The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part Three

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

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.

In Part 2, All Things Crime showed the photographic and document evidence, much of it from recently-released public records compiled by true crime author Arthur Jay Harris, proving that a Florida medical examiner was hasty and wrong when he identified the head of a child found 125 miles from where 6-year-old Adam Walsh had disappeared, two weeks earlier in 1981, as Adam. In fact, the top four front teeth of the found child were distinctly different from Adam’s; between the two children there was possibly a year’s worth of difference in dental development.

PART THREE: DID POLICE CLOSE THE ADAM WALSH CASE ON THE WRONG SUSPECT?

In December 2008, Hollywood Police held a surprise press conference, broadcast live on all three cable news channels and attended by John and Reve Walsh, whose 6-year-old son Adam had disappeared from a Sears store in their Hollywood neighborhood twenty-seven years earlier. Two weeks later, in a canal 125 miles north, a child’s severed head was discovered and identified as him. Police announced that, at last, they’d “exceptionally closed” their investigation, which meant that they’d determined who killed Adam but their suspect was himself dead and therefore beyond prosecution.

The suspect was Ottis Toole, from upstate Jacksonville, Florida, who became famous while in police custody in 1983 as the serial-killing partner of a more-famous drifter, Henry Lee Lucas. In fact, the phrase “serial killers” didn’t seem to be in wide usage until Lucas and Toole.

Ottis Toole, 1983. Photo: Miami-Dade Police Department

Detectives from agencies in many states had presented their unsolved murders to both of them, separately, and they would say whether or not they were the killers. There were attempts to count the number of their murder admissions under interrogation and although the totals aren’t reliable, they easily topped 500 and may well have been double or triple that. Were they the worst criminal killers in recorded history?

But after a (significant) while, after comparing notes, police stopped believing them. Lucas and Toole were claiming to have committed murders in different states at what turned out to be about the same times.

Why would anybody confess to killings they hadn’t done? We have since learned that happens more than one might expect. Usually it’s from police pressuring the suspect, but in the instances of Toole and Lucas, they seemed to be competing with each other to see who had the higher numbers. It was a strange game for a couple of strange birds.

Besides, after a while, both Toole and Lucas decided to recant most or all of their confessions. And then, depending on circumstances, re-confess. After a while, police realized they’d been had, and embarrassingly so, by a couple of drifters with grade-school educations.

While Toole was still in full confession mode, he volunteered from his jail cell in Jacksonville that he’d killed Adam Walsh. Coincidentally or not, the day he first mentioned it was the same day a TV movie about the story was going to premiere on NBC, in the evening. It may have been that Toole or others in the jail had seen television promos for it in the days before the show.

Initially, Toole didn’t admit to killing Adam. Nor did he even say his name. He was confessing to a murder case in Brevard County, in mid-state Florida, and mentioned to the detective that he’d “gotten into something” in Broward County, which includes Hollywood. A week later, he told Louisiana detectives that he and Lucas went to a shopping center near West Palm Beach looking for a child to abduct. Offering candy and toys, they lured a 6 or 7-year-old into their car, then drove south for an hour until they found a swampy, wooded area, where, using a machete or bayonet, they killed him and chopped off his head. Taking only the head and leaving the rest of the child behind, they disposed of the head in a ditch or canal at or near Fort Lauderdale.

There were some problems with that: West Palm Beach is about 50 miles north of Hollywood (and Fort Lauderdale, which borders Hollywood); Toole said from West Palm Beach they drove south, but the child’s head had been found 125 miles north of Hollywood (and therefore 75 miles north of West Palm Beach). Also, it was later determined that Lucas had been in a Maryland jail on the day Adam disappeared.

AAA map of Southeast Florida. Hollywood is at bottom, Fort Lauderdale just above it, and West Palm Beach about 50 miles north. The remains were found west of Vero Beach, about 75 miles north of West Palm Beach.

But this may be the best argument that Toole had invented his story:

Excerpt from the University of Florida C.A. Pound Human Identification Lab 1997 report for Hollywood Police on the head that was identified as Adam Walsh. C3 is the last spinal vertebra on the remains. This handwritten note of the forensic anthropologists’ examination suggests that the cut there was fine, possibly made by a scalpel.

Neither Toole nor Lucas was the type to be carrying a scalpel, nor did Toole ever mention they used one. Rather, he carried in his car gardening tools for work, including a machete. (In Part 4, Harris identifies another suspect who was clearly skilled in using a scalpel.)

Toole’s Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office handler played phone tag with Hollywood Police, and it was another week before they connected, at which time Hollywood immediately sent its two lead Walsh detectives north to see him.

Toole offered no specifics about the murder to the Hollywood detectives, at least nothing that was correct. Apparently realizing that, rather than give up on him right there, the detectives began to tell and show him case information. Harris thinks they were correct in doing that; they prompted him to see if he could recall other real, unprompted case facts.

Here are some examples: Toole said that when he drove from Jacksonville to Hollywood he took Florida State Road A1A, the famous length-of-the-state east coast beach highway. But that was the scenic route, 400 miles through every beach town. To get a more likely answer, one of the Hollywood detectives resorted to guided multiple choice:

“Do you remember coming down a main road, the interstate, A1A, or what road you used to get to this mall? … Was it close to an interstate or the turnpike?”

Toole answered, “I’d say it was pretty close to A1A.”

The right answer was that the Hollywood Mall was by the interstate, I-95.

“Did you go inside the mall?”

That was a tip-off that the mall was enclosed, not a strip mall. Toole answered, “I looked at all kinda stores. There was a Sears store, there was all different kind of drug stores, and wig shops and furniture shops and…” The TV movie had shown that the disappearance had occurred at a Sears.

The detective asked if there was a supermarket in the mall. “Like Winn-Dixie?”

