The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh

On the surface it’s a straightforward story. Here in South Florida, somebody took 6-year-old Adam Walsh from the toy department of his neighborhood Sears, where his mother said she’d left him alone for just a few minutes because he’d wanted to play at the video games display while she shopped. Store cameras would have solved this – except it was 1981 and stores didn’t yet have them.After two weeks of a huge, unprecedented police and community search, and with the story in the local news every day, men fishing 125 miles upstate in an orange grove canal saw something floating they thought was a doll’s head. It was a child’s head.Just the head.Cops arriving on the scene figured it was Adam. A DNA comparison with his parents would have been definitive – but this was years before forensic DNA was in use. Fingerprints – there was only a head, no other body part was ever found. A visual ID by his parents – they could have made one, but they sent someone else to go to the morgue. Adam’s dental records – while his parents and the news media waited, that was how the ID was done, by a medical examiner who compared them to the found child’s teeth. Yes, he declared, it was Adam.Adam’s image in his last photograph became the raison d’etre for the Walsh parents, who told their heart-wrenching story in interviews with newspapers and on TV talk shows; in testimony to Congress to urge the enactment of new laws to help find missing children, then at a signing ceremony at the White House Rose Garden; and in two made-for-television movies and a best-selling book. John Walsh became the crusading host of a long-running TV crime show, America’s Most Wanted, which helped catch hundreds of violent fugitives. Meanwhile, the police had never solved Adam’s case.But kind of lost in all of this was Adam himself.

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