6-Year-Old's Murder Still Haunts Nation

MIAMI - Among America's most famous unsolved crimes, few are as perplexing as the disappearance and beheading of Adam Walsh, a 6-year-old from Hollywood, Fla.

Case 81-56073 remains in the nation's consciousness in part because his father, John Walsh, is the host of "America's Most Wanted," the TV show famed for cracking true-life crime mysteries.

Last month, a court order compelled Hollywood police to open to the public its 10,000-page homicide file, and the unanswered question resurfaces: Who killed Adam Walsh?

It's the morning of July 27, 1981, and Reve Walsh figures to run three errands: pay her son Adam's $90 tuition at St. Mark's Lutheran school, stop by Sears at the Hollywood Mall to buy a lamp and drop by the gym for her 1 p.m. workout. Adam, on summer break before second grade, will tag along.

Two people know Reve's schedule.

One is her husband, John, and the other is James Edward "Jimmy" Campbell, Adam's godfather.

Campbell stops by the McKinley Street home about 9:30 a.m., just as Adam is getting up. John Walsh is already at work in Bal Harbour, where he books conventions for a Bahamas hotel. Campbell shares a cup of hot tea with Reve and watches mother and son cuddle on the sofa. Then, he later says, he drives to work at the Golden Strand Hotel in Miami Beach, arriving about 11 a.m.

After Campbell leaves, Reve says later, she and Adam head to St. Marks. It's about noon, she says.

From there, she says, she drives to Sears, arriving about 12:30. It's directly across the street from police headquarters. She leaves Adam at a video game in the toy department for 10 minutes, she says.

Not long afterward, Sears switchboard employee Jenny Rayner receives a phone call: "Reve Walsh stated, `I was supposed to meet my son Adam in the toy department. He's not here.' "

By day's end, there is a massive manhunt for Adam Walsh. Helicopters hover overhead, police boats cruise canals, and 50 police officers and 100 crime-watch volunteers scour Hollywood.

No sign of Adam.

It's Aug. 10, 1981, and Adam is missing two weeks. Police fear the worst but hope. So do Adam's parents.

That day, Jimmy Campbell, then 25, walks into the office of Joseph Matthews, polygraph examiner. "Joe, why are they treating me so rough? I know they think I'm responsible for Adam being missing," he complains.

"I was close to Adam, closer than his father. I was his father, brother, uncle and playmate," Campbell tells Matthews. "I could play with him, and John would read to him. Adam would say, `I have two fathers, one stays at home, one works.' We're inseparable - totally. If he got scared, he would sleep with me."

Godfather questioned

That day, Campbell takes his second polygraph test. The first, three days earlier, Matthews classified inconclusive.

Campbell is asked:

Do you know who took Adam? (No.) Do you know where Adam is now? (No.) Did you conspire with anyone to cause Adam's disappearance? (No.) Are you withholding information from the police concerning Adam's disappearance? (No.) Do you suspect anyone of taking Adam? (No.) Did you take Adam? (No.)

"It is the opinion of this examiner based on Mr. Campbell's polygraph examination that he responded truthfully," Matthews concludes.

That evening, one question is resolved forever: Adam is dead. In a canal in Indian River County 125 miles north of Hollywood, two fishermen find his severed head.

Though Campbell passed the polygraph, detectives Jack Hoffman and Ron Hickman go back to him.

On Nov. 25, 1981, they tell him no one can vouch for his whereabouts from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the day Adam vanished. Campbell explains it was too windy to rent boats at the Golden Strand, so he stayed in his cabana.

The detectives say they think they know his motive: Reve Walsh.

Campbell, who lived with the Walshes for two years, admits he's in love with Reve and carried on a four-year affair with her. He moved out at John's request. "The day I left, we argued," Campbell says.

But Campbell says he dearly loved the boy. "My life centered around Adam. Period."

A detective suggests otherwise. "I think Adam was the one that kept John and Reve's marriage strong. And Adam was the person standing between you."

Today, Campbell still lives in Hollywood and declines interviews.

Mark Smith, a detective on the case, discounts the "love-triangle" motive and says Campbell is not a suspect.

