Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: BOOK TWO: FINDING THE VICTIM. The body identified as Adam Walsh is not him. Is Adam still alive? - Softcover

Harris, Arthur Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1484167627 ISBN 13: 9781484167625

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH is a two-book series
 
Six-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared from the toy department of a Sears in Hollywood, Florida, in 1981. Two weeks later and 125 miles away, a child's severed head was found and identified as Adam. His parents, Reve and John Walsh, deeply grieved and dedicated their lives going forward to helping find other parents' children who had gone missing. In 2008, 27 years later, police announced at a live televised press conference that they'd finally solved the case, blaming the kidnapping and murder on a by-then dead man. Because of that there could never be a trial.
All of that is true. But virtually everything else that you think you know about this famous case is wrong.In 1983, 25 years earlier, that suspect had volunteered a confession that he'd killed Adam Walsh. But the police then had deeply investigated his story and couldn't verify anything he'd said, not even that he'd been within 400 miles of the area. In 2008, when a new Hollywood Police chief closed the case, he admitted they had no new evidence.
What the new chief didn't mention was that by then he had six separate police witnesses who'd been at the shopping mall on that day in 1981, and had since spoken up. Most had seen Adam;all had seen a much more likely suspect -- Jeffrey Dahmer. A microfilmed Miami police report the author found and had previously shown to the Walsh detectives proved that Dahmer was then living just a few miles from the Sears. Dahmer's boss told the author that the prompt for the report was that Dahmer had told him he'd just found the body of a homeless man behind the store. Yes, bad luck, Jeffrey Dahmer found a dead body. 1981 was 10 years before Milwaukee police found severed heads in Dahmer's refrigerator and arrested him as a serial killer. He said he'd killed his first victim in 1978.
Even worse, it turned out that the identification of the child as Adam had been slapdash and suspect. The Walsh parents weren't present for it; John Walsh wrote years later that he'd never viewed even photographs of the remains. A family friend had been present for the ID, and Walsh wrote that his first impression had been that it wasn't Adam. Because the remains were only a severed head, there were no fingerprints, and forensic DNA was still years away. The pathologist making the identification did it strictly by teeth, but he admitted he wasn't a dental expert. Dental X-rays, when available, are a standard for comparison, but he didn't have them. He also had a forensic dentist available but never consulted him. A medical examiner in another regional office performed the autopsy, but he also never consulted a forensic dentist.
Worse again, that medical examiner never wrote and submitted an autopsy report, as state laws and guidelines require. That perhaps never happens.Had police ever charged any live defendant with murder in this case,prosecutors in court would have been handcuffed to prove that the dead child was Adam. The case likely then would have ended.
Why all the misdirection? Did Dahmer take Adam? Is Adam even dead, is that someone else's child? Could Adam be... alive?
Fifteen years of continuing research. Author's story appeared in 2007 on ABC Primetime,and in 2010 on a Sunday front page of The Miami Herald.
 
"I never, and to my knowledge no one in the office, prepared a report on the head of Adam Walsh."
--2010 email from Dr. Ronald K. Wright, in 1981 the Chief Broward County Medical Examiner, who performed the autopsy on the remains of the child previously identified as Adam Walsh, when asked if he had a personal copy of Adam Walsh's autopsy report that neither the Medical Examiner's Office nor the police had.

