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
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.
In Part 4, All Things Crime Blog revealed that Jeffrey Dahmer was in South Florida at the time when Adam Walsh disappeared, and in fact, 20 days earlier had reported finding a dead body behind the shop where he worked. Seven separate witnesses in the Hollywood Police Department’s Adam Walsh file, who were all at the mall when Adam disappeared, identified Dahmer as the suspicious man they saw either with or near Adam. Police dismissed all of these eyewitness reports.
PART FIVE: COULD THE MAN WHO SAYS HE IS ADAM WALSH POSSIBLY BE HIM?
When Art Harris published his book in 2009 about Dahmer’s likely involvement in the Adam Walsh kidnapping, he thought he was finally done with the story, which he’d been reporting on since 1996. Then he got a Facebook message from someone who had seen news stories online about what Harris had written.
The messenger said that he was Adam Walsh. And that, yes, his kidnapper had been Dahmer, who had abducted him from the Hollywood Mall and had taken him to a house in Miami Beach where he tortured him right up until he escaped.
Harris wrote that he didn’t know what to make of this. Just in case it wasn’t a hoax, he decided to request the man’s phone number.
They spoke, at length, over a number of days. The man was highly intelligent, well-spoken, and did not come off as a hoaxer. He said that Dahmer had kept him for about a month, during which time Dahmer had let him hear the radio news reporting that Adam’s body had been discovered. The man could not describe the details of his release/rescue because Dahmer had left him unconscious and near death.
After that, he’d been adopted by another family and grew up with them, using an entirely different name which included their surname. Although he revealed the name to Harris, he asked him, for personal reasons, to be referred to in print as “A.W.,” that is, when Harris decided he would write about him. After his rescue, now part of a new family, recovering from his extreme physical and mental trauma, speaking Spanish and answering to a new name, “A.W.,” gradually forgot that he was Adam Walsh. That seemed by his new parents’ design. Not until he reached his late twenties did he begin to have stirrings that he was someone else, and only a short time before he found and contacted Harris did he come to realize for sure that he was Adam. His purpose for contacting Harris, he said, was to become Adam Walsh again and reunite with his birth parents, the Walshes. He’d tried to contact them through letters to John’s TV show and Facebook messages to the family, but had never gotten any response.
For better or worse, Harris was the only person to listen to him at any length.
Harris had never before heard almost anything of what A.W. said. He didn’t think any of it could be corroborated. Rather, he thought more likely he could prove him wrong. Then, in clear conscience, he could walk away.
For A.W. to be Adam meant that the child who was found must have been misidentified as Adam, which is what A.W. told Harris. When Hollywood Police closed the case in 2008, all the official investigative files became public record, including the Broward Medical Examiner’s file. As detailed in Parts One and Two of this series, Harris examined that file and others and realized that they had misidentified the found child as Adam.
At least outside the circle of official investigators, no one knew that. But A.W. did. How?
Harris realized then he that he was going to have to look into this very carefully. Could he prove that A.W. was Adam Walsh?
Among the impossibly bizarre things A.W. told Harris was that Ottis Toole was with Dahmer at the torture house. Dahmer and Toole, together? Oh no, went Harris when he heard that. At what point should he just drop this whole ridiculous thing?
Either proving his mettle or just his gullibility, Harris made a concerted effort to connect Dahmer and Toole.
There was one lead: years before, a Miami detective had told him that he’d taken a confession from Henry Lee Lucas that led to murder charges. Toole hadn’t confessed nor was similarly charged, but Lucas had said that Toole was with him then. Because Harris had written a previous book on another case investigated by the same detective, he personally knew the high integrity of his work.
Two teenage girls were last seen at a bar three blocks from the ocean in an area that has since been incorporated into the city of Sunny Isles Beach. Days later, their hogtied bodies were found, drowned, in a drainage area about 30 miles away. Because the case was solved in 1984 based on Lucas’s confession, Miami-Dade Police made its file available after Harris’s public records request. In it, Harris saw a videotape of Lucas’s confession interview. Unprompted, Lucas correctly detailed what the girls were wearing, including their jewelry, and described their hair. He also picked out the two victims from a photo lineup.
