He was kidnapped and murdered in 1981---- Then his father went on to host 'America's Most Wanted'
On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh and his mother Revé went to a Sears department store in a Hollywood, Florida mall to shop for lamps. When they entered the store, Adam spotted a group of teenagers playing an Atari video game system and asked if he could watch them. His mom agreed since the lamps were just a few aisles over. However, when Revé returned less than 10 minutes later, Adam was gone.
It was later discovered that a security guard had kicked the teens out of the store when they became rowdy while playing. The guard assumed Adam was with them and made him leave the mall too, but he was too shy to speak up to say that his mother was nearby. Adam was then abducted just outside the store, and his severed head was found in a drainage canal 100 miles away two weeks later.
Click the link in our profile to go inside the tragic abduction and murder of the son of "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh.
Adam John Walsh (November 14, 1974[1] – July 27, 1981) was an American child 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.
Adam's father, John Walsh, became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and was the host of the television program America's Most Wanted and, later, In Pursuit with John Walsh. Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam's murder, but was never convicted of the crime because evidence was reportedly lost and Toole later recanted his 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 and that they were satisfied that Toole was the killer.
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. The 2019 Netflix miniseries The Confession Killer shows footage of him apparently being fed information from interrogators and he later confessed to several cases he had no involvement in. 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 of cirrhosis at the age of 49 while serving a life sentence for other crimes.
Later, his niece told John Walsh that he made a deathbed confession to Adam's murder. His confession was viewed as unreliable, as he and Lucas confessed to or implicated themselves in more than 200 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 a review of taped interrogations of Toole by Hollywood detective Mark Smith. Stone says that his review found evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Toole murdered Adam. Stone noted that both Toole and Lucas were notorious for confessing to crimes that they had committed and then recanting.
In 2007, according to allegations that earned widespread publicity, Jeffrey Dahmer, who was arrested in Wisconsin in 1991 after killing more than a dozen men and boys, was also named as a suspect in Adam's murder. Dahmer's father called the America's Most Wanted hotline soon after his son's arrest to claim that he believed that his son was a pedophile.
Dahmer was living in Miami Beach at the time of Walsh's murder, and two eyewitnesses placed him at the mall on the day that 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 revealed that the delivery shop where Dahmer 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 he was interviewed about Adam Walsh in 1992, Dahmer repeatedly denied his 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 it to someone else?" After this rumor surfaced, John Walsh stated that he had "seen no evidence" linking Adam's abduction and murder to those that were committed by Dahmer.
On December 16, 2008, Hollywood police chief Chad Wagner, with his friend John present, made the announcement 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.
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