Police have positively confirmed that the killer of Adam Walsh, the then 6-year-old son of "America's Most Wanted" host John Walsh in 1981 was in fact in serial killer who died more than a decade ago.
Police said the suspect, Ottis Toole, was for a long time the primary suspect. In fact, he had twice confessed to killing the child, but later recanted.
Ottis Toole died in 1996, in Florida State Prison (a.k.a. Raiford State Penitentiary), at the age of 49. Toole died of liver failure.
Ottis Toole had been sitting on death row for the murder of George Sonnenburg, whom he killed in 1982 by locking him in his own home and setting the house on fire.
Adam Walsh went missing from a Hollywood mall on July 27, 1981. Two weeks later, fisherman discovered his head in a canal 120 miles away. The rest of his body was never recovered.
If nothing else, Adam Walsh's death, and his father John Walsh's subsequent activism on his behalf, helped change our lives. We now have faces on milk cartons, shopping bags and mailbox fliers. Also started were fingerprinting programs and increased security at schools and stores.
It also led to the debut of John Walsh's TV show, "America's Most Wanted," which has brought many unsolved those cases into millions of homes. As a result, many of those cases have been solved.
At the press conference announcing the result of the investigation, and confirming the ID of Ottis Toole as the murderer, John Walsh said:
"Who could take a 6-year-old and murder and decapitate him? Who? We needed to know. We needed to know. And today we know. The not knowing has been a torture, but that journey's over."
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