Florida police finally closed the missing-child case that led to the creation of the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” announcing yesterday that a drifter who died in jail was the monster who abducted and murdered 6-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981.
Ottis Elwood Toole, who confessed and recanted twice in the grisly murder, had long been the prime suspect. But holes in the case – including the failure to find Adam’s body – stopped cops from charging anyone for 27 years.
“Who could take a 6-year-old and murder and decapitate him? Who?” the boy’s father, John Walsh, said yesterday, blinking away tears. “We needed to know. We needed to know. And today we know.”
“The not knowing has been a torture. But that journey’s over.”
The search for Adam and the shock of his death made the fate of missing children a national priority and inspired the show “America’s Most Wanted,” which Walsh hosts.
The freckle-faced boy disappeared from a Hollywood, Fla., mall across the street from a police station on July 27, 1981.
Two weeks later, his severed head was discovered by fishermen in a canal 120 miles away. The rest of his body was never found.
Police checked out dozens of suspects, including serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
But the leads kept pointing towards Toole, who was 31 at the time of the murder. A pedophile with a long arrest record, Toole was also a sometime partner of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.
Cops found bloodstains in the carpeting of Toole’s white Cadillac and other forensic evidence.
In October 1983 he confessed, telling detectives he kidnapped the boy and drove around with him in the Cadillac for an hour before killing him. He showed police the spot where Adam’s head was found.
But Toole also claimed he committed hundreds of murders, and cops determined he was lying about them.
He led police to the spot where he claimed he left the rest of Adam’s body, but there was nothing there.
Investigators also made several errors, such as losing the bloodstained carpeting as well as the car. That prevented later DNA technology from establishing where Adam died.
Frustrated with the botched probe, John Walsh became an advocate for awareness of the plight of missing children.
Toole, convicted of other crimes, died in prison in 1996.
His niece told Walsh that Toole made a deathbed confession.