Adam Walsh Essay

For my final project I chose to view the television film Adam (1983) (YouTube). This movie is about Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy, who was abducted and murdered in Hollywood, Florida on July 27, 1981. Adam and his mother, Reve Walsh, had gone to the Sears Department Store at the Hollywood Mall. Reve Walsh left Adam in the toy department to watch older boys play video games while she went to inquire about a lamp that she was interested in buying. When Mrs. Walsh returned to the toy department some 10 to 15 minutes later, Adam was gone.

Mrs. Walsh frantically searched for her son. She first searched the immediate area and when she did not find Adam she went to the customer service department and asked to have him paged over the store’s

The parents, John and Reve Walsh suffered and continue to suffer the loss of their precious child. They had to experience intense questioning by the police as they had to be ruled out as suspects. They also spent many sleepless nights worrying about their son until the horror of his death was revealed. After their son’s death they experienced depression, grief and their marriage was shaken. The children John and Reve had following Adam’s death were also secondary victims. They had to witness their parents’ grief and Adam’s death most definitely changed the way they were parented. The grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of Adam Walsh were secondary victims. They too experienced depression, grief and loss.

A final secondary victim would be all the police who worked so diligently trying to find Adam. For more than two decades, police tried to locate Adam’s murderer. A drifter by the name of “Ottis Toole, had confessed twice to killing the child, but later recanted.” (NBCNews.com) Unfortunately, critical DNA evidence from Toole’s impounded car and a machete that were found were lost by the police. It was not until December of 2008 that police acknowledged their mistakes and Ottis Toole was named as Adam Walsh’s

In Chapter 7, Child Abduction and Exploitation, the book discusses the “Code Adam” program. This program “established a protocol to find missing children in department stores” (Burgess, et al. page 233). Additionally, because of this crime, John Walsh helped form the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Missing Children’s Act was enacted in 1982. “In 1981, when Adam disappeared, you couldn’t enter missing children information into the FBI computer system” (Allen, Ernie). There was no way of tracking missing children. “The Missing Children’s Act of 1982 and the subsequent Missing Children Assistance Act of 1984, which requires the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to conduct periodic studies to determine the number of U.S. children reported missing and the number of children recovered during a given year” (Burgess, et al. page