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Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh - Book Two: Finding the Victim
(Also THE UNSOLVED “MURDER” OF ADAM WALSH
Book Finding the Victim. The body identified as Adam Walsh is not him. Is Adam still alive? The cover-up behind the crime that launched “America’s Most Wanted”)
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE ADAM WALSH CASE
A New Two-Book Series
(with a Special Single Edition, a condensed version of both books)
AN INDEPENDENT TEN-YEAR REVIEW OF THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION EXPOSES MANY CLEAR, VITAL
WERE THE POLICE WRONG WHEN THEY NAMED THE KILLER OF ADAM WALSH? (Book One)
WAS THE MEDICAL EXAMINER WRONG WHEN HE IDENTIFIED THE REMAINS OF A FOUND CHILD AS ADAM WALSH? (Book Two)
BOOK ONE ASKS, DID THE POLICE GET THE RIGHT KILLER OF ADAM WALSH?
In July 1981, the mother of 6-year-old Adam took him shopping at a Sears store near their home in Hollywood, Florida, a suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Mrs. Walsh said she left Adam to play the video games at the display and returned for him about ten minutes later. He was gone and she couldn't find him.
For the next two weeks, nearly the entire Hollywood Police Department, much of the community, and the Walshes searched for Adam everywhere they could think of. The family printed his most recent photograph, of him wearing a T-ball team baseball cap and shirt and holding a bat. What made him even more endearing was his big smile, revealing the absence of both his top front teeth.
Exactly two weeks later and about a hundred miles north of Hollywood, a man fishing in a drainage canal saw, floating, a child's severed head. Police suspected it was Adam Walsh, and by the next morning, a medical examiner announced the official identification.
In 1983, Ottis Toole, a drifter from upstate Jacksonville, Florida, confessed to the murder, and Hollywood Police announced it at a dramatic press conference. But then came the real for much of the next year police tried to link anything Toole said to actual case facts not already publicly known. They weren't able to. In 1984 police dropped Toole as an active suspect.
But in 2008, a new Hollywood Police chief held another dramatic press conference to announce, again, that Toole killed Adam. And again, the chief admitted there was no substantiation beyond his confession--no new evidence. But this time Toole was dead--he'd died in 1996, in a Florida prison for another crime, so he could no longer be prosecuted. Because of that, the chief announced that the case investigation was finally over.
But when Hollywood closed the case, its file became public record. In it, author and investigative journalist Arthur Jay Harris discovered, was much more evidence that Adam's kidnapper had been Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer.
Dahmer had been captured in Milwaukee in 1991. Police there found in his apartment eleven severed heads--mostly of young men, though none close in age to Adam. He also admitted going to shopping malls to find victims, that he'd killed his first victim in 1978, and that he'd been in Miami when Adam was taken. However, Dahmer denied anything to do with that. A spokesman for Hollywood Police said they certainly wouldn't trust such a killer's mere denial, but after they were unable to independently prove that Dahmer had been in South Florida, they dropped it. Later, when an FBI agent confronted Dahmer in prison about Adam, he thought he'd tacitly admitted killing him. He got word to Adam's father, John Walsh, who by then was hosting a reality television crime show series called America's Most Wanted. Walsh got Hollywood to interview Dahmer, but when he directly denied it, Hollywood dropped it again.
Upon his arrest, Dahmer insisted he came clean about all his crimes, but evidence shows he did not.
It was not police but Harris who located the only document that proved Dahmer had indeed been in Miami that summer when Adam went missing. A Miami police report dated 20 days before Adam's kidnapping read that "Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer" had found the body of a homeless man in the alley behind where he worked. That was suspicious, but Dahmer never mentioned it, or his repeated physical torture and rape of his roommate in the U.S. Army, Billy Capshaw, when they were stationed in Germany. Also, German police had suspected Dahmer of a series of mutilation murders there. Dahmer denied them, but Capshaw had seen him return from weekend leaves with his clothes and skin soaked in dried blood. He also found (and threw out) a series of Dahmer's hunting knives, their blades covered with blood, and had seen M.P.s return Dahmer to their room after he'd been caught masturbating in a park in front of children.
