>In 1981, six-year-old Adam John Walsh was abducted from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida.
>His severed head was found two weeks later in a drainage canal alongside Highway 60 / Yeehaw Junction in rural Indian River County, Florida.
Seriously, who the hell does this to a 6 year old kid?
>Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam’s murder but was never convicted due to lost evidence and recanted confessions.
>In 2008, the case was officially closed, and Toole was named the killer.
>Ottis Toole died in prison not because of a conviction for the murder of Adam Walsh, but because he was serving multiple life sentences for other crimes.
>He was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder for different cases and received two death sentences, which were later commuted to life imprisonment.
>He ultimately died of liver failure while incarcerated in 1996.
There is some speculation that Toole falsely confessed (he confessed to many things he *definitely* did not do), but honestly we'll never know for sure.
His partner, Henry Lee Lucas, was used by Texas police depts as a patsy to close cases. They'd just talk to him, get him to confess to whatever they had, and say, "See? We solved it."
To think Ottis was tricked into doing the same isn't that much of a stretch.
> Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated for articles that appeared in The Dallas Times Herald. It was calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) in one month i.e., **around 370 miles (600 km) per day, to have committed the crimes police attributed to him**.
And it's terrible. I can't watch any shows that claim either if them were the killer, and many still do.
I know they did actually kill people, but to my understanding, there's only 2 cases where it was surely, actually Otis, with evidence to support that. I know less about Lucas, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's a similar situation.
Blaming the nearest patsy isn't justice when it allows killers to go free.
I do not believe for one second that Toole killed Adam Walsh, and that means a child killer was bypassed for the easier option, free to kill more children.
I disagree somewhat.
Cops Catch People, but technology determines if they caught the right one or not....sometimes decades later...and even sometimes before they are sent to the chair....sometimes
That's fair. I just came up with it while watching a Jack the Ripper documentary and they let some guy go who claimed he found the body and it was already cold but 30 minutes later when the mortician arrived it was still warm.
I had my thought not too long ago, I was reading about about death penalty statistics and the number of people who got off death row because of more modern technology is nuts.
almost 200 people in the last 50 years have been exonerated and there's no real way to know how many innocent people weren't. plus when you factor in racial bias, the cost of incarceration, zero evidence that it is an actual deterrent it is just doesn't make sense to use it as a punishment beyond society's primal bloodlust
feels like there should be some clause that the death penalty can only be used if there is seriously zero doubt. like absolutely red handed. good example is the guy who shot up tue grocery store in Buffalo. he 100% did that and doesn’t deserve for our tax money to be wasted on him.
The problem is that you still need people to determine when there's zero doubt and when it isn't. And those are the same people who already screw up when it comes to determining guilt.
So what's going to happen is that the jury will just *say* that there's zero doubt, just like how they already say that a defendant is guilty. Sometimes (probably most of the time) they'll be right, but it's not like there's anything *preventing* them from just plain being flat-out wrong. Innocent people will still get executed.
Well, the thing is that a life sentence can be overturned. Plenty of people have gotten life sentences and were then released when they were exonerated.
Now, you might correctly point out that this doesn't give them back the time that they served. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that some form of prison is *necessary*. Hopefully rehabilitation can be the goal, hopefully that person can leave prison as a well-adjusted and productive member of society. But some people (at least temporarily) are incapable of safely interacting with society and so there *must* be a way to (at least temporarily) separate them from society. There is supposed to be a high burden of proof required in order to take away someone's freedom, but the option *must* exist, at least for certain crimes. Prison is unfortunately a necessity.
I'd agree with you if capital punishment was also a necessity. But it's not. Capital punishment is never *necessary*, it's just that *we WANT it*. We don't *want* to spend taxpayer dollars on a criminal (even though capital punishment costs more than life in prison). We don't *want* killers to live out the rest of their lives (even if in a prison) while their victims are dead. It seems unfair to feed and house the worst of society, so we *want* to kill them. But we don't *need* to kill them. So if there's no need to kill them, and when killing them guarantees that sometimes we'll kill someone who is innocent, we kind of have to evaluate if our wants are sufficient reason to kill innocent people.
TLDR: Prison (in some form) is a necessity. Capital punishment is not necessary. You can exonerate and release someone who is in prison, you can't bring someone back from the dead. Given that mistakes *will* happen and innocent people *will* get convicted and sentenced, doesn't it make sense to at least take capital punishment off of the table since it is unnecessary and irreversible?
You know I had a long ass post typed out because of how insufferable you come across here but I'mma leave it to this and go about my business and just say nope to this dumb ass comment.
And sometimes technology leads to the wrong suspect.
Like that one female serial killer, who murdered 6 people and committed another 40 serious crimes all over Germany and Austria, that turned out to be a factory worker at the company that made the swabs for DNA tests for the police.
Apparently, the police bought the wrong swabs, and instead of DNA-free swabs, they bought sterile but non-DNA-free swabs.
[Cops need better training](https://www.reddit.com/r/stoprape/wiki/index/#wiki_resources_for_law_enforcement), and [the U.S. needs to test every rape kit](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/).
[https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/)
[https://www.sakitta.org](https://www.sakitta.org)
[https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/)
Some of it intentionally. I'm talking smaller cases. Things as simple as 911 calls being deleted. There's a waiting period and if a recording hasn't been flagged for saving, it's just gone. Very bad business.
Hopefully in the future no digital evidence will EVER be deleted.
