Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [106]
But others, particularly the parents of children lost and missing, praised Walsh’s work in redefining a nation’s indifference to a significant problem. As a spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put it, “Before the Adam Walsh case, it was easier to locate a stolen car than a missing child.”
That first piece ended with a reprise of milestones to date in what de Vise referred to as the “missing-children movement,” including the FBI database established by the Missing Children Act of 1982, and the 1984 legislation establishing the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Also referenced was “Megan’s Law” of 1996, named after Megan Kanka, a New Jersey seven-year-old raped and murdered by a child molester who had moved into the neighborhood unbeknownst to residents. That measure required the notification of communities when a freed sex offender moves into a neighborhood.
De Vise also cited the AMBER Alert system, named for Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old resident of Arlington, Texas, kidnapped while riding a bicycle near her home, her body later discarded in a ditch. It began as a grassroots movement in 1996 and has since been formalized nationwide, with bulletins interrupting radio programming and emblazoned on highway alert displays and elsewhere during the first hours following an abduction. Also mentioned was the Jimmy Ryce Act, the Florida measures named after a young Homestead boy taken and killed by a handyman, allowing law enforcement to publicize the identities of sexual offenders and extend the sentences of the most violent sexual predators.
On July 27, 2001, de Vise’s follow-up piece centered on the status of the long-stalled investigation. De Vise cataloged the emergence and dismissal of various individuals considered as suspects, including the quickly cleared John and Revé Walsh and Jimmy Campbell, who, de Vise pointed out, not only passed his polygraph examinations but also had an alibi. De Vise also rehashed the brief flurry caused in November 1981, when a drifter in a Broward County lockup claimed his cellmate Edward James had confessed to the crime. As it turned out, however, James, who passed a voice stress analysis test, was proven to be at work the day of the crime.
And in 1995 there were reports in an Alabama newspaper contending that Michael Monahan, the younger son of Walsh’s former boss John Monahan, might have murdered Adam Walsh as a favor to his pal Jimmy Campbell. After all, police records showed that just three days after Adam’s disappearance, the younger Monahan had slashed through a door of a Broward County home with a machete during a dispute over a stolen skateboard.
But that also came to nothing. Tests on the machete revealed no evidence, and Monahan had an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of Adam’s death. Once he passed a polygraph exam, police quickly cleared him as well.
Ottis Toole remained the most likely suspect, de Vise wrote, before adding the familiar saw, “But there is no hard evidence to support it.” For his story, de Vise tracked down former Hollywood police chief Richard Witt, who acknowledged in an interview that the department could have done a better job. Focusing on Jimmy Campbell had probably been a mistake, and, given their relative inexperience in such matters, they might have tried harder to get the FBI involved at the outset. “Within the first few months of this case,” Witt told de Vise, “it was really screwed up to the point where obtaining a conviction had been compromised.”
A companion piece in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale was replaced in the