This is the full-sized luminol photo of the rear carpet from Toole's Cadillac taken by FDLE in 1983; Matthews and Les Standiford cropped it before presenting it in their book
Bringing Adam Home:
Turn it counter-clockwise 90 degrees to see what they claim is a face. Art Harris thinks it's a boot print. Who knows. Adam's DNA was not found in Toole's car; DNA testing as such didn't exist in 1983, and when in 1994 Hollywood Police cold case Det. Mark Smith sought the carpet, and the car it came from, they had all been misplaced in some inter-agency vortex.
With what we currently know, the case against Dahmer as Adam's killer is implausible, though not impossible. The case against Ottis Toole is also highly problematic.
First, Dahmer was interviewed by Hollywood police and by the FBI in 1991 and denied killing Adam. Toole admitted killing Adam, but then he recanted. Then he admitted, then recanted, and so on.
Regarding Dahmer, there's an initial problem of means. Harris proved conclusively that Dahmer lived in Miami Beach during the period Adam was abducted. Although Harris has offered compelling evidence that Dahmer could have had access to a blue van owned by the sub shop in Miami Beach where he sporadically worked, and a handful of witnesses have reported a blue van at the Hollywood Mall, where Adam was abducted, on the date and around the time he disappeared, Dahmer was less than securely housed during the time he lived in Miami Beach. He was apparently homeless from time to time, sleeping on the beach, though he also seems to have lived in a nearby motel room for a time. So the question of where Dahmer might have taken a victim at that time is a thorny one.
Harris found an open meter room behind the sub shop's location, and even got an ABC Primetime news crew to go in with a forensic investigator. They found an old rusty ax and a sledgehammer and patterns of something which looked to them like old blood, but a preliminary field test was inconclusive. Harris' findings are certainly interesting but far from conclusive.
Regarding signature, Park Dietz, the psychiatrist who interviewed Dahmer before his trial, doubts Dahmer would have found the six-year old Adam appealing as a victim, as Dahmer's tastes went toward pubescents and young adults.
Dahmer did decapitate many of his victims, but he kept the heads, along with various other body parts, either burying them before disposal or, later in his career, keeping them in his kitchen. Dahmer kept his victim's remains nearby so he could fondle, bleach, decorate and/or pulverize them. Two weeks after he disappeared, Adam's head was found dumped in a remote canal off the Florida Turnpike approx. 120 miles from the Hollywood Mall where he was abducted.
Then there's the problem of M.O. Two witnesses claimed to see a man carrying a small boy forcefully to a blue van parked outside the Sears Adam disappeared from -- though at different entrances to the store. A 12-year old boy claimed to see a small boy beckoned by two men wearing stocking masks in a blue van outside the Sears and grabbed.
There's no record of any of Dahmer's victims being taken in a blitz-style attack like the one indicated by these witnesses. Dahmer's M.O. was to lure his victims to a secure location, drug them, then strangle them.