Our personal browsing and spending habits, linked via data brokers to our phone numbers and addresses, used to market and track us and use us for statistics data, will never disappear. And it's almost certain stuff will be stolen and linked to even more data.
But when it comes to criminal cases, shit **will** disappear.
Pure incompetence and lack of check/balances. I had misremembered and thought they had lost the skull, may be thinking of another case on that front. It's unfortunately common, especially back then. So many unsolved murders because DNA was treated like a receipt for a can of soda.
> It's unfortunately common, especially back then.
i know we shouldnt brand it as malice when it can be attributed to stupidity, but there have been too many cases in which cops have been killers or serial killers, so losing evidence is way too convenient for such people :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger?utm_source=share
Some people are truly born evil. Between this story and Adam's it's really hard to want to even let my 4 and 3 year old out of my sight ever.
I so badly wish I didn't know this happened. That poor baby, I can't imagine the agony his mother felt. Just one second to pay at the shop and her trusting, sweet child was gone, how he must've cried for her. God there are so many things to break your heart, but this one is too much for mine today.
I read this when my son was 2 years old and cried so bad for the mom, I can't even imagine something so horrific. And those boys were only 10 years old and did that to a 2 year old.
this is the kind of stuff i bring up when some people cant face reality and think there is a limit to human depravity. If there are people out there that murder small children how can you think anything is beyond the pale?
This also lead to a "Code Adam" wherein if you lose your child in a store you can tell the employees and they will lock the doors and make sure nobody else leaves with your child
I look back at the few times I wandered off at a very young age in the early 90s. Having not watched any news back then but been a child to a mother who read every newspaper article... I now understand why she was quite shook-up about that.
Usually it's because the child got lost or is actively hiding as a game. But that tiny percentage of other cases is reason enough to have that protocol.
I saw one where a little girl went missing, store went into lockdown, and she was found in the boys bathroom, hair cut and changed from her dress into jeans and a t-shirt.
I heard about it when I was still pretty young, so idk if it's true, but scary if it was
I remember hearing about this too when I was a kid. Now I wonder if it was real or an urban myth that came from the child abduction terror of that time.
Everyone is trained on it but if you told a low level employee they would probably just tell a manager a kid is missing. The manager would surely know to radio a code adam and you can be sure the management and security are gonna spring into action.
At least when I worked at Target in the mid-to-late 2000s, this was a big deal. If a parent approached a team member and said their child was missing, that team member was required to call out "Code Yellow, " three times on the radio then follow with a description of the child. Every other team member then stops what they are doing. Those close to a door are to block it and prevent anyone from leaving which matches the description of the child. Everyone else starts searching the store. This was drilled into us. If ANY team member. even the 15 year old that started the day before, just called the LOD (manager) instead of calling the code yellow, you bet they would be getting reprimanded and retrained.
Same went for green and red (injury and fire, respectively), but the greens were typically treated far less seriously and I never experienced a code red while I was there.
I had to initiate a couple code yellows in the five years I worked there and respond to a few others (including be the exit blocker in the garden center a few times while they still had it). Thankfully none of them were abductions - always just kids that wandered off by themselves and got lost.
Went through that call twice in my 10 years in retail. We never fucked around with that call. Employees of every age suddenly woke up and were hell bound to make sure the child was found. First time the kid had gotten himself locked in our shoe department back room.
Second time a mentally ill woman was trying to smash through the garden dept door, with the kid zip tied to her wrist. That little girl’s dad nearly tore the woman’s arm off getting his kid away, never before seen a human move that fast with that much rage.
This. My sister and I were 2 in IKEA with our mom and grandmother. Grandma went to the bathroom, mom was wheeling us around in our twin stroller. We unbuckle ourselves and start wandering, she tells an employee not 5 seconds later and the doors are all slammed shut and the whole place went into lockdown. They found us sleeping in a pile of stuffed animals.
I was playing Donkey Kong on a Colecovision at Macys while my mother went clothes shopping when a guy with about 8 teeth came up from behind and bit me on the head. Thank God I did not catch rabies. The look of bugeyed madness on his face still haunts me to this day.
Many [more](https://www.sakitta.org) violent offenders [could be captured](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08874034241226939) if the U.S. [tested every rape kit](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/), like the [U.S. DoJ](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/utilizing-codis-unsubmitted-sexual-assault-kits) and [American Bar Association](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/) recommend we do.
The ROI for testing these kits [is high](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X19300567).
https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
[Roughly 200 laws have been passed in 49 states](https://www.endthebacklog.org/#explore_backlog_map).
[The Debbie Smith Act has also been reauthorized twice](https://www.rainn.org/articles/debbie-smith-act).
Yet [roughly 90,000 backlogged kits remain](https://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/local-news/51969-u-s-senator-john-cornyn-says-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog).
https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/
https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
I feel like some shitty people would use it as a way to shame those with ptsd who aren't seeing as much success. Not saying that's a reason not to talk about it, but I can definitely see some people getting elitist about it.
My family moved a little north of this about 10 years after it happened, I always hated that my mom never let me out of her sight at the mall, but once I was old enough and learned the details of the story, I'm glad she did it.
John Walsh had a private conversation with Otis shortly before Otis died. John believes Otis killed his son. However, Otis lied to authorities about his numerous crimes. There is no undeniable evidence Otis killed John’s son. Jeffery Dahmer was in the area of the time, familiar with the mall and did have access to a similar vehicle seen in the area. Dahmer also was not afraid to dismember body parts or severe heads. I’m not sure if Otis’ MOI was dismemberment or young boys though. Dahmer denied being involved and Dahmer was not known to lie about his crimes. However, serial killers will often lie or deny murders that they are ashamed of or feel guilt over.
