The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part One

Who killed Adam Walsh (and is he really dead?) The search for the truth behind the crime that launched “America’s Most Wanted”

A review in five parts of a new two-book series, The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh by Arthur Jay Harris

When All Things Crime Blog discovered Arthur Jay Harris’s new two-book series on what Harris calls the still-unsolved Adam Walsh kidnapping, we did our best to maintain an objective distance. At the same time, we could hardly keep from doing the two-step as we went about our daily business. If Mr. Harris’s hypothesis was correct, we had just been handed one of the most important crime scoops in recent memory. As we became more familiar with the quality of Mr. Harris’s work and research, our excitement grew exponentially with each new revelation Mr. Harris painstakingly uncovered. Needless to say, we are thrilled that Mr. Harris has asked us to post this five-part series in which we present his theory in considerable detail. So fasten your seat belts, friends. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the author’s hypothesis, we are quite sure that you will find his work completely fascinating.

The disappearance of 6-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981 from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, marked the beginning of perhaps the most famous missing child case in America. After a decapitated head discovered in a drainage canal was identified as that of Adam, his mother and father, Reve and John Walsh, became crusaders to change the laws governing how police searched for young children when they were reported missing. Later, John became the reality TV host of America’s Most Wanted. Only recently did Hollywood Police declare Adam’s case solved, and no one was ever arrested. Florida true crime author Arthur Jay Harris has researched and reported on this story for nearly 20 years, and now, in a new two-book series—in which he reveals recently-released public record actual photographs and documents—Mr. Harris disputes almost everything that officials have determined about the case: Not only did police blame the wrong suspect for abducting and killing Adam, writes Harris, but the medical examiner was wrong when he determined that the child found two weeks after Adam disappeared was, in fact, Adam. Which means, Harris writes, that although Adam Walsh went missing, the case wasn’t about his murder, after all. Could Adam still be alive, somewhere? Yes, says Harris. Incredibly, in recent years, a man contacted him and said that he is Adam. After a great deal of very skeptical checking, Art Harris came to the conclusion that the man claiming to be Adam Walsh very likely is him.

PART ONE: Might Adam Walsh Not Be Dead?

The last known picture of Adam Walsh, 1981. Photo credit: Gerlinde Photography/Michael Hopkins. Courtesy Hollywood Historical Association (Hollywood, Florida)

This isn’t fictional or irresponsible speculation. Florida true crime author Arthur Jay Harris has just published a two-book series (The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh) which includes never-before reported evidence, much of which was culled from recently-released public records of the 1981 Adam Walsh case, which seems to prove the point: The remains of the child identified as Adam Walsh is not him. He also strongly believes that a man who contacted him four years ago and said he was Adam Walsh is, in fact, him.

Of course, to say all of that requires a whole lot of bulletproof supporting evidence, which Harris has painstakingly assembled, as will be demonstrated in each of the five parts of this review.

Harris has been researching the story since 1996, and at full tilt for the last ten years. The fruits of his labor are immediately evident when you open his books, which are not only page-turners, but are chock-full of new facts about the case of which you had absolutely no idea—although it’s one of the most famous murder cases in America. And I hesitate now to say murder because if Harris is right, it’s not a murder case, or rather, it’s not about the murder of Adam Walsh, but rather of a child close to his age who has never been properly identified, whose parents were never notified, and for whom a homicide investigation was never initiated.

But the most stunning thing of all is that he says he’s been speaking to Adam Walsh. And don’t think Harris wasn’t stunned when he was contacted. After the man got in touch with him, Harris gave him the opportunity to speak his piece, just in case his story might have credence. After listening carefully, for days on end, Harris initially tried to prove that the story was a fabrication. For one thing, the man told Harris that the child who had been identified as Adam was misidentified. That would be easy to check, thought Harris, he just needed to look at the medical examiner’s autopsy report.

To make an appointment to see its file, Harris called the Medical Examiner’s office. He was told it was missing.

Really, Harris answered. The most famous case in the county’s history, and the file is missing?

A week later the M.E.’s office called him back. They found the file. He could come in and review it.

He did. When he opened it he looked, naturally, for the autopsy report. There was a single-page cover sheet which told how the remains were received by the office, when the autopsy was performed, and who did it: Dr. Ronald Wright, the Chief Broward Medical Examiner in 1981.

Bottom of the cover sheet page of the Adam Walsh case file in the Broward Medical Examiner’s office indicating that Dr. Ronald Wright performed the autopsy.

But as for the narration of the actual autopsy itself, there was none.

In 2010, Harris reported in The Miami Herald, as part of a larger story, that the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office did not have an autopsy report narrative in its Adam Walsh case file.

Later, Harris realized that the autopsy report narrative was missing not just from the Adam Walsh file at the Broward M.E., but from all the relevant files, which included the Hollywood Police Department file, the Broward State Attorney’s Office file, and the medical examiner’s office file in mid-state Indian RiverCounty, where the remains were discovered in a roadside canal. (They’d sent them along to the Broward office to perform the autopsy.)

Asked to explain the document’s absence, Dr. Wright would not respond to Harris or The Miami Herald. But Harris did succeed in getting him on the record. In Florida, when someone makes a public records request for a document missing from a local or state government agency, a statute obligates that agency’s head to try to find it. Harris suggested to the then-current BrowardM.E. that Wright, logically, might have kept a personal copy. Wright responded:

In 2010, Sherri Baker was the assistant to the Chief Broward M.E., Dr. Joshua Perper. Dr. Wright is correct that the case originated in another district, but another Florida Statute seems to imply that the responsibility for writing a report lay with the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, which is defined as a dissection. The Indian River M.E., who made the official identification, did file a “preliminary” report, but it was only of his external observation of the remains. He later sent the remains to Dr. Wright, who did the actual cutting of the body.

