7. Solved or Unsolved - Adam Walsh, Pt. 2
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Binged and to part two of our look at the abduction and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh. In this episode, we're going to focus on the investigation and some of the leads that came into the Hollywood police.

Sometimes it will be fragmented and nonlinear because there's just so much to cover that I won't even be able to get to all of it in merely two episodes. This was a massive investigation that spanned over a decade. And the more you know, the stranger the case grows. In our last episode, we ended on the tragic news of Adam's head being discovered floating in a canal alongside the Florida Turnpike.

a discovery that was made after two weeks of an intense search effort and national coverage in the media, with Adam's parents, John and Revae, appearing front and center on daily TV appearances.

Now, once Adam's head was recovered, it was taken to the Indian River County Medical Examiner's Office, where forensic examination led to a few conclusions. For one, Adam was dead before he was decapitated and had likely been killed by asphyxiation or strangulation.

His head was severed with four or five blows from a sharp instrument, like maybe a meat cleaver. And the pathologists believe the head had been in the water for anywhere between six and 12 days, but had only been on the surface for about 24 hours. Now Hughes and Bailey, the two fishermen who discovered the head, theorized that the motor on their boat may have brought the head to the surface when they were on the canal the previous day.

Now, some fractures in the mandible and nose area also suggested the possibility that Adam had been punched before death. But this remains unclear. Divers, meanwhile, searched the canal for additional remains but were unable to find any. And the underwater search was cut short by the high number of alligators that were in the area at the time. Remember, this is Florida. This is gator country. And the canals are full of them.

The Indian River County Sheriff's Office then deployed airboats and helicopters and expanded the search up and down the turnpike. They were assuming that the killer may have disposed of the rest of Adams' remains at various locations while driving. But the search, just like the underwater search, uncovered nothing. Around this time, press conferences were being held by the Hollywood police and other agencies. They

They expressed their fears that Adam's killer was a psychopath who might very well kill again. We need to get this man off the streets, implored the chief investigator for the Broward Medical Examiner's Office. And then he added, I say man because dismemberment is not something females are noted for. And I mean, sure, women aren't noted for dismemberment, but it's never not happened.

Speaking of which, remember the supposed sighting of Adam Walsh at the amusement park? The kid who asked for a Slurpee and a root beer, who was seen in the company of an unidentified woman? Well, that woman actually ended up coming forward five days after Adam's head was found. And turns out it was her and her son that had been reported by the refreshment stand worker. So that lead turned out to be nothing.

Now, police were still on the hunt for that blue van. However, it seemed like their most promising lead. But some of the tips that came in and there were many slipped through the cracks.

On August 11th, the day after the head was found, detectives had gotten a call from a guy named Dennis Bubb. Now Dennis worked as a truck driver for the Publix supermarkets chain, both Dennis and a fellow Publix truck driver named Clifford Ramey reported having observed a suspicious vehicle on the Florida turnpike just after midnight on Friday, August 7th. This was three days before Adam's head surfaced. Now,

Now, Dennis told investigators that he was driving along the turnpike up in Indian River County when he saw a late model van pulled over to the side of the road right by mile marker 131. That's one mile up from where Adam's head was found.

He said the sliding door was open and he saw a white male subject standing down by the canal, shining a flashlight into the water. Clifford, who was driving behind Dennis, observed the same van, but all he could add was that it was a dark color. He said he saw the same subject standing next to the van with a flashlight.

Now, decades later in an interview, Dennis Bubb would claim the van was blue, the passenger seat was missing, and the subject with the flashlight was also fumbling with a bucket. Now, again, these are details that he either didn't share in 1981 when he called in this information or they weren't written down by whoever took the notes.

And it appears that this lead was actually never followed up on, which is pretty crazy. Perhaps it's because the pathologist determined the head had been underwater for at least six days, and this sighting was only three days before the head surfaced. But it's also worth noting, and we'll get more into this later, that Jeffrey Dahmer briefly was named after

As a suspect in the 1990s, after it was learned he'd been living in South Florida at the time of Adam's disappearance. And I know that's a big name to drop, but this really did happen. He had worked for a sub shop where supposedly subs were delivered in a blue delivery van with a missing passenger seat.

But keep in mind the details concerning the turnpike van that was seen by the two Publix truck drivers, the fact that it was a blue van and missing its passenger seat, this wasn't stated until well after Jeffrey Dahmer had been proposed as a subject and after it was known that the sub shop used a blue van with a missing passenger seat.

But now we're going to return back to the days after Adam's head was found. You may remember in our last episode, the 10 year old boy named Timothy Pottenberg, who claimed that he saw two men wearing stockings over their heads, pulling Adam into a blue van. And he'd gotten a good look at one of them because he said the man had been loitering in the toy department and followed Adam out just before this happened.

Before Adam's head was found, the little boy's mother, Marilyn, refused to allow her son to be hypnotized. We talked about this. But then after the discovery, she changed her mind. And so she recontacted the police and told them that she'd now allow it, which is a practice that's a lot less common now. But we'll get more into that in a little bit.

So the Pottenbergs came into the police station and Timothy was placed under hypnosis for the purpose of providing a more detailed account of what he witnessed.

Now young Timothy recalled being in the Sears department with his grandmother when he saw a white male in his mid-20s about five feet tall to six feet tall with dark brown curly hair, a mustache, a multi-colored tank top, and blue jeans. This man was hanging around the toy department reading a comic book glancing toward the video game kiosk where the boys were playing video games. Timothy

Timothy said he then saw a small boy who looked like Adam Walsh exit the store through the north door. That's the receiving door, the door through which Adam and his mom had entered the store that day.

