The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Book Two: Finding the Victim

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET:

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH

BOOK TWO: FINDING THE VICTIM

The body identified as Adam Walsh is not him.

Is Adam still alive?

BY ARTHUR JAY HARRIS

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright, 2016, by Arthur Jay Harris

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET:

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH

IS A TWO BOOK SERIES

BOOK ONE: FINDING THE KILLER

Was the man in the mall

the most notorious murderer in history?

FOR BRIEFER READING, THE TWO BOOKS

HAVE BEEN CONDENSED INTO A

SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION

First the police found the body. Then the killer. Neither was right.

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET: THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH is a journalistic account of the actual investigation of the abduction murder of Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in 1981. The events recounted in this book are true. Names that have been changed are noted in the text as such. Research has been done using author interviews, law enforcement and other public records, published and broadcast news stories, and books. Quoted sworn testimony has been taken verbatim from transcripts.

Copyright © 2016 by Arthur Jay Harris

Published by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information, please email the author at http://www.arthurjayharris.com

Cover and author photos: Sandy Levy, Miami, Fla. http://www.levyphoto.com

Cover and typographical design: Bruce Kluger, New York.

http://www.brucekluger.com

Photographic usage of Hollywood Sun-Tattler newspapers courtesy Hollywood Historical Society, Hollywood, Fla.

Mugshot of Jeffrey Dahmer, courtesy Milwaukee Police Department.

Baseball photo of Adam Walsh, courtesy Hollywood Historical Society. Credit: Gerlinde Photography/Michael Hopkins

Photographs, updates, links and additional materials available at: http://www.arthurjayharris.com.

Or contact the author at Facebook: Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh

First electronic book edition: June 2013

Second edition: January 2015

Third edition: January 2016

Also available in print edition

Other true crime books by

ARTHUR JAY HARRIS

SPEED KILLS

Who killed the Cigarette boat king, Don Aronow, the fastest man on the seas?

FLOWERS FOR MRS. LUSKIN

Who ordered the deadly delivery for the millionaire’s wife?

UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

Could the real-life Kojak help save a man from the electric chair?

ALL OF THE BOOKS ABOVE ARE ALSO AVAILABLE

IN PRINT EDITIONS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 22: 2009-10:

REVISITING EVENTS OF THE WEEK OF AUGUST 10, 1981

CHAPTER 23: A FACEBOOK FRIEND REQUEST

CHAPTER 24: CORPUS DELICTI (BODY OF THE CRIME)

CHAPTER 25: UNDER WATER

CHAPTER 26: ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS...

CHAPTER 27: ROTTEN TO THE CORE

CHAPTER 28: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

CHAPTER 29: THE SHROUD OF TURIN

CHAPTER 30: POTTERSVILLE

CHAPTER 31: DAHMER ON A SPREE

CHAPTER 32: A GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH

CHAPTER 33: A HASTY IDENTIFICATION

CHAPTER 34: THE DNA LAB REPORT

CHAPTER 35: WHO KILLED ADAM WALSH?

A FRIEND REQUEST ON FACEBOOK

I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED to know that J. Dahmer did kidnap me… I have to give you credence outright for laying most of the blame on the man behind my own abduction.

It was signed, Sincerely, Adam J. Walsh.

Introduction

Book Two

RARELY DOES A BOOK SEQUEL CONTRADICT ITS ORIGINAL TITLE, but it does in the instance of Jeffrey Dahmer’s Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh (Book One: Finding the Killer, and now Book Two: Finding the Victim—Is Adam Still Alive?)

These books represent work I’ve done over much of the last eighteen years, beginning in 1996 when police in Hollywood, Florida, were forced to open their Adam Walsh murder file to the public although they had not solved the case. In court, counsel for news media argued that the police investigation of the then-fifteen-year-old case was dormant, and therefore under Florida public records statutes was eligible for public exposure. A judge agreed, and for the first time in Florida (if not elsewhere), reporters and everyone else had nearly full access to copies of an unsolved murder file.

