(Also titled: THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH
Book One: Finding the Killer. Did Jeffrey Dahmer kidnap Adam Walsh? The cover-up behind the crime that launched America s Most Wanted )
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE ADAM WALSH CASE
A New Two-Book Series
(with a Special Single Edition, a condensed version of both books)
AN INDEPENDENT TEN-YEAR REVIEW OF THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION EXPOSES MANY CLEAR, VITAL MISTAKES:
WERE THE POLICE WRONG WHEN THEY NAMED THE KILLER OF ADAM WALSH? (Book One)
WAS THE MEDICAL EXAMINER WRONG WHEN HE IDENTIFIED THE REMAINS OF A FOUND CHILD AS ADAM WALSH? (Book Two)
BOOK ONE ASKS, DID THE POLICE GET THE RIGHT KILLER OF ADAM WALSH?
In July 1981, the mother of 6-year-old Adam took him shopping at a Sears store near their home in Hollywood, Florida, a suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Mrs. Walsh said she left Adam to play the video games at the display and returned for him about ten minutes later. He was gone and she couldn't find him.
For the next two weeks, nearly the entire Hollywood Police Department, much of the community, and the Walshes searched for Adam everywhere they could think of. The family printed his most recent photograph, of him wearing a T-ball team baseball cap and shirt and holding a bat. What made him even more endearing was his big smile, revealing the absence of both his top front teeth.
Exactly two weeks later and about a hundred miles north of Hollywood, a man fishing in a drainage canal saw, floating, a child's severed head. Police suspected it was Adam Walsh, and by the next morning, a medical examiner announced the official identification.
In 1983, Ottis Toole, a drifter from upstate Jacksonville, Florida, confessed to the murder, and Hollywood Police announced it at a dramatic press conference. But then came the real work: for much of the next year police tried to link anything Toole said to actual case facts not already publicly known. They weren't able to. In 1984 police dropped Toole as an active suspect.
But in 2008, a new Hollywood Police chief held another dramatic press conference to announce, again, that Toole killed Adam. And again, the chief admitted there was no substantiation beyond his confession--no new evidence. But this time Toole was dead--he'd died in 1996, in a Florida prison for another crime, so he could no longer be prosecuted. Because of that, the chief announced that the case investigation was finally over.
But when Hollywood closed the case, its file became public record. In it, author and investigative journalist Arthur Jay Harris discovered, was much more evidence that Adam's kidnapper had been Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer.
Dahmer had been captured in Milwaukee in 1991. Police there found in his apartment eleven severed heads--mostly of young men, though none close in age to Adam. He also admitted going to shopping malls to find victims, that he'd killed his first victim in 1978, and that he'd been in Miami when Adam was taken. However, Dahmer denied anything to do with that. A spokesman for Hollywood Police said they certainly wouldn't trust such a killer's mere denial, but after they were unable to independently prove that Dahmer had been in South Florida, they dropped it. Later, when an FBI agent confronted Dahmer in prison about Adam, he thought he'd tacitly admitted killing him. He got word to Adam's father, John Walsh, who by then was hosting a reality television crime show series called America's Most Wanted. Walsh got Hollywood to interview Dahmer, but when he directly denied it, Hollywood dropped it again.
Upon his arrest, Dahmer insisted he came clean about all his crimes, but evidence shows he did not.
It was not police but Harris who located the only document that proved Dahmer had indeed been in Miami that summer when Adam went missing. A Miami police report dated 20 days before Adam's kidnapping read that "Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer" had found the body of a homeless man in the alley behind where he worked. That was suspicious, but Dahmer never mentioned it, or his repeated physical torture and rape of his roommate in the U.S. Army, Billy Capshaw, when they were stationed in Germany. Also, German police had suspected Dahmer of a series of mutilation murders there. Dahmer denied them, but Capshaw had seen him return from weekend leaves with his clothes and skin soaked in dried blood. He also found (and threw out) a series of Dahmer's hunting knives, their blades covered with blood, and had seen M.P.s return Dahmer to their room after he'd been caught masturbating in a park in front of children.
But the main evidence that Dahmer took Adam came from the Hollywood Police's own files. There, Harris found seven witnesses who had offered tips to police as well as to John Walsh's TV show that they had seen a man in or outside the Hollywood Sears with or close to Adam. Two told police that the man was Dahmer; the rest, when Harris showed them pictures of Toole, then Dahmer, said the man they'd seen wasn't Toole--it was Dahmer. But police weren't interested in re-interviewing their own witnesses.
BOOK TWO ASKS: DID THE MEDICAL EXAMINER CORRECTLY IDENTIFY THE REMAINS OF THE CHILD HE SAID WAS ADAM WALSH?
After Hollywood Police closed the case in 2008, not only was the police investigative file made a public record, so were the medical examiners' files in two districts. Harris got to see all of them and realized this:
As shown in his smile in the "Missing" picture, Adam's top front teeth were both gone. That photo, Harris found, had been taken about a month before his disappearance. The police also had a last-seen-alive description which said that Adam's top left front tooth had just erupted but he didn't have a top right front tooth.
However, the found child had both top front teeth. The left was mostly in and the right had recently erupted.
That was a significant discrepancy, but there was still another:
The found child was missing two other top teeth that Adam was not--its lateral incisors, the teeth (one on each side) immediately next to the front teeth (called the central incisors). In his last photo, Adam had both lateral incisors, and the last-seen-alive description does not mention that they are missing. If they had been, at the time of his disappearance Adam would have had a gap of not two top front teeth, but four.
Certainly his mother and father would have seen that and told it to the police.
When the child's head was found, Adam had been missing only two weeks. Further, the Fort Lauderdale medical examiner told the newspapers then that the child (Adam, he said) had been dead for possibly all of the 14 days he had been missing.
In fact, for Adam's teeth to progress to where the found child's teeth were might have taken possibly a year.
The teeth of the found child do not match the teeth of Adam Walsh.
Did anyone ever realize this?
Coincidentally or not, all of the investigative case files are missing documents that at a trial (that never occurred) would have been crucial to establish the ID of the child as Adam Walsh:
The Fort Lauderdale medical examiner performed an autopsy on the child's head but there is no narrative report of it. Homicide detectives, prosecutors, and defense attorneys told Harris they had never heard of such an instance;
Although the identification of the child as Adam was made strictly by its teeth, there is no forensic dental report in any of the files, nor any evidence that one was ever commissioned;
The police and two medical examiners' offices handled Adam's pediatric dental records, but they are missing from the files of all three agencies.
This is what it all means:
There could never have been a trial for the murder of Adam Walsh because the case is not about the murder of Adam Walsh.
Instead, it is about crimes and injustices against two young children:
The horrific murder of a child close in age to Adam who has never been correctly identified, whose parents were never notified and whose murder was never investigated, and who was not buried under his (or her) correct identity;
And also the kidnapping of a young boy in a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida.
Which leads to an incredible pair of questions:
What ever happened to Adam Walsh?
Could he still be alive?
In Book Two, Arthur Jay Harris answers those questions.
Book Two and the Single Edition include never-before-seen photos and documents from public records