About this title

From the Author

            The famous missing child case of Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old last seen at a Sears in a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, in July 1981 was the worst nightmare imaginable. Two weeks later, a child's severed head was found and identified as Adam. No one has ever been arrested for the crime.
            For the most part, the case's narration has been told by the victims, Adam's parents Reve and John Walsh. However, there has been another voice, independent investigative journalist and author of five True Crime books about Florida, Arthur Jay Harris, who has continued to write about it for two decades, and has worked on it with ABC News, The Miami Herald, and others. The deeply-researched story he tells disputes almost everything that everyone in the public has been led to believe.
            IN BOOK ONE, Harris shows that the taker of Adam was most likely not the drifter Ottis Toole, as police now say, but rather the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was arrested ten years later with eleven severed heads in his apartment. Harris documented him by a police report living near Hollywood as a transient about when Adam disappeared. That report had him supposedly finding a dead body in an alley behind where he worked. The report referred to a meter and storage room steps away where Harris and ABC News found blood droplets rising up a wall next to a lumberman's axe and a sledgehammer. Was this Dahmer's doing?
            Further, Dahmer was identified by seven police witnesses who said they saw him at the mall with or near Adam when he was taken. One of those witnesses said he saw him throw Adam into a blue van and get away. Where Dahmer worked there was a blue van, easily and often taken for personal use, without permission. Early on, a blue getaway van was Hollywood's first, best clue.
            Also, a police composite drawing of a suspect in an attempted kidnapping of a similar-age child at a Sears in the next county, two weeks before Adam's disappearance, closely matches a mug shot of Dahmer taken a year later. The similarity was confirmed by the near-victim, a witness who helped make the drawing, and a police artist Harris consulted. The photo comparison is in the book.
            IN BOOK TWO, more shocking, Harris shows that all the official files are incredibly missing the most customary documents that would prove the identification of the found child who was said to be Adam. Among the documents missing are the autopsy report, a forensic dental report (considering that the ID was strictly based on a tooth comparison), and Adam's dental chart and dental X-rays. An investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed his finding.
            In fact, the ID was not only shoddy and inadequate but is overwhelmingly likely wrong. In Adam's last photo he was clearly missing both his top front teeth. A police crime scene photo, never before published, shows the found child had a mostly-in buck tooth -- a top left front tooth. Harris consulted a number of pediatric and forensic dental and medical examiner experts who confirmed the obvious: there wasn't enough time for Adam to have grown it in that far.
            All that would have been exposed at a court trial -- but more than 30 years after Adam's disappearance, there has never been one.
            Yet another remarkable finding Harris made is that more than 20 years after the incident, the Walshes consented to police forensic testing that presumed a doubt about the found child's real identity.
           Did police end the search for Adam too soon? Could Adam still be alive? In fact not so impossible, Harris found...

From the Back Cover

OTHER TRUE CRIME BOOKS BY ARTHUR JAY HARRIS:

            KINDLE UNLIMITED SUBSCRIBERS can also read for FREE Until Proven Innocent, Speed Kills, and Flowers for Mrs. Luskin in a SPECIAL 3-BOOK BOX SET. Go to my Amazon Author Page.

UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT begins with a night 911 call from a woman gasping her last breaths. When police arrived at the house they found her dead, stabbed, and her husband, infant, and father-in-law all shot point-blank. They would survive.
            Minutes later, a man also called 911, a gunman had released him from a robbery at the same house. He said he knew of no violence before he left. Yet he was the only one who the gunman hadn't tried to kill. Police instantly suspected him.
            That night and long after, police tried to shake the man, Chuck Panoyan, who insisted he didn't know who the gunman was.
            Police guessed right. A tip led them to the gunman, and that led to a trip Panoyan took to see him. Both were arrested, and prosecutor Brian Cavanagh won a death penalty indictment against them both.
            But in pretrial, Panoyan's attorneys unraveled Cavanagh's case against their client. No longer certain Panoyan was guilty, Cavanagh reached No Man's Land: his choice was to let the jury sort it out, or admit he was wrong about Panoyan for now three years.
            Cavanagh's dad Tom was a retired NYPD lieutenant who'd had a double murder he couldn't solve, then at another precinct a suspect confessed. Tom recognized it had been coerced and quietly asked his detectives if they could prove it wrong. When they did, the case became famous for police integrity. A TV movie renamed Tom's character: Kojak.
            Years later, son Brian was at a similar turning point. Like his dad, he would not leave it to a jury to unscramble. He moved to release Chuck Panoyan from jail. But Panoyan had to tell his story: he'd lied to police because the gunman had threatened to kill his family if he spoke up. Once before, the gunman had killed a small child and went to prison.
            Who was the only one could make Panoyan comfortable enough to talk? The old man, the real-life Kojak, Tom Cavanagh.
 