The question became: if the cops couldn’t solve the case in fifteen years, could fresh, non-police eyes reviewing the same material do anything with it?

These books are my answer to that question.

Don’t expect the police to be grateful for the help. They aren’t.

In an era when my adopted home of South Florida was renown (infamous, really) for its murders, the Walsh case was arguably the biggest one here of its time—and the most awful. For a young child left alone just a few minutes in a public place like a shopping mall department store to disappear and two weeks later emerge monstrously dead seemed to speak to the illness of the community, if not all of modern America.

As I wrote in Book One, regarding a suspect, the police never got far beyond Ottis Toole, the Jacksonville drifter who in 1983 had volunteered a jailhouse confession. On his initial statements alone, Hollywood Police quickly after held a press conference announcing that the case was solved. But without confirmation the state attorney had declined to prosecute, and when detectives did the legwork, intense months of it, they could not corroborate anything Toole said. Released as public records in 1996, transcripts of the detectives’ interviews with Toole showed they had prompted him with information about the entire case, including photographs of the crime scene and Adam. As bad as that sounds, the problem seemed to be not that the detectives acted unethically but rather that Toole tricked them. You might not think that Toole, who had a low-intelligence manner, could play the police so well, but that’s what he later explained he did in this case as well as in confessions he’d made to other murders elsewhere.

Although Toole was a willing confessor, at the outset it was apparent that his information ranged on a scale from worthlessly vague to inaccurate to completely wrong. Reading the interviews, I kept wanting to shout at the detectives, Leave! Go home! This guy obviously knows nothing! But the detectives had just traveled on short notice on a police plane across the state to Jacksonville, and, it looked like, they decided to stick it out. By prompting Toole little by little to see if maybe he could recall details that were real, they may have figured they had nothing to lose. In fact, that’s what one of the interviewing detectives later told me.

In the end, Toole added nothing of value. I can understand that Toole was easily and probably often underestimated, but it was a mistake to think he was dumb. I also understand that Toole and his partner Henry Lee Lucas, then in the midst of their confessional reign of terror, sort of wrote the book on false confessions. Up to then, police tended to consider confessions as the gold standard of crime-solving. Still, what I’ve never understood is why anyone, after reading Toole’s initial interview, took seriously what he said. I don’t think the two Hollywood detectives who interviewed him ever understood that, either.

By the end of 1984, after Hollywood couldn’t prove anything Toole had said that they hadn’t shown or told him or he haphazardly later added, sometimes reversing himself, police publicly dropped him as an active suspect—only to revive him once again in 2008, although by then he was twelve years dead and there was, to Hollywood’s admission, no further new information against him.

Jeffrey Dahmer did not become a suspect until his arrest in Milwaukee in 1991, ten years after Adam’s disappearance. And to Hollywood Police, he never became much of a suspect at all. But as I showed in Book One, Dahmer was in South Florida when Adam disappeared. That was by his own admission, the witnessing of others I found who knew him, and if that wasn’t enough, a Dade County police report I uncovered which documented him finding a dead body.

Days after his 1991 arrest, two separate witnesses had contacted Hollywood Police to say that they had been at the Hollywood Mall at the time Adam disappeared and they’d seen a man there they now thought they recognized as Dahmer. Police weren’t enthusiastic. However, an FBI agent who later interviewed Dahmer thought he’d implied to him that he’d taken Adam; the agent got word to John Walsh, who had to lean on the state attorney to get the lead Hollywood detective to fly to Wisconsin to interview Dahmer. If Dahmer would confess, Walsh even got the state attorney to agree in writing to waive the death penalty, which Dahmer hadn’t faced for his admitted killings in Wisconsin and Ohio. However, at the interview, there was no indication that the detective mentioned the concession on the death penalty, and Dahmer just simply denied having anything to do with Adam. For the police, that was pretty much that.

