Digital News Report- In 1981, John Walsh’s son, Adam, was abducted from a Sears department store and murdered. In his grief, Walsh helped many campaigns to help missing and exploited children, including the creation of the Missing Children Act of 1982 and the television show America’s Most Wanted. While his efforts have helped solve hundreds, if not thousands of missing children cases, his own sons murder remained unsolved for 27 years.
On December 16th, it was announced by the Hollywood Police Department announced that a drifter by the name of Ottis Elwood Toole, who died in prison in 1996, has been officially identified as the killer and that they consider the case closed. Though Toole confessed to the boy’s murder in 1983, the police dismissed him out as a suspect early on. Toole confessed to several other murders and was serving multiple life sentences. He died in his prison cell of liver failure.
“For 27 years we’ve been asking who could take a six-year-old boy and murder him and decapitate him? Who? We needed to know,” John Walsh stated. “And today we know. The not knowing has been a torture but that journey is over.”