Harris asked Ron Hickman, one of Hollywood’s two original lead detectives on the case but since retired from police work, whether he’d ever seen the autopsy report narrative. No, he hadn’t, Hickman admitted, although he’d assumed it was there.

“You can’t file a case without it,” Hickman added. Told that it wasn’t there, he said, “That’s very unusual. That doesn’t make sense.”

Indeed it is unusual. Harris said he’d also talked to police detectives, prosecutors and defense attorneys who have investigated and tried homicides, and they all told him they’d never heard of a criminal case where an autopsy had been performed but yet there wasn’t an autopsy report.

That report, however, wasn’t the only essential identification document missing in all of the files:

Since the discovered remains consisted only of a severed head, and the ID was made strictly by a tooth comparison, you would expect that one of the two medical examiners would have commissioned a forensic dental report.

There’s no evidence of that anywhere, either, nor of Hollywood Police requesting it.

Harris asked the two forensic dentists working in South and Central Florida in 1981 whether they had been consulted. No, said both, although they were available. Dr. John Williams, of Vero Beach, has had a contract with the medical examiner in Indian RiverCounty to perform its forensic dentistry since before 1981. “I would have kept records,” he said. “You gotta have the charts, the X-rays.” Dr. Richard Souviron, of Coral Gables, in the Miami area, had worked with Dr. Wright three years earlier, in 1978, on bite mark evidence left on victims of serial killer Ted Bundy. But on the Adam Walsh case, he said, “I’m surprised that Ron Wright didn’t call me in. Why they didn’t call for a board-certified dentist to make an ID on the child is beyond me.”

Also, a Hollywood Police lieutenant had gathered Adam’s pediatric dental records and brought them to the M.E. in Indian River, Dr. Franklin Cox, who used them to compare Adam’s teeth to the found child. Cox even referred to those records in his “Preliminary Autopsy Report,” his external observations of the remains. Cox, since retired, told Harris that he’d filed his copy of the dental records and sent another to the Broward M.E.

It should have been in all three places but it was in none of them.

Without an autopsy report narrative or the other identifying documents, should a defendant have been brought up on murder charges, the prosecutors could never have proven the first element of the case, i.e., that the victim was, without question, Adam Walsh.

And, in fact, more than 30 years after Adam’s disappearance, no murder charges have ever been brought against any defendant.

To Harris, this started to sound just as crazy as the story told him by the man who said he was Adam Walsh.

NEXT: The Walshes did not personally identify the remains as Adam. Instead, they’d sent a family friend, John Monahan (since deceased) to the Indian River morgue. In the introduction to his book Tears of Rage, John Walsh writes that because the remains were significantly decomposed, Monahan was at first unable to recognize them as Adam. Only when he saw the teeth did he give his positive ID. Using newly-released public record photos and documents which he cites, Harris made a comparison of the top teeth of the found child and Adam Walsh and realized that they don’t match. Although both Adam and the found child had a just-erupted top front tooth, the found child’s was its right tooth; Adam’s was his left tooth.

SERIES OVERVIEW:

Part 1: In 1981, remains of a child were identified as Adam Walsh, but, incredibly, essential identification documents are missing from all the official files, and some of them apparently were never even created. Without them, prosecutors never could have charged anyone with the murder of Adam Walsh—and although police in 2008 closed the case, they never did.

Part 2: The child found two weeks after Adam disappeared, and identified as him, had a just-erupted top right front tooth, newly-released public record pictures and descriptions show. Adam, in his last-seen-alive description, also had a just-erupted top front tooth, but it was on his left side. Was the found child hastily misidentified as Adam?

Part 3: With the assent and praise of John Walsh, in 2008 Hollywood Police “exceptionally closed” the then-27-year-old Adam Walsh case, blaming his murder on Ottis Toole, who had since died. But by 1984 police had concluded they had no evidence of Toole’s involvement, and in 2008, the police chief admitted there was no new evidence.

Part 4: Police documents recently released into public record show that at the mall where Adam was last seen, seven separate witnesses saw a man with or close by Adam; all of them identify the man as Jeffrey Dahmer. A Miami police report, dated the same month that Adam disappeared, shows that Dahmer had a job about 20 minutes away from that mall.

Part 5: Is Adam Walsh alive? A man contacted Harris to say that he is Adam Walsh. In discussions with Adam’s last, best friend, the man recalled lengthy specifics of their close friendship, information not available on the Internet or elsewhere. To prove he is Adam, he wants a DNA comparison with Mr. and Mrs. Walsh, but they and the police have not responded.

Please click here to view Part Two of this series:

The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part Two

Like a private detective (which he isn’t), in his stories, South Florida true crime author Arthur Jay Harris pursues not the question “Why?” but rather, “Are you sure?” Crime detection and crime stories are all about constructing narratives, but there are almost always loose ends that just don’t fit. Once the flaws in a narrative are discovered, the challenge for the narrative-constructor and the critic is whether to ignore them because they may mean nothing or follow them to what might just be a conclusion that is a totally unexpected reversal. Given his nature, Harris is a pursuer into rabbit holes. His stories are about both the crimes themselves and his ability to stay the course atop the roller coaster ride of surprises in an unflinching Sherlockian effort to reach the elusive truth. There are times he’s upended in mid-flight, which is always a shock, but when he picks up the right trail, it soon becomes obvious and the results can be astounding.

Harris’s other books, Speed Kills, Flowers for Mrs. Luskin, and Until Proven Innocent, also follow investigative paths not yet taken. In addition to appearing in print, Harris has made guest television appearances on ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Snapped; City Confidential; Cold Blood; and Prison Diaries.

Arthur Jay Harris
True Crime Author