The argument against Dahmer has always been that Adam, at six years old, didn’t fit his pattern of victims. His closest acknowledged murder victim in age to Adam was thirteen years old. But that argument relies on a bit of popular forensic science, that serial killers necessarily have known or knowable M.O.’s that don’t change. Another fallacy is that Dahmer, who for his murderous career had kept his own counsel, should have been believed when he said soon after his capture that he’d admitted all his killings.

I found much reason to think that Jeffrey Dahmer, after arrest, left out a great deal of his story.

For one thing, I found Billy Capshaw, Dahmer’s roommate for a year during 1980-81 in the U.S. Army at a base in Germany. Although after his capture Dahmer never mentioned him, Billy had a story of mental and physical control and torture by Dahmer, which included repeated druggings, rape, hits from metal objects that broke bones, cuts and stabbings, and even surgery. Although Billy often didn’t think he’d survive, as a result he had the most intimate knowledge of Dahmer of anyone, arguably better even than his family.

He was also a secondary witness to what was likely violence Dahmer had done in Germany. Dahmer often took weekend leave to travel around the country, and Billy saw him return with dried blood soaked through his clothes to his skin. He also repeatedly found blood and mucus on hunting knives that Dahmer hid. In 1991, after his arrest, German police investigated him for about a dozen mutilation murders, seemingly a pattern, mostly of women and within fifty kilometers of his base while Dahmer was there, which ended after he was kicked out of the Army in March 1981. At the time, the entire country of Germany had only about two hundred or so murders a year. When asked, however, Dahmer denied the killings—he said he was only interested in men and boys. And again, that was pretty much that.

In fact, Dahmer denied killing anyone between what he said was his first murder, in 1978, and a spree that began in 1987 and ended with his 1991 arrest.

After Germany, to avoid going home where he’d have to confront his failure to stay in the Army, Dahmer chose to go to Miami, where he spent the spring and summer of 1981. In July 1981, Adam Walsh’s mother said she last saw her son when she left him alone for an intended few minutes at the videogame display in their neighborhood Sears that was, as it turned out, about twenty minutes by vehicle from where Dahmer at the time had a cleanup job at a sub and pizza shop.

Dahmer told the police he had no vehicle then but I learned that the sub shop had a blue van that employees could, and often did, take for their personal use without asking permission. Hollywood Police’s first hot clue in 1981 was a blue van; at about the time that Adam disappeared, a man was reported throwing a small child into a blue van in the parking lot just next to Sears. Based on that, Hollywood stopped all the blue vans they saw, requested other police agencies to do the same, and as well asked the public through the media to report to them all their sightings of blue vans. After about a month of attempting to track a deluge of blue van sightings, Hollywood declared the lead invalid.

One of the 1991 Dahmer witnesses also had him throwing a child into a blue van. Then in 2008, after Hollywood Police declared the case solved at last, they released most of the remainder of their case information, which showed five previously-undisclosed witnesses who apparently also had seen Dahmer at the mall that day in 1981; three of them as well had seen a blue van there. Four of the five reports had the van parked or standing in the same spot, just outside the entrance to the Sears store, and the fifth had it close to there.

Still, Hollywood wouldn’t budge from their position that Toole took Adam.

With the publication in 2009 of what I now refer to as Book One, I thought that after years of work I could finally put the story down.

I was completely wrong, the story was just starting again, I hadn’t gotten the half of it.

By a Facebook message that arrived in my email, a man wrote me that he was Adam Walsh. Yes, that one. And that Jeffrey Dahmer, in fact, had taken him from the mall, in a blue van.

Wasn’t Adam Walsh, um, dead, wasn’t that what this story was all about? A severed head had been found in a canal more than a hundred miles north of Hollywood two weeks after Adam was reported last seen at the mall, and an upstate medical examiner had announced a positive identification: it was Adam. No other part of his body was ever found. Adam’s parents gave him a public funeral service, they as well as the very scared and traumatized community cried their eyes out, and the Walshes had rededicated their lives to helping other parents of children who were missing. And at Hollywood Police’s 2008 press conference, they’d accepted with gratitude the police chief’s decision to finally close the case with the declaration (again) that Toole had killed Adam.

