By Seamus McGraw
August 4, 2006
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (Crime Library) — For 25 years, John Walsh, as an activist and as the host of the popular television show "America's Most Wanted," has worked to expose criminals — often those who target children — and has helped authorities track down scores of fugitives.
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| John Walsh |
And yet, the crime that wracked Walsh's family — the abduction and grisly slaying of his young son, Adam — a crime that catapulted John Walsh from benign obscurity to national prominence as one of the nation's most visible victims' advocates, remains unsolved.
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| Adam Walsh |
It was 25 years ago last week that Adam, then just 6 years old, vanished while shopping with his mother at a Hollywood, Fla., Sears store. The young boy had asked his mother if he could go three aisles away to the store's toy department, a request that in those days, before America became saturated with stories of abductions and murders, his mother granted.
A few minutes later, Adam was gone.
Police fanned out, searching the area around the mall, but turned up nothing. Soon, an army of volunteers, rallied by John Walsh's impassioned calls for action first on local television, then on network news shows, carried the search even further, scouring what seemed to be every inch of turf and swamp within miles of the store.
Two weeks later, the search for Adam Walsh ended.
To the horror of his family and, to some degree, the nation for whom John Walsh had become a kind of symbol, a national spokesman against what seemed to be a growing evil, fishermen in a canal in Vero Beach — 100 miles away from the spot where the boy vanished — found a severed head. It was Adam's. His body was never recovered.
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