Timothy said he then saw the adult man follow the boy through the north door. And as the little boy then walked around to the west side of the building to stand near the garden department, the adult man ran to a blue van where another white male adult happened to be waiting in the passenger seat.

As Timothy and his grandmother walked toward their car, which was parked near Reveille's car, which was a distinctive gray checker marathon, the two then stepped off the sidewalk. The van then sped past them, nearly hitting them as it turned the northwest corner of the store. Timothy watched as the van stopped in front of the garden shop. He

He said he saw the side door slide open and two hands from inside motioned to the boy, the little boy, who was now standing in the parking lot to come over to the van. And as the boy approached the van's right side, he was then pulled into it. And the person who pulled him in looked to young Timothy like he was wearing a stocking mask.

When asked to describe the van, Timothy described it as a shiny navy blue Ford van with tinted windows, mag wheels, a black bumper with a chrome ladder and no spare tire on the rear, and possibly Florida plates.

Timothy's grandmother didn't witness any of what Timothy described having seen that day. All she could recall was a blue van almost running her over as they walked through the parking lot back to their car.

So this is odd. It's odd that no one happened to see what looked like an abduction except for this 10-year-old boy, Timothy. And then after the hypnosis session ended, the tip line rang and it was yet another witness who saw a blue van speeding near the mall the afternoon Adam Walsh was kidnapped.

This tip was from a man named Eugene and Eugene said that he'd been driving to the mall with his wife that afternoon waiting at the intersection to turn in when suddenly a blue van came speeding past and almost struck his car.

So there's at least a common theme between Eugene's story and Timothy's grandmother, which is a recklessly driving blue van speeding away, almost having an accident. Eugene agreed to come into the station that same day while the forensic hypnotist was still on hand and he was placed under hypnosis. So he came in, was hypnotized, and then proceeded to describe what he saw that afternoon.

He remembered that it was around 1230 p.m. and he was waiting on Hollywood Boulevard to make a left turn onto the road leading into the mall parking lot when suddenly a blue van appeared traveling westbound at a high rate of speed. To him, the driver looked like a white male in his mid-20s with black hair, a thin mustache, olive complexion and no shirt.

Eugene said he didn't see anyone else inside the van. The van, he said, appeared to be a shiny dark Navy blue newer model 1979 or 1980 Ford van with a rectangular window on its sliding door on the right side of the vehicle. He said the van had a chrome running board, shiny mag wheels, a chrome ladder on the rear and two tinted windows on the rear doors.

He described a small silver mirror on the passenger side, two antennas, one on the roof and one on the left front driver's door. Eugene said the inside of the van had black stock seats, a black steering wheel and wood grain behind the front seats. Now,

I must say, and you might be thinking as well, this is a very detailed description for a van that had been traveling at a high rate of speed. But that's supposedly the point of forensic hypnosis. It's supposed to allow the hypnotized subject to draw more detail from a memory than one otherwise might be able to.

Though in the time since, it's become a highly questioned practice. One that's known to generate inaccuracies and the use of hypnosis in criminal investigations has become even less popular than the polygraph, which is saying something.

But either way, Eugene, while still under hypnosis, said he recalled the numbers 4-6 or 6-4 on the license plate, which he believed were Florida plates. And what he couldn't say for sure was whether or not this van had actually come from the Sears mall.

as it only first caught his attention when it nearly hit him. He then worked with police composite artist John Valer and a composite sketch was created. And then a short time after Eugene's hypnosis session ended, the Pottenbergs returned to the station and also worked with John Valer to create a composite.

The result was two composites that looked nearly identical to each other, which again is compelling. But when you consider that both composites were done by the same sketch artist on the same day, it does undercut the significance of this just a little bit. But the two descriptions did generally match up and each composite was shown to the witness, right?

Eugene and then Pottenberg who confirmed it looked like the man they saw and the descriptions of the van just as with the driver were also very very close with no real discrepancies with the exception of the subject Eugene had seen was not wearing a shirt and also appeared to be alone while Timothy had seen two people in the van. Now a

Another older lead the police now wanted to follow up on since the discovery that Adam was dead had been received on August 10th, mere hours before Adam's head was found. The tipster, a woman named Jane, reported witnessing what she believed had been an attempted child abduction at another Sears store. This one at the Twin City Mall in North Palm Beach.

That incident had taken place on Monday, July 13th, two weeks before Adam first went missing. So a good lead here. Jane says she was in the store with her son doing some shopping when suddenly they noticed a white male in his mid-20s, about 5'10", with dark hair, running after a small boy. The little boy came up to Jane and said, that man is chasing me.

So Jane took the little boy by his hand and led him into the shoe department where she had the salesman page the boy's mother, who then showed up to collect him, seemingly unfazed by the whole situation. Now, revisiting this tip, Hollywood police reached out to the police in North Palm Beach.

And they realized that no report of this incident had ever been made. It seemed like no one contacted the police about it. So on Thursday, August 13th, Jane and her son Matthew were called into the Hollywood police department to create a composite drawing of the man seen chasing the boy that day. The following day, that composite was released to the news media and put in the newspaper and on TV.

Now, meanwhile, the police contacted employees of that Sears store, the one in North Palm Beach, including the shoe salesman who paged for the boy. And he corroborated Jane and Matthew's story. And then later that same day, the store's 19-year-old plainclothes security guard, Mark,

And this job is essentially more a store to store detective than a uniformed security guard. He met with Detective Hoffman and his sergeant. Now the security guard told the detectives that he'd been working in the North Palm Beach Sears when he spotted a little boy loitering in the sporting goods department.

