How It Took 27 Years to Solve the Murder of 6-Year-Old Adam Walsh

On July 27, 1981, Revé Walsh took her 6-year-old son Adam with her to the Sears at a mall in Hollywood, Fla. She left Adam in the toy department playing video games while shopping nearby, but he was gone when she returned minutes later.

The investigation into the boy’s disappearance revealed that a security guard had ordered a group of kids, including Adam, to leave the store. Then he vanished. On August 10, 1981, two fishermen found Adam's severed head in a canal off the Florida Turnpike, more than 100 miles from Hollywood. 

Besides the anguish over losing a son, the Walsh family would become frustrated as multiple missteps derailed the subsequent murder investigation. 

While waiting for answers, John Walsh, Adam's father, helped solve other open cases as host of America's Most Wanted. It would take 27 years for police to be certain who had killed his son.

Authorities asked Adam’s parents to take lie-detector tests, which they passed. John also had an alibi from his job as a hotel developer.

Investigators then focused on Jim Campbell, a family friend whose affair with Revé had recently ended. Officials theorized that Campbell could have wanted to undermine the Walshes’ marriage or sought revenge on them by hurting Adam. 

But Campbell declared his innocence and passed a lie-detector test. Authorities also determined he would have been unable to make the trip to the place where Adam’s head was found.

The initial police focus on Adam’s parents and Campbell was standard investigating practice, David Carter, a policing expert and professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

"You always focus on people who know a victim. That's where you start, then [in 1981] and today,” he says. “Because unfortunately, what we have seen is, too many times that is the case."

Ottis Toole, jailed while facing arson charges, told an investigator on October 10, 1983, that he had kidnapped a boy from a Florida mall and killed him.

When Hollywood police visited Toole on October 19, 1983, he confessed to killing Adam. Detectives then took Toole to Hollywood, where he pointed out a bus bench by Sears as where he'd met a little boy before using promises of candy to lure him away. 

He also led police to where he said he had buried Adam's body, though no remains were found. However, Toole's description of cutting off the boy’s head with a machete in four or five strikes jibed with autopsy findings.

But according to a Hollywood detective’s report, Toole incorrectly described Adam’s hair color and the clothes he was wearing when he disappeared. Toole also initially said that a man named Henry Lee Lucas was with him when he abducted Adam, but authorities determined Lucas was jailed when Adam disappeared. On October 26, Toole recanted, but confessed again minutes later.

Investigators tracked down the Cadillac Toole said he'd been driving when he kidnapped and killed Adam; they found blood on the front and rear floorboards and removed carpeting. Police were unable to conduct blood type testing, and DNA testing didn't exist in 1983. 

Authorities also located a machete that Toole likely had access to at the business where he purchased the Cadillac. Testing revealed traces of blood on the weapon.

Orlando news outlet WFTV noted that Toole's pattern of confessing and recanting would repeat for years. He also admitted to numerous other murders, many that he said had been committed with Lucas. But authorities concluded that Toole and Lucas made mostly false confessions.

Toole reportedly had an IQ of 75, meaning he had an intellectual disability that limited his ability to function intellectually. Rod Hoevet, a forensic and clinical psychologist, tells A&E Crime + Investigation, "A guy who's that intellectually compromised might be inclined to admit to something he didn't do. Maybe for the attention, maybe for the notoriety."

In July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was gruesomely revealed as a serial killer who kept body parts as souvenirs from some of his victims. Ten years earlier, he lived in Florida, and witnesses told police after Dahmer’s arrest that they had seen him at the Hollywood mall the day Adam disappeared.

Hollywood detectives went to Wisconsin to interview Dahmer in August 1992. According to The Miami Herald, Dahmer said he didn't kill Adam, and police believed him because Dahmer’s known victims were between the ages of 14 and 32.

"Serial killers tend to have an age range, they have a gender preference. They have something that they're looking for," Hoevet says. "It would be very strange that if he had begun his career with young adult men, that he would suddenly deviate so markedly to a young male child."

A breakthrough in the case happened in August 1991, when a witness told police he had seen Adam get into a Cadillac with a man who looked like Toole. 

The witness described a dent on the car that matched with Toole’s vehicle. Investigators were convinced the witness was truthful because the dent detail had not been made public previously.

Police wanted more information, and in 1995, as DNA testing was becoming commonplace, they wanted to test the bloody car mats. But the mats had been lost and the Cadillac had been sold for junk. Authorities still had the machete, but they could no longer detect blood traces, perhaps because they were degraded by the original tests.  

Toole—who reportedly had cirrhosis of the liver and may have been infected with HIV— died in prison on September 15, 1996, at age 49. He had given two dozen documented confessions in Adam's case.

A niece of Toole's said her uncle made a deathbed confession about killing Adam. Hoevet feels this type of confession goes against the theory that Toole was only seeking attention: “At that point, he stands to gain nothing, if he really knows that he's going to die."

In December 2008, Hollywood police announced that a review of the case allowed authorities to conclude Toole was responsible for Adam's abduction and murder. 

The investigation was finally closed and Adam's parents were relieved.

"We needed to know,” John told reporters at a press conference. “Not knowing has been torture."

He added, “This is not to look back and point fingers, but it is to let it rest.”

The Walshes pushed federal lawmakers to pass 1982's Missing Children Act, which mandated the FBI add information about missing kids to its National Crime Information Center database. 

Carter tells A&E Crime + Investigation that at the time of Adam’s disappearance, local police typically only reached out to the FBI about missing children in suspected interstate crimes.

John and Revé also founded the Adam Walsh Outreach Center, which became the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. 

In 2006, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act became law. The legislation expanded the national registry of sex offenders and set up a registry for child abuse.