'America's Most Wanted' Host Has Seen No Evidence
POSTED: 5:16 pm PST February 8, 2007
MIAMI -- The host of "America's Most Wanted" said he's seen no new evidence linking his son's unsolved kidnapping and slaying to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer despite a recent report laying out a possible connection.
Thoughts of a Dahmer connection to the 1981 killing of John Walsh's 6-year-old son Adam date back years but emerged anew with a report in the Daily Business Review, a Miami publication, and on television. "America's Most Wanted" issued a release saying its producers and investigators have long been aware of the rumors but that no credible information has emerged.
"Despite news stories prompted by the publication of a recent article in a Florida newspaper, 'America's Most Wanted' is aware of no credible information connecting Jeffrey Dahmer to the murder of Adam Walsh," the show said in a release issued Tuesday. Walsh believes another serial killer, Ottis Toole, murdered his son.
But Arthur Jay Harris, a Fort Lauderdale man who has authored three true crime books - including an unpublished one on the Walsh murder that he is trying to sell - says the evidence points to Dahmer. He has been following the case for years and wrote the Daily Business Review story.
Harris says a review of the 7,000-page case file shows two men claim to have seen a man they believed to be Dahmer at the mall where Adam was abducted during a shopping trip with his mother. One of the men said he saw the Dahmer look-alike carrying a struggling boy into a blue van matching another witness's description. They went to police separately after seeing Dahmer's photo when he was arrested in 1992 in Wisconsin.
Dahmer did live in South Florida at the time of Adam's slaying and reportedly had access to a blue van through the sandwich shop where he worked.
"I'm not way off on this," Harris said in a phone interview Wednesday. "This is something that needs to be investigated."
The Hollywood Police Department, the lead agency investigating the case, did not immediately return a call late Wednesday afternoon. But Capt. Tony Rode told The Miami Herald, "We investigated the Dahmer link and spoke with Dahmer. We don't believe he murdered Adam." "Detectives took statements at the time from the two witnesses who said they saw someone resembling Dahmer at the mall the day of Adam Walsh's disappearance," the agency said in a statement. "We have begun carefully re-examining those statements. Last week we told John Walsh that, if necessary, we will interview those witnesses again to make sure nothing was missed."
Adam Walsh disappeared from a Hollywood Sears store on July 27, 1981; his severed head was later found 100 miles away in a Vero Beach canal but the case was never solved.
Toole, a drifter who was convicted or pleaded guilty to several murders and claimed hundreds of others, told police he killed the boy with the help of a partner. But the alleged accomplice was in jail at the time and the drifter was unable to correctly describe the child's hair or clothing.
Authorities made a series of crucial errors, losing the bloodstained carpeting in Toole's car - preventing DNA testing - and the actual car itself. Still, Toole's niece told Walsh that her uncle gave her a prison deathbed confession to the murder when he died in September 1996.
Walsh said he still believes Toole is responsible. Ten years ago, explaining that belief, he said investigators found a pair of green shorts and a sandal similar to the ones Adam was wearing at Toole's Jacksonville home.
Even if Dahmer was involved in the killing it would have little effect. He was serving a series of life sentences after admitting to the murders of 17 young men and boys, some of whom he mutilated and cannibalized, when he was killed by another inmate at a Wisconsin prison in 1994. more at link:
http://www.ktvu.com/news/10966918/detail.html