He suspected that the kid may have been shoplifting. So he began following the kid around the store, trying to keep an eye on him. And when the kid noticed he was being followed, he got scared and began to run. Detective Hoffman showed the security guard the composite and the security guard indeed believed

believed that it was himself that the composite depicted. The detective took a Polaroid photograph of the security guard and later showed it to Jane and Matthew. The witnesses agreed that the security guard was the man they saw following the little boy. So again, this lead was a dead end.

And in a totally unrelated twist of fate, this security guard, Mark himself, became a murder victim in 1985 when he was stabbed to death by a neighbor. Just a small sad footnote that I felt was worth sharing. But anyway...

In early September 1981, Detective Hickman called Marilyn Pottenberg back into the station along with her mother, Carolyn Hudson. It seems like police really feel like 10-year-old Timothy is their best lead.

And Carolyn Hudson, who was Timothy's grandmother, who said she was almost run over by that blue van, the blue van that Timothy claimed he saw a boy resembling Adam being pulled into. She recounted to the detectives that she was picked up by her daughter, Marilyn and Timothy to go shopping for school clothes at Sears that day. She remembered getting to the Sears mall around 11:45 that morning.

After about an hour, they all decided to have lunch at the sidewalk cafe. It was around 1245 p.m. at this point, and Carolyn remembered that this was around the time she heard a page for a lost child just as they were leaving Sears to go eat.

They finished their lunch around 1:15 PM and they walked back through Sears to return to their car. And that's when the incident with the blue van occurred. So this would have happened at around 1:25 PM, more than half an hour after Carolyn heard the page for a lost child inside Sears.

So based on this information, the detectives concluded that whatever 10-year-old Timothy said he observed, which was unseen by his grandmother and his mother, it had to have been unrelated to Adam Walsh, who'd been missing for over half an hour by that point.

And so their biggest lead, the blue van, looked like yet another dead end. But to be sure, they called Eugene for a follow-up interview. Remember, he's the guy whose car was almost hit by the speeding blue van.

Because now they wanted him to be as specific about the time frame of the incident as he possibly could. And the narrowest he could narrow his time frame was between 1230 and 1, which would have been at least 15 minutes before the Pottenbergs claimed to have encountered that blue van. So it was weird because everything else seemed to match up.

a shiny blue Ford van with mag wheels, the chrome ladder. Could Eugene have been mistaken about the time? Now timelines and timeframes here are really key to this investigation.

And to that point, there were also many inconsistencies in Revae Walsh's timeline that police also wanted to clear up. So they re-interviewed Adam's mother to get a tighter lock on the timeline of everything that happened that day before the abduction.

Reve went back through her activities, recalling that she arrived at St. Mark's school around 1220 and Adam came into the office with her, which interestingly, the secretary of the school, Jackie Wing, and the vicar both disputed. Both told police that Reve had come in earlier that morning, closer to 10 or 1030, and by herself. Adam, her son, was not with her, they claimed. And the

And this was a claim that Revae just couldn't wrap her head around because she was certain Adam had entered the school with her. And she even remembered talking to him, telling him to say hello. And she was also positive that it was around noon. These witnesses discrepancies are frustrating.

and may seem hard to reconcile, but they're not necessarily suspicious. There's nearly always variation and mismatches among eyewitness statements and accounts.

It's the nature of human perception and memory. Very few of us have perfect recall. Our eyes and brains are imperfect recording devices. And there's actually a term for this phenomenon. It's called the Rashomon effect.

The term is named after the 1950 movie Rashomon by the famous Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. The film is about a murder in a small Japanese village, but the story of the crime is told from the points of view of four different witnesses with contradictory accounts of what they saw.

So the movie tells the story over and over again, multiple times, but with variations in the details, depending on the storyteller. So that's where the Rashomon effect comes from. And it underlines the reality of memory, which is that it's pliable and not entirely reliable.

which makes eyewitness accounts and statements so problematic, not just in investigations, but in testimonies at trials as well. In fact, especially at trials. And so while the staff at the St. Mark's school were saying one thing, Adam's mother was saying something else.

And the detectives wanted to make sure this wasn't due to deception, but just normal flaws of perception and memory. In this case, the overall timelines provided by everyone else who was interviewed from the employees at Sears to Jimmy Campbell to others at the mall seemed to suggest that Revae Walsh's memory is correct. And she was at the St. Mark's School with Adam sometime around noon.

But investigators at the time were slow to realize that. Reve said that after leaving the St. Mark's school, she proceeded on to Sears, parked her gray checker marathon two spots from the building and entered it around 1235 p.m. And then some of these times were also not quite matching up with what some of the Sears employees had stated. For example, Andrews,

Angelique, who waited on Reveille in the lamp department, believed it was 12.05 or 12.10 that she helped Reveille. Angelique, in fact, was confident about the time, she said, because she had just relieved her coworker for lunch, which was at noon.

at noon and it was only a few minutes later that Reve approached her. So the detectives asked Reve if she was certain about the times and she actually said she wasn't certain because she wasn't wearing a watch that day.

But she was certain about the time when she had Adam paged for a second time. Because remember, as I'd mentioned in the last episode, she'd asked Aurora Delgado, the employee in the catalog department, what time it was after requesting the page. And Delgado told her the time was 1250 p.m.,

Jenny Rainer, who paged for Adam, remembered the first request coming in at around 1220 or 1225. Another Sears employee named Joanne Braun, who also worked in the catalog department, remembered Reve parking her checker marathon between 1130 and noon. And I've been specifying the make of Reve's car because I feel it's significant because

only because the checker marathon was not an especially common car. It was a car with the same body as that of a yellow checker cab and was made by the same company, but it was gray and made for the consumer market. By the early 2000s,

80s, it wasn't a big seller and in fact was discontinued only a year later. My point here being it would have stood out as more distinctive. So it's unlikely any of these store employees would be mixing it up with a different car. Also,

Also, the detectives, almost from the beginning, were feeling some degree of suspicion toward Reve, not just because of timeline inconsistencies, but because she had originally not been truthful with them about her relationship with Jimmy Campbell.