So much else in the story had turned out contrary to what the police and the Walshes had insisted upon. The message to me didn’t read like a malicious drive-by prank; it was too detailed, well-written, and sincere-sounding. The date he sent it was a few days before what would be, or would have been, Adam’s thirty-fifth birthday, though I only realized that much later. At its conclusion he asked to talk. Which was riskier, replying or not? I decided to ask for his phone number, and that day’s call to him turned into a week of stomach-churning conversations, for me and though at the time I was not thinking it, him as well.

Right off the bat I asked him for his legal name, the one on his driver’s license. Of course it could not be Adam Walsh. He gave it to me, and answered all the other questions I asked him. He said Dahmer had kept him for possibly a month. He let him hear the news about the discovery of Adam, dead. After that, Dahmer tortured him horribly and left him near-dead himself. Unconscious, he had been rescued but didn’t know the details. After life-saving hospitalization and a good deal of reconstructive surgery, another family took him in and raised him, giving him the name and birth certificate of a child of theirs who had died, who had been born in a third-world country. They spoke a language other than English, and he had to learn it.

Could I speak to anyone in who he called his foster family? No, they were in denial. Anybody else who could confirm it? No. Documents? No. I already knew there weren’t any news stories. He was a super-smart guy and very personable and I didn’t doubt that he believed his story, but self-delusion was becoming the likeliest explanation.

Yet I couldn’t be sure.

I brainstormed an answer. Although it seemed impossible to prove that he was Adam Walsh, I might be able to prove that he wasn’t. The answer would be in the medical examiner’s file: the evidence supporting the positive identification of the found child as Adam Walsh.

A little background on public records exemptions in Florida: under a state statute, local police case files are public record unless the case is under active investigation, that is, police must expect to make an arrest in the foreseeable future. After fifteen years without an arrest, Hollywood Police had continued to insist that the Walsh case fit the definition for an exemption from public release. But in 1996, despite emotional pleas by the Walsh family, a judge ruled otherwise and ordered police to make the file available to the public.

Since then, I’d repeatedly asked the police to release the rest of its file, generated after 1996, arguing that the case hadn’t risen back to the statutory definition of active investigation. But Hollywood brushed me off like a fly, or better put, a gadfly, and I’d never taken them to court. So despite how it looked on the surface—a very public rebuke of my Dahmer theory—police’s closure of the case in 2008 turned out to be a great, unexpected favor to me. With the police case closed, that is, no longer under active investigation, all of the official investigative files in the case at last became public record.

The morning after police closed the case I’d called the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office, asking to see its file.

Up to then, only bits of the Broward M.E.’s file had been in the public record, those exposed in Hollywood Police’s 1996 release. A preliminary autopsy report, written by the upstate M.E., showed that he’d made the identification of the found child as Adam by relying on Adam’s pediatric dental records. (Because the remains were only a head there were no fingerprints, and forensic DNA technology was still off in the future.)

As well, he wrote, a Walsh family friend had made a visual identification at the morgue. (When police told the Walshes that remains had been found, they were in New York, hours before a scheduled appearance on network morning television to promote the search for Adam. Either disbelieving or in denial that the remains could be Adam, they turned down the show’s offer to immediately fly them home.) However, as Walsh wrote in his book Tears of Rage, the family friend did not on first sight recognize the child as Adam, he’d made the ID only after seeing that the child had a small, emerging tooth. Days before Adam had disappeared two weeks earlier, when the friend had last seen him, he’d seen the same thing, he said.

The autopsy had been done in Broward, according to a single page generated by the Broward M.E. For comparison, I had a report of another autopsy the Broward office had done less than two weeks before the date of Adam’s; its equivalent page was in effect the cover sheet, which was followed by a narrative of the details of the external examination then the internal examination after a dissection. Both cover pages attributed the cause and manner of death. On the Walsh remains, the upstate M.E. had done only an external, that is, visual examination. He had not dissected the body.

