HOLLYWOOD, Fla. - A serial killer who died more than a decade ago is the person who decapitated the 6-year-old son of "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh in 1981, Florida police said Tuesday.

 

The announcement brought to a close a case that has haunted the Walsh family for more than two decades, launched the television show about the nation's most notorious criminals and inspired changes in how authorities search for missing children.

 

"Who could take a 6-year-old and murder and decapitate him? Who?" John Walsh said at Tuesday's news conference. "We needed to know. We needed to know. And today we know. The not knowing has been a torture, but that journey's over."

 

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Walsh's wife, Reve, at one point placed a small photo of their son on the podium.

 

Suspect made deathbed confession

The suspect, Ottis Toole, had twice confessed to killing the child, but later recanted. He claimed responsibility for hundreds of murders, but police determined most of the confessions were lies. Toole's niece told the boy's father, John Walsh, her uncle confessed on his deathbed in prison that he killed Adam.

 

Police said Toole was long the prime suspect in the case and that they had conclusively linked him the killing. They declined to be specific about their evidence and noted they had no DNA proof of the crime, but said an extensive review of the case file pointed only to Toole, as John Wash long contended.

 

"Our agency has devoted an inordinate amount of time seeking leads to other potential perpetrators rather than emphasizing Ottis Toole as our primary suspect," said Hollywood Police Chief Chadwick Wagner. "Ottis Toole has continued to be our only real suspect."

 

Wagner acknowledged numerous missteps in the investigation and apologized to the Walshes.

 

"I have no doubt," John Walsh said. "I've never had any doubt."

 

Investigation long criticized by Walshes

Many names have been mentioned in connection to the case in the years since the killing, including serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but Toole's has persistently nagged detectives. John Walsh has long said he believed the drifter was responsible, saying investigators found at Toole's home in Jacksonville a pair of green shorts and a sandal similar to what Adam was wearing.

 

The Walshes long ago derided the investigation as botched. Still, he praised the Hollywood police department for closing the case.

 

"This is not to look back and point fingers, but it is to let it rest," he said.

 

Adam Walsh went missing from a Hollywood mall on July 27, 1981. Fishermen discovered his severed head in a canal 120 miles away two weeks later. The rest of his body was never found.

 

Authorities made a series of crucial errors, losing the bloodstained carpeting in Toole's car ? preventing DNA testing ? and the car itself. It was a week after the boy's disappearance before the FBI got involved.

 

"So many mistakes were made," John Walsh said in 1997, upon the release of his book "Tears of Rage," which harshly criticized the Hollywood Police Department's work on the case. "It was shocking, inexcusable and heartbreaking."

 

Major advances in searching for missing children

For all that went wrong in the probe, the case contributed to massive advances in police searches for missing youngsters and a notable shift in the view parents and children hold of the world.

 

Adam's death, and his father's subsequent activism on his behalf, helped put faces on milk cartons, shopping bags and mailbox fliers, started fingerprinting programs and increased security at schools and stores. It spurred the creation of missing persons units at every large police department.

 

It also prompted national legislation to create a national center, database and toll-free line devoted to missing children, and led to the start of "America's Most Wanted," which brought those cases into millions of homes.

 

What it also did, said Mount Holyoke College sociologist and criminologist Richard Moran, is make children and adults alike exponentially more afraid.

 

"He ended up really producing a generation of cautious and afraid kids who view all adults and strangers as a threat to them and it made parents extremely paranoid about the safety of their children," Moran said.

 

 

This happened when i was 4-5 years and i have never 4gotten cause he played ball in some of the same parks that i did and remember playing against him and then us hearing later about what had happened to him. It was horrible,i always knew it was that P.O.S. Ottis Toole,i hope he's burning in hell. After this happened i never walked away from my parents when we went somewhere....

 

You can finally rest in peace Adam...

Shouldn't this be in The Bullpen?

 

Anyway, glad to know they finally found out who did it. RIP.

Who knew that so much good could come from such a horrid situation. Glad they can finally rest assured that their son's killer has had what's coming to him.

That's good to hear, in a weird sort of way. I'm happy for John Walsh and his family.

Who knew that so much good could come from such a horrid situation.

 

Good point. :thumbup

 

I've always known about this case and knew it was in South Florida but never realized it happened just a few blocks from my house.

Shouldn't this be in The Bullpen?

 

Anyway, glad to know they finally found out who did it. RIP.

:thumbup :thumbup

The topic title should be changed. Just because the cops say a guy is guilty doesn't mean the case was solved. Many times cops are more concerned with getting a guy than gettign the right guy.