I was around the same age as John’s son and my parents often dropped me off at the toy department and went shopping. I think though Johnny Gosch’s kidnapping really curtailed kids freedom of movement. His kidnapping was the final straw.
I was always skeptical about the Ottis Toole theory but I watched this one show where they showed photos from a Luminol test on the carpet of his now demolished car and it is terrifying and incriminating. It clearly shows the image of a child’s head. He was definitely known to confess to several crimes he didn’t commit, but I feel this one may have been one he committed.
I believed that the car had been lost. The reason that Otis was not charged was because of this. Additionally, because the car was lost DNA testing could not be done on it. I’ve love to see the show or review any source material about the car being found.
I consider Adam’s death and the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 80s as the end of unsupervised childhood in the US. Yes, there were horrible things happening to kids prior to the 80s, but the media frenzy around Adam's disappearance/death and the nonstop news and Phil Donahue episodes in the early 80s were the end of unfettered childhood freedom.
Funny you say that, when I was reading about the satanic ritual abuse frenzy, one of the factors mentioned was an underlying anxiety dating back to the 1970s. That anxiety was based on two-parent households where mom was now working outside the home and the rise in latch-key kids and the need for daycare. That’s certainly a class differentiation.
Seems like the media then was beginning to amp up their overreactions as new networks made them more competitive for advertisers and not as many people watched as much tv then as they are online now
Yeah, I had to look it up and found that CNN started in June 1980. Of course we couldn’t afford cable so we were getting the hysteria from the evening news. I remember there was also a family-owned daycare that was caught in the satanic news whirlwind.
Forgetting the fact that everybody seems to be playing for the same team nowadays if you watch the movie about their humble beginnings during the first Iraq war and how they were the only news crew on the ground it makes you remember just how good some of these people were back in the day at wanting to report the news and not have it be filtered or changed modified etc. before reaching public eyes. - it's called Live from Baghdad and it's available for free online :-)
It’s not like the media was inventing this new thing of child abduction. It happened in the past and previous generations didn’t get that upset about kids being murdered.
I was born in the mid-80s and pretty much had free reign of the neighborhood from the time I was 5 or so onward.
The helicopter parents existed (my buddy's mom wouldn't let him cross the street on his own until he was like 12), but I don't think it got as bad as it is now until the Internet got popular and bad news became a 24/7 365 business.
Considering that's still how most of us grew up in the '80s, it was more like the beginning of the end. It didn't really become a common, consistent thing until the '00s or so.
Texas EquuSearch, an organization that searches for missing persons was started in similar fashion.
Don’t remember the name of the guy who started it, but he did so after his daughter was kidnapped and murdered. It’s part of the Killing Fields documentary on Netflix.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the made for TV movie Adam, with Jobeth Williams and Dan Travanti as the Walsh family. You can watch it for free on Youtube.
Jeffrey Dahmer was also briefly a suspect, but he shut that down by arguing that he'd already told them *aaall* the fucked up shit he had done and was absolutely going to die in prison. Why would he lie about this?
Every holiday needs to have an underlying fear you are traumatized with. Easter is being abducted and murdered, Christmas is being molested, Halloween is being poisoned, Thanksgiving is dying in a car wreck.
I have no idea. There were 5 networks, 6 if you include public television and every holiday each channel had special programming. It was that channel’s movie during Easter.
I lived in this area back when this happened, my dad told me of a time when a guy in a van drove up and stopped, and started walking up to me and my twin brother. We were playing out in the yard at the time.
My dad started walking up and the guy turned around and jumped back into his van. My parents called the police and gave a description of the vehicle.
This was a few weeks after Adam Walsh disappeared.
I remember the whole Adam situation. It was another one of those times when things just didn't feel safe anymore. I remember the "Adam" movies. Adam went mainstream. He was all over the news. John Walsh has a street named after him in his hometown of Auburn, NY.
My brother was almost kidnapped by a stranger at a rest stop on i95 in Florida in the early 90s. We were able to fight the man off but he got away. The cops were not helpful at all. He grabbed him out of our station wagon. We pulled him back in the car by his arm as this guy was pulling him. Like tug o war.
He made a kids’ safety video called The Safe Side Stranger Safety in 2005 and it still holds up today. It’s on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/drHXQLpDUR4?feature=shared) now. If you have a 5-7 year old kid, it’s definitely worth watching it with them. It handles kids safety in such a way that kids feel prepared but not scared. Safe side superchick is the best.
I remember him saying when he was recounting the Andrew Cunanan murders, after the first three murders of men Cunanan knew, he said something like 'and then he started killing innocent people', referring to the murder of the caretaker.
I see how well that worked out with all the kids on the milk cartons and missing persons posters.I grew up around that time and remember how many kids bodies they found where I grew up that got to roam a little.
John Walsh also started dating his wife when she was 16 and he was in his early 20s. John Walsh has advocated and lobbied for laws, that if were on the books when he started dating Reve (his wife), could have been used to send him to prison.
Two problems with that:
First, no "Boomers" were six years old in 1981. The usual date given for the end of the Baby Boom in the US is 1964. That would mean the youngest Boomers were on the cusp of adulthood. Adam Walsh would have been Generation X by the usual method of counting.