The date of the girls’ disappearance was relevant: May 27, 1981. In Dahmer’s 1992 interview with Hollywood Police, he said he’d arrived in Miami just after the Army had kicked him out.
That was at the end of March 1981. Dahmer’s money quickly ran out, so after that, until he left the area in September, he sometimes slept on the beach. The best beach for homeless drifters was HauloverPark, a long sandy stretch owned by Miami-DadeCounty. The north end of the park was blocks from the bar where the girls were last seen. It was also just a few more blocks from the Collins Avenue sub shop where Dahmer was either then working, or would be soon.
That meant Dahmer and Toole had been in close proximity to one another. Could Harris dig deeper? He scoured the books written about Lucas, and in Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, author Max Call wrote that in Miami in early 1981, Lucas said he saw Toole with an unnamed pal:
“Ottis was traveling with an effeminate friend, but the man’s pale blue eyes were cold as ice.”
Not only were Dahmer’s eyes light blue, but almost everyone Harris spoke to who had crossed paths with him before he was arrested was at least momentarily terrorized by his eyes. Ken Haupert, Sr., who had hired him at the sub shop, told Harris, “I saw hell in his eyes once.” Said Billy Capshaw, Dahmer’s roommate in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, “If Jeff gave you that dead look, there is no fucking way you could ever forget it.” Willis Morgan, who said that Dahmer had approached him in the mall just before Adam was abducted, said “He had a look on him, like the Devil was in him.”
Was Dahmer effeminate? Capshaw told Harris that although Dahmer wasn’t in public or in his television interviews after he was arrested, alone with Billy he was. When Jeff was drinking, Capshaw said, he “prissed around, happy-prissy,” and would shake his butt and dangle his hand in a limp-wristed way.
Asked the same question, A.W. answered: “He had a gay voice, and descended into this gay persona,” and also cross-dressed. “He seemed like a tough kind of person, then he’d become this wacky kind of gay person when he got behind closed doors.” One eccentric thing he did was “the way he’d move his hands, like an Egyptian,” as in Steve Martin’s King Tut parody song and routine on Saturday Night Live. Capshaw said Dahmer did the same thing with him.
Toole had told police that he also cross-dressed when he’d try to pick up men.
On Dahmer-as-torturer, Capshaw was the authority. When Dahmer was in his Dr. Jekyll mode, Capshaw said, he actually liked him and appreciated how brilliant and learned he was, especially about anatomy, which he taught Billy. But after drinking, in an instant he’d morph into the monstrous Mr. Hyde, in which guise he’d beat him, break his bones with an iron pipe, drug him, rape him, and even once did surgery on him while he was drugged.
Capshaw had known of no other victim of Dahmer who had spent more than a few hours, or a night, with him and escaped. Capshaw’s ordeal was more than a year long, ending with Dahmer’s abrupt discharge. A.W. said that Dahmer had kept him about a month. If A.W. was telling the truth, Capshaw reasoned that by necessity he would have become as exacting an observer of Dahmer as he had been, even though Adam was only 6 years old. Nor would he be likely to have forgotten much. As for Capshaw, his memories were at the core of his crushing post-traumatic stress disorder, from which he was just recovering after more than ten years in concentrated, effective therapy.
Capshaw took it upon himself to find out, to his satisfaction, whether A.W. had really met Jeff Dahmer.
Harris put Capshaw and A.W. together on the phone. He counseled Billy not to volunteer much about Dahmer because it wasn’t a sharing exercise, at least at first. The question was, did A.W. know only second-hand stuff about Dahmer from the Internet, in books and elsewhere, or did he know him as well as Billy?