Hollywood Chief Richard Witt says it's a "physical impossibility" that Campbell did it. The reason: Though no one could vouch for Campbell earlier, he was definitely in town that afternoon and for long after and couldn't have driven that far north and back in time.

These days, John and Reve live north of Hollywood on the Treasure Coast. They have three children, all born since Adam.

Search for van

In the frantic days after the discovery of the severed head, another lead consumes: a desperate search for a navy-blue van.

Initially, police collect the names of eight individuals who "may have seen" Adam at Sears. No one identifies him positively. One is a 10-year-old boy, whose mother reported a "suspicious incident."

On Aug. 14, 1981, Martin Segall hypnotizes the boy. The story: A white man about 6 feet tall with dark brown hair and mustache was hanging around the toy department, reading a comic book. When a little boy - presumably Adam - left Sears, the man followed and got into a blue van.

Two men "wearing stocking masks" pulled the boy inside the van and drove off.

The alleged getaway vehicle: navy-blue Ford van, tinted windows, mag wheels, chrome ladder, no spare tire on the rear.

Suddenly, practically every blue van in South Florida is suspect; hundreds are checked and cleared.

TV movie airs

It's 9 p.m. Oct. 10, 1983, two years after the murder, and the Adam Walsh story goes network. "Adam," starring Daniel J. Travanti as John Walsh, airs on NBC.

At 9 a.m. Oct. 11, 1983, a Jacksonville detective telephones Hollywood and says an inmate in the Duval County Jail wants to talk.

He is Ottis Elwood Toole, notorious confessor of multiple murders. Hollywood Detectives Hickman and Hoffman fly to Jacksonville: Did he see the TV movie? No, Toole says, adding he doesn't listen to radio news.

Toole spins a story. He snatched the boy from the Sears parking lot and locked the doors on his 1971 Cadillac. He says his buddy in crime, Henry Lee Lucas, used a bayonet to cut off the child's head.

A few days later, the department calls a press conference to proclaim the case solved.

But no indictment follows. It turns out that Lucas, the supposed executioner, was in a Maryland jail cell the day Adam disappeared.

Toole can't describe Adam's hair color or clothes. Although he claims he buried the body near mile marker 126 of Florida's Turnpike, a search finds nothing. Toole changes his tale: He cremated Adam's remains.

Then it develops that a Jacksonville detective, J.W. Terry, is trying to cut a book deal with Toole.

In 1984, Hollywood Lt. J.B. Smith concludes: "We can't confirm one thing he has said."

Yet police still consider Toole - serving five life terms for murder - a prime suspect. That day, a security guard ushered four arguing boys out of the mall, and one may have been Adam. Ten years after the murder, a Hollywood man, William Mistler, comes forward to suggest he saw Toole ushering Adam from the mall parking lot.

The potential physical evidence - his alleged getaway car, which showed traces of blood in 1983 - was sold for scrap to a junk yard for $50.

Of Toole, Chief Witt admits "a certain amount of skepticism" but adds: "I am absolutely, thoroughly convinced that this is a stranger abduction and murder."

In 1995, police look briefly at a second family friend, Michael V. Monahan. He and his brother, John Jr., roomed with Campbell at the time of Adam's abduction.

The investigation comes after a reporter for the Mobile (Ala.) Press Register, Jay Grelen, creates a "furor" with a series of articles, Detective Smith notes. Three days after the abduction, Grelen reported, reports, an enraged Michael Monahan, then 20, slashed a door with a machete in a dispute about a skateboard in Oakland Park.

In a police memo, Smith says he had talked with the reporter - and Grelen raised a startling possibility: "That Monahan committed the murder of Adam Walsh as a favor for James Campbell."

On June 29, 1995, Police Chief Richard Witt writes The Miami Herald to say Monahan has been eliminated as a suspect.

From Volume II, File 17, Page 1090, report of Detectives Hickman and Hoffman:

"We're gonna step on a lot of people's toes in this investigation. And whatever it takes to solve Adam's death, we're gonna solve it."

Fourteen years and eight months after the crime, the words ring hollow.