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| December 04, 2006 |
By: Arthur Jay Harris |
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wenty-five years to the day after his son, Adam, was abducted from a Hollywood shopping mall and then killed, John Walsh and his family appeared at the White House for the signing of the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act.
That night, on “Larry King Live,” the CNN talk show host asked Walsh if he thought the murder would ever be solved.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get any justice,” Walsh replied.
The highly publicized kidnap-murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh remains as cold a case as they come, despite countless leads and years of investigation. Hollywood police consider it open despite the theory that the late killer and drifter Ottis Toole committed the crime. Toole confessed in 1983.
But in recent interviews, two people who say they were at the scene of the July 27, 1981, abduction of the boy point not to Toole, but to another notorious figure: serial slayer Jeffrey Dahmer. He lived and worked in South Florida at the time but was dismissed by police as a suspect.
In addition, two FBI agents who separately interviewed Dahmer allow that the man who killed 17 people in the Midwest might have murdered the Walsh boy, too. They say it’s worth an official investigation by authorities in Broward County.
Hollywood police and the Broward state attorney’s office disagree.
Shown material used to prepare this story, Hollywood police Capt. Mark Smith, the department’s cold case detective, indicated there was no reason to pursue it further and showed little interest in the theory.
In a statement to the Daily Business Review, the Broward state attorney’s office said Dahmer had been thoroughly investigated by police and ruled out as a viable suspect.
“The only thing that can be drawn from the circumstantial evidence pointing to Dahmer’s possible involvement in the Adam Walsh murder are hunches and suspicions; but there is no concrete evidence that proves Dahmer committed the crime,” the office said last week.
“Without any concrete direct or circumstantial evidence that would have connected Dahmer directly to Walsh’s murder, there would have been no chance of indicting him — much less obtaining a conviction,” the statement added.
Frustrated father
John Walsh, a tireless child safety advocate and star of the television crime- fighting program “America’s Most Wanted,” once believed Dahmer should be investigated. In 1992, he wrote Broward State Attorney Michael Satz asking him to explore Dahmer, who died two years later at the hands of a fellow state prison inmate in Wisconsin.
“Two credible witnesses have come forward placing Dahmer inside and outside the Hollywood mall the day of Adam’s abduction,” Walsh wrote.
“Many people in the criminal justice system and the public have forgotten that Jeffrey Dahmer started out as a pedophile, kidnapper and torturer of young boys and committed the ultimate travesty to a family,” Walsh added.
 “He certainly fits the profile of someone who might be capable of murdering a beautiful 6-year-old boy.”
Walsh did not respond to a message left with his office at “America’s Most Wanted” in Washington. A representative expressed interest in the story but offered no comment.
By 1996, Walsh had shifted his thinking to Toole.
“He was the main suspect,” Walsh told Larry King during the CNN interview this July. He chastised police for losing a bloody carpet seized from Toole’s car that might have produced DNA.
But police could never conclude Toole was ever in South Florida, much less prove a case against him.
 Face-to-face, Toole seemed to toy with police — repeatedly confessing and recanting. Investigators finally dismissed him as a suspect in the mid-1980s. The only conviction authorities ever secured against Toole was for an arson death in Jacksonville.
Walsh cooled on Toole as a suspect. In the July 1992 edition of South Florida magazine, Walsh said Toole and his partner, Henry Lee Lucas, “confessed to a lot of murders they didn’t do” as a ploy to get credulous detectives to take them out of their cells, visit crime scenes and feed them pizza.
Around the same time — roughly a decade after the slaying — Jeffrey Dahmer surfaced in the media as someone who had been in South Florida in the summer of 1981.
Blue van, chilling confrontation
In the first month of their search for Adam’s abductor, investigators desperately sought a blue van seen leaving Hollywood Mall with a small child thought to be Adam. Interviews with eight people indicate it was Dahmer, not Toole, who had access to a blue van through his job at a Sunny Isles Beach sub shop.
Investigators did not think it significant that Dahmer, three years before Adam’s murder, had decapitated one of his victims. The only part of Adam’s body that was found was his head.
Police heard from two men who say they saw Dahmer at the Hollywood Mall on the day of the abduction.
“Hi there, nice day, isn’t it?”
The banal words belied the terror Willis Morgan felt when a man approached him around noon that day. Morgan, a Miami Herald pressman, was browsing the red tag sale table in the doorway of a RadioShack in the mall on his day off.
