MIAMI — The murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, which raised awareness about missing children and led to television shows like “America’s Most Wanted,” has been solved, authorities said Tuesday.
At a news conference, the police in Hollywood, Fla., announced that Adam was murdered by Ottis Elwood Toole, [pictured] a drifter who confessed and then recanted to the murder before dying in prison in 1996.
Adam was abducted from a mall across from the police headquarters in Hollywood on July 27, 1981. His severed head was found two weeks later in Vero Beach, 120 miles north of the mall. The body was never found.
John Walsh, Adam’s father and the host of “America’s Most Wanted,” was at the news conference with Adam’s mother, Reve, and their three children.
The photograph of the freckle-faced Adam, jauntily holding a baseball bat, became well known to Americans after his disappearance. The police investigated hundreds of leads — the serial killer Jeffrey L. Dahmer was a suspect at one point — but no arrests were made.
Adam’s parents turned to the F.B.I. for help in finding their son, only to discover that it did not become involved in such cases without proof that there had been a kidnapping. As hope for Adam’s return faded, the Walshes began an organization to aid and comfort other families of missing children.
The Walsh family also helped lobby Congress to pass the Missing Children’s Act in 1982, which urged local police departments to start searches more quickly and created a national computer database of information on missing children at the F.B.I.
In October 1983, Mr. Toole told the police that he had abducted Adam from the mall and drove for about an hour to an isolated dirt road where he decapitated him.
Investigators lifted bloodstained carpet from Mr. Toole’s white Cadillac. But DNA testing then was not as advanced as it now, and investigators could not tell if the blood was Adam’s.
When a detective assigned to the case in 1994 went to order DNA testing on the bloodstained carpeting from Mr. Toole’s car, the carpeting and the car were found to be missing.
Mr. Toole died in prison on Sept. 15, 1996.