Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret

A CASCADE OF CONVENIENT FICTIONS

Does an autopsy file locked away decades ago, never meant to be seen, contain the key to Adam Walsh's murder mystery? Is it nothing you've been led to believe?

A famous old crime. No linking physical evidence. For decades, 6-year-old Adam Walsh's murder was a mystery. Suddenly police declared a solution resurrected on a theory they'd long discredited, clearly a convenient fiction to benefit the victim's family, who at a live nationally-televised police press conference were tearful and grateful.

The national media bought it; the local press knew better. As Fred Grimm wrote in the South Florida Sun Sentinel on July 30, 2021, days after the 40th anniversary of Adam's disappearance:

"A sensational alternate theory blamed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Miami in 1981. But in 2008, despite no new evidence, Hollywood police hung the crime on long-dead Ottis Toole.

"The only mystery left unsolved was how any cop could have possibly believed Ottis Toole."

Before the 2008 announcement, Adam's father John Walsh had bitterly complained, often crying, that there was "no justice, no justice" for his family. But while Toole was still alive and in state custody, and could have been charged with Adam's murder and brought to trial on the same information, Walsh had belittled the idea:

"A lot of people still think Ottis Elwood Toole did it. But he and Henry Lee Lucas confessed to a lot of murders they didn't do. It's a great ploy for convicts: They read about a murder and they're in solitary. They call the police, desperate to clear a murder, and they say, 'Fly me there and buy me a pizza,' and they get out of their cells for two days!"

-South Florida magazine, July 1992

Police had statements from six separate police witnesses at the mall who said they saw Dahmer at the time Adam disappeared, but police couldn't confirm that Dahmer had been in town at the time. Then reporter Art Harris, working with ABC Primetime, found a Miami police report with Dahmer's name 20 days before Adam disappeared. Still the police weren't interested. But by 2008, both Dahmer and Toole were dead, there couldn't be a trial against either, so what did it matter? Although the police's conclusion was eye-rolling, it seemed harmless.

Grimm was wrong only in that police's belief in Toole was the only mystery left. Actually, it became the least of the mysteries.

By closing the case, probably without realizing it, police unlatched a door, locked nearly 30 years before, to a previously-guarded secret that possibly only one man, maybe two, seemed to know about-not even the detectives. At that point you just needed to know to ask to open the door.

Only one reporter did. Who knew what would be inside?