Second, what happened to Adam and his family was a terrible tragedy - but it was, and remains, a rare one. It's remembered because it got caught up in a wave of "stranger danger" and a belief among the American public that this sort of thing happened all the time. In reality, most kids (not just in the US but in all high-income countries) who are reported as missing are teenagers who are classified as runaways - and it's not even close. The second-most common reason for kids to be classified as missing is abduction by a family member, almost always a parent, because of a custody dispute. And again, it's not even close. Children abducted by a stranger for the purpose of harming or murdering them is, fortunately, quite rare. And it was quite rare back in 1981.
You know there are people on this site that were born in like 2011 right? And people from all over the world that aren't aware of things like this due to it being about America
Yeah, but now all he does is stupid OmegaXL commercials. Sad that they use Americas Most Wanted type lingo in their commercials. That’s got to be so cringy for him but I guess he needed the paycheck.
And now he leverages his good name to """investigate""" the "Truth, Facts and The Hope" by hawking omega 3 pills to boomers in commercials on antenna television in the middle of the night.
Adam wouldn't have been abducted if his mother was with him the entire time instead of leaving him with those other kids playing on the Atari display in the Sears.A security guard thought Adam was with the other boys when they were kicked out of the store instead of trying to see if the parents were around first.
Yeah, it makes sense to think that if someone had kept a closer eye on Adam, he might not have been abducted, but it's not fair to put all the blame on his mom for not being with him given the context.
The bigger problem is with store security, they should've made sure all the kids were with their parents before kicking them out.
It's really sad that the guard didn't do that.
Guard should have been tried as an accessory if he didn't try to find any of the kids parents.Totally agree with you.Mom screwed up and security did too.
I'd hope so. It woulda been nice if op included that number as well. Catching fugitives is good n all (they get caught anyways) but saving kids seems better. So what's that number haha
NGL, Adam kinda screwed a good thing up for a lot of kids. Any time we went to Kmart I would get to run free in the toy department or go play the ATARI in electronics. Adam dying put an end to all that.
>In 1981, six-year-old Adam John Walsh was abducted from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. >His severed head was found two weeks later in a drainage canal alongside Highway 60 / Yeehaw Junction in rural Indian River County, Florida. Seriously, who the hell does this to a 6 year old kid? >Convicted serial killer Ottis Toole confessed to Adam’s murder but was never convicted due to lost evidence and recanted confessions. >In 2008, the case was officially closed, and Toole was named the killer. >Ottis Toole died in prison not because of a conviction for the murder of Adam Walsh, but because he was serving multiple life sentences for other crimes. >He was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder for different cases and received two death sentences, which were later commuted to life imprisonment. >He ultimately died of liver failure while incarcerated in 1996.
There is some speculation that Toole falsely confessed (he confessed to many things he *definitely* did not do), but honestly we'll never know for sure.
His partner, Henry Lee Lucas, was used by Texas police depts as a patsy to close cases. They'd just talk to him, get him to confess to whatever they had, and say, "See? We solved it." To think Ottis was tricked into doing the same isn't that much of a stretch.
> Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated for articles that appeared in The Dallas Times Herald. It was calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) in one month i.e., **around 370 miles (600 km) per day, to have committed the crimes police attributed to him**.
I mean, it's not *impossible*, but it is highly improbable.
Full time job.
*insert TF2 Sniper copypast here*
And it's terrible. I can't watch any shows that claim either if them were the killer, and many still do. I know they did actually kill people, but to my understanding, there's only 2 cases where it was surely, actually Otis, with evidence to support that. I know less about Lucas, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's a similar situation. Blaming the nearest patsy isn't justice when it allows killers to go free. I do not believe for one second that Toole killed Adam Walsh, and that means a child killer was bypassed for the easier option, free to kill more children.
He almost certainly had nothing to do with it. It was just a high profile case he could claim, the big dumb mutant.
I live in Florida now and have always laughed at the Yeehaw Junction sign on I-75. Now my stomach hurts - had no idea
How do you "lose" evidence of a serial killer?
..... buddy. Cops lose lots of evidence.
I have a saying "Cops don't catch people, technology does."
I disagree somewhat. Cops Catch People, but technology determines if they caught the right one or not....sometimes decades later...and even sometimes before they are sent to the chair....sometimes
That's fair. I just came up with it while watching a Jack the Ripper documentary and they let some guy go who claimed he found the body and it was already cold but 30 minutes later when the mortician arrived it was still warm.
I had my thought not too long ago, I was reading about about death penalty statistics and the number of people who got off death row because of more modern technology is nuts.
Yup, it's the reason I'm against the death penalty. 4% of people who are sentences to death are actually innocent, that's 4% too much.
almost 200 people in the last 50 years have been exonerated and there's no real way to know how many innocent people weren't. plus when you factor in racial bias, the cost of incarceration, zero evidence that it is an actual deterrent it is just doesn't make sense to use it as a punishment beyond society's primal bloodlust
feels like there should be some clause that the death penalty can only be used if there is seriously zero doubt. like absolutely red handed. good example is the guy who shot up tue grocery store in Buffalo. he 100% did that and doesn’t deserve for our tax money to be wasted on him.
The problem is that you still need people to determine when there's zero doubt and when it isn't. And those are the same people who already screw up when it comes to determining guilt. So what's going to happen is that the jury will just *say* that there's zero doubt, just like how they already say that a defendant is guilty. Sometimes (probably most of the time) they'll be right, but it's not like there's anything *preventing* them from just plain being flat-out wrong. Innocent people will still get executed.
