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    The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition
    Unavailable
    The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition
    Unavailable
    The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition

    By Arthur Jay Harris

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    ALSO AVAILABLE: FULL-LENGTH BOOKS ONE AND TWO
    THIS SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION IS A CONDENSED VERSION OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO, FOR BRIEFER READING:

    Six-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared from the toy department of a Sears in Hollywood, Florida, in 1981. Two weeks later and 125 miles away, a child’s severed head was found and identified as Adam. His parents, Reve and John Walsh, deeply grieved and dedicated their lives going forward to helping find other parents’ children who had gone missing. In 2008, 27 years later, police announced at a live televised press conference that they’d finally solved the case, blaming the kidnapping and murder on a by-then dead man. Because of that there could never be a trial.

    All of that is true. But virtually everything else that you think you know about this famous case is wrong.

    In 1983, 25 years earlier, that suspect had volunteered a confession that he’d killed Adam Walsh. But the police then had deeply investigated his story and couldn’t verify anything he’d said, not even that he’d been within 400 miles of the area. In 2008, when a new Hollywood Police chief closed the case, he admitted they had no new evidence.

    What the new chief didn’t mention was that by then he had six separate police witnesses who’d been at the shopping mall on that day in 1981, and had since spoken up. Most had seen Adam; all had seen a much more likely suspect -- Jeffrey Dahmer. A microfilmed Miami police report the author found and had previously shown to the Walsh detectives proved that Dahmer was then living just a few miles from the Sears. Dahmer’s boss told the author that the prompt for the report was that Dahmer had told him he’d just found the body of a homeless man behind the store. Yes, bad luck, Jeffrey Dahmer found a dead body. 1981 was 10 years before Milwaukee police found severed heads in Dahmer’s refrigerator and arrested him as a serial killer. He said he’d killed his first victim in 1978.

    Even worse, it turned out that the identification of the child as Adam had been slapdash and suspect. The Walsh parents weren’t present for it; John Walsh wrote years later that he’d never viewed even photographs of the remains. A family friend had been present for the ID, and Walsh wrote that his first impression had been that it wasn’t Adam. Because the remains were only a severed head, there were no fingerprints, and forensic DNA was still years away. The pathologist making the identification did it strictly by teeth, but he admitted he wasn’t a dental expert. Dental X-rays, when available, are a standard for comparison, but he didn’t have them. He also had a forensic dentist available but never consulted him. A medical examiner in another regional office performed the autopsy, but he also never consulted a forensic dentist.

    Worse again, that medical examiner never wrote and submitted an autopsy report, as state laws and guidelines require. That perhaps never happens. Had police ever charged any live defendant with murder in this case, prosecutors in court would have been handcuffed to prove that the dead child was Adam. The case likely then would have ended.

    Why all the misdirection? Did Dahmer take Adam? Is Adam even dead, is that someone else’s child? Could Adam be... alive?
    Fifteen years of continuing research. Author’s story appeared in 2007 on ABC Primetime, and in 2010 on a Sunday front page of The Miami Herald.

    “I never, and to my knowledge no one in the office, prepared a report on the head of Adam Walsh.”
    -- 2010 email from Dr. Ronald K. Wright, in 1981 the Chief Broward County Medical Examiner, who performed the autopsy on the remains of the child previously identified as Adam Walsh, when asked if he had a personal copy of Adam Walsh’s autopsy report that neither the Medical Examiner’s Office nor the police had.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArthur Jay Harris
    Release dateJun 7, 2013
    ISBN9781301611232
    Unavailable
    The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition
    Author

    Arthur Jay Harris

    A feature film, SPEED KILLS, based on my book, opened in November 2018! You can stream it.Watch the trailer:https://www.screendaily.com/news/first-look-trailer-john-travolta-in-speedboat-drama-speed-kills-exclusive/5129868.articleTrue crime writers primarily pursue the question "Why?" Why did somebody commit the crime? How could he get away with it for so long?In my true crime books, I pursue a different primary question: about the case's outcome, I ask, "Are you sure?"Every true crime story has loose ends that naggingly just don't fit into the constructed narrative. They make for a challenge: stay with your narrative and ignore or play them down, or follow them and risk your narrative.There is an essential messiness to true crime that a reader of it must both resist and embrace. But that's why we read it, right? If you want everything well-tied up at the end, read crime fiction. To start, give up on the idea that a story must have a bottom. How can there not be a bottom? Yes, theoretically there is a bottom, but to us on the outside looking in, it's just not accessible. In reality, what we think are story bottoms are really false bottoms; beneath them, if we dare to look, are more bottoms. That wisdom, I should add, did not come to me easily. My stories are always less about the crimes themselves than my endurance to stay on the rollercoaster rides to find the truth. Countless times I'm upended, and I never see it coming.Yet the job of a guide, narrator and investigator, such as myself, remains to organize that mess. However, I also scrutinize the work of the other guides, narrators, and investigators on the story. When I approach a story, I look for, then follow, significant pathways not taken: people who law enforcement couldn't get or weren't then ready to talk; witnesses who weren't asked everything important; and things the authorities were blind to or simply missed.Then there are the stories in which the official investigators suppressed facts. On those, I am unrelenting in pursuing public records (always politely, politeness is essential in all information gathering). In obscure files and from additional reporting based on them, I've discovered a few rare things that were never known outside of law enforcement.Always remember that to some extent, every interested party in a crime story is intentionally misleading us. They tell mostly true things but withhold or lie about other facts that are contrary to their interests. Trust only the people with no skin in the game not to intentionally mislead.In each of my books, I first bring you up to speed by composing the story from what's on the record, then I make a narrative switch to first person and have you follow my investigation. When I pick up the right trail, it becomes obvious. I always advance my stories, including Speed Kills and Until Proven Innocent, but the two books in which I made the most significant (and contrarian) contributions are Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, and Flowers for Mrs. Luskin.And now, because it seems obligatory in such biographical summaries, among the television shows I have appeared on with my stories include: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Snapped; City Confidential; Cold Blood; and Prison Diaries.

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