On the afternoon of July 27, 1981, Adam’s mother, Revé, took him shopping with her to the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Hollywoodis a city in Broward County, Florida, between Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
Reve and Adam went together to the department store Sears .
Revé intended to inquire about a lamp which was on sale, and left Adam at a kiosk with Atari 2600 video games on display, where several other boys were taking turns playing them.
Computer games were new and all the rage in 1981. Adam begged his mum to let him stay and watch these boys play the game.
Revé completed her business in the lamp department 2-3 minutes later, at around -12:15 pm. She said that she returned to find that Adam and the other boys had disappeared. Unable to find Adam in the toy department, she searched everywhere inside and outside Sears and the mall itself. for 40-45 mins, before calling the Hollywood police.
On the morning of August 11, John and Revé appeared on national television saying they still hoped that Adam was alive; a $100,000 reward had been posted for his safe return.
What they didn’t know is that the day before, on the 10 August, a severed head was found in a drainage canal alongside the Florida Turnpike near Vero Beach, almost 130 miles from Hollywood.
Soon after, the recovered remains were identified as Adam’s.
The coroner ruled that the cause of Adam’s death was asphyxiation. The state of the remains suggested Adam had died several days before the discovery of his head. The rest of his body was never recovered
Investigation
John and Revé personally believed that the Hollywood police department botched the treatment of Adam’s disappearance, first the missing-persons investigation, then the investigation into his murder
Toole
After some investigation, police eventually concluded that Adam was abducted by a drifter named Ottis Toole near the front exterior of Sears that afternoon, after being instructed to leave by a security guard.
According to Toole, he lured him into his white 1971 Cadillac with a damaged right bumper with promises of toys and candy, then proceeded to drive north on Interstate 95 toward his home in Jacksonville.
Adam, at first docile and compliant, began to panic as they drove on. Toole punched him in the face, but as this just made the situation worse, he then “walloped him unconscious. When Toole realized Adam was still breathing, he strangled him to death with a seat belt,
In October 1983, Investigators lifted bloodstained carpet from his car. But DNA testing then was not as advanced as it now, and investigators could not tell if the blood was Adam’s.
When a detective assigned to the case in 1994 went to order DNA testing on the bloodstained carpet from the car, the carpeting, and the car itself were found to be missing.
Toole, repeatedly confessed and then retracted 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. 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, aged 49, of cirrhosis while serving a life sentence for other crimes.
Afterwards, his niece told John that he made a deathbed confession to Adam’s murder. His confession was viewed as unreliable since he confessed to or implicated himself in many different homicides.
In 1997, Hollywood Police Chief Rick Stone conducted an exhaustive review of Adam’s case. Although the crime happened 16 years before the time of his review, he provided an analysis of the evidence, including reviewing taped interrogations of Toole by Hollywood Police Detective Mark Smith. Stone says his review found evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Toole murdered Adam.
Jeffrey Dahmer In 2007, allegations earned widespread publicity that Jeffrey Dahmer, a notorious serial killer, arrested in Wisconsin in 1991 after killing more than a dozen men and boys, was also named as a suspect in Adam’s murder.
Lionel Damer, Jeffrey’s father, called the AMW hotline not too long after his son’s arrest. He said that while his son was never convicted for it, he believed his son was paedophile.
He was living in Miami Beach at the time, and two eyewitnesses placed him at the mall on the day Adam was abducted.One claimed to have seen a strange man walking into the toy department. The other said that he saw a young, blonde 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 showed that the delivery shop where he 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 MO included severing his victims’ heads. When interviewed about Adam in 1992, he repeatedly denied 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 someone else?” After this rumour surfaced, John stated that he had “seen no evidence” linking Adam’s abduction and murder to Dahmer and that they were satisfied that Toole was the murderer.
The television film Adam premiered on October 10, 1983. The film was based on Walsh’s kidnapping and murder and attracted 38 million viewers on its first airing. Each of its three broadcasts in 1983, 1984 and 1985 were followed by pictures and descriptions of missing children. A hotline was also created to take calls regarding them. The pictures and hotline were ultimately credited with finding several missing children. 13 of the 55 children shown in the 1983 broadcast were located.
In 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Missing Children’s Assistance Act, owing in part to the advocacy of the Walshes and other parents of missing children. It allowed the formation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
The Code Adam program for helping lost children in department stores is named in Adam’s memory. The U.S. Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act on July 25, 2006, and President Bush signed it into law on July 27. The signing ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House, attended by John and Revé.
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