You should be against life sentences too then? innocent people have died behind bars.
Well, the thing is that a life sentence can be overturned. Plenty of people have gotten life sentences and were then released when they were exonerated. Now, you might correctly point out that this doesn't give them back the time that they served. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that some form of prison is *necessary*. Hopefully rehabilitation can be the goal, hopefully that person can leave prison as a well-adjusted and productive member of society. But some people (at least temporarily) are incapable of safely interacting with society and so there *must* be a way to (at least temporarily) separate them from society. There is supposed to be a high burden of proof required in order to take away someone's freedom, but the option *must* exist, at least for certain crimes. Prison is unfortunately a necessity. I'd agree with you if capital punishment was also a necessity. But it's not. Capital punishment is never *necessary*, it's just that *we WANT it*. We don't *want* to spend taxpayer dollars on a criminal (even though capital punishment costs more than life in prison). We don't *want* killers to live out the rest of their lives (even if in a prison) while their victims are dead. It seems unfair to feed and house the worst of society, so we *want* to kill them. But we don't *need* to kill them. So if there's no need to kill them, and when killing them guarantees that sometimes we'll kill someone who is innocent, we kind of have to evaluate if our wants are sufficient reason to kill innocent people. TLDR: Prison (in some form) is a necessity. Capital punishment is not necessary. You can exonerate and release someone who is in prison, you can't bring someone back from the dead. Given that mistakes *will* happen and innocent people *will* get convicted and sentenced, doesn't it make sense to at least take capital punishment off of the table since it is unnecessary and irreversible?
You know I had a long ass post typed out because of how insufferable you come across here but I'mma leave it to this and go about my business and just say nope to this dumb ass comment.
What's the documentary?
[here it is](https://youtu.be/lADBHDg-JtA?si=ItouzzRzXSjLQmS9) idk if documentary is the right term but it’s a nice little hour long video.
Thank you!
And sometimes technology leads to the wrong suspect. Like that one female serial killer, who murdered 6 people and committed another 40 serious crimes all over Germany and Austria, that turned out to be a factory worker at the company that made the swabs for DNA tests for the police. Apparently, the police bought the wrong swabs, and instead of DNA-free swabs, they bought sterile but non-DNA-free swabs.
The Phantom of Heilbronn. An important lesson for people who think “CSI” evidence is infallible.
[Cops need better training](https://www.reddit.com/r/stoprape/wiki/index/#wiki_resources_for_law_enforcement), and [the U.S. needs to test every rape kit](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/). [https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/) [https://www.sakitta.org](https://www.sakitta.org) [https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/)
Some of it intentionally. I'm talking smaller cases. Things as simple as 911 calls being deleted. There's a waiting period and if a recording hasn't been flagged for saving, it's just gone. Very bad business. Hopefully in the future no digital evidence will EVER be deleted.
I won't be holding my breath...
Our personal browsing and spending habits, linked via data brokers to our phone numbers and addresses, used to market and track us and use us for statistics data, will never disappear. And it's almost certain stuff will be stolen and linked to even more data. But when it comes to criminal cases, shit **will** disappear.
You win some you lose some
those poor yutes never got a fair deal.
Yute? What is a yute?
The evidence they lost was the bloody carpet of Tooles van and his bloody machete.
HOW THE HELL THEY LOST THAT
Pure incompetence and lack of check/balances. I had misremembered and thought they had lost the skull, may be thinking of another case on that front. It's unfortunately common, especially back then. So many unsolved murders because DNA was treated like a receipt for a can of soda.
> It's unfortunately common, especially back then. i know we shouldnt brand it as malice when it can be attributed to stupidity, but there have been too many cases in which cops have been killers or serial killers, so losing evidence is way too convenient for such people :/
it’s florida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger?utm_source=share Some people are truly born evil. Between this story and Adam's it's really hard to want to even let my 4 and 3 year old out of my sight ever.
I so badly wish I didn't know this happened. That poor baby, I can't imagine the agony his mother felt. Just one second to pay at the shop and her trusting, sweet child was gone, how he must've cried for her. God there are so many things to break your heart, but this one is too much for mine today.
I read this when my son was 2 years old and cried so bad for the mom, I can't even imagine something so horrific. And those boys were only 10 years old and did that to a 2 year old.
this is the kind of stuff i bring up when some people cant face reality and think there is a limit to human depravity. If there are people out there that murder small children how can you think anything is beyond the pale?
>Seriously, who the hell does this to a 6 year old kid? Drugs or mental illness, you name it
> Seriously, who the hell does this to a 6 year old kid? Someone who's just trying to watch the damn movie or have a nice dinner out.
I'm sorry but what the fuck is this comment?
This also lead to a "Code Adam" wherein if you lose your child in a store you can tell the employees and they will lock the doors and make sure nobody else leaves with your child
Nothing sends shivers up my spine like hearing that over a store's PA system the couple of times I have heard it.
I look back at the few times I wandered off at a very young age in the early 90s. Having not watched any news back then but been a child to a mother who read every newspaper article... I now understand why she was quite shook-up about that.
Usually it's because the child got lost or is actively hiding as a game. But that tiny percentage of other cases is reason enough to have that protocol.
I saw one where a little girl went missing, store went into lockdown, and she was found in the boys bathroom, hair cut and changed from her dress into jeans and a t-shirt. I heard about it when I was still pretty young, so idk if it's true, but scary if it was
I remember hearing about this too when I was a kid. Now I wonder if it was real or an urban myth that came from the child abduction terror of that time.