            SPEED KILLS opens with the stunning daylight murder in 1980s Miami of boat builder, boat racer, and wealthy bon vivant Don Aronow. He invented, raced, built and sold Cigarette boats, the fastest thing on the water. Everyone who worshipped speed and could afford one, wanted one; his clients were royalty, U.S. presidents, CEOs, intelligence services, and--most of all, eventually--dope smugglers. Don took everyone's money and traveled between all those worlds.
            You could also see it as Don playing all sides. When the Feds needed faster boats to keep up with the Cigarettes that Don sold to dopers, they came to him. It was sort of the same with his wife and girlfriend (and girlfriend and girlfriend).
            How long could anybody get away with that? Confidence men are known as con men; Don wasn't that, but he was a supreme self-confidence man, that is, he was his own victim.
            Finally he was cornered. Don's protégé in racing and boatbuilding was also the largest pot smuggler in America.The Feds needed Aronow to testify against him. For leverage, they apparently threatened Don with a tax evasion case. The quintessential free-spirit boat racer could go to prison--or he could risk the wrath of a major criminal organization.
            Aronow made his decision. Days later, he was killed.
 
            FLOWERS FOR MRS. LUSKIN begins with a flower delivery to the best house in the best part of Hollywood, Florida. Inside, Marie Luskin was cautious; her husband Paul used to send her flowers but those days had ended more than a year before when she filed for divorce. She thought it was safe to open the door just enough to accept the pot of azaleas.
            She was wrong. The delivery was a ruse; the man pointed a gun at her and demanded her money and jewelry. When he left, she fell to the floor, bloodied, thinking he'd hit her with the gun.
            Over 40 years, Paul's family had built a business called Luskin's from one store in Baltimore into a chain of consumer electronics stores in Florida. Coming of age, Paul was taking it over, to run. He'd already made his first million, and he and Marie were living a life their friends admired. But between them all was not well. Then Paul's high school girlfriend moved to town with her husband, and sparks rekindled. When Marie discovered it she threw Paul out of the house. For a moment it looked like they would reunite. She asked Paul to move back in at the end of the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest sale day of the year. But that was a ruse, too. That day at the store, her attorneys served him the divorce.
            Marie's attorneys were aggressive. Accusing Paul's parents of shielding his assets, they asked the judge for everything he--and his parents--had. A year later, it looked like Marie would get it all.
            The divorce was overwhelming and compound stress. Three times Marie had him arrested for not paying his very high support payments exactly on time; the judge had frozen his assets, and his dad had asked him to leave his high-paying job because he couldn't concentrate both on it and the divorce. Marie's attorneys wanted Paul's mom to testify for days about the business's finances, but because she had a blood clot that stress could loosen and become lethal, Paul's family asked them to lay off her. They refused. Not long after came the flower delivery.
            The Feds indicted Paul for attempted murder-for-hire. They told the jury:
            A Luskin's employee called his brother in Baltimore who was a mob guy, who got someone to come to Hollywood to kill Marie. Although she thought the gunman hit her with the gun, he really shot her--his bullet grazed her head. Paul was convicted and sentenced to prison for 35 years.
            In prison, Paul married his high school girlfriend. To me, they protested so insistently that there was no murder-for-hire that it seemed something was truly wrong. I eventually found there had been a murder plot--but the real question was, who had asked the Luskin's employee to call his brother in Baltimore?
            Testimony said "Mr. Luskin" ordered the murder; the prosecutor naturally assumed that meant Paul. But there was a better case that "Mr. Luskin" was Paul's dad. As a result of his son's divorce he lost his whole business, owed Marie $11 million he didn't have and was facing jail for contempt of court for not paying her, and so had to leave the country.
            At the story's turning point, "Mr. Luskin" had to choose between two untenable outcomes: the death of the elder Mrs. Luskin or the younger. But prosecutors also were forced to make a tragic choice. Without certainty of which "Mr. Luskin" it was, did they choose the wrong one?

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1484167627
• ISBN 13: 9781484167625
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 440