After a couple of conversations, which by their conclusion had turned into an uncomfortably intense grilling, Capshaw was convinced that A.W. had indeed met Jeff:
“He told me everything I already knew. He really knew what he was talking about. He didn’t have it rehearsed. He had it right on the nose. The confidence, the change in [Jeff’s] personality in less than a second. It was so twisted. It was so chilling to me, listening to him. There’s no way he could have known that without knowing him.
“He described Jeff perfectly. He knew too much about Jeff’s body language. He remembers the jaw, the panther-walk—that was part of him.” He’d also told him how Jeff could be sitting still, then get up and be running at full speed almost instantaneously.
Harris had observed A.W.’s tongue—it has a deep wound, front to back; he told Harris that Dahmer had cut it and said afterward, “Don’t worry, it’ll heal.” In fact, Dahmer would regularly show sorrow after the fact for hurting him. Capshaw said that after Dahmer would hurt him, he’d apologize and say that “all the time: ‘It will heal.’ It reeks of Jeff.”
“He knew how he walked, he ran, his facial features, his jokes. Sounds just like Jeff. There’s nothing on the Internet that’s anything like what he’s talking about.
“When we were talking, it was like we were reminiscing about someone we both knew. I know, without any doubt in my mind, that he met Jeff.”
To Harris, that was satisfaction that A.W. wasn’t lying or trying to hoax him. But it wasn’t yet proof that he was Adam.
During Harris’s earlier research in the story, one of his best sources, Darlene Hill, had told him that she’d known a boy who had been on Adam Walsh’s T-ball team. She’d even seen a wallet-size photo of him wearing the same baseball uniform as Adam, the one from his famous “Missing” picture. His name was Frank Sortini, he was the child of her ex-husband from a subsequent relationship, and was a stepbrother to her daughters.
Harris found Sortini on the Internet. He’d never posted any association with Adam Walsh. Not only had they been on the same team, Sortini said, but they’d been best friends up to the time when Adam disappeared. Frank had even saved the dinky trophy all the kids in the league had gotten for participating.
Frank Sortini’s copy of the trophy Adam Walsh also got for playing on the same Hollywood Optimist T-ball team in 1981. Photos courtesy Frank Sortini.
Harris let him reminisce for a while, then told him, that wasn’t why he’d bothered to find him. Harris braced him for the reason: “There’s someone who says he’s Adam. Would you talk to him to see if he’s real?” Frank was certainly skeptical but was willing to do so. As he had Billy, Harris counseled Frank to make sure he didn’t tip him off.
A.W. had warned Harris that he hadn’t been able to recall much about his life as Adam. But when Harris told him that he could put him on the phone with Frank Sortini, after a moment’s pause, he exclaimed, “Frankie!” In fact, that was his childhood name, as Darlene had informed Harris. A.W. said that Frankie was three years older than he, and had been the best player on their T-ball team. Frank later confirmed both things as true. Frank had guided Harris to Frank’s Facebook page, where he’d posted a picture of himself as a kid, and after Harris sent it to A.W., he said, “He was the first person who encouraged me to talk a lot. I had traveled places and he hadn’t. There were lots of things I knew about the world and he didn’t—and I was younger and that blew his mind.”
During their conversations, A.W. told Harris that he’d fished with Frank in the canal behind his house. Google Maps showed that although the Walsh home didn’t border the canal, it was close by. “There was an empty lot three houses down,” Frank said, where they’d fished off the seawall. “That’s how far my mom would have let us go,” said A.W.
“I think I was like a mini-me to you,” A.W. said. That Adam had tried to emulate him sounded right to Frank. “Like a big brother,” Frank said.
“Do you remember breaking in my glove with me?” A.W. asked. “Sounds familiar,” Frank said. A.W. described oiling his baseball glove, placing a ball in the pocket, folding it, and then compressing it under his mattress.
“That definitely sounds familiar,” Frank said. He remembered trying to show Adam how to do that, although at the time, as Frank now confessed, he himself didn’t know how to do it, either.
