Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [129]
Matthews watched on, scarcely able to believe what he was witnessing. For many years, he’d hoped to find a partner, one individual at Hollywood PD who seemed as determined to solve this case as he. In Chad Wagner, it seemed he finally had.
On Wednesday, December 10, Chad Wagner called Joe Matthews with the news. He had just received a letter from the state attorney’s office. Michael Satz—the man who had been Broward state attorney in 1981 when Adam disappeared, and who had held the post ever since—had made his call.
Would Matthews like to be the one to let John and Revé Walsh know? And did he mind asking if the Walshes could be present at Hollywood police headquarters on the afternoon of December 16, 2008? Wagner wanted to hold a press conference to announce the decision to the world.
Hollywood, Florida—December 16, 2008
As promised, the press conference Wagner arranged took place at department headquarters the following Tuesday afternoon, with reporters from every major news organization in the United States jostling for space in the crowded training room. More than twenty-seven years had passed since Adam Walsh went missing and was found brutally murdered, and in spite of all the time that had gone by—or perhaps because of it—the case still had the power to mesmerize a nation. This was, after all, an event that had changed how every parent in America viewed the world.
Among the myriad, unkillable pieces of spam that circulate through the Ethernet is one that invites readers of a certain age to “remember when.” Popular songs once had melodies, we are reminded, and stores were once closed on Sundays, and “underwear” meant exactly that.
But there are more poignant notes on the list, including an invocation of those innocent summer days when kids blew past a banging screen door with a shouted promise to be “home by dark,” and who ever worried about that? Today, of course, such carelessness upon the part of parents is unthinkable, if not vaguely criminal in itself. Perhaps, once upon a time, parents only worried about their kids when they took them to the beach or to the pool, or hiking along some steep path. Now vigilance begins at birth, if not before, and for most the worry never ends.
In his book Tears of Rage, John Walsh gave his own account of how the apparently unsolvable case had impacted his life and that of Revé. He said then that though it was terribly painful to revisit such loss, he wanted to do so in hopes that it might help others who had lost children to senseless tragedy. Mostly, he said, he wanted to talk about “how to come to terms with life when you think you’re dying of a broken heart.”
At that same time, Revé spoke of the helplessness they felt in the aftermath of Adam’s disappearance and the subsequent string of failures by law enforcement. “I remember thinking, ‘Our son’s been murdered, and now we’ve got to be the ones to do something about it?’ ” she said.
“It was a sad thing for this country that the fight had to be led by two broken-down parents of a murdered child,” she added. “But we had to, because no one else was going to do it.”
Imagine then, the anticipation of John and Revé Walsh as the chief entered the room and called for order. He was there to announce that the 1981 murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh had been solved, “a day that’s long overdue,” Wagner said, before adding, “This case could have been closed years ago.”
Furthermore, he was not there to brandish news of some “smoking gun” unearthed miraculously after years of fruitless gumshoe work, he said. Rather, his announcement was the result of the assembly and examination of evidence that had been there all along. “What was there