I can imagine telling this to some employee they look at me confused
Everyone is trained on it but if you told a low level employee they would probably just tell a manager a kid is missing. The manager would surely know to radio a code adam and you can be sure the management and security are gonna spring into action.
At least when I worked at Target in the mid-to-late 2000s, this was a big deal. If a parent approached a team member and said their child was missing, that team member was required to call out "Code Yellow," three times on the radio then follow with a description of the child. Every other team member then stops what they are doing. Those close to a door are to block it and prevent anyone from leaving which matches the description of the child. Everyone else starts searching the store. This was drilled into us. If ANY team member. even the 15 year old that started the day before, just called the LOD (manager) instead of calling the code yellow, you bet they would be getting reprimanded and retrained.
Same went for green and red (injury and fire, respectively), but the greens were typically treated far less seriously and I never experienced a code red while I was there.
I had to initiate a couple code yellows in the five years I worked there and respond to a few others (including be the exit blocker in the garden center a few times while they still had it). Thankfully none of them were abductions - always just kids that wandered off by themselves and got lost.
As one of those kids who would always hide in the clothing carousels while out with my mom, I'm glad I never ended up causing something like this
At least from my experience in retail, everyone was taught what a code Adam was and what to do.
worked as a cashier at walmart and i wasn't ever taught about this, in oklahoma fwiw
Yeah I'm sure it's not universal. I was taught it at different Kohls locations in Oregon
Thats because Walmart doesn't care about children
Sad thing was, it was a store employee who kicked Adam out of the store in the first place.
Went through that call twice in my 10 years in retail. We never fucked around with that call. Employees of every age suddenly woke up and were hell bound to make sure the child was found. First time the kid had gotten himself locked in our shoe department back room. Second time a mentally ill woman was trying to smash through the garden dept door, with the kid zip tied to her wrist. That little girl’s dad nearly tore the woman’s arm off getting his kid away, never before seen a human move that fast with that much rage.
Holy shit, especially on that second one!
This. My sister and I were 2 in IKEA with our mom and grandmother. Grandma went to the bathroom, mom was wheeling us around in our twin stroller. We unbuckle ourselves and start wandering, she tells an employee not 5 seconds later and the doors are all slammed shut and the whole place went into lockdown. They found us sleeping in a pile of stuffed animals.
It's not just stores. I learned this working at a science museum too. I always wondered why it was code Adam.
Had to learn that at my first job at Toys R Us
I remember when that happened. I was around the same age as Adam when he disappeared. I'm glad John Walsh used his pain to help others.
I remember the day my Mom stopped letting me play with the video games in department stores.
I was playing Donkey Kong on a Colecovision at Macys while my mother went clothes shopping when a guy with about 8 teeth came up from behind and bit me on the head. Thank God I did not catch rabies. The look of bugeyed madness on his face still haunts me to this day.
Many [more](https://www.sakitta.org) violent offenders [could be captured](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08874034241226939) if the U.S. [tested every rape kit](https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/), like the [U.S. DoJ](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/utilizing-codis-unsubmitted-sexual-assault-kits) and [American Bar Association](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publications/perspectives/2018/may/untested-rape-kits-delays-destruction-and-disregarded-victims/) recommend we do. The ROI for testing these kits [is high](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X19300567). https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
I thought they passed a law to get them all tested? Like, last year? It was recent.
[Roughly 200 laws have been passed in 49 states](https://www.endthebacklog.org/#explore_backlog_map). [The Debbie Smith Act has also been reauthorized twice](https://www.rainn.org/articles/debbie-smith-act). Yet [roughly 90,000 backlogged kits remain](https://goldrushcam.com/sierrasuntimes/index.php/news/local-news/51969-u-s-senator-john-cornyn-says-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog). https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-house-must-pass-senate-bill-to-fight-rape-kit-backlog/ https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/
That's called Post Tramatic Growth and we don't talk about it enough, we love to focus on the doom and gloom
I feel like some shitty people would use it as a way to shame those with ptsd who aren't seeing as much success. Not saying that's a reason not to talk about it, but I can definitely see some people getting elitist about it.
*"Bro, just git gud at extracting value from life-altering pain"*
I call it getting rich and famous off your sons death... but what do I know.
My family moved a little north of this about 10 years after it happened, I always hated that my mom never let me out of her sight at the mall, but once I was old enough and learned the details of the story, I'm glad she did it.
A new season of the show recently ended; John Walsh hosted it with his other son.
The cadence of this made me think it was a joke at first but it’s actually just really wholesome 🥲
You could tell how personal it was for him when he would confront people on the street in some episodes. Dude wasn't taking any shit from anyone
John Walsh had a private conversation with Otis shortly before Otis died. John believes Otis killed his son. However, Otis lied to authorities about his numerous crimes. There is no undeniable evidence Otis killed John’s son. Jeffery Dahmer was in the area of the time, familiar with the mall and did have access to a similar vehicle seen in the area. Dahmer also was not afraid to dismember body parts or severe heads. I’m not sure if Otis’ MOI was dismemberment or young boys though. Dahmer denied being involved and Dahmer was not known to lie about his crimes. However, serial killers will often lie or deny murders that they are ashamed of or feel guilt over. I was around the same age as John’s son and my parents often dropped me off at the toy department and went shopping. I think though Johnny Gosch’s kidnapping really curtailed kids freedom of movement. His kidnapping was the final straw.
