Before there was Caylee, there was Adam. The six-year-old boy who went missing and was later found dead spurred his distraught father, John Walsh, to create America's Most Wanted, the TV program that's been credited with getting more than one thousand dangerous fugitives off the street.
Now, twenty-seven years after Adam Walsh went missing, Florida police have announced the man responsible for killing the little boy - responsible for setting a father on a lifelong mission to rid the world of bad guys, has been positively identified. He's been dead for more than a decade.
Ottis Toole is the man John Walsh has long thought killed his little boy. Toole twice confessed to grabbing the boy in a Hollywood, Fla. mall and later dropping his head in the water - to be discovered in a canal one hundred twenty miles from where he first went missing some two weeks after his disappearance. Toole later recanted each confession, and the Walshes have long criticized police for botching the investigation.
Today, Hollywood Florida Police Chief Chadwick Wagner said it's his department's "determination and conclusion that Ottis Toole was the abductor and murderer of Adam Walsh."
If the missing Lindbergh baby was the child kidnapping that changed the way parents looked at strangers, the Adam Walsh disappearance was the one that made parents take action. It forced them to not only be more cautious, but to stand up for child security measures in schools and daycare centers, to expect others to take better care of their children.
On the Website for his TV show, John Walsh and wife Reve said today that they can finally move forward, at least knowing who killed their little boy.
"We, along with our children, Meghan, Callahan and Hayden, pray for the
thousands of parents of murdered and still-missing children. We
continue to fight for their safety, and to make sure that no child --
especially Adam -- died in vain."
Do you think the Adam Walsh case changed America?
Image: NBC
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