Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh
The key to Adam Walsh's murder mystery was secretly hidden 40 years ago in an autopsy file never expected to be publicly seen. On its reveal, it showed that every police action in the case since couldn't possibly have been right. And that was the least of it.
A famous old crime. No linking physical evidence. For decades, the murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, the iconic face of Missing Children, the boy on the milk carton, was an unsolved mystery. Suddenly police declared a solution resurrected on a theory they'd long discredited, clearly a convenient fiction to benefit the victim's family, who at a live nationally-televised police press conference were tearful and grateful.
The national media bought it; the local press knew better. As Fred Grimm wrote in the South Florida Sun Sentinel on July 30, 2021, days after the 40th anniversary of Adam's disappearance:
"A sensational alternate theory blamed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Miami in 1981. But in 2008, despite no new evidence, Hollywood police hung the crime on long-dead Ottis Toole.
"The only mystery left unsolved was how any cop could have possibly believed Ottis Toole."
Before 2008, Adam's father John Walsh had bitterly complained, often crying, that there was "no justice, no justice" for his family. But while Toole was still alive and could have been charged on the same information, Walsh had belittled the idea:
"A lot of people still think Ottis Elwood Toole did it. But he and [his partner] Henry Lee Lucas confessed to a lot of murders they didn't do. It's a great ploy for convicts: They read about a murder and they're in solitary. They call the police, desperate to clear a murder, and they say, 'Fly me there and buy me a pizza, ' and they get out of their cells for two days!"
-South Florida magazine, July 1992
Police had statements from six separate witnesses at the mall who said they saw Dahmer when Adam disappeared, but police couldn't confirm that Dahmer had been in town then. Then reporter Art Harris, working with ABC Primetime, found a Miami police report with Dahmer's name dated 20 days before Adam was taken. Still they weren't interested. But by 2008, both Dahmer and Toole were dead, so did it matter? Although the police's conclusion was eye-rolling, it seemed harmless.
Grimm was wrong only in that police's belief in Toole was the only mystery left.
Probably without realizing it, by closing the case police unlatched a door locked nearly 30 years before to a guarded secret that possibly only one man, maybe two, seemed to know-not even the detectives. At that point you just needed to know to ask to open the door.
Only one reporter did. Who knew what would be inside?
Inside Harris discovered a much larger convenient fiction, but this one not at all harmless. In looking back it explained everything irregular in the investigation that had followed. As long as the secret was kept, the case could never be truly solved. Harris was then working with The Miami Herald, but even when they confronted them, the chief medical examiner who'd hidden it, the police-and most surprisingly, even the Walshes all turned blind eyes.
What was the never-meant-to-be-seen or spoken-of truth in Adam Walsh's murder?
First, despite what everyone has been led to believe, the autopsied child was only presumed to be Adam. Without a signed autopsy report, as reported in The Miami Herald, he was never actually properly identified as him.
Why wasn't there an autopsy report?
Because, as it turns out, the child was very likely not Adam.
Which makes the unsolved murder mystery in the case, Who is i
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