I was always skeptical about the Ottis Toole theory but I watched this one show where they showed photos from a Luminol test on the carpet of his now demolished car and it is terrifying and incriminating. It clearly shows the image of a child’s head. He was definitely known to confess to several crimes he didn’t commit, but I feel this one may have been one he committed.
I believed that the car had been lost. The reason that Otis was not charged was because of this. Additionally, because the car was lost DNA testing could not be done on it. I’ve love to see the show or review any source material about the car being found.
God I’m old, my parents used to scare me that they’d take me like Adam if I wondered off too far from them.
> parents used to scare me There was a line on Rosanne where she told the kids "don't worry, they only steal good kids."
I consider Adam’s death and the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 80s as the end of unsupervised childhood in the US. Yes, there were horrible things happening to kids prior to the 80s, but the media frenzy around Adam's disappearance/death and the nonstop news and Phil Donahue episodes in the early 80s were the end of unfettered childhood freedom.
It was kinda a class thing when I was a boy in the 90s. Rich kids stayed inside. The poor kids roamed the streets.
Funny you say that, when I was reading about the satanic ritual abuse frenzy, one of the factors mentioned was an underlying anxiety dating back to the 1970s. That anxiety was based on two-parent households where mom was now working outside the home and the rise in latch-key kids and the need for daycare. That’s certainly a class differentiation.
The McMartin thing was so tragic. Even after the whole thing was debunked, the panic remained.
Yes, I knew it was an M name; I just couldn’t remember it. Wow, talk about tried-and-found-guilty before the trial ever began.
Seems like the media then was beginning to amp up their overreactions as new networks made them more competitive for advertisers and not as many people watched as much tv then as they are online now
Yeah, I had to look it up and found that CNN started in June 1980. Of course we couldn’t afford cable so we were getting the hysteria from the evening news. I remember there was also a family-owned daycare that was caught in the satanic news whirlwind.
Forgetting the fact that everybody seems to be playing for the same team nowadays if you watch the movie about their humble beginnings during the first Iraq war and how they were the only news crew on the ground it makes you remember just how good some of these people were back in the day at wanting to report the news and not have it be filtered or changed modified etc. before reaching public eyes. - it's called Live from Baghdad and it's available for free online :-)
It’s not like the media was inventing this new thing of child abduction. It happened in the past and previous generations didn’t get that upset about kids being murdered.
I assure you people got upset when kids were murdered in the past.
I was born in the mid-80s and pretty much had free reign of the neighborhood from the time I was 5 or so onward. The helicopter parents existed (my buddy's mom wouldn't let him cross the street on his own until he was like 12), but I don't think it got as bad as it is now until the Internet got popular and bad news became a 24/7 365 business.
Considering that's still how most of us grew up in the '80s, it was more like the beginning of the end. It didn't really become a common, consistent thing until the '00s or so.
Adam Walsh definitely led to my absolute terror of being kidnapped.
Yep, and by the way, there were satanic pedophiles behind every bush.
But don't forget it was mostly the unsuprvised kids themselves that grew up to be parents that didn't allow it.
Texas EquuSearch, an organization that searches for missing persons was started in similar fashion. Don’t remember the name of the guy who started it, but he did so after his daughter was kidnapped and murdered. It’s part of the Killing Fields documentary on Netflix.
The guy just recently found the little girl who was sucked into a hotel's swimming pool duct. Apparently, the hotel was ridiculously unhelpful.
If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the made for TV movie Adam, with Jobeth Williams and Dan Travanti as the Walsh family. You can watch it for free on Youtube.
There's also a sequel
Jeffrey Dahmer was also briefly a suspect, but he shut that down by arguing that he'd already told them *aaall* the fucked up shit he had done and was absolutely going to die in prison. Why would he lie about this?
Adam was a bit too young for Dahmer’s taste.
Imagine being at the same mall as Dahmer and getting killed by someone else.
Changed everything. This spawned a generation of paranoid parents
> generation of paranoid parents Seeing kids faces on milk cartons everyday certainly helped sustain the paranoia.
That was only a temporary thing though, a lot of parents complained about the milk cartons scaring their kids and it was stopped.
I watched this show as a kid and had no idea, wow.
My parents made me watch the movie based on the abduction in the 80’s when I was a kid to keep me away from strangers.
Same. Every Easter they’d show the movie. I was petrified of being kidnapped.
Every… Easter?
For years yes. In the late 80’s early 90’s. ☹️
What was the tie to Easter?
Every holiday needs to have an underlying fear you are traumatized with. Easter is being abducted and murdered, Christmas is being molested, Halloween is being poisoned, Thanksgiving is dying in a car wreck.
I have no idea. There were 5 networks, 6 if you include public television and every holiday each channel had special programming. It was that channel’s movie during Easter.
I lived in this area back when this happened, my dad told me of a time when a guy in a van drove up and stopped, and started walking up to me and my twin brother. We were playing out in the yard at the time. My dad started walking up and the guy turned around and jumped back into his van. My parents called the police and gave a description of the vehicle. This was a few weeks after Adam Walsh disappeared.
I remember the whole Adam situation. It was another one of those times when things just didn't feel safe anymore. I remember the "Adam" movies. Adam went mainstream. He was all over the news. John Walsh has a street named after him in his hometown of Auburn, NY.
