Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [1]
She fought the surge of panic that every mother feels when she turns and finds her child suddenly lost from sight. The ripples on the surface of the nearby pond are all menace. The sounds of distant traffic suggest catastrophe and grief and guilt.
But she would not panic foolishly, this mother. She would retrace her steps. She would have the store announce her son’s name, and that he should find a clerk and report himself. While store personnel stood ready, she would return to the place she had left her car. He would be waiting there, or he would come to her, or she would find him. She would not panic. She would find her son. Surely, she would find her son.
Washington, D.C.—February 13, 2006
At a Capitol Hill press conference, a reporter stood to ask a final question of John Walsh, leading proponent for the about-to-be-debated Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Walsh, a private citizen, had become perhaps America’s most recognizable crime fighter owing to his work as executive producer and host of the long-running television program America’s Most Wanted. But also, in the wake of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of his son Adam, he and his wife, Revé, had dedicated much of their lives’ energies to raising awareness of the problem and the plight of missing children in America.
As a result of the Walshes’ work had come the passage of the 1982 Missing Children Act, the establishment of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984, and the national AMBER Alert program of 2003. Walsh considered the new bill that was about to go before Congress the capstone of a life’s work removing impediments to the recovery of the nearly 800,000 children who are reported missing in the United States each year.
“Mr. Walsh,” the reporter began. “You’ve done much good work on behalf of children and families everywhere, and you’ve brought any number of heinous criminals to justice with your television show. But I’m wondering if it ever bothers you that you have been unable, in all these years, to find out who killed your own son?”
It was a question asked out of ignorance, the sort of thing that made several in the room wince. Walsh managed to respond without losing his composure, but following the incident, he and Revé contacted longtime associate and America’s Most Wanted investigator Joe Matthews to set up a meeting that would prove to be momentous. As a veteran homicide detective for the Miami Beach Police Department, Matthews had supervised and conducted more than 20,000 criminal investigations and over 2,000 death and homicide investigations, and had obtained confessions and convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including Miami’s infamous Baby Lollipops torture-murder, that of Washington State’s spree killer Chad Daniel Roberts, and Canada’s University of Waterloo serial rapist Christopher Meyer.
But more important, Matthews, a widely recognized polygraph expert, had been involved in the investigation of Adam Walsh’s disappearance and murder from the very beginning, twenty-five years before. His skill and tireless efforts to bring mistakes and overlooked evidence to the attention of those in charge of that still-unresolved investigation had earned him the respect and the friendship of the Walshes over the years, and following his retirement from the Miami Beach force, Matthews had gone to work as a lead investigator for America’s Most Wanted, where he was quickly credited with solving the program’s first cold case investigation, the killing of a former high school wrestling champ by four football players at Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania.
Matthews was well aware that for all the good work that the Walshes had accomplished over the years, there still existed a great void in their lives. Adam was gone, and though both they and he had expended vast resources and energy trying to do what the authorities had been unable to do, the person responsible had