But the main evidence that Dahmer took Adam came from the Hollywood Police's own files. There, Harris found seven witnesses who had offered tips to police as well as to John Walsh's TV show that they had seen a man in or outside the Hollywood Sears with or close to Adam. Two told police that the man was Dahmer; the rest...
Book Finding the Victim. The body identified as Adam Walsh is not him. Is Adam still alive? The cover-up behind the crime that launched “America’s Most Wanted”)
THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE ADAM WALSH CASE
A New Two-Book Series
(with a Special Single Edition, a condensed version of both books)
AN INDEPENDENT TEN-YEAR REVIEW OF THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION EXPOSES MANY CLEAR, VITAL
WERE THE POLICE WRONG WHEN THEY NAMED THE KILLER OF ADAM WALSH? (Book One)
WAS THE MEDICAL EXAMINER WRONG WHEN HE IDENTIFIED THE REMAINS OF A FOUND CHILD AS ADAM WALSH? (Book Two)
BOOK ONE ASKS, DID THE POLICE GET THE RIGHT KILLER OF ADAM WALSH?
In July 1981, the mother of 6-year-old Adam took him shopping at a Sears store near their home in Hollywood, Florida, a suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Mrs. Walsh said she left Adam to play the video games at the display and returned for him about ten minutes later. He was gone and she couldn't find him.
For the next two weeks, nearly the entire Hollywood Police Department, much of the community, and the Walshes searched for Adam everywhere they could think of. The family printed his most recent photograph, of him wearing a T-ball team baseball cap and shirt and holding a bat. What made him even more endearing was his big smile, revealing the absence of both his top front teeth.
Exactly two weeks later and about a hundred miles north of Hollywood, a man fishing in a drainage canal saw, floating, a child's severed head. Police suspected it was Adam Walsh, and by the next morning, a medical examiner announced the official identification.
In 1983, Ottis Toole, a drifter from upstate Jacksonville, Florida, confessed to the murder, and Hollywood Police announced it at a dramatic press conference. But then came the real for much of the next year police tried to link anything Toole said to actual case facts not already publicly known. They weren't able to. In 1984 police dropped Toole as an active suspect.
But in 2008, a new Hollywood Police chief held another dramatic press conference to announce, again, that Toole killed Adam. And again, the chief admitted there was no substantiation beyond his confession--no new evidence. But this time Toole was dead--he'd died in 1996, in a Florida prison for another crime, so he could no longer be prosecuted. Because of that, the chief announced that the case investigation was finally over.
But when Hollywood closed the case, its file became public record. In it, author and investigative journalist Arthur Jay Harris discovered, was much more evidence that Adam's kidnapper had been Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer.
Dahmer had been captured in Milwaukee in 1991. Police there found in his apartment eleven severed heads--mostly of young men, though none close in age to Adam. He also admitted going to shopping malls to find victims, that he'd killed his first victim in 1978, and that he'd been in Miami when Adam was taken. However, Dahmer denied anything to do with that. A spokesman for Hollywood Police said they certainly wouldn't trust such a killer's mere denial, but after they were unable to independently prove that Dahmer had been in South Florida, they dropped it. Later, when an FBI agent confronted Dahmer in prison about Adam, he thought he'd tacitly admitted killing him. He got word to Adam's father, John Walsh, who by then was hosting a reality television crime show series called America's Most Wanted. Walsh got Hollywood to interview Dahmer, but when he directly denied it, Hollywood dropped it again.
Upon his arrest, Dahmer insisted he came clean about all his crimes, but evidence shows he did not.
It was not police but Harris who located the only document that proved Dahmer had indeed been in Miami that summer when Adam went missing. A Miami police report dated 20 days before Adam's kidnapping read that "Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer" had found the body of a homeless man in the alley behind where he worked. That was suspicious, but Dahmer never mentioned it, or his repeated physical torture and rape of his roommate in the U.S. Army, Billy Capshaw, when they were stationed in Germany. Also, German police had suspected Dahmer of a series of mutilation murders there. Dahmer denied them, but Capshaw had seen him return from weekend leaves with his clothes and skin soaked in dried blood. He also found (and threw out) a series of Dahmer's hunting knives, their blades covered with blood, and had seen M.P.s return Dahmer to their room after he'd been caught masturbating in a park in front of children.