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Let's get back into the episode. So by this point in their investigation, they wanted her to take a polygraph test and she agreed to submit to one. So Adam's mother took the polygraph and afterward it was felt that she had passed the test and was not being deceptive.

Detectives then returned to the Sears where Adam was abducted to re-interview the employees who were at work that afternoon. Some of them recalled seeing Revae and Adam. Some didn't, but none of them remembered seeing anyone or anything suspicious. However, the plainclothes security guard at that store had some interesting information.

The security guard on duty that day was 17 year old Kathy Schaefer. They were hiring them really young for Sears security, it seems. Remember the security guard at the Sears store in Palm Beach was only 19. Kathy Schaefer recalled that on the day of Adam's disappearance, she was summoned to the toy department after an altercation broke out between two older black children and two young white children at the video game kiosk.

It was sometime between 1230 and 1245. Kathy remembered. She said one of the older children slapped a younger kid who appeared to be about 10 years old.

She said the older boy became verbally abusive toward her. And when she asked the two black children, if their parents were in the store, they said no. So she ordered them to exit the store through the South doors. She then asked the two white kids, the same question, the older one, though one who looked about 10 said no. So she directed both boys to exit the store through the garden entrance at the Northwest side of the store.

This way, the one set of kids wouldn't cross paths with the other set of kids once outside the store.

Both kids walked out through the garden center exit. The 10-year-old boy and the younger boy, who looked about seven years old to her recollection. Detective Hoffman showed her some photos of Adam Walsh and asked her if she was the younger of the children that she ejected. She said she was absolutely sure that he wasn't.

But that wasn't in fact true. Secretly, Kathy Schaefer was pretty sure the younger boy was Adam Walsh. And she would, a couple of years later, finally come clean about that. And some people would actually blame her for Adam's murder.

while others have blamed Reveille for leaving Adam alone. But these are things that take place pretty commonly, and no one was truly responsible for Adam's murder other than Adam's murderer. But Kathy Schaefer's story is important because it provides a possible puzzle piece explaining why Adam may have walked outside the store on his own.

And it's another event in the sequence of events that afternoon, which helps serve as a kind of signpost along the timeline. And Kathy's story about the altercation and ejecting the kids had actually been corroborated by a statement given the day before by another individual, a woman named Joyce Satio, whose son and nephew had walked through the Sears store after lunch on their way to a 1 p.m. tennis match,

The kids had told her they'd walked past the video game kiosk and stopped to play the Atari when they witnessed an incident involving two black youths that occurred at around 1245 p.m. They remembered the time, she said, because they were almost late to their tennis match.

But when the detectives asked her if the two boys were available to come in to be interviewed, that they now were out of the country attending school in South America. It was at this point that blue van tips, meanwhile, were spilling into the Hollywood Police Department left and right.

Investigators weren't sure how to feel about the blue van angle now that 10-year-old Tim Pottenberg's story seemed like a dead end, but they never issued any kind of public statement downplaying the significance of this lead because Eugene's description matched Pottenberg's almost exactly, and that took place earlier, closer to the time Adam went missing. So,

So it really would have been unwise to dismiss the blue van lead. And because of this, people were calling in with tips any time they'd see a blue van. October of 1981, two months after Adam's head was found, detectives Hoffman and Hickman wanted to meet with Jimmy Campbell to go over his timeline yet again, hoping, of course, to spot inconsistencies or new details that would incriminate him.

Now, Campbell's story more or less remained consistent and he could not come up with anyone who might be able to verify his whereabouts between 1045 a.m. when he said he arrived at work and 330 p.m. when he left to shoot the promotional video. Something he did add was that he was able to verify his whereabouts

which was of interest to the investigators, was that around noon that day, he said he changed his mind about wanting to spend the afternoon with Adam and was actually going to call Reveille and let her know.

but he couldn't recall if he actually tried to call her or not. Remember he'd stated in previous interviews that Reve asked him if he'd watch Adam that day. And he was now elaborating that Reve wanted him to take Adam to the beach with him, but he declined because of the filming he had to do. So he was now saying he changed his mind, but couldn't remember if he called Reve or not. But see,

See, he already knew she was planning on going to St. Mark's School, Sears, and then the gym at 1 p.m. So if this were around noon, his best guess would have been that Reveille and Adam were at Sears. He knew where to find them. Jimmy also volunteered a theory, which was that whoever abducted Adam probably knew him well enough to talk him out of the mall, as it was uncharacteristic of Adam to just leave with a stranger.

And later in the interview, he talked about the many times he'd driven Adam to and from school and that on many occasions he'd go to pick up Adam without even telling Revae. And Revae would, as a result of not being aware that Jimmy was picking up Adam, sometimes show up at school at the same time.

Detectives then asked Campbell about a motorcycle they learned he had borrowed during the period Adam was missing. And he told them he had borrowed the motorcycle from his friend so he could assist with the search.

They asked him what was the longest period he was away from the other searchers and investigators during this time. And he said he believed it was about four hours, which would have been just enough time to say drive from Hollywood to Indian River and back. But Jimmy said he telephoned frequently during the time he was riding solo to check for updates from other searchers.

