In July 1981, the mother of 6-year-old Adam Walsh took him shopping at a Sears store near their home in Hollywood, Florida, a suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Mrs. Walsh said she left Adam to play the video games at the display and returned for him about ten minutes later. He was gone and she couldn't find him.

For the next two weeks, nearly the entire Hollywood Police Department, much of the community, and the Walshes searched for Adam everywhere they could think of. The family printed his most recent photograph, of him wearing a T-ball team baseball cap and shirt and holding a bat. What made him even more endearing was his big smile, revealing the absence of both his top front teeth.

Exactly two weeks later and about a hundred miles north of Hollywood, a man fishing in a drainage canal saw, floating, a child's severed head. Police suspected it was Adam, and by the next morning, a medical examiner there announced the official identification.

In 1983, Ottis Toole, a drifter from upstate Jacksonville, Florida, confessed to the murder, and Hollywood Police announced it at a dramatic press conference. But then came the real work: for much of the next year police tried to link anything Toole said to actual case facts not already publicly known. They weren't able to. In 1984 police dropped Toole as an active suspect.

But in 2008, a new Hollywood Police chief held another dramatic press conference to announce, again, that Toole killed Adam. And again, the chief admitted there was no substantiation beyond his confession--no new evidence. But this time Toole was dead--he'd died in 1996, in a Florida prison for another crime, so he could no longer be prosecuted. Because of that, the chief announced that the case investigation was finally over.

But when Hollywood closed the case, its file became public record. In it, author and investigative journalist Arthur Jay Harris discovered, was much more evidence that Adam's kidnapper had been Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer.

Dahmer had been captured in Milwaukee in 1991. Police there found in his apartment eleven severed heads--mostly of young men, though none close in age to Adam. He also admitted going to shopping malls to find victims, that he'd killed his first victim in 1978, and that he'd been in Miami when Adam was taken. However, Dahmer denied anything to do with that. A spokesman for Hollywood Police said they certainly wouldn't trust such a killer's mere denial, but after they were unable to independently prove that Dahmer had been in South Florida, they dropped it. Later, when an FBI agent confronted Dahmer in prison about Adam, he thought he'd tacitly admitted killing him. He got word to Adam's father, John Walsh, who by then was hosting a reality television crime show series called America's Most Wanted. Walsh got Hollywood to interview Dahmer, but when he directly denied it, Hollywood dropped it again.

Upon his arrest, Dahmer insisted he came clean about all his crimes, but evidence shows he did not.

It was not Hollywood Police but Harris who located the only document that proved Dahmer had indeed been in Miami that summer when Adam went missing. A Miami police report dated July 7, 1981, 20 days before Adam's kidnapping, read that "Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer" had found the body of a homeless man in the alley behind where he worked, in Sunny Isles, about 20 minutes by vehicle from Hollywood. Of course, no one in 1981 knew who Dahmer was.

That was suspicious, but when Milwaukee Police had asked Dahmer to tell of all his lifetime interactions with police, he'd left it out -- and this police report was written before computerization.

Nor did Dahmer speak of his repeated physical torture and rape of his roommate in the U.S. Army, Billy Capshaw, when they were stationed in Germany. Dahmer was thrown out of the Army for drunkenness in March 1981, four months before Adam disappeared, and instead of going home, came to Miami. Also, German police had suspected Dahmer of a series of mutilation murders there. Dahmer denied them also, but Capshaw had seen him return from weekend leaves with his clothes and torso soaked in dried blood. He also found (and threw out) a series of Dahmer's hunting knives, their blades covered with blood, and had seen M.P.s return Dahmer to their room after he'd been caught masturbating in a park in front of young children.

But the main evidence that Dahmer took Adam came from the Hollywood Police's own files. There, Harris found seven witnesses who had offered tips to police as well as to John Walsh's TV show that they had seen a man in or outside the Hollywood Sears with or close to Adam. Two told police that the man was Dahmer; the rest, when Harris showed them pictures of Toole, then Dahmer, said the man they'd seen wasn't Toole--it was Dahmer. But police weren't interested in re-interviewing their own witnesses.

The story's not over, by a lot. See also The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, Book Two