But the main evidence that Dahmer took Adam came from the Hollywood Police's own files. There, Harris found seven witnesses who had offered tips to police as well as to John Walsh's TV show that they had seen a man in or outside the Hollywood Sears with or close to Adam. Two told police that the man was Dahmer; the rest...
- GenresTrue Crime
397 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 6, 2013
9 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Arthur Jay Harris
12 books4 followersArthur Jay Harris is the author of the investigative true crime books Speed Kills, Flowers for Mrs. Luskin, Until Proven Innocent and the two-book series with a Single Edition, Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh. He lives in Florida.
For the Adam Walsh case, he has appeared on television many times: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Cold Blood, and on local TV in Miami and Milwaukee. He has also written stories on the case that have appeared in periodical print in The Miami Herald, Broward-Palm Beach New Times, and Miami Daily Business Review.
In addition, Art has presented on television other crime stories he has investigated at length, including on the shows Snapped; City Confidential; Prison Diaries, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Hard Copy.
For the Adam Walsh case, he has appeared on television many times: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Cold Blood, and on local TV in Miami and Milwaukee. He has also written stories on the case that have appeared in periodical print in The Miami Herald, Broward-Palm Beach New Times, and Miami Daily Business Review.
In addition, Art has presented on television other crime stories he has investigated at length, including on the shows Snapped; City Confidential; Prison Diaries, Inside Edition, A Current Affair, and Hard Copy.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 12, 2022
(SPOILERS) Disappointing!
I tried to keep reading until I was finished but couldn't justify wasting the time. There were so many hypothetical explanations as to be ridiculous as to why Adam hadn't been found and identified as a bodyless head. It just wasn't convincing. Not only was that not convincing, neither was I convinced that Jeffrey Dahmer could have had anything to do with any young boy's disappearance. From the few things I understand about serial killers, they usually have a type, at least sort of; Dahmer's youngest victim was 14 but I think that may have been because he physically resembled the type of men he usually was attracted to: slight, with darker hair, eyes, and skin. If he had kidnapped Adam Walsh, he would have been his only other child victim unless, as this book is trying to claim, the severed head two M.E.s and a close family friend of the Walsh's said was Adam was really another of Dahmer's child victims who was killed to satisfy the search for Adam so Dahmer could keep him -- alive? Or whatever the theory was. There was so much information stuffed in here that didn't seem to really have anything to do with anything that I can't even clearly state the theory of the author. He also seems to think he's heard from someone who believes he's Adam Walsh, but the reason his DNA doesn't match Mrs. Walsh's is because he's had such extensive facial reconstructive surgeries to repair damage Dahmer did to him. That was just too much for me.
I tried to keep reading until I was finished but couldn't justify wasting the time. There were so many hypothetical explanations as to be ridiculous as to why Adam hadn't been found and identified as a bodyless head. It just wasn't convincing. Not only was that not convincing, neither was I convinced that Jeffrey Dahmer could have had anything to do with any young boy's disappearance. From the few things I understand about serial killers, they usually have a type, at least sort of; Dahmer's youngest victim was 14 but I think that may have been because he physically resembled the type of men he usually was attracted to: slight, with darker hair, eyes, and skin. If he had kidnapped Adam Walsh, he would have been his only other child victim unless, as this book is trying to claim, the severed head two M.E.s and a close family friend of the Walsh's said was Adam was really another of Dahmer's child victims who was killed to satisfy the search for Adam so Dahmer could keep him -- alive? Or whatever the theory was. There was so much information stuffed in here that didn't seem to really have anything to do with anything that I can't even clearly state the theory of the author. He also seems to think he's heard from someone who believes he's Adam Walsh, but the reason his DNA doesn't match Mrs. Walsh's is because he's had such extensive facial reconstructive surgeries to repair damage Dahmer did to him. That was just too much for me.
Displaying 1 of 1 review