In summer 1981 6-year-old Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, vanished from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. After two frantic weeks in which the entire community searched for him, a child's severed head declared to be Adam's was found 125 miles north in a drainage area. No other body parts were ever found.
In 1991, Milwaukee police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer and found 11 severed heads in his apartment. He admitted then that in the summer of 1981 he'd lived in Miami 15 minutes from the Hollywood Mall. Dahmer denied killing Adam because, he said, he didn't have his own vehicle.
But immediately after Dahmer's arrest two separate insistent witnesses went to Hollywood police and identified Dahmer as the man they saw at the mall on the day Adam disappeared. In 1981 they'd both told police what they'd seen but police had kept no record of their tips. One said Dahmer had approached him inside the mall in a drunken, threatening way. He'd followed him at a distance into the toy department of Sears, where Mrs. Walsh had said she'd left Adam. The other witness said he was outside and saw Dahmer grab and violently throw a protesting child into a blue van that screeched away. That matched what a 1981 witness had said about a blue van, and for the first month of the case, police throughout the state had stopped every blue van they saw.
Yet without seriously checking, Hollywood police simply believed the word of a manipulative serial killer when he said he didn't kill Adam Walsh.
Investigative author and journalist Arthur Jay Harris did what Hollywood police wouldn't do: he traced Dahmer's movements in Miami and built a case against him. He learned that at the sub and pizza shop where he worked there was a blue van for deliveries that employees often took for their own use, without asking. He also learned that Dahmer often showed up for work in the morning drunk and was sent home. As well he discovered the only official document with Dahmer's name on it: a police report dated 20 days before Adam's abduction in which Dahmer reported finding a dead body of a homeless man in the alley behind his shop. In Dahmer's confessions to supposedly all of his murders, he'd never mentioned this.
In 2007, ABC Primetime with Harris entered a meter room in the alley that Dahmer had said was where the homeless man had slept and found a huge amount of spatter on a wall. Next to it was an old lumberman's axe and a sledgehammer. A retired crime scene investigator confirmed the spatter as blood. The autopsy report of the homeless man showed that he had not bled. Was this Adam's blood? Even after an ABC producer informed Hollywood Police, they never bothered to enter that room, much less test the blood evidence.
In 2008 Hollywood police announced the case was finally solved-not that Dahmer had killed Adam, but incredibly, the killer was Ottis Toole, who in 1983 had confessed to killing Adam but had been dismissed as a suspect for the previous 25 years and never prosecuted. Toole had not been able to tell police a single specific true thing about the case, and much of his initial information was painfully wrong. He'd blamed Henry Lee Lucas for killing Adam, but Lucas was in jail that day. He said Adam's murder happened around January and he wore mittens! Not likely, in July in South Florida. No DNA evidence could ever be matched to him. Toole had also confessed to hundreds of other murders for which he was never charged. And police said they had no new evidence when they closed the case on him.
But in closing the case police exposed all of their case files they had not made public earlier. In them Harris found four more insistent witnesses who had also seen Adam, Dahmer, and a blue van in the same precise spot at Hollywood Mall that day in 1981. Inexplicably, Hollywood police had turned them all away. Why would the police and the Walshes dismiss without examination the compelling evidence against Dahmer and instead say Ottis Toole killed Adam?
In 1991, Milwaukee police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer and found 11 severed heads in his apartment. He admitted then that in the summer of 1981 he'd lived in Miami 15 minutes from the Hollywood Mall. Dahmer denied killing Adam because, he said, he didn't have his own vehicle.
But immediately after Dahmer's arrest two separate insistent witnesses went to Hollywood police and identified Dahmer as the man they saw at the mall on the day Adam disappeared. In 1981 they'd both told police what they'd seen but police had kept no record of their tips. One said Dahmer had approached him inside the mall in a drunken, threatening way. He'd followed him at a distance into the toy department of Sears, where Mrs. Walsh had said she'd left Adam. The other witness said he was outside and saw Dahmer grab and violently throw a protesting child into a blue van that screeched away. That matched what a 1981 witness had said about a blue van, and for the first month of the case, police throughout the state had stopped every blue van they saw.
Yet without seriously checking, Hollywood police simply believed the word of a manipulative serial killer when he said he didn't kill Adam Walsh.
Investigative author and journalist Arthur Jay Harris did what Hollywood police wouldn't do: he traced Dahmer's movements in Miami and built a case against him. He learned that at the sub and pizza shop where he worked there was a blue van for deliveries that employees often took for their own use, without asking. He also learned that Dahmer often showed up for work in the morning drunk and was sent home. As well he discovered the only official document with Dahmer's name on it: a police report dated 20 days before Adam's abduction in which Dahmer reported finding a dead body of a homeless man in the alley behind his shop. In Dahmer's confessions to supposedly all of his murders, he'd never mentioned this.
In 2007, ABC Primetime with Harris entered a meter room in the alley that Dahmer had said was where the homeless man had slept and found a huge amount of spatter on a wall. Next to it was an old lumberman's axe and a sledgehammer. A retired crime scene investigator confirmed the spatter as blood. The autopsy report of the homeless man showed that he had not bled. Was this Adam's blood? Even after an ABC producer informed Hollywood Police, they never bothered to enter that room, much less test the blood evidence.
In 2008 Hollywood police announced the case was finally solved-not that Dahmer had killed Adam, but incredibly, the killer was Ottis Toole, who in 1983 had confessed to killing Adam but had been dismissed as a suspect for the previous 25 years and never prosecuted. Toole had not been able to tell police a single specific true thing about the case, and much of his initial information was painfully wrong. He'd blamed Henry Lee Lucas for killing Adam, but Lucas was in jail that day. He said Adam's murder happened around January and he wore mittens! Not likely, in July in South Florida. No DNA evidence could ever be matched to him. Toole had also confessed to hundreds of other murders for which he was never charged. And police said they had no new evidence when they closed the case on him.
But in closing the case police exposed all of their case files they had not made public earlier. In them Harris found four more insistent witnesses who had also seen Adam, Dahmer, and a blue van in the same precise spot at Hollywood Mall that day in 1981. Inexplicably, Hollywood police had turned them all away. Why would the police and the Walshes dismiss without examination the compelling evidence against Dahmer and instead say Ottis Toole killed Adam?