“I seem to remember someone at the field saying you need to oil your glove. I said, I’ve done that a thousand times, I’ll show him.” Then he recalled folding it and stuffing it under Adam’s mattress. “You laid on the bed, it was lumpy. I was laughing. You said, how am I going to sleep with these things under my back? You remember?”
A.W. laughed. That part, he said he actually didn’t remember.
Later, Frank told his wife the story of breaking in Adam’s baseball glove and she reminded him that he’d told her the story ten years earlier, when their son was just starting to play organized baseball and needed to break in his new glove.
At one point in the conversation, A.W. mentioned that “I was a smart-assed little kid.” Frank said he remembered that, then asked how he was a smart-ass.
“I would want to say the one thing that would make all the adults laugh. But sometimes I did that with my friends.” He remembered that he’d pick up bits of information from cartoons, like names of obscure places, and drop them in conversations. “You were showing me how to one-up another kid.”
Frank: “Definitely something I would do, to show how to stand up for yourself.”
A.W.: “End of that summer, we were like two comedians. You’re describing me for sure.”
Harris asked Frank, was Adam a bright kid?
“I remember thinking, how did he know that?” Frank answered.
Not only was Frank the best player on their team, A.W. said, but he, Adam, was by far the worst. Much of their friendship was Frank mentoring him, teaching him the fundamentals of the game, how to play it as well as how to watch it.
At games, when Adam swung a bat, Frank remembered him usually hitting the tee instead of the ball, so the ball would drop to the ground. When he did hit the ball, he didn’t have the strength to get it more than halfway to third base. “We were the worst team, and Adam was the worst player on it.”
A.W.: “I was the smallest kid in that baseball league. But not one to back down from challenges.” He remembered Frank pitching to him so he could learn how to hit. But since he’d usually miss the ball, “it tired me out. I would always have to chase it.”
Despite how awful the team was, Frank still wanted to win, that was his competitive nature. A.W. said Frank would say that “some player isn’t good, hit it to him.” He told Frank, “You were watching the game intently. Either talking to me or listening to the coach.”
Frank: “Any advantage, I would have done. Sounds exactly how I’d be the lead. I’d talk to the coach about the other team.”
Then A.W. came up with perhaps the most remarkable moment of their conversation:
“Frank knew the hand gestures of baseball. We had a conversation, and then we used it in the game.” Frank would raise two fingers, although A.W. no longer could remember what it signified. After some back-and-forth, they realized it was this: Frank, as team leader in the field, would keep alert his progressively dejected and bored teammates awake. Two fingers in the air meant that they had two outs.
“I did do that, like the big ballplayers,” Frank said. “When you did that, I changed the way I played and watched,” said A.W.
Youth league coaches stick the weaker players in right field, where the ball is rarely hit, and that’s where Adam had played. Harris knew that because John Walsh had told it to The Miami Herald for its first story after Adam’s disappearance. Both Frank and A.W. confirmed that. But up to then, A.W. hadn’t recalled what position Frank generally played. But after envisioning Frank in the field raising his fingers and calling two outs, he said third base.
“I played third base,” said Frank. “I was the big shot of the team, I did that, two fingers, two outs.”
After more calls and subsequently meeting him in person, Frank Sortini concluded that there was no other possible explanation for someone knowing what A.W. knew unless he was who he said he was—Adam Walsh.
A.W. met with a Hollywood Police detective who was on the case. The detective was courteous but didn’t follow up. Harris offered the detective his research so he could attempt to duplicate it, but the detective didn’t take him up on that, either.
When A.W. first contacted Harris, he asked for help in getting a DNA comparison with Mrs. Walsh. Was all this good enough proof to earn him that test?
As crazy as it sounds, could he possibly be Adam Walsh?
Please click here to view Parts One, Two, Three and Four of Mr. Harris’s compelling Adam Walsh series:
The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part One
The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part Two
The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part Three
The Unsolved “Murder” of Adam Walsh: Part Four
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
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