Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [10]
John Walsh, however, could not shake the feeling that someone who had recently lost a child to some tragic circumstance might have taken his son. Yet even that scenario was preferable to the most logical explanation for many a missing child case in South Florida. The spidery network of drainage canals that intersect the narrow strip of habitable land between the Everglades and the Atlantic—the crackpot work of developers such as Henry Flagler and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward—had claimed more than their fair share of children over the years. It is hard to drive a mile in South Florida without encountering one of the deeply chiseled, rock-walled channels meant to turn the Everglades into homesites, few of them fenced, many of them abutting parks, bike paths, and heavily traveled thoroughfares. If Adam had tumbled into one of those canals . . . well, it was a prospect John Walsh did not want to contemplate.
And despite the efforts of the local police and news media, there was the distressing possibility that Adam and his abductor were long gone from the area. In 1981, there were none of the regional and national alert systems and shared databases that the public and the law enforcement community take for granted today. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of children went missing each year, the world had simply not recognized the need for such measures. Most kids “showed up,” right? Such disappearances were ordinarily treated by law enforcement as local matters.
But by now it seemed to the Walshes that Adam was not simply going to “show up.” And if he had indeed been taken, and his abductor had slipped them outside the local network of cops and media alarum, who would even notice?
To try and cover such bases, the Walshes designed a poster offering a reward of $5,000—no questions asked—for Adam’s safe return. It featured a photograph taken only a week before—a gap-toothed little boy in a baseball cap, holding a bat—and assured anyone who might have taken Adam, “DO NOT FEAR REVENGE! We will not prosecute. We only want our son.” They printed 150,000 of the posters, and they did a thing unheard of at the time: through friends with connections to Delta Airlines, copies were given to every passenger who passed through the airline’s busy Atlanta hub. Copies, including those translated into Spanish, were distributed on every outgoing flight at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Eastern Airlines followed suit, and soon the posters were being issued to their passengers at every airport in the United States.
By Wednesday, forty-eight hours after Adam’s disappearance, it seemed almost certain there would be no simple resolution to the case. “Probes Yield No Clues to Missing Boy,” the headlines read. “Reward Rises as Police Probe Any, Every Clue.”
Fred Barbetta, public information officer for the Hollywood PD, assured reporters that the cops had spared no effort. “We’ve got the whole Detective Bureau on this one,” he told reporters, “the whole patrol, everybody.” But then he added a grimmer assessment, one that reflected what many inside the department had come to think: “It’s time we hit the waterways hard. If he’s in the water, this is when he’d come up.” As a result, those same volunteers who’d scoured the streets and combed the parks and playgrounds and golf courses began to walk the banks of the dark canals.
On Thursday, lead detective Hoffman made his first public statement on the case, telling reporters that Adam’s disappearance might possibly have been an abduction after all. “This is not the type of child to just walk off,” he explained. He’d had considerable discussion