Since the ID was made strictly by teeth, I mainly wanted to confirm that Adam’s dental records matched the teeth in the found child. Then without regret I could walk away from this guy who said he was Adam Walsh.

There had been so many interesting leads to pursue in the newly-released police file in 2008 that I’d kind of forgotten about the Broward M.E.’s file and hadn’t followed up. One thing I’ve learned about asking for public records, at least on the local level, if you ask only once you may not get them.

So a year later when I again asked the Broward M.E. to see its Adam Walsh file, this time they told me that the file was lost. Lost? The most famous homicide case in the county’s history? But the next week they called to tell me they’d found it and I could see it.

Here’s what wasn’t in it:

It didn’t have any more of any autopsy report than I’d already seen, that is, its cover page. As such, it didn’t have a charting of the found child’s teeth; the upstate M.E. in his report had done an inventory of its teeth but he mainly counted them, he made little attempt to identify which teeth were in its mouth. The comparison autopsy report from less than two weeks earlier had included a signature by the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. Missing those additional pages, the Walsh report had no signature. Further, there were no photos of the autopsy.

It didn’t have Adam’s pediatric dental records, nor a chain of custody report or narrative proving receipt of them. Better than Adam’s dental charts to make an identification would have been his dental X-rays, if they existed, but they weren’t in the file either, nor was there any mention of an attempt to get them.

Considering that the ID was made strictly by teeth, it was hard to reconcile that there was no forensic dental report or any mention of one.

The upstate preliminary autopsy report had just a single line stating that the Walsh family friend had made a visual ID but no narrative of what he had said. Besides a duplicate of that upstate report in the Broward file, there was no other mention of the family friend’s visual ID. Nor, when I later checked, was there any further mention in the upstate M.E.’s complete file, or in Hollywood Police’s file.

A Florida state statute in the Medical Examiner’s chapter requires that the detailed findings of autopsy and laboratory investigations shall be maintained by the district medical examiner.

I’d expected to prove to myself that the guy who told me he was Adam Walsh couldn’t possibly be Adam Walsh, but instead I’d discovered something maybe more inexplicable: there was no clear, slam-dunk ID at the M.E.’s office that the child who all along they’d said was Adam Walsh was in fact him.

Two successive chief M.E.’s of the Broward office confirmed for me the absence of all those documents and materials and more. None of the other official investigative files had duplicates. Did the pathologist who performed the autopsy, an earlier chief Broward M.E., keep a personal copy? He would not speak to me. To get some kind of answer, I made a public records request to the Broward M.E.’s office asking them to ask him. If he had it, upon my request the M.E. was obliged by statute to get at least a copy and place it in its file, then give me a copy. He responded, in writing, that neither he nor anyone else in his office ever wrote a report, it was the upstate M.E.’s case. It was, originally, but in writing they’d authorized Broward to do the autopsy, and now there was no narrative report of it available anywhere.

Did Adam’s dentist still have a copy of Adam’s records? He wouldn’t speak to me, either, so I asked the upstate medical examiner’s office to ask him. He told them no.

The Broward State Attorney had signed off on the Hollywood Police chief’s 2008 decision that Toole killed Adam although the chief admitted they’d found no new evidence against Toole since Hollywood’s original investigation of him had ended, which was in 1984. Toole died in 1996, so there had been twelve years the state attorney was sitting with the same evidence that was later deemed sufficient. Why hadn’t they prosecuted the case while they could, while Toole was still alive?

On the other hand, given these absences in the files, how could the state attorney have proved at trial that the identification was correct, that the dead child was Adam Walsh?

I asked the Chief Assistant Broward State Attorney, then in charge of the case for his office, whether he was bothered by those absences in the file—the ones by then I’d realized, which was most of them. He said he was not.

Yet this was not the largest problem.