Campbell was also asked about other girlfriends or sexual relationships that he'd had in recent years, and he said there had been none. Only a brief fling he'd had with a guest at the hotel where he worked, and he said that fling had left him feeling like he'd been unfaithful to Reveille. Finally, Campbell told detectives that he frequently took Adam to the sailboat rental area where he worked at the Golden Strand.

And he added he would tell him never to wander off and to scream loudly if any stranger attempted to take him. And that was the end of the interview. Pretty much the umpteenth interview they'd conducted with Jimmy Campbell in the few months since Adam's murder. But they weren't done with him. They were interviewing kids on the t-ball team that Adam had played on, which was called Campbell's Rentals, as Jimmy Campbell was the coach and

And one of those kids made a troubling accusation against Jimmy Campbell. That kid, a kid named Tony, made an allegation that Campbell had molested him. So on the day before Thanksgiving, 1981, they called Campbell back to the station to confront him with this. Campbell's nerves were visibly frazzled. It was a more contentious interview with a more agitated Jimmy Campbell than on previous occasions.

And the detectives were more confrontational as well. When they brought up the allegation without naming the accuser, Campbell instantly knew it was Tony. "It's false," he said. "It's totally ridiculous.

And yet you mentioned Tony, Detective Hoffman said to him. Why would you mention him? I mean, we talked to him. So, yeah, we got this from him, but we talked to nine or 10 different boys from the team. And yet you immediately named Tony as the accuser. Well, he was the biggest wise guy, Campbell said. In fact, he didn't even finish up the season. Campbell went on to say that he was the biggest wise guy.

Campbell went on to explain that the reason he guessed Tony was that Tony was a tall telltale who made stuff up.

So during this interview, detectives made Jimmy go through the day of Adam's abduction yet again. He told the same story, the same sequence of events with still no one to account for his whereabouts in the afternoon. They played good cop, bad cop and tried to bait him. We know a lot more about this than we're telling you. Detective Hickman said to Campbell, trying to get him to break.

They accused him of reacting too calmly when they told him the allegation Tony had made against him. They tried to get Campbell to admit that he'd taken Adam and then there was some kind of accident.

Maybe hid him in a closet where he suffocated. They were trying to set the trap of getting him to admit he'd caused Adam's death by framing it as an accident. When that didn't work, they suggested Adam had reminded him of his own younger brother and implied that he had resentment toward his younger brother for being his parents' favorite. They tried every trick in the book.

Campbell accused them of taking cheap shots. Hickman shot back. We have more to do, Jim Campbell, than to sit around and trip you up on cheap shots. You're never going to solve this case, he taunted. What are you saying? Campbell asked. I

I think you took Adam. That's what I'm saying. I think it was a whole accident. I think you did it for spite to show Reve, you know, I'll show you who are you to tell me to get out of the house. He may have choked in some way. He may have suffocated. I don't know, but we believe you're the one who did it. It was at this point that the interview then ended.

A week later, Detective Hickman and Hoffman learned that Campbell had retained an attorney. They learned this because that attorney sent them a letter accusing them of harassing his client, despite him cooperating fully and submitting to two polygraphs. Now he was done cooperating and had nothing left to give.

And the letter instructed them to stay away from Campbell. And so they did. They left him alone. There would be no more follow-up with Campbell. And in 1994, he would be officially ruled out solely on the basis of him having been cooperative. And the Walsh family has defended Campbell as a good man who had nothing to do with Adam's death. In 2003, James Campbell died at the age of 47.

Now, 1983 was a significant year in the Walsh case. By this time, John and Revae Walsh had become vocal advocates for missing children, lobbying before Congress for missing and exploited children, which led to the Missing Children Act of 1982 and the Missing Children's Assistant Act of 1984.

They created the nonprofit Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, and they also filed a lawsuit against Sears once they learned about the 17-year-old security guard possibly ejecting Adam from the store. Sears lawyers very bluntly placed the blame on the Walshes.

But for the negligence of the mother, the Sears attorney wrote, the alleged abduction and death of Adam J. Walsh would not have occurred. 1983 was also significant because a made-for-TV movie called Adam aired on NBC.

And 1983 was also the year the direction of the Walsh case was about to turn in a new single lane direction from which it would almost never again deviate to explore any other avenue. And this all began with the arrests of two men, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole.

Now, Henry and Otis were what you might call scummy buddies, a very 70s and 80s cultural phenomenon where two sleazy degenerate men would buddy up in a partnership that would reveal itself to be a match made in hell. Like Lawrence Bideker and Roy Norris, the so-called toolbox killers, or Bianchi and Bono, the hillside stranglers. Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were like that.

Scummy buddies. They were both drifters who had become best buds and occasional lovers who traveled around the states together, drinking, loitering, living rough, sleeping in their car in cheap motels and committing crimes. Henry Lee Lucas was 46 and Otis Toole was 10 years younger and was generally considered to be intellectually handicapped.

Both had rap sheets dating back decades, and Toole had been a suspect in the murders of at least two women in Colorado in the mid-1970s. Lucas's rap sheet included second-degree murder in the killing of his own mother, as well as kidnapping.

In June of 1983, Lucas was picked up on a charge of unlawful possession of a firearm. And shortly after, he confessed to the murders of an 82-year-old woman he worked for named Kate Rich and a 15-year-old friend named Becky Powell.

Becky Powell also happened to be the niece of Otis Toole. And while in custody, Lucas named Toole as his accomplice in multiple murders in Florida, Texas, and then other states. Lucas went on to claim that he'd committed hundreds of murders in 17 different states. And the devastation about Henry Lee Lucas,

is he would provide details on each murder. And oftentimes when he didn't get a detail right, detectives interviewing him, detectives from various jurisdictions would coach him, feed him details until he got them right. And then sometimes he would recant those confessions, admitting that he was just making stuff up for attention.