The man was drunk, disheveled and spoke inappropriately loud. Morgan looked around for help or a witness, but the mall was mostly empty. The man stepped closer, got angry and repeated his comment at the same volume. Morgan had the feeling the man was carrying a knife and wanted to pull him out of the store.
 The man was taller than Morgan, then 34. The man stared at him. “He had a look on him, like the devil was in him,” Morgan recalled in an interview.
Finally the man abruptly turned around and left. Morgan said he realized the man might approach someone else. At a safe distance, Morgan followed him — through the mall into Sears and its toy department, where he lost sight of the man. Adam’s mother, Reve Walsh, said she left her child alone in the toy department.
Back at work, Morgan told his Miami Herald co-workers of his encounter. They urged him to contact Hollywood police, whose search for Adam was already in high gear. At the end of his overnight shift, Morgan telephoned. He said a police officer took his tip but seemed disinterested.
Ten years later in 1991, while still working at the Herald, Morgan proofed a story about the arrest of a man in Milwaukee with severed heads in his apartment. A thumbnail-sized mug shot accompanied the story.
“I was freaking out. This is the guy! This was the guy I followed in the mall!” Morgan recalled.
His friends had to calm him. At the end of his shift, he visited Hollywood police.
After waiting three months, lead Detective Jack Hoffman took Morgan’s sworn statement.
Morgan frequently tried to contact John Walsh and sought to persuade reporters — including those at the Herald — to investigate, without success. He also went to the FBI and called Milwaukee police.
Later he spoke to Hollywood police cold case detective Smith. Morgan says the detective dismissed him with a “Yeah, right” when he told the detective that he saw Jeffrey Dahmer in the mall in 1981.
The same week Morgan saw Dahmer’s picture in the Miami newspaper, an Alabama man reading the Sunday Birmingham News saw the same mug shot of Dahmer.
Bill Bowen also thought he recognized him as the man he’d seen outside the Hollywood Mall on the day of Adam’s disappearance.
“It hit me like a baseball bat,” he told police in an interview.
Bowen called Hollywood police. By chance, he was to fly to Miami the next day on business. That afternoon, Bowen met with Hoffman and gave a statement.
Bowen had lived in Hollywood in the early 1980s. On the day he says he saw Adam, he said he visited the mall to pay his Sears bill.
But first, in the Sears parking lot from 40 feet away, “I heard the racket of a man dragging a boy out by his arms, really manhandling him. ... I heard the little boy saying, ‘I don’t want to go. I’m not going.’ ”
Bowen recalls the man picked up the boy, threw him into a blue van, “and I vividly remember this van screeching off.”
Bowen and Morgan both described the man’s age and size — early 20s, about 5-foot-10, medium build —which matched Dahmer at the time. The description also was close to one given in 1981 by a 10-year-old witness who reported seeing a child thrown into a blue van.
Agents’ interest piqued
The men’s statements have led two now-retired Wisconsin-based FBI agents, both of whom interviewed Dahmer in 1992, to conclude Hollywood police should reconsider what they dismissed.
But Capt. Smith, who told a Hollywood community newspaper last summer that the Walsh case is still open, has thus far declined.
In 2003, another Hollywood detective made a cursory investigation then dropped it.
Chuck Morton, the Broward County chief assistant state attorney, also declined to investigate.
The statement issued last week by his office noted that investigators “looked hard at Jeffrey Dahmer,” interviewed him in prison and “offered him immunity from Florida’s death penalty should he make admissions about Adam’s death.”
“While freely admitting that he committed numerous murders across America,” the statement added, Dahmer “denied murdering Adam Walsh.”
Repeated denials
FBI agent Dan Craft initially believed the denial but, after hearing evidence presented to him by a reporter, he said what sounded like a favorite maxim he teaches to his classes:
“In law enforcement there are no coincidences.”
Describing his interviews of Dahmer, he said, “I looked him in the eyes and pressed him. His answers looked truthful and sounded truthful. But I have talked to thousands of liars and been lied to many times. I’m not naive enough to think I can’t be fooled.”
Now Craft says he has an open mind about Dahmer’s possible involvement.
FBI agent Neil Purtell thought Dahmer tacitly admitted killing Adam.
“It’s my experience when people overemphasize their denials, it’s usually an admission,” Purtell said. Dahmer prefaced one denial with “Honest to God, Neil.”
