25 ago today, a 6-year-old named Adam Walsh disappeared
wazzzy
25 years after crime, a new federal law
Twenty-five years ago today, a 6-year-old named Adam Walsh disappeared
from a Hollywood department store.
Two weeks later, after one of the most intensive searches in Florida
history, his severed head was found in a Vero Beach canal, 100 miles
from where he was last seen.
The rest of his body was never found. No one has ever been convicted of
the crime.
But it was a crime that would change the nation.
Few parents would ever again leave their kids alone. Children were
fingerprinted, laws were changed. Finding lost children took on a new
urgency, and police mobilized more swiftly.
''It remains the most horrific crime I have ever seen in my 30-plus
professional years,'' said State Attorney Bruce Colton of Indian River
County, who in 1981 was an assistant state attorney in Vero Beach.
The crime transformed Adam's parents, John and Reve Walsh, a young,
middle-class couple who lived on McKinley Street in Hollywood. And they
channeled their grief into a movement, becoming the nation's most
powerful activists for the rights of missing and exploited children.
Today, yet another of one of the Walshes' efforts -- almost three years
in the making -- will be signed into law by President Bush.
The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act will create a national
sex offender registry, authorize grants to help local law enforcement
agencies beef up registry systems, assign more FBI agents to Internet
sex crimes and require DNA samples of sex offenders.
''This bill will make a uniform sex offender registry in every state
[and] add 500 new U.S. marshals, who will be assigned to fugitive task
forces,'' John Walsh, host of Fox's America's Most Wanted, said Tuesday
to TV critics gathered for a press tour in Pasadena, Calif., according
to a transcript obtained by The Miami Herald.
The laws and protections the Walshes helped put in place did not exist
25 years ago. Theirs remains one of the county's most famous cold
cases.
''The two weeks that I searched for Adam, the two weeks I searched for
that little boy, were the worst two weeks of my life, except for the
day we found him,'' Walsh said at the conference.
On July 27, 1981, Adam Walsh -- a boy who loved baseball and Star Wars
-- went with his mother to Sears in the former Hollywood Mall, along
Hollywood Boulevard west of Interstate 95. Adam asked to play video
games in the toy department and Reve Walsh left him there, telling him
she was three aisles away.
When she returned after a short time, he was gone.
Hollywood police and hundreds of volunteers searched the mall parking
lot. In the ensuing days, they would expand their searches to golf
courses, fields, wooded lots and gravel pits.
Posters were plastered across South Florida. The reward grew to
$100,000.
John Walsh went to the media, pleading for the public's help.
And two weeks later, a horrible discovery: a head, believed to be a
child's, found by fishermen in a canal in Vero Beach.
It was a big break.
''We were lucky that we found the head,'' said former Broward County
Medical Examiner Ronald Wright.
The skull -- which remains in the Broward County medical examiner's
office -- is one of the few remaining, and most important, pieces of
evidence in the case.
''If those fishermen hadn't come along, no one would ever have known
what happened to Adam,'' Wright said.
The case, which remains open and active, has never been forgotten by
Hollywood police -- even though they've been criticized for mishandling
the case.
Two of the original detectives on the case have since died, a third is
in Colorado and a fourth is elsewhere in Florida. The Miami Herald was
unsuccessful in reaching the two living detectives.
When Richard Witt arrived in Hollywood in 1994 to assume the chief's
position, the murder was still being actively investigated.
Plenty of mistakes were made, Witt recalls. The main suspect in Adam's
slaying, a drifter named Ottis Toole, died in prison. Witt said Toole,
who confessed twice to the killing but recanted, should have been
worked harder by detectives.
At the time, the department was small and had a largely inexperienced
force, but detectives did not ask the FBI for help.
The crime scene, 100 miles north of Hollywood, was handled by the
Indian River County Sheriff's Office, which didn't secure the scene or
perform the kinds of forensics that law enforcement does today.
Discarded bottles and cigarette butts were left to lie in the swale.
''We left Toole's car with the Jacksonville police and allowed them to
get rid of it,'' Witt said. ``And the patch of carpet from the car that
had blood on it disappeared.''
Witt still felt the case was solvable. He assigned then-detective Mark
Smith to jump-start the investigation.
But as Smith dug deeper, the case only grew colder.
''I reworked the case like it was brand new,'' Smith said.
Smith said he prefers to call it an unsolved case rather than a cold
case.
''I still hold out hope that someone will come forward one day with
information that will allow us to close this case,'' he said.
A new witness could come forward. A relative of the killer who knows
about the crime may want to finally unburden himself, said Vernon
Geberth, one of the country's foremost experts on homicides.
The DNA collections required under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and
Safety Act may help solve cold cases, Walsh said.
''We'll probably solve thousands of old cold cases and get innocent
people out of jail,'' Walsh said.
But whether any resolution to Walsh's tragedy will ever be achieved is
another story.
''The Walshes -- and all families of missing children -- never get
closure,'' said Bill Fleisher, commissioner of the Vidocq Society, a
group of forensic specialists in Philadelphia who work on long-unsolved
crimes.
''Cold case investigations have become more sophisticated over the
years due to technological advances and the legal resources the Walshes
continue help put into place,'' Fleisher said.
``They are likely the most important advocates that the country has
ever had for preventing and solving crimes against children.''
John Walsh is realistic when it comes to Adam's case and others.
'The first thing I say to parents, `What you see on TV is not real
life. They don't swoop in. The harsh reality is that you'll probably
never get justice.' ''
~~
kathypig
the run-up to the Prince Charles/Lady Diana wedding. Hard to believe so
much time has passed and *still* no real resolution as to the killer or
the motive.
Kathy C