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Florida Police Close the Adam Walsh Case After 27 Years and Name the Late Ottis Toole as the Killer

Toole, who died in prison in 1996, twice confessed and twice recanted. Police cited no new evidence and apologized to the Walsh family for lapses.

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Ottis Toole in a plaid shirt standing beside a dirt road in Florida scrubland

The 1981 abduction of 6-year-old Adam Walsh from a Florida shopping mall put missing children on the national agenda, but no one was ever charged. On December 16, 2008, Hollywood Police Chief Chad Wagner closed the case and named the late Ottis Toole as the killer.

"If Ottis Toole was alive today, he would be arrested for the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh on July 27, 1981," Wagner said at a news conference. Adam disappeared that day from a Sears store at the Hollywood Mall, across from the police station, while his mother shopped, and his remains were found two weeks later in Vero Beach. Toole, a drifter who associated with the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, twice confessed to the killing and twice recanted. He died in prison in 1996 while serving a sentence for an unrelated murder.

Wagner said there was no "magic" piece of evidence behind the decision and that the case "could have been closed, and should have been closed years ago." He apologized to Adam's parents, John and Reve Walsh, for lapses in the investigation; police had lost a bloodstained carpet from Toole's 1971 Cadillac and then the car itself. "We can now move forward knowing positively who killed our little boy," John Walsh said.

A CNN photo caption said Adam disappeared in August 1981, while Chief Wagner gave the date of his abduction as July 27, 1981.

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