Recent content by mistertheplague

Yes, I’m a few months older than Adam and this was the rule rather than the exception. Reve was later criticized for dropping Adam off in the toy department, often by people who weren’t alive at the time and were used to policies and cultural norms that came about in large part because of what...

1 and 2. Kathy Shaffer was the 17-year old security guard who intervened in a fight at the Atari station between two black kids and two white kids. The black kids have never been identified. The two white kids were Adam and then-8 year old Joel Cockerman. Cockerman died of a drug overdose years...

Well, never say never, but the odds of that are long unless some bombshell piece of physical evidence that law enforcement lost turns up. Even then, though the DNA technology now exists to test blood samples, e.g., against John Walsh’s paternal DNA, A. one couldn’t assume the samples wouldn’t...

Part of this was complicated by the fact that John and Reve were initially suspects. In a murder of a child, cops are/were inclined to look at the parents first, and there were some things in the Walshes family life (marriage problems, John’s business contacts, Reve having an affair with a guy...

I’m actually only a couple of months older than Adam, and I remember the case having a profound effect on parents at the time. Regarding local LE, currently watching the Netflix documentary on the Texas Killing Fields. Incredible how many bodies of young girls were dumped along a stretch of...

Speaking of official incompetence/malfeasance, one of the things Art Harris and Miami Herald reporter David Smiley turned up in 2010 was that the Broward ME didn’t appear to have done an official autopsy on Adam’s remains. The upshot is that, had a suspect been arrested, per Florida law he...

The Walshes had a hard time with the Hollywood Police Department because frankly the cops were in miles over their heads. They were simply not equipped in training or manpower to conduct an effective search for a missing child following a stranger abduction. Also, missing person searches as...

It’s important to note that when Hollywood PD detectives went up to Wisconsin to question Dahmer, per John Walsh’s request the Broward DA agreed to waive the death penalty if Dahmer confessed to murdering Adam. So being extradited to Florida and electrocuted for Adam’s murder was never a...

I would definitely recommend Art Harris’ series, even though he and I disagree about some of his major conclusions, and despite my feeling that his final entry about meeting the alive-and-well Adam Walsh is simply wacky. I wrote the following review of Art Harris’ book in 2013, and still mostly...

However, this is exactly the same reason Ottis Toole might have recanted his confession.

Fair point. But what is everybody discussing on the Casey Anthony and JonBenet Ramsey forums? The only "news" I saw on either one of them is some update about Casey Anthony's bankruptcy and that someone saw her in a bar in West Palm Beach. Mostly it's people debating various issues pertaining to...

I've been mesmerized by the Adam Walsh case for years now, and for the life of me I could never understand why it has received so little attention from true crime buffs. Aside from being arguably the most important case of our lifetime, the Adam Walsh case is a powerful, haunting, heartbreaking...

Very interesting. Hats off to Nero and Mr. Oller for some very fine work. After reading the available facts, my first thought was that the police work in this case has been so jaw-droppingly inept, you almost have to assume -- unless the homicide cops in Columbus were as high as the kids at...

Happens a lot more than the public knows. In the course of researching a book I'm currently writing about the dubious closure of the Adam Walsh murder in Hollywood, Florida, I came across a Miami Herald investigation that turned up at least 38 homicide prosecutions based on false confessions...

To follow up on my earlier post, here's a link to the Adam Walsh case files, available on Willis Morgan's site: http://www.justiceforadam.com/ Willis has made available, free of charge, case files from both Hollywood Police and the Broward State Attorney's Office (BSAO), which launched its...