The last known photo of Adam is his since-famous Missing picture in which he was dressed in his baseball league uniform and held a bat. His smile revealed, endearingly, that he was missing some top baby teeth, as was age-appropriate at six and a half. I wanted to know just which ones. There was confusion about this in the local newspaper stories published while he was still missing, as well as in the description on his Missing poster which the family had written and distributed as widely as possible. Was he missing one or both of his top front teeth?

On the Internet there were a number of copies of the picture but when I attempted to enlarge them I realized that their pixel counts were too low.

I solved this by finding an original. It was a studio shot, same as a school picture, all the kids in the league sat for individual shots and parents bought multiple prints. On the day their son disappeared, the Walshes gave them out to the local newspapers, including the Hollywood paper I had worked for as a reporter two years before the incident. It’s long since defunct but its photo archives remain, and from there I got a high-resolution scanned copy.

That copy of the photo clearly answered my question: Adam had neither of his top front teeth. But when had the picture been taken? In his book, John Walsh wrote it was a week before he disappeared. From the studio photographer who took the shot and others, I found it was closer to a month before.

I also found Adam’s last best friend, and among other things asked when he’d last seen him. He said it was a week or two before Adam disappeared. Did he notice whether either of his top front teeth were in? They weren’t, he said, and he’d specifically noted that to himself, thinking that Adam was awfully smiley for a kid missing his two front teeth.

More specific than the family’s last-seen-alive description of Adam’s teeth in the Missing poster was a Hollywood Police teletype to another police department that read that Adam was missing his right top front tooth but his left top front tooth was partially in.

Adam had been missing two weeks when the child’s remains were found, and the Chief Broward M.E. told the news media and Hollywood detectives that the child (Adam, he said) had been dead for possibly all fourteen days. Forensic dentists and medical examiners told me that teeth do not continue growing after death.

For the found child to be Adam, its top left front tooth should have showed about two weeks growth beyond eruption, maybe less.

How much is that? To compare, the pediatric dentists and parents I asked said that a child’s permanent top front tooth, once erupted, on average takes about six months to fully come in. Two weeks is a thirteenth of twenty-six weeks. Let’s round that up to a tenth—ten percent. That gives you a probably fair idea of how far Adam’s top left front tooth should have been in.

Through public records requests, I got or saw all of the photos of the found child that were in the files of the Hollywood Police and the Broward M.E. There weren’t many, and they weren’t particularly good, especially to show the teeth. The best police photo of the child’s top front teeth shows its left tooth stuck out like a buck tooth. Although the M.E. had no photos of the actual autopsy, it did have pictures taken later of the cleaned skull. No visible gum line remained, but viewed next to the other teeth in the top jaw, the left front tooth looked like it was in about two-thirds of the way. The police, years later, had consulted a forensic anthropologist who had taken his own set of pictures of the cleaned skull. Although a few were available in public records I could not get the rest through a records request. However, the anthropologist agreed to look at them and describe how far in the top left front tooth was. Almost all the way, he told me.

I showed and told all this evidence to a number of forensic and pediatric dentists. Given all this, I asked, could the found child be Adam Walsh?

None thought so. The bluntest reply I got was, No way in hell.

If this is right and it isn’t Adam Walsh…

… then who is it?

From here on in, my answers aren’t very good.

I can’t say who it is. Records of missing children as far back as 1981, at least those available online, aren’t comprehensive.

But if the child isn’t Adam Walsh, then the parents of some other child were never told that he (or, who knows, she) was found. That child, then, never got a homicide investigation under its real identity or even as a merely unidentified child. Might the child have been abandoned and unloved? There is one good clue that it had been cared for: it had a filling in a baby tooth that was eventually going to fall out.

Did police and the medical examiner realize the misidentification and do nothing? Could all that explain why all those documents are missing? Again, I can’t say. Anybody who might know, or could even deny it, hasn’t talked to me.