Winn-Dixie was one of the state’s two biggest grocery chains. Toole answered, “I say, there could have been one there.” Winn-Dixie didn’t have a store in Hollywood Mall; Publix, the other big grocery chain, did.

Asked to describe the child he had snatched, he answered, “And, ah, he had on a pair of dungarees and a blue shirt, and I know he, a, he even had a pair of smitten on.” That was how the police transcript spelled the word, and in the detectives’ later report they wrote he said “sneakers,” but “he even had a pair of sneakers on” didn’t make the same sense as “he even had a pair of mittens on.” Besides, looking at their next questions, the detectives seemed to have picked up on the word mittens. They asked Toole the time of year that the abduction and killing occurred, and he answered, “Somewhere around close to the first of the year.”

It was actually in the last week of July. In January, Jacksonville often gets daytime temperatures cold enough for gloves, but South Florida just about never does—and certainly not in the summer. Later, Toole’s Jacksonville police handler offered him a chance to change his mind:

“I know you’re meaning to tell us the truth, but is it possible you’re not sure about the clothing?”

“No, I’m sure about the clothing,” Toole said.

The Hollywood detectives gave him a chance to mention Adam’s missing top teeth. “Anything unusual about his teeth, crooked teeth?”

“No, he was a nice-looking kid,” Toole said.

As they continued, the detectives revealed to Toole every major fact of the case, including Adam Walsh’s name and photograph, and the closest mile marker on Florida’s Turnpike to where the remains were found. Yet Toole never did volunteer anything that would suggest he knew things only the killer would know.

Toole did say he could show the detectives where he’d left the remainder of the child’s body, and on a semi-guided road trip, he led them to a site just off the turnpike near that mile marker. Late that night, a Friday, Hollywood Police announced at a dramatic press conference that they’d solved the case. On Monday, police would begin digging where Toole had shown them.

The Miami Herald, October 22, 1983

But that site produced no body. Nor did a second, in Jacksonville, where Toole later said he had disposed of the remains.

Egg increasingly on their faces, Hollywood Police spent months intensely investigating Toole, but finally they gave up. They couldn’t prove that he had ever been in South Florida, much less when Adam went missing, and could never substantiate any information he’d volunteered, except when the police prompted him.

The Miami Herald, August 2, 1985, quoted Hollywood Police Capt. Steve Davis: “Everything the man said proved false. We left no stone unturned.” In a June 26, 1991, Herald story, Hollywood Police Maj. J.B. Smith was quoted, “Ottis Toole is probably the most complete investigation we’ve ever done to prove that somebody didn’t do it.”

In a Florida prison for a 1982 arson of a boarding house in Jacksonville that resulted in a death, Toole died in 1996, never charged with Adam Walsh’s killing.

But at the 2008 press conference, when a new chief of Hollywood Police, Chadwick Wagner, announced that Toole had done it after all, one question from the press was, do you have any new evidence? His answer was No. Although the national media kvelled that the case was finally resolved, the local press in South Florida wasn’t quite as convinced. Miami’s Fox TV affiliate aired a story, “Questions still surround Adam Walsh case after its official closure,” the Associated Press ran, “Case closed? Questions linger in Adam Walsh probe,” and a blogger for Broward-Palm Beach New Times wrote, “According to no new evidence, deceased pathological liar killed Adam Walsh.”

Still, the Walshes were relieved. Since 1996, when the existing documents in the Hollywood Police file were first released as public records, John Walsh had been insisting that Toole was guilty. In a 2011 book, Bringing Adam Home, written with Walsh’s cooperation, retired police sergeant (and America’s Most Wanted contributor) Joe Matthews presented one of the photographs taken of carpet in Toole’s car by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 1983. Sprayed with luminol, a chemical that reacts with blood (actually, the trace metal in blood or other substances) by briefly glowing in the dark a shade of electric blue, the rug revealed Adam’s anguished face, Matthews wrote, as clear to him as the Shroud of Turin.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s photo of a carpet in Ottis Toole’s car. The blue tint is from sprayed luminol, which glows in the dark and can be photographed with a long exposure. This is the orientation of the photo that Joe Matthews used. Matthews, however, cropped the picture to use only the top right quadrant.

Does it look like the anguished cry of a little boy? In a Rorschach test way, sure, yeah. Harris wrote that it reminded him of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, in blue monochrome. The Broward-Palm Beach New Times blog wrote, “Is it really Adam or is it the forensic equivalent of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich?”

Harris got copies of the same pictures from FDLE. At first he couldn’t find what Matthews saw. There were also natural light images of the same carpet that were oriented to how they would appear if someone was sitting in the car, looking down. Using those, Harris found the picture and realized that Matthews had rotated it by 90 degrees, cropped it and flipped it (that is, reversed it). By viewing it the way FDLE printed it, that is, un-rotated, un-cropped, and un-flipped, the same picture looked like something much more ordinary: the impression left by a heel and sole of a boot.

The orientation of FDLE’S photo as someone sitting in the car would have seen it, looking down at the carpet. Don’t believe it’s the same picture? Rotate it 90 degrees to the right to see the way Joe Matthews presented it, as above.

NEXT: Although police could never prove that Ottis Toole had ever been in South Florida, much less at the time Adam disappeared, there was another suspect who police had dismissed with very little investigation but who absolutely was at least nearby Hollywood at the time. In fact, seven separate police witnesses who had been at the mall when Adam was last seen identified this suspect as being with or nearby Adam: Jeffrey Dahmer.

SERIES OVERVIEW:

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.

Part Four of Arthur Jay Harris’s’ Adam Walsh series will be posted on Monday, March 3rd.

Please click here to view Part One and Part Two of Mr. Harris’s compelling Adam Walsh series:

The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part One

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