Bringing Adam Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

Golf Course. A group of Crime Watch volunteers organized a walking search of the city, aided by a police helicopter that swept the streets with its spotlight.
    At one point late in the night, John Walsh hailed a cruiser driving through his neighborhood. “How’s the hunt going?”
    The patrolman behind the wheel was a rookie named Mark Smith, who pointed to a photo of Adam pinned to his visor. “We’re all looking for him,” Smith said. “Don’t worry.”
    But still there was nothing. By morning, the news had hit the local papers, with the local Hollywood Sun-Tattler running a front-page banner: “Massive Search Launched for Boy, 6—Adam Walsh Disappeared from Sears Monday Afternoon.” A piece in the Miami News quoted Hollywood police as saying that while six-year-old Adam Walsh had indeed gone missing, “kidnapping is not suspected.” And in fact, there was little concrete reason at that moment to believe that an abduction had taken place. There was no ransom note, no disgruntled parent held at arm’s length by divorce, none of the “logical” reasons for a child to be taken.
    John Walsh, however, could not shake the feeling that someone who had recently lost a child to some tragic circumstance might have taken his son. Yet even that scenario was preferable to the most logical explanation for many a missing child case in South Florida. The spidery network of drainage canals that intersect the narrow strip of habitable land between the Everglades and the Atlantic—the crackpot work of developers such as Henry Flagler and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward—had claimed more than their fair share of children over the years. It is hard to drive a mile in South Florida without encountering one of the deeply chiseled, rock-walled channels meant to turn the Everglades into homesites, few of them fenced, many of them abutting parks, bike paths, and heavily traveled thoroughfares. If Adam had tumbled into one of those canals . . . well, it was a prospect John Walsh did not want to contemplate.
    And despite the efforts of the local police and news media, there was the distressing possibility that Adam and his abductor were long gone from the area. In 1981, there were none of the regional and national alert systems and shared databases that the public and the law enforcement community take for granted today. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of children went missing each year, the world had simply not recognized the need for such measures. Most kids “showed up,” right? Such disappearances were ordinarily treated by law enforcement as local matters.
    But by now it seemed to the Walshes that Adam was not simply going to “show up.” And if he had indeed been taken, and his abductor had slipped them outside the local network of cops and media alarum, who would even notice?
    To try and cover such bases, the Walshes designed a poster offering a reward of $5,000—no questions asked—for Adam’s safe return. It featured a photograph taken only a week before—a gap-toothed little boy in a baseball cap, holding a bat—and assured anyone who might have taken Adam, “D O N OT F EAR R EVENGE ! We will not prosecute. We only want our son.” They printed 150,000 of the posters, and they did a thing unheard of at the time: through friends with connections to Delta Airlines, copies were given to every passenger who passed through the airline’s busy Atlanta hub. Copies, including those translated into Spanish, were distributed on every outgoing flight at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Eastern Airlines followed suit, and soon the posters were being issued to their passengers at every airport in the United States.
    By Wednesday, forty-eight hours after Adam’s disappearance, it seemed almost certain there would be no simple resolution to the case. “Probes Yield No Clues to Missing Boy,” the headlines read. “Reward Rises as Police Probe Any, Every Clue.”
    Fred Barbetta, public information officer for the Hollywood