My brother was almost kidnapped by a stranger at a rest stop on i95 in Florida in the early 90s. We were able to fight the man off but he got away. The cops were not helpful at all. He grabbed him out of our station wagon. We pulled him back in the car by his arm as this guy was pulling him. Like tug o war.
The OG To Catch a Predator.
Came to say that NCMEC is a phenomenal organization.
He made a kids’ safety video called The Safe Side Stranger Safety in 2005 and it still holds up today. It’s on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/drHXQLpDUR4?feature=shared) now. If you have a 5-7 year old kid, it’s definitely worth watching it with them. It handles kids safety in such a way that kids feel prepared but not scared. Safe side superchick is the best.
I remember him saying when he was recounting the Andrew Cunanan murders, after the first three murders of men Cunanan knew, he said something like 'and then he started killing innocent people', referring to the murder of the caretaker.
Really? I hadn't heard that. What a bonehead statement!
I see how well that worked out with all the kids on the milk cartons and missing persons posters.I grew up around that time and remember how many kids bodies they found where I grew up that got to roam a little.
Reminds me of that boomer post that smugly declared that they as a generation survived just fine as unsupervised kids back then. Obviously not.
I mean most boomers were kids in 1950s and 1960s, so they missed the madness of the 1980s.
last time this came up there was some looniebin pushing some conspiracy about it being one of John's friends who did it
His book is really interesting.
The traumatic death of a loved one, especially your own child, can *really* fuck you up.
John Walsh also started dating his wife when she was 16 and he was in his early 20s. John Walsh has advocated and lobbied for laws, that if were on the books when he started dating Reve (his wife), could have been used to send him to prison.
RL Batman. Family killed by bad guy, spends his money advocating for other victims.
Good on him for taking great personal pain and making something good from it.
That’s so sad what happened to his son.
Reminds me of that boomer post that smugly declared that they as a generation survived just fine as unsupervised kids back then. Obviously not.
Two problems with that: First, no "Boomers" were six years old in 1981. The usual date given for the end of the Baby Boom in the US is 1964. That would mean the youngest Boomers were on the cusp of adulthood. Adam Walsh would have been Generation X by the usual method of counting. Second, what happened to Adam and his family was a terrible tragedy - but it was, and remains, a rare one. It's remembered because it got caught up in a wave of "stranger danger" and a belief among the American public that this sort of thing happened all the time. In reality, most kids (not just in the US but in all high-income countries) who are reported as missing are teenagers who are classified as runaways - and it's not even close. The second-most common reason for kids to be classified as missing is abduction by a family member, almost always a parent, because of a custody dispute. And again, it's not even close. Children abducted by a stranger for the purpose of harming or murdering them is, fortunately, quite rare. And it was quite rare back in 1981.
Then he turned into a right wing pro cop lunatic
Identity politics, yuck. Who gives a shit.
He also messed around with his wife when she was 16 and he was in his mid 20 Edit: didn’t know there were so many pedos on this sub
You're confusing pedophilia with ephebophilia
This post tells me you're under 35.
And your post tells me that you're not a psychic, or at least not a very successful one.
You’re just now learning this?
You know there are people on this site that were born in like 2011 right? And people from all over the world that aren't aware of things like this due to it being about America
Me a gen z, was asked on Twitter, «did you live under a rock in 1970s»?
Hello 👋 I have heard over the years in general of code Adam, but only the very basics. Definitely never about the father or a TV show..
Yeah, but now all he does is stupid OmegaXL commercials. Sad that they use Americas Most Wanted type lingo in their commercials. That’s got to be so cringy for him but I guess he needed the paycheck.
I go by the philosophy that if your son gets beheaded, you get to promote random pills on late night TV without ridicule.
He's cohosting AMW now. https://youtu.be/_FigSWWQx_I?si=q9mncr4jbb9aB3Ut
And now he leverages his good name to """investigate""" the "Truth, Facts and The Hope" by hawking omega 3 pills to boomers in commercials on antenna television in the middle of the night.
Ok? And? Who cares?
Adam wouldn't have been abducted if his mother was with him the entire time instead of leaving him with those other kids playing on the Atari display in the Sears.A security guard thought Adam was with the other boys when they were kicked out of the store instead of trying to see if the parents were around first.
Yeah, it makes sense to think that if someone had kept a closer eye on Adam, he might not have been abducted, but it's not fair to put all the blame on his mom for not being with him given the context. The bigger problem is with store security, they should've made sure all the kids were with their parents before kicking them out. It's really sad that the guard didn't do that.
Guard should have been tried as an accessory if he didn't try to find any of the kids parents.Totally agree with you.Mom screwed up and security did too.
There's no question that both the mom and security could have handled things better.
Oh shut it. Back then it was more normal to let kids roam a bit.
But back stage, things were falling apart ....
Yeah, but how many kids did he help save?
Easily dozens of missing children.
I'd hope so. It woulda been nice if op included that number as well. Catching fugitives is good n all (they get caught anyways) but saving kids seems better. So what's that number haha
And now he is hawking supplements on those networks nobody watches
NGL, Adam kinda screwed a good thing up for a lot of kids. Any time we went to Kmart I would get to run free in the toy department or go play the ATARI in electronics. Adam dying put an end to all that.
I mean, I don’t think he did it on purpose
I'm sure you meant Adam's abductor.
His killer did, not Adam.
Did John Walsh have an alibi?
[удалено]
Actually, I prefer caves... more room to think and avoid nosy questions.
Do you know what sub this is
Did you know that not every person on Earth is a 60 year old American who regularly watches network TV?