So Henry Lee Lucas soon became known as a serial confessor. Otis Toole was also arrested around the same time as his scummy buddy, arrested for setting a house on fire that was resulted in the death of its occupant. And when Otis Toole was sent to jail for arson and murder, he followed his scummy buddy's lead and began doing the same thing. He began by admitting to setting nearly four dozen house fires across two decades.

And when Toole was given a map of the state of Florida, he marked all of the areas where he claimed he had committed murders. In all, there were over 100 murders across the state of Florida that Toole had claimed responsibility for.

It should have been obvious that while Toole and Lucas were responsible for some deaths, they were greatly exaggerating the number, padding their resumes with murders they'd read about, heard about, or had been told about, either in prison or by investigators. And it was getting them what they wanted, attention. Suddenly, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were famous. So

So is it just coincidence then that Otis Toole happened to first confess to killing Adam Walsh on October 11th, 1983, the day immediately after the made for television movie Adam first aired on NBC?

It was then that Toole first claimed he'd committed a murder down in Broward County and wanted to discuss it with someone from down there. Instead, he was sent Detective Buddy Terry from the Jacksonville Police Department. Jacksonville, Florida was Otis Toole's home base.

and is about five hours north of Hollywood. And he told Detective Terry that about two years earlier, he had abducted a young boy from the Sears Mall in the Fort Lauderdale area and then killed him. He said the boy had been between six and 10 years old.

And of course, the only crime fitting that description was the murder of Adam Walsh. So detectives Hoffman and Hickman from the Hollywood PD traveled up to Jacksonville to interview Toole. It was October 19th, 1983, and Otis Toole began his account of what happened.

He said that in July of 81, he and Henry Lee Lucas had traveled to Fort Lauderdale in a white 1973 Cadillac he'd purchased a year earlier from Faye McNett, a woman Toole had worked with at a roofing company.

The car, he said, had Pennsylvania tags at the time. He said that he and Lucas used cash to buy fuel and slept in the car along their way through South Florida. So of course, this established that there wouldn't be any purchase records to corroborate Tool's story. Tool went on to tell detectives that he and Henry Lee Lucas snatched the kid from a single-story mall outside of a Sears store.

"'How do you know it was a Sears?' Detective Hoffman asked, suspicious that Tool was just recycling details he'd just seen on TV. But Otis replied, "'Cause I know a Sears when I see a Sears.' "'I mean, fair enough. Who can argue with that?'

Toole described the boy he and Henry allegedly kidnapped as being seven to 10 years old, having blonde curly hair and wearing dungarees, a blue shirt and sneakers. Six-year-old Adam had straight brown hair and when he disappeared, he had been wearing a short sleeved, red and white, straight eyes on pullover shirt, green shorts and flip flops. So the description doesn't match at all. But of course, if there'd been any other

any other kidnapping out of a Sears store in South Florida, everyone would know about it. So there were only two possibilities. Either Tool was remembering Adam Walsh incorrectly or he was making the whole thing up after watching the documentary.

Otis went on to tell detectives that the little boy had run out of the Sears store and into their car, at which point Henry grabbed the little boy. They then rolled up the windows of the Cadillac and drove away from the mall with Otis in the driver's seat.

Otis claimed he was drunk throughout the abduction, but remembered that he got onto the turnpike heading northbound until Henry couldn't control the kid anymore and had Otis turn off down a dirt road. Where Henry then pulled out a machete, announced that he was quote, demon of the devil and beheaded the child with four blows while the boy was lying face down in the dirt.

Very soon after Otis shared this account with police, it was confirmed that Henry Lee Lucas had been in jail up in Maryland at the time of Adam Walsh's murder. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out. That's

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Visit CBDistillery.com and use code DARK for 20% off, you guys. If you wanted to give CBD a try, go to CBDistillery.com, code DARK. CBDistillery.com, use code DARK. All right, let's get back to the episode. So Otis Tool's story was at least in part a total fabrication.

And then once confronted with this, Toole admitted to lying about Henry Lee Lucas having participated in the crime. He claimed he'd lied to get back at Lucas for implicating him as an accomplice in other crimes. He then told a revised version of the story as he now said, "It really happened."

He said that he'd encountered Adam at the Sears store and talked to him for a while before luring the boy into his car with candy and toys. And once the boy was inside his vehicle, he locked the doors and rolled up the windows. He told detectives he did this because he wanted to take him back to Jacksonville and raise him as his own child.

But when the boy realized he couldn't get out of his car, he began crying, at which point Tool punched him in the eye. Tool then drove off, he said, got onto the turnpike, and as Adam continued crying, he then, quote, smacked the daylights out of him. Hit him so many times that the little boy fell unconscious.

He then turned off onto a dirt road and believing the boy could identify him to police, used a machete to cut off his head.

It was noted in the police report of the interview that Toole claimed he cut off Adam's head with four or five blows, which were close to where the neck and head connected. And this was consistent with the autopsy findings. Toole said he then put the head on his front passenger seat and also on the floor in the back seat. And then he said he wasn't sure where in the car he put the head. He seemed to have trouble keeping his story straight.

He also claimed he stabbed the body after cutting off the head and then drove about 10 miles north, stopped his car and tossed the head into a canal near what he described as a little wooden bridge, which again is consistent with where the head was found. Right in that area, there was a narrow wooden dock that was parallel to the road and

He claimed he then buried the rest of the remains off a dirt road off the turnpike about four miles to the south. He was able to lead police to that location, but once he was there, he was unable to find the exact spot.

