouldn’t take the bet.
Smart. Geoff would have won.
In the end, despite all that the story was missing, I was overwhelmingly pleased by what was there. Let me gush: what a terrific journalist, a terrific producer, a terrific person Geoff Martz is.
On the night we’d finished shooting here, I held a wrap party, dinner for about 20 at a Peruvian restaurant called Pachamamma. I let everyone think that in selecting this place I merely had eclectic tastes, until I got up and told them: This is 17040 Collins Avenue, the same space as where Sunshine Subs was. This is where Jeffrey Dahmer worked that summer. I also invited anyone to go outside into the alleyway to see the dumpster, there was one still there.
Bill Bowen told me later what he thought of that prank:
“You little shit,” he said, laughing.
In the same April 1992 FBI teletype saying that Gerry Boyle wasn’t letting them interview Dahmer, the Miami office said there were not just two, but three witnesses who said they saw Dahmer at the Hollywood Mall when Adam disappeared. Names were blacked out, however:
Nothing in Hollywood’s file showed there were three witnesses. And there was no way in this document to identify who the third one was — or who had reported this to the FBI.
Did Neil Purtell know about the third witness? No, he told me. But in 2007 he’d told Geoff Martz and me of a man in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, who’d called the FBI’s Knoxville office to say that he thought he’d seen Dahmer at a mall in Hialeah, which is in northwest Dade County:
July 29, 1991, was one day after Bill Bowen had first called Hollywood Police.
The Pigeon Forge tipster also said this:
The big mall in Hialeah was called the Westland Mall, which also had a Sears. From where Dahmer was living on Sunny Isles Beach, Westland Mall was about the same distance west as was the Hollywood Mall, north.
At the beginning of 2008, Hollywood Police had just installed a new chief, Chadwick E. Wagner, and I mailed him a letter with copies of these documents. He forwarded the letter to Det. Lyle Bien, now in charge of the case, and he returned my call. He said he didn’t know of any third witness of Dahmer at Hollywood Mall. He’d asked the FBI to provide him an unredacted copy of the documents, but frankly, he said, “It’s of no value to us. I don’t believe there’s anything there.”
We talked about the other two witnesses. “I don’t believe that Morgan came face-to-face with Jeffrey Dahmer,” Bien said, although he did think that Willis had “convinced himself it happened.” A normal person, he said, doesn’t do what Willis said he’d done, follow a suspicious person through the mall. Willis had told me he did it because he’d expected the man to approach someone else, who’d need help.
Bowen wasn’t credible, either. He’d had just a “brief side profile encounter. I just can’t believe somebody saw that and remembers it so many years later.” He said that wasn’t how it went in police work.
This is what Bowen had told Jack Hoffman:
Yes, it was brief, but he said it had stuck in his mind. Besides, Bowen had told me, “The guy was nuts, out of his mind, he was raging. He turned around for just a brief moment.”
Had Bien spoken to Bowen? No, he said. Nor had he spoken to Ken Haupert Sr. or Jan Johnson. He’d re-interviewed Morgan because he’d insisted. He hadn’t gone into the meter room. He said our inconclusive field test results were good enough that they didn’t have to do their own.
A Metro-Dade Police cold case detective had gone into the room, at my insistence, and Bien told me that he’d seen a dead bird inside, which Bien thought was the source of the blood on the wall. I’d seen the bird, too – but only because I’d put down my pint container of orange juice on the concrete floor next to it. Geoff Martz had noticed I’d done that, because I hadn’t – the room wasn’t well lit and I was looking up, not down. When I did look, it was a baby bird – a chick, which had come to its final rest about 10 feet away from the wall with the bloodstains, inches from the wall opposite. There were no stains on or around the bird, nor any trail from it to the bloody wall. The idea that the little birdy was the source of so much blood spatter, rising so far up the wall, and falling too, was, well…
Auggh!
I wasn’t getting anywhere. At least Bien didn’t suggest to me that I had done the murder, as he had to Willis. (Since I mentioned it, I have an alibi. I was then living in Los Angeles. Shoulda stayed.) I mentioned the eight witnesses who’d seen the blue van, none of whom they’d questioned. “We proved there was no blue van from the guys we talked to,” he said.
In October 2008 at an award dinner for the Broward County prosecutor of the year – my friend Brian Cavanagh, I ran into Mark Smith, who Wagner had promoted to Assistant Chief of Police. He seemed pleased to see me, and said he was still working the case. In the next few weeks he was about to pursue a new lead, although it probably wasn’t earth-shattering, he conceded. He wouldn’t tell me about it except that it didn’t connect to Dahmer or Toole.
Next on Adam Walsh: America’s Missing Child:
Episode 33: Hollywood Police solves the case! Meet the new suspect. Same as the old suspect.
#true crime, #truecrime, #cold case, #katie, #terry, @meidas, @paul, @joy, @robert, @gavin, @sharyl, @aaron, @bulwark, @lincoln, @popular, @investigative
