Word: walshs
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...year old boy named Adam on July 27, 1981; the discovery of his severed head 16 days later in a Florida drainage ditch; the inability of the legal system to pin the crime on anyone. Two TV movies have been produced on the ordeal of Adam's parents, John Walsh and his wife Reve. But only recently did Walsh--the no-nonsense host of the Fox TV show America's Most Wanted--decide to write down his own story. From its searing prologue through its frank re-creation of the lives undone by Adam's murder, Tears of Rage (Pocket...
...book began as a record of Walsh's transformation from victim to crusader for a constitutional amendment on victim's rights. But as his co-author, PEOPLE senior writer Susan Schindehette, explored the documents on Adam's death, details emerged of a potential bungle by the Hollywood, Florida, police. To the surprise of Walsh, a loud champion of police work generally, the revelations were found in a 10,000-page case file that a judge had released to the media in 1996 against the wishes of the family. Walsh had feared it would hurt the investigation by publicizing information known...
...Elwood Toole as his son's murderer. In one confession, Toole said he decapitated Adam with a machete and placed the head on the floor of his white Cadillac, which he then drove to a secluded spot off the Florida turnpike. He threw the head off a small bridge. Walsh asserts he even took police investigators to the location. Toole, however, stopped cooperating when, Walsh writes, the police became verbally abusive; he recanted. It might have been possible to run DNA tests to determine whether the blood in Toole's Cadillac was Adam's. But the carpet samples have disappeared...
Hollywood police chief Rick Stone, who says he has skimmed Walsh's book, maintains that his department never had the carpet samples to begin with because the car was impounded by another law-enforcement agency. Stone says there is no evidence to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Toole murdered Adam. Both Toole and his close friend, convicted mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas, were notorious, he says, for confessing to crimes they didn't commit...
...Walsh had held out hope that Toole, suffering from cirrhosis and facing five life sentences for other crimes, would make a deathbed confession. He may have. Walsh has since learned from an ex-prison official that Toole had spoken of Adam's murder to a nurse before he died in September 1996. But confidentiality rules prevent the nurse from confirming the allegation. Toole's niece told a detective her uncle confided that he had killed Adam, and felt bad about it. That is little consolation for John Walsh. Hearsay is not closure...