He claimed he couldn't remember. And then he would later go on to change his story and say he took Adam's remains back to Jacksonville, where he put them inside an old gutted out refrigerator in his backyard and set the refrigerator on fire. So there remains some debate over a couple of unknown factors in this confession. One,

One is the question of whether or not Otis Toole was in jail at this time, had the opportunity to watch the Adam TV movie from which he could have picked up details about the case. Some of his fellow inmates, when they were interviewed, claimed that the channel was changed from the Adam movie to a football game almost immediately after the movie began airing at 9 p.m.,

So then if Otis Toole never watched the TV movie and never saw pictures of the location where Adam's head was found and didn't know about the wooden dock, that seems to increase the likelihood that he was telling the truth as he provided some details that he could not have otherwise known. But then the other question is how much

How much case information did the detective in Jacksonville provide Otis Toole before he met with Hickman and Hoffman of the Hollywood Police Department?

It was later found out by investigators in Broward County that the detective in Jacksonville who first sat down with Toole had fed him confidential case information and made a deal with Toole for the book and movie rights to his story, which that detective categorically denied.

But if he showed Toole pictures of the Turnpike Canal where Adam's head was found or described it to him and told him how Adam had been killed, then that, along with everything else we know about Toole, calls the whole confession into question. As does the number of times since that Toole recanted and then reinstated the confession.

And was Otis Toole even in South Florida at the time of Adam Walsh's abduction? No one has ever been able to say for sure that he was or wasn't.

He had been admitted to a hospital in Virginia for depression on July 23rd, 1981, and then released the next day when he then proceeded to buy a one-way bus ticket from Virginia back down to Jacksonville, where he arrived the next day, the 25th of July, two days before Adam's abduction in Hollywood, which is 330 miles south of Jacksonville. Tools,

whereabouts and movements were unaccounted for from July 25th when he's in Jacksonville through August 1st when he filed a police report alleging that his brother assaulted him also

also up in Jacksonville. So this is enough time to allow him to borrow the Cadillac, which he did not in fact own at the time without its absence being noted, drive down to Hollywood, abduct Adam Walsh, kill him, presumably on route back to Jacksonville and then return to Jacksonville. But how plausible is this? And then there's the problem of why,

Why would six-year-old Adam Walsh have gone along with Otis?

Otis tool was for lack of a better description, a filthy drifter. He looked like every child's vision of the boogeyman and Adam was a shy, timid boy who didn't talk to strangers, a boy from an upwardly mobile middle-class family. So Otis tools story of how Adam willingly entered his car with him kind of seems implausible.

And even Adam's parents had a hard time believing Adam would have willingly gone with someone like Tool. But for investigators, the priority now became tracking down Otis Tool's white Cadillac, the one that he claimed he'd used to kidnap Adam, where he claimed he had kept Adam's head before disposing of it.

And when they finally located that Cadillac, they impounded it and began to process it for forensic evidence. They sprayed luminol in the front seat, back seat, and inside the trunk, and multiple areas began to fluoresce in the back seat and in the trunk, areas that indicated the presence of blood. They also recovered a machete from inside the vehicle and a sheath, and luminol applied to the sheath revealed traces of blood.

And they cut bloodstained carpet from the rear floorboards where Toole claimed he'd put Adams' head. But since it was 1983, DNA testing wasn't yet being done. So the state crime lab was limited in what they could do with these stains and this evidence. But they also didn't even test the blood to figure out what blood type it was. The best they could determine forensically at the time was the machete-

been the weapon used to decapitate Adam Walsh, but this couldn't be determined conclusively.

After it was processed, the Cadillac was returned by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to the Jacksonville police. In 1994, when cold case detective Mark Smith with the Hollywood police was assigned to the Walsh case, he began looking for the Cadillac because now DNA profiling was a tool that could be used in this case and pulling up the carpet from inside the vehicle would yield a DNA profile because

and they could determine once and for all if what Otis Toole had said was true. If Toole was Adam Walsh's killer. So Detective Smith called up to the Jacksonville Police Department and they told him they no longer had the Cadillac. And they also were unable to locate the carpet samples that they had cut from the floorboard of the car.

The detective, who allegedly made a book deal with Toole, claimed he didn't recall ever receiving this evidence. So then Detective Smith tracked down the last owner of the vehicle, a guy who had been working as a cook at Pizza Hut in the mid 80s and really wanted a Cadillac.

So he bought the car from a used car dealership, but he had to wait for it to become available because the dealership told him the car had been owned by Henry Lee Lucas and was, quote, under investigation, which didn't deter him because a few weeks later, the car was ready. So he dropped by the dealership to pick it up.

But almost immediately, the window stopped working and he began having trouble with the engine. And after sinking more money into repairs than what he'd even paid to buy it, he decided to get rid of it and sold it for just $50 for scrap to a junkyard where it almost certainly was destroyed and has not been seen since.

So the only testable evidence that remained at this point was the machete recovered from the vehicle, its sheath, and some debris lifted from the machete. These items were sent to a North Carolina lab called Genetic Design, which only tested the machete. And this lab was unable to find any testable DNA on it.

Back in 1985, both Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were on death row at the time, but would later have their sentences commuted. In fact, Lucas's death sentence was commuted to life by then governor of Texas, George W. Bush. And it was the only death sentence Bush commuted in his two terms as governor, during which he signed off on 152 executions.

And so back in 1985, both Lucas and Toole had already begun recanting many of their confessions, including Toole's confession to killing Adam Walsh. In 1988, he confessed yet again, but recanted once more in 1991. And then shortly before his death from liver disease in 1995, he again claimed he didn't do it.