What do Adam’s parents, the Walshes, think? On the realization so many years later of at least the serious possibility that their son Adam might not be dead, you might think they’d have shivers up their spines.

But I don’t have a good answer to that, either. It may come to your surprise but the Walshes and I have never spoken.

Hearing that, you can also understand that the Walshes, as traumatized and now high-profile people, might have built a sort of self-protection wall against crackpot-sounding theories and information.

I first asked to speak to John Walsh in advance of the first story I wrote about Adam, published in 1997. He was then promoting Tears of Rage, his book about what was in the Hollywood Police public record case file, first opened the year before, and included his and his wife’s first-person narratives. Walsh felt the newly-exposed evidence clearly led to Ottis Toole. My story’s main interview subject was a Broward State Attorney’s Office investigator who’d been working the case who also thought it was Toole. Although I was then years away from discovering Dahmer as a better suspect, I was dubious of Toole and had said so during friendly exchanges with the investigator.

Walsh didn’t return my phone call asking for an interview but I expected I’d meet him at a scheduled bookstore appearance nearby in a few days. Then he canceled his appearance.

In Walsh’s book was a section describing when an out-of-state reporter had approached John’s office in 1995 for an interview with him about the status of the case, fourteen years later, and how he had since coped with Adam’s death. As Walsh wrote, he told his assistant, Something about it just didn’t feel right to me. He asked his assistant, "What do you think this guy really wants?"

Walsh didn’t reply, the reporter continued to pursue him, and I kept ignoring him, Walsh wrote. In what was a second letter to Walsh, the reporter wrote, My newspaper is committing much in time and resources to this project… Won’t you please help us in our effort to help you find Adam’s killer? In his first letter he’d written that he wanted to meet Walsh in person and was willing to come to the studio in Washington where he shot his show America’s Most Wanted. And then he did that unannounced, as Walsh wrote. There, Walsh wrote that his executive producer told the reporter in no uncertain terms that Walsh "was not going to be talking to him."

After 1997, in advance of each of the next six stories about the case that I worked on, I’d always asked my editor, co-reporter or the television news producer I was working with to reach out to Walsh for comment. He never spoke directly to any of them, either, not even from ABC News or The Miami Herald.

How about the man who contacted me saying he’s Adam Walsh? Has he spoken to the Walshes?

No, him neither. Before he contacted me he’d tried to reach John Walsh through his show’s tip line. He got nowhere. Maybe you’d expect that, you might think, but on the other hand, the show set up the line to take tips on solving crimes to pass onto police for investigation. Even if the operators might have rolled their eyes listening to him, shouldn’t they have at least written something down?

He also tried Facebook to reach relatives of the Walshes. That also got him nowhere, and after a while he gave up on it. But when he contacted Hollywood Police they asked him to come to the detective bureau to talk. He did, a detective still on the case politely listened to him without showing disbelief, and then didn’t follow up.

Did the police tell John Walsh that they had conducted an interview with this man who was claiming to be their son? I don’t know. When I later made another public records request to police, asking for the detective’s summary of the interview, I was told none had been written.

After the detective did his interview, I followed up and offered him the names of two people I’d had speak to the man who said he was Adam: Adam’s last best friend, and Billy Capshaw, Dahmer’s Army roommate. The detective didn’t follow up with me, either.

Yet those two interviews had been interesting smell tests; could the man tell Adam’s best friend anything convincing about their friendship? On the Internet or elsewhere there was nothing about this man’s friendship with Adam. Could he describe the up-close-and-personal habits and horrors and tics of Dahmer that Billy knew so well that it was a battle not to constantly think of them, which also wasn’t on the Internet or in books?

My instructions to the two men were, don’t let him do like Ottis Toole. Don’t tell him what you know, let him tell you what he knows.

Both spoke to the man at length over a number of conversations, and Adam’s best friend met him in person twice. Billy was astounded that he’d encountered anyone else who’d shared nearly the same experience he’d had. He couldn’t say whether or not he was Adam, but his story of torture by Dahmer was absolutely real, he said.