He added: “When someone says ‘Honest to God,’ I know they’re lying.”
Purtell said he asked Dahmer to take a polygraph. Dahmer refused, citing Florida’s death penalty and saying no child killer would live long in prison.
“Did he do Adam? I think he did,” Purtell said in an interview. “My impression was he admitted it.”
But if the evidence is correct, John Walsh is right — there will never be a denouement for his family — at least not a trial.
Dahmer was killed in a Wisconsin prison, three years after his 1991 arrest on charges that he killed 17 men and boys in two states.
A young killer
Immediately after his arrest, Milwaukee detectives asked Dahmer to tell them everywhere he’d ever lived or traveled. He said he’d spent his adolescence in Bath, Ohio, near Akron.
At 18 in 1978, Dahmer’s separated parents had left him alone in the house — and that’s when he killed for the first time. He dismembered his victim and buried the remains in the backyard.
After Dahmer spent a drunken semester at Ohio State University in the fall of 1978, his father, Lionel, demanded Jeffrey join the Army. But he was discharged early for alcoholism in 1981. His official Army records say March, but other evidence suggests it was early July.
Instead of telling his family, the young Dahmer flew to Miami. He told Milwaukee detectives he briefly lived homeless on the beach and worked at Sunshine Sub in Sunny Isles Beach. He took an apartment nearby in Bimini Bay apartments, where he remained through September.
In 1991, after Dahmer’s arrest in Wisconsin, Hollywood detective Hoffman visited both places — off Collins Avenue about 15 minutes from Hollywood Mall. But by then, neither the shop nor the apartment building existed. Hoffman checked Dahmer’s name in area police records but found nothing, according to the case file.
Hoffman requested an interview with Dahmer in jail, but his Milwaukee trial attorney wouldn’t let him speak to any Florida detectives.
Lionel Dahmer didn’t believe his son’s denials that he killed Adam. He telephoned John Walsh’s show and said he thought Jeffrey was a liar and a pedophile. On his criminal record, Jeffrey Dahmer had convictions for sexual assault on a 13-year-old and lewd acts in front of two 12-year-olds.
But by December 1991 Hollywood police told the Miami Herald that Dahmer had been “pretty well ruled out. We never really expected it to turn into anything, but we had to look into it because of the nature of the thing.”
John Walsh didn’t give up as quickly.
After Dahmer’s Milwaukee murder convictions in 1992, the FBI told Walsh that Dahmer would let Hollywood police interview him. Walsh asked Hoffman to go to Wisconsin, but Hoffman said his bosses might not fund the trip.
Walsh offered to pay for it.
He also asked Satz to write a letter saying he wouldn’t pursue the death penalty if Dahmer confessed to killing Adam.
Satz wrote the letter, and Hoffman and Craft did the interview. Dahmer told them he’d never been to Hollywood Mall, didn’t know how to get there and didn’t have a vehicle that summer. He also said he wasn’t interested in boys Adam’s age and reminded them he had admitted more murders than police could prove.
All 17 of Dahmer’s confessed murders were in Wisconsin and Ohio, neither of which had the death penalty.
Hoffman and Craft believed his denials about Adam. When Hoffman returned to Florida, he left it at that.
So did John Walsh.
A year before, when Dahmer had first denied killing Adam, a Hollywood police spokesman said, “We’re not going to take the word of an admitted killer on whether he did anything or not.”
But they did.
Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent trained by the serial killer unit, wrote a book including details from his 1992 interview with Dahmer.
In “I Have Lived in the Monster” published in 1997, Ressler wrote that Dahmer said he was surprised to learn his youngest admitted murder victim, a 14-year-old Laotian boy whom he found in a Milwaukee mall, was the brother of a child he was earlier convicted of sexually assaulting.
“I was just walking in the mall, ran into him, didn’t know him from Adam,” Dahmer told Ressler.
Dahmer, trolling a mall for men or boys for sex and to kill, didn’t know the kid from Adam? A cliche or a Freudian slip?
Case files cast fresh light
In 1996, as a result of a news media suit using Florida’s open records law, the first 15 years of the Hollywood police investigative file was opened for public viewing. It included a transcript of Hoffman’s interview with Dahmer as well as statements from the two Dahmer witnesses, Morgan and Bowen.