Toole recanted and confessed so many times that in one instance, he had recanted, confessed and recanted again all in the span of 12 minutes. By the mid 90s, John Walsh broke his silence and became vocally critical of the Hollywood Police Department for their incompetence in mishandling the case. By this time, he was reasonably satisfied that Otis Toole was the killer of his son.

And in 1996, multiple news outlets, including the Fort Lauderdale Sun Centennial, successfully sued the Hollywood Police Department for the release of the entire Adam Walsh case file, all 10,000 pages. It was an unprecedented move, fueled by criticisms against this police agency for its failure to solve the Walsh case. And this pretty much let the air out of the investigation.

Twelve years later, in December 2008, the Hollywood Police Department held a press conference with both John and Revae Walsh participating, announcing that they were officially closing the Adam Walsh case, declaring it solved, naming Otis Toole as Adam's killer. It was stunning, giving how much reasonable doubt there is that Otis Toole was responsible, and how many other leads were never really closed.

Another of many suspects that may never have been properly followed up on was a man named Kenneth Adrian LeClair. LeClair had been the prime suspect in the 1972 murder of a 10-year-old boy in the state of Ohio, the circumstances of which were very similar to Adam Walsh's murder nine years later.

LeClaire was known to have lured boys into his vehicle, was a sex offender, and that murdered boy had last been seen with LeClaire, though he was never charged in that case.

He later moved to Florida and was arrested for firearm and drug possession in 1982 in the county of Indian River, the same county where Adam's head was found. In 1995, detectives traveled to Kenneth LeClair's house to interview him, but they weren't able to contact either him or any of his neighbors. It's unknown whether or not there was ever any follow-up with LeClair, and he has died since. And then...

Another suspect who surfaced in 1991 was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in July of 1991 and found to have killed and cannibalized over a dozen men and teenage boys, keeping some of their remains inside his Milwaukee apartment, in chemical drums and in his refrigerator. After his arrest, Dahmer confessed to a much earlier murder, the 1978 murder of 18-year-old Stephen Hicks.

whom Dahmer, who was also 18 at the time, picked up hitchhiking, brought back to his parents' home, and killed before scattering his remains in the woods nearby. Stephen remained a missing person until Dahmer's confession.

Dahmer seemed to come clean about all of his past crimes and was cooperative with authorities. However, when it was learned that Dahmer was living in South Florida at the time of Adam Walsh's murder, police questioned him about his possible involvement. Dahmer had lived and worked in South Miami Beach from April through September 1981. And when questioned, Dahmer emphatically denied that he had anything to do with Adam's murder. Now,

I tried to do a deep dive with this two-part episode, but ultimately I find myself left with at least two more episodes worth of material.

And there are so many bizarre odds and ends that we'd maybe need a whole season to cover all of it. More witnesses, more leads, more uninvestigated leads. Like for example, the Hollywood police department received an anonymous letter in August, 1981, that was eerily similar to the last authenticated letter sent by San Francisco's unidentified Zodiac killer.

The final Zodiac letter was sent in May 1974 and was not written in the Zodiac identity. Rather, it was signed by, quote, "a citizen." And at the top of the letter, it was addressed to Sears, but spelled S-I-R-S. But the handwriting, the way the envelope is addressed, and the tone and content of the letter leaves little doubt it was sent by the Zodiac.

The August 1981 letter sent to the Walsh investigators mailed from Hollywood, Florida, just to be clear, was also signed a citizen and addressed Dear Sears, S-I-R-S. Now I'm not saying that the Zodiac had anything to do with either this letter or Adam Walsh's murder. It is almost certainly a coincidence, but it seems to come from the same weird genre of crime related anonymous correspondences.

And then something at the end of the letter just doesn't feel right. And also reminds me of another suspected Zodiac letter. The author concludes with, do not want to give name because if right one possible retaliation, basically explaining why they're writing anonymously. In 1969, a suspicious anonymously written card was sent to the Viejo police department investigating two of the Zodiac crimes.

And the author also felt the need to explain why they were holding back on their name. Please forgive the absence of my signature name as I do not wish to have my name in the papers and it could only be mentioned by a slip of the tongue. Again, not saying there's any connection to the Zodiac, only that there are eerie similarities that suggest common traits behind anonymous letter writers that might betray questionable motivations and maybe even guilt.

But to make the Zodiac parallels even weirder here, in 1991, John Walsh, who by this time had become famous as the host of America's Most Wanted, began receiving ciphers from someone claiming himself as the Scorpion and claiming to be a serial killer and master criminal. And this person was clearly inspired by the Zodiac Killer, who hadn't yet been covered on America's Most Wanted.

So this is all quite strange, as is the crime itself. A six-year-old boy taken from a crowded mall from a department store in broad daylight, and no one saw anything that ever led to a suspect.

The more you examine the Adam Walsh case, the stranger and more improbable a crime it seems. And how likely it is that Otis Toole did not kill Adam Walsh. Especially when you consider that no witness came forward reporting anyone who resembled Otis Toole at the Sears that day until after it was well publicized that Otis Toole had confessed to the crime.

much like with Jeffrey Dahmer. There were eyewitnesses who came forward saying they saw Jeffrey Dahmer there that day when he was caught. And I feel like there are suspects that were never fully cleared who are more viable and more interesting than Otis Toole or Dahmer. Even more likely, someone whose name has never entered the radar of the investigation and might never be identified.

But we can't fault the Walsh family for accepting Otis Toole as Adam's killer. He was a bad man after all, but also they need closure and the torment of not having it is powerful stuff. So them being the family, I'll respect it. And with that, thank you for listening. It's been a deeper dive than what you might be accustomed to, but the Adam Walsh case warrants it because many in the true crime community do accept it as solved.

But like so many cases, do we really ever know? We'll see you next time with another mini series of Binged.