Adam’s best friend had much more pleasant conversations, listening to him recall how they’d practiced baseball together and played on the same T-ball team that won only one game. Adam knew that his friend had volunteered to break in his baseball glove, was the team leader in the field and played third base, was three years old than him (and sort of a ringer on a T-ball team with children much younger), and in general, mentored him in sports and was like his big brother.

None of that confirmed he was Adam, but we agreed that now it was hard to think that he wasn’t.

Wouldn’t DNA quickly resolve whether he was? Hollywood Police could have taken a swab sample but didn’t. He gave me a sample, but no comparison is possible without samples from the Walshes. Actually, through public records I learned that in 2003 police took a DNA sample from Mrs. Walsh and had it processed, and I got the lab report. But the lab result had contamination issues and therefore wasn’t reliable. As it turns out, the process of forensic DNA matching is more problematic than most people realize.

So as of this writing, here’s what I can say:

For sure: the official documents that were used or should have been used to identify the found child as Adam Walsh are missing.

Highly if not overwhelmingly likely: the found child isn’t Adam Walsh.

More likely than not: the man who says he’s Adam Walsh is indeed him.

I concede, all of this sounds pretty hard to believe.

The proof is in the details. Read them and see what you think.

Arthur Jay Harris

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

January 2015

"No matter how many spin doctors were provided by no matter how many sides of how many arguments, from Watergate on, I started looking for the truth after hearing the official version of a truth."

-- Ben Bradlee, Executive Editor, The Washington Post

22

2009-10: Revisiting Events

of the Week of August 10, 1981

"YOU WILL BE FOUND. YOU WILL BE FOUND. If you have to be backed into a corner, you’ll be found."

—Reve Walsh, Wednesday, August 12, 1981

Of all the Hollywood Mall witnesses, Willis Morgan had been the most insistent voice. In 1981, as soon as he’d realized the significance of what he’d seen, he’d gone to the police. Of course, the police had nothing in the case file saying so, but they hadn’t saved many of their tips from that first week and beyond. Also, he said that had Toole ever been prosecuted for the murder, he would have offered to testify for him. In 1991 he’d kept after Jack Hoffman for a year, stopping only after Hoffman returned from his Wisconsin interview with Dahmer and told Morgan that Dahmer had looked him in the eyes, told him he didn’t do it, and Hoffman believed him.

During that year, Morgan had tried to enlist a reporter from the Miami Herald, where he still worked in the pressroom, and when that failed, reporters from Miami TV stations. The closest he came was a polite callback from one TV reporter telling him that she had called Hoffman who had told her that Morgan was irrelevant to the case.

I hadn’t told any of the case witnesses I had found about each other because I hadn’t wanted them to cross-pollinate, but I couldn’t continue that after December 2006 when I put the story in the Miami Daily Business Review. I then introduced, at first by phone, all those who wanted to meet each other. It was an eye-opener for them, especially Willis and Bill Bowen, neither of whom knew that another witness had identified Dahmer at the mall. After ABC Primetime flew in Bowen to return to the scene, I hosted a dinner for he and Willis and my friends and intimates at the space that had been Sunshine Subs—it was now a Peruvian restaurant. After the Primetime show aired, I had a conference call so Billy Capshaw could meet everyone.

Willis also wanted to help with the investigation. After I’d showed him the July 7, 1981 police report, it was his idea to search the meter room behind Sunshine Subs. I was totally skeptical that anything could be found twenty-six years later but suggested it to ABC producer Geoff Martz, who wanted to do it. If it had been up to me, I confess, we never would have gone into that room.

Point for Willis.

When Hollywood announced its press conference closing the case, they gave the media only a few hours notice. Martz and others called to tell me, and I told Willis so he came too. When I discovered in the case the four new Hollywood Mall witnesses, Willis helped me locate them and spoke to them all with me.

He wanted to read the whole file, so we made a duplicate CD-ROM. Looking for things I might have missed, he studied it