Murder of Adam Walsh haunts state, 40 years later

Four decades ago, the photo of a gap-toothed kid in a red baseball cap was forever embedded in our collective imagination. Day after day, newspapers and TV news showed us that smiling face that belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting. Not on a wretched police report.

Adam Walsh, age 6, went missing from the Hollywood Mall on July 27, 1981, lured away from the toy department at Sears by someone with nefarious intent. For two weeks, even as hope dwindled, Hollywood was ground zero for a frantic search and a frenzied media. Then, on Aug. 10, a fisherman discovered the boy’s severed head, floating in a canal in Vero Beach.

America was gobsmacked. The abduction had become an obsession for TV news. (CNN was barely a year old.) That adorable photo became ubiquitous, the quintessential all-American boy in Little League garb, clutching a bat. Parents worried that if such a kid could be snatched so easily from the hermetic environs of a shopping mall, no child was safe.

So much for the free-range, be-home-bydark way of child rearing. After Adam’s death, parenting entered an era of obsessive supervision, organized activities and structured playdates, ever mindful of the looming “stranger danger.” Lose track of a child in Target for a few quick moments, and recollections of

July 27, 1981, would slither into a parent’s consciousness like a black mamba.

It doesn’t help, all these years later, that the identity of Adam’s murderer remains shrouded in doubt, false confessions and slipshod police work.

In 2008, Hollywood police finally settled on a half-wit drifter named Ottis Toole, who, after all, admitted killing Adam. Trouble is, before Toole died in prison in 1996, he had confessed to nearly any unsolved homicide case police dredged up from their cold case files — 160 murders in Florida alone.

Police from all over the south upped their clearance rates, and we journalists invoked fantastic hyperbole, anointing Toole “the most prolific mass murderer in Florida history” after his confessional deluge.

The only mystery left unsolved was how any cop could have possibly believed Ottis Toole.

On Oct. 14, 1983, Toole told a Jacksonville detective that he and his lover, fellow serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, had seized Adam from the mall. How Lucas had butchered the child.

There were problems. Toole’s description of Adam didn’t match. The clothes, age and hair were all wrong. Toole couldn’t ID Adam’s photo. Oh yeah — at the time of the killing, Henry Lee Lucas was incarcerated in Maryland.

Later, coached by his interrogator, Toole cleaned up his story, deleting Lucas from the narrative. But not his inconsistencies. One version described burying Adam. Another had him burning the body. He killed the kid. He didn’t. Confessed. Recanted.

Even the few accurate details attributed to Toole were suspect. The policeman who coaxed incriminating information from Toole had earlier convinced him to sign over the book and movie rights to his horrifying life story.

Meanwhile, as if they were in a gruesome competition, his buddy Lucas was busy confessing to 210 other murders, several of which would have required his presence in Florida and Texas simultaneously.

Adam’s father, John Walsh, whose search for the killer inspired his popular crime-solving TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” had characterized the Hollywood police investigation as “a disaster . . . right from the start.” Walsh had long argued that Toole was the likely killer.

A sensational alternate theory blamed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Miami in 1981. But in 2008, despite no new evidence, Hollywood police hung the crime on long-dead Ottis Toole.

Over the past 40 years, other gruesome child abductions have reverberated through the media, adding to this sense that kids have become ever more vulnerable. Politicians responded with the Jimmy Ryce Act, meant to keep dangerous sexual predators behind bars; Megan’s Law, which alerts neighbors if a convicted predator moves nearby; Amber Alerts when a child goes missing and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, with mandatory 10-year sentences for sex crimes against children.

But if runaways and children spirited away by non-custodial parents are subtracted from the equation, the actual risk hardly measures up to our collective anxieties. Various agencies report that 100 or maybe 200 American kids are kidnapped annually by strangers. Most escape the ordeal. Other ordinary and preventable dangers kill many more children than the likes of Ottis Toole.

But parental fears aren’t constrained by national crime stats. The appalling fate of Adam Walsh, with his gap-toothed smile, created a kind of dread that’s impervious to math. Forty years later, parents still shudder.