 

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/bre...127,print.story

 

Questions still remain in Adam Walsh slaying despite police naming suspect

By Matt Sedensky

 

The Associated Press

 

6:35 AM EST, December 19, 2008

 

HOLLYWOOD

 

A quarter-century ago, Adam Walsh's accused killer accompanied police to a bus bench outside a Sears where he claimed to have snatched the 6-year-old boy. Then, Ottis Toole went with authorities to a turnpike where he said Adam cried for his mother. Later, they stopped at a bridge where Toole said he hacked off the boy's head.

 

But did he really do it?

 

The story was one of several accounts Toole gave over the years. And while Adam's father, "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh, has long believed Toole abducted and decapitated his son on July 27, 1981, it wasn't until this week that Hollywood police said they agreed, and closed the case. But there was no new evidence, nothing new that came to light.

 

New Hollywood Police Chief Chadwick Wagner said after a re-examination of the evidence, he believes Toole could have been tried and convicted before he died in 1996 serving a life sentence for other killings. Detectives were too hesitant, he says, partly because they didn't want to admit mistakes they made investigating Toole.

 

But the case against Toole has holes. An Associated Press examination of documents released with this week's announcement leaves many questions about the kidnapping and killing ? there is nothing standing alone points to Toole. There are no DNA or blood tests, no slam-dunk eyewitness accounts.

 

"If you're looking for that magic wand, that one piece of evidence, it's not there," Wagner admits.

 

Even basic details of what happened can't be determined because Toole never kept his confessions straight (when he wasn't recanting).

 

He said he picked up Adam outside Sears. Or was it by the mall merry-go-round? He said he bribed the boy with candy ? except when he said he used a baseball glove. He said he threw the boy's body into the same central Florida canal as his head, the only part of Adam ever found. He also said he buried the body off a highway and burned it in his mother's yard in Jacksonville. He took credit for many murders ? including some committed by others.

 

He once accused his sometime traveling partner, another self-professed serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, of being Adam's slayer ? but Lucas was jailed then. In a 1996 AP prison interview, Lucas said Toole confessed to him, even taking him to the mall to show him where he picked up Adam and to the spot where he supposedly killed him. Lucas died in 2001.

 

Jailed for the 1982 murder of a Jacksonville man, Toole began confessing to Adam's slaying and others in 1983, sometimes to detectives from other jurisdictions checking to see if he could be linked to homicides of children and adults they were investigating.

 

For example, despite having confessed to Adam's slaying, he told a Texas detective that he was incapable of killing a child. "I wouldn't do that. Not no little kid," Toole laughed, according to the documents.

 

A day later, in a conversation with the same investigator, Toole said he killed Adam then dismembered the boy's body. But later in the same interview he said he left the body intact.

 

In one of the most gruesome explanations of Adam's fate, Toole told a Brevard County investigator that he chopped off the boy's head, then brought his body back to Jacksonville and burned it in his mother's yard. "I ate a little bit of him," the detective recalled Toole saying. But Toole told others he buried it by the Florida's Turnpike or dumped it in the canal with the head.

 

When the Brevard investigator asked why he kept recanting if he really did it, Toole blamed the Hollywood detectives.

 

"Every time I'd tell them something, they would tell me I was lying and I was a liar," he later recalled Toole saying. "They finally just made me mad ... You are right, I didn't do it."

 

Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said Toole's confessions may have been his way of attaining notoriety or "immortality." But when he realized the disadvantage such a confession would have ? say, retribution from fellow inmates ? he recanted.

 

"Sometimes these people are thinking in terms of chess games," said Heide, who studies homicides and child abductions. "But they're not that smart, and they don't play chess. Somebody who is going to commit a crime like that has problems with human decency and morality."

 

But why confess and recant several times? Heide says Toole's low IQ, his troubled childhood and his inability to distinguish reality from fantasy all played a role.

 

"His hold on reality was likely quite slippery," she said.

 

Some eyewitnesses identified Toole as the weird man they saw at the mall the day Adam disappeared. Years later, others said they recognized the kidnapper the second he first appeared on TV ? infamous Wisconsin serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who lived in South Florida in 1981. Some in the community still believe the case is stronger against Dahmer, who was killed in prison 14 years ago.

 

The two pieces of evidence that might have provided definitive answers with today's advanced DNA testing were lost by Hollywood police during their investigation ? a bloodstained carpet taken from Toole's car and the car itself.

 

No one knows where they are.

I cannot imagine a horror worse than the death of your own child, much less in the circumstances that Adam endured.

 

God Speed, Adam. We remember you.