Hoffman had found the former owners of the since-demolished Bimini Bay apartments, but they had destroyed all their records and didn’t remember Dahmer. He failed to find the owners of Sunshine Sub shop or anyone else who had met Dahmer in South Florida.
However, a reporter found four people who remembered Dahmer, including the man who hire him. Eight in all recalled his place of employment.
Dahmer’s most convincing argument that he didn’t kill Adam was that he lacked a vehicle in the summer of 1981. Dahmer never told police, but the sub shop and a sister store 10 blocks north on Collins Avenue also delivered pizzas.
In interviews, former employees of Sunshine Sub and the sister store, Mr. Pizza, recalled that the stores shared three delivery vehicles. One was a blue van — the same color sought by Hollywood police. They said all of the vehicles were easily accessible to employees for their personal use and often disappeared, sometimes overnight.
 In his police interview, Dahmer identified his boss at the sub shop as Ken Houleb.
A search of Miami-Dade County records did not turn up anyone with the surname Houleb.
But the owner of Mr. Pizza said the Sunshine manager was Ken Haupert.
In Bartlesville, Okla., where he managed his own sub shop, Haupert remembered well how he met Dahmer — in the summer of 1981 — rummaging through the dumpster behind Sunshine Sub, picking out pizza.
“I said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘I’m hungry and I have no job.’ I said, ‘Come in, I’ll give you something to eat.’ I gave him food, then a couple days later he was back at the trash cans.”
Haupert said he needed a busboy, and Dahmer was hired.
“Who knows who you meet in life?” Haupert said in an interview.
Haupert said Dahmer worked part-time Mondays through Fridays from late morning to late afternoon. Dahmer told Hoffman and Craft he’d worked seven days full-time with only a rare day off.
Haupert said Dahmer became erratic after a few weeks on the job.
“All of the sudden he came in filthy dirty — like he was drinking all night, drunk and dirty, unable to work. I’d send him home, and the next day he’d be OK.”
It became a frustrating pattern, he recalled. Dahmer once came to work stinking, his eyeglasses broken.
“He explained, ‘I was running and fell down and broke my glasses.’” Losing patience, Haupert told to get out.
After three months, “I got fed up and fired him.” That was their last contact.
“He was a bum,” he said. “He turned into a bum.”
Might one of those weekday mornings when Dahmer came in drunk have been the Monday of the kidnapping? It’s possible, but Haupert does not recall.
Haupert, however, does recall a trait that others including Willis Morgan saw in him: a propensity for impulsive violence.
“I saw hell in his eyes once,” Haupert said.
In his book “A Father’s Story,” Lionel Dahmer wrote that his son was “filthy and disheveled” and stank of whiskey when he picked him up at the Cleveland airport from a Miami flight in September 1981.
Later in a bar with police around, his son suddenly turned violent, he recalled.
Army bunkmate
Billy Joe Capshaw was Dahmer’s Army bunkmate in Baumholder, Germany, for more than a year until Dahmer’s discharge.
 In an interview this fall, Capshaw said Dahmer repeatedly sodomized and tortured him, using drugs and knives, while at the same time wanting to be his friend.
“I know him better than anyone else, better than his father,” he said.
Told what the man in the mall had told Willis Morgan — “Hi there, nice day, isn’t it?” — Capshaw said, “That’s Jeff. Oh yeah. He’d always tell people things like that. Like ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ ”
Told that Morgan had described how Dahmer’s eyes had turned demonic in an instant, Capshaw replied: “That sounds like him. His anger was something. In a millimeter of a second, he turned from good to bad — and then he’d attack. If you’ve ever seen that — I promise you, you will never forget that eye contact.”
Capshaw believes police were too easily taken in when Dahmer said he only was interested in young adult males. Dahmer committed lewd acts in front of children in Germany as well as Milwaukee. Capshaw also believes Dahmer killed and mutilated at least one woman in Germany. He was suspected of five.
Craft, the former FBI agent, said serial criminals usually like only one type of victim, but some are “try-sexuals” — they’ll “try anything with anybody at anytime. Sometimes it just boils down to convenience, any port in the storm.”
“I’m old school,” Craft added. “We work for God. It doesn’t matter the subject’s dead. Who speaks for the victim? Adam needs to be spoken for.”
Craft said if he was still at the FBI, he’d sit down with John Walsh and ask, “What do you want to do?”
Jeffrey Dahmer photo by Allen Fredrickson/Reuters
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