Les Standiford - Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

Contents

In the Beginning

Blood of the Lamb

World of Hurt

Through the Boneyard

As Evil Does

Thunder from Heaven

Bringing

Adam

Home

The Abduction That Changed America

Les Standiford

with Detective Sergeant Joe Matthews

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Alexander Standiford, 19912009;

to Mama Margaret Matthews, 19142008;

and, of course, to Adam Walsh, 19741981,

as well as all the other sons and daughters

taken long before their time.

After the first death, there is no other.

DYLAN THOMAS

In the Beginning

Hollywood, FloridaJuly 27, 1981

S hortly after lunch on what seemed an ordinary summer afternoon, a young South Florida housewife set out on a shopping trip with her six-year-old son in tow. It was the sort of outing that millions of other mothers all across the country might have taken on any given day. Her husband, a sales and marketing manager for a local hotel company, had noticed an ad in that mornings newspaper and called home to say that the brass barrel lamps they had been looking for had just gone on sale at the local Sears store. Maybe she ought to run over and take a look.

She was happy to do ittheyd been wanting the lamps, and the chance to save a few dollars seemed too good to pass up. She freshened herself up, dressed her son in shorts, a polo shirt, flip-flops, and his favorite way-big boat captains hat, and set out for the store.

It was a Monday, typical ninety-degree weather with humidity just as high, but that was July in South Florida for you. Come January, when the rest of the country was in a deep freeze, Floridians would have payback. Besides, traffic in their suburban town of Hollywood was light that early afternoon, and it was less than a two-mile drive to the Sears Mall. As a bonus, the parking space she liked to usenear the receiving dock, on the buildings north side, where the whole family could remember itwas open.

Just inside the doors, at the entrance to the toy department, her son spotted a video display with a demo of the new Asteroids game running, and he begged his mother to let him play.

She hesitated, but home furnishings was just a couple of aisles away, and besides, the world had not yet turned upside down. She pointed out to her son where she was going and told him shed be back in a few minutes to pick him up. She gave her son a kiss, then, and hurried off to see about those lamps.

She would relive the moment a hundredperhaps a milliontimes. Had she just said no to him, Stay with me; had she simply returned to the game display a minute sooner; had any one of a thousand things happened differently in the slightestas it is said that the flapping of a butterflys wings in the Amazon can form a tsunami in a distant time and placeperhaps what occurred might not have occurred at all.

But there is no changing what did happen that day. The mother found a salesperson in home furnishings easily, but there was a bit of a problem: they searched up and down the bright aisles but could find none of the barrel lamps on display. The clerk was happy to check in the back, of courseit would only take a moment. Which turned into something more.

When the clerk finally returned, her downcast expression said it all. The store had not received any of the advertised lamps, but they would be happy to call the moment they came in. The mother quickly gave her name and number and hurried back to where shed left her son.

She could hear the clamor of spaceships and cannon fire tearing the air as she hurried down the aisle, and smiled at her sons passion for such games. But when she rounded the corner, she stopped short. The game was running, but its stations were deserted, the sounds issuing mechanically from the demo loop. She glanced about, puzzled, hoping she would see her son browsing in the nearby toy department, or ambling toward her from where she had been. But she did not.

She fought the surge of panic that every mother feels when she turns and finds her child suddenly lost from sight. The ripples on the surface of the nearby pond are all menace. The sounds of distant traffic suggest catastrophe and grief and guilt.

But she would not panic foolishly, this mother. She would retrace her steps. She would have the store announce her sons name, and that he should find a clerk and report himself. While store personnel stood ready, she would return to the place she had left her car. He would be waiting there, or he would come to her, or she would find him. She would not panic. She would find her son. Surely, she would find her son.

Washington, D.C.February 13, 2006

A t a Capitol Hill press conference, a reporter stood to ask a final question of John Walsh, leading proponent for the about-to-be-debated Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Walsh, a private citizen, had become perhaps Americas most recognizable crime fighter owing to his work as executive producer and host of the long-running television program Americas Most Wanted. But also, in the wake of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of his son Adam, he and his wife, Rev, had dedicated much of their lives energies to raising awareness of the problem and the plight of missing children in America.

As a result of the Walshes work had come the passage of the 1982 Missing Children Act, the establishment of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984, and the national AMBER Alert program of 2003. Walsh considered the new bill that was about to go before Congress the capstone of a lifes work removing impediments to the recovery of the nearly 800,000 children who are reported missing in the United States each year.

Mr. Walsh, the reporter began. Youve done much good work on behalf of children and families everywhere, and youve brought any number of heinous criminals to justice with your television show. But Im wondering if it ever bothers you that you have been unable, in all these years, to find out who killed your own son?

It was a question asked out of ignorance, the sort of thing that made several in the room wince. Walsh managed to respond without losing his composure, but following the incident, he and Rev contacted longtime associate and Americas Most Wanted investigator Joe Matthews to set up a meeting that would prove to be momentous. As a veteran homicide detective for the Miami Beach Police Department, Matthews had supervised and conducted more than 20,000 criminal investigations and over 2,000 death and homicide investigations, and had obtained confessions and convictions in a number of high-profile cases, including Miamis infamous Baby Lollipops torture-murder, that of Washington States spree killer Chad Daniel Roberts, and Canadas University of Waterloo serial rapist Christopher Meyer.

But more important, Matthews, a widely recognized polygraph expert, had been involved in the investigation of Adam Walshs disappearance and murder from the very beginning, twenty-five years before. His skill and tireless efforts to bring mistakes and overlooked evidence to the attention of those in charge of that still-unresolved investigation had earned him the respect and the friendship of the Walshes over the years, and following his retirement from the Miami Beach force, Matthews had gone to work as a lead investigator for Americas Most Wanted , where he was quickly credited with solving the programs first cold case investigation, the killing of a former high school wrestling champ by four football players at Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania.