Arthur Jay Harris

ARTHUR JAY HARRIS

Journalist and author of three true crime books Arthur Jay Harris spent 11 years researching the unsolved 1981 murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who’s father John Walsh made him the poster child for missing children before John himself became the host of the crime-solving TV show America’s Most Wanted. In 2006 Harris published a stunning theory: Adam was murdered by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who at the time was living 15 minutes from the South Florida shopping mall where Adam’s mother lost him. Harris also found two police witnesses who had identified Dahmer as the man they’d seen at the mall that day.
Police in Hollywood, Florida, had considered Dahmer a suspect in 1991 immediately after 11 severed heads were found in his Milwaukee apartment, including in his refrigerator. Adam’s severed head was the only part of his body ever found. Dahmer’s father Lionel called America’s Most Wanted to tell John Walsh he thought his son might have killed Walsh’s son. However, for himself, Jeffrey denied killing Adam.

Just after the kidnapping in 1981, a young witness who’d been at the Hollywood Mall at the time of the incident told police he’d seen a man chase a child he thought was Adam. The man entered a blue van, continued the chase, then grabbed the child. Police had considered that their best lead and asked citizens to be on the lookout for any blue vans they saw. For months police ran down hundreds of leads, and searched streets and driveways in the region and throughout the state for blue vans.
One of the two witnesses who’d identified Dahmer in 1991, who’d also spoken to police in 1981, reported viewing a similar event. Bill Bowen said he’d seen the man – Dahmer, he said, immediately when he first saw his newspaper photo – throw the boy he thought was Adam “like a sack of potatoes” into a blue van that burned rubber to get away. Bowen was horrified.
Hollywood police had never checked, but Harris years later found a number of people who remembered Dahmer’s Miami place of employment, a sub shop. They recalled it had a blue van for pizza deliveries that was easily accessible to employees, and which often disappeared for hours or even overnight.

The other of the two mall witnesses, Willis Morgan, said he was browsing in a Radio Shack around noon when Dahmer tried to pick him up. The man was drunk, disheveled, and Morgan thought, ready to pull a knife on him. When Morgan refused to have a conversation with him, the man shot him what he described was an evil stare.
Harris found the sub shop manager who’d hired Dahmer, who said Dahmer would sometimes come to work in the late morning drunk and disheveled, at which time he’d send him away. After reading Morgan’s description, he said he had no doubt that Morgan did see Dahmer at the mall.

Nor did Hollywood Police consider a Wisconsin-based FBI agent who’d interviewed Dahmer months after his Milwaukee murder convictions, who said he believed Dahmer conceded to him that he’d killed Adam.
Neil Purtell, now retired from the FBI, said when he pressed Dahmer to admit the murder, he’d responded that Florida had the death penalty. Although he’d admitted 17 murders in Wisconsin and Ohio, neither state had the death penalty in effect when he’d killed there. Dahmer also told Purtell, whomever killed Adam would not be able to live in any prison.
In 1992 Purtell had urged Hollywood police to interview Dahmer but its lead detective Jack Hoffman was reluctant. Instead, Purtell worked through channels to convince John Walsh, who got Hoffman to go. In a letter to the Broward County State Attorney, Walsh called Morgan and Bowen “two credible witnesses,” and added that Dahmer “certainly fits the profile of someone who might be capable of murdering a beautiful six-year-old boy.”

At the interview, that August, Dahmer denied killing Adam. He said he’d worked seven days a week, 10 hours a day that summer, didn’t know where the Hollywood Mall was, didn’t have a vehicle to get anywhere, and wasn’t interested in children as young as Adam. Reporting back to Willis Morgan, Hoffman said Dahmer had looked him in the eyes, and he’d believed him.
However, Hollywood police never found the sub shop manager. He told Harris that Dahmer worked only part-time that summer, and never on weekends. Although Dahmer didn’t have arrests for offenses against children as young as Adam, he had been arrested for lewd behavior in front of 12-year-old boys. And Billy Capshaw, who had been Dahmer’s roommate in the U.S. Army in Germany just before Dahmer was discharged early for alcoholism and came to Miami, said the military police had on two occasions returned Dahmer to their barracks room and told him that Dahmer had exposed himself to children in a nearby public park.
Capshaw also saw Dahmer return from a weekend leave with a large stain of blood that had soaked through his clothes and encrusted to his chest. Other times he found bloody buck knives in his locker. Dahmer also kept a dorm-sized refrigerator in the room, padlocked, that Capshaw never saw inside. After Dahmer’s 1991 arrest, German police came to America to investigate him as a suspect in a possible series of mutilation murders within a hundred miles of his army base while he was stationed there in 1980-81.

Harris first published his findings in a December 2006 cover story he wrote for the Miami Daily Business Review. In February 2007 he appeared on WSVN-TV Miami and WISN-TV Milwaukee then was interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and Nancy Grace, Court TV’s Catherine Crier and Ashleigh Banfield, Fox News’s The Lineup, Inside Edition and elsewhere.
Hollywood Police responded that they had fully checked out Harris’s information previously and found it without merit. In fact, four years earlier, Harris had offered them what he’d collected but they were mostly uninterested, failing to call either the sub shop manager or any of seven other witnesses he’d found who remembered the blue van, or the two Dahmer witnesses at the mall. New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman responded, “It's a ridiculous stance but one that is predictable from a department that has notoriously lost evidence and bungled the case to the point that it seems more intent on covering its own hide than in finding the killer… At the very least, Arthur Jay Harris' case should be deeply investigated by trained investigators who share at least one very important qualification: That they have never, ever been employed by the Hollywood P.D.”

John Walsh initially asked the Broward State Attorney to investigate the new Dahmer leads and was critical of Hollywood police. He told WISN he couldn’t believe that after 25 years, he was still fighting for a competent investigation into Adam’s killing. “That's a bitter pill for me to swallow. (As) someone who's a big supporter of law enforcement, that the law enforcement agency investigating my son's murder would… not interview people who thought they had important information about the case, it's really a tough thing,” Walsh said. But days later, Walsh reversed himself. A statement from America’s Most Wanted instead relied on Hollywood Police’s assertion. The show added they believed a previous suspect, Ottis Toole, had killed Adam.

In October 1983, Jacksonville, Florida, drifter Ottis Toole had confessed to killing Adam and Hollywood Police announced they’d solved the case. However, Toole also eventually confessed to hundreds of other murders to detectives from all over the country, all of which eventually were discounted except for an arson in his hometown that caused a death. Toole seemed to relish his police and media attention, and later, depending on his mood or whom he was talking to, would either recant his confession that he killed Adam or re-confess. He was never charged in Adam’s case.

In 1994 the media asked a Broward judge to open the still-unsolved Adam police file, citing Florida state public records laws regarding inactively-investigated cases. Police and the Walshes objected but in 1996 the judge ruled for the media. Police interview transcripts then released showed that detectives had continually offered Toole specific facts, showed him photos, and brought him to crime scenes in the seeming hope it would prompt him to reveal something true they hadn’t told him. But that never happened. In fact, in Toole’s initial telling, he said he’d taken Adam in a January, and that the child was wearing mittens. In fact, Adam was taken in July, during a typically-steaming South Florida noontime.

In 1983 Hollywood police spent months of intense investigation to document or disprove that Toole was even in South Florida in the days around the time Adam was taken. In the end, they could do neither. By 1984, embarrassed, Hollywood police abandoned their theory.

In a 1992 South Florida magazine interview, John Walsh ridiculed the idea that Toole had killed Adam. In 1994, to the Palm Beach Post, he said he thought the killer was still at liberty and still killing. Toole, however, had remained in prison since 1983. But in 1996, just before the police file was opened, Walsh changed his mind and accused Toole. In 1997, Harris wrote in New Times Broward-Palm Beach disputing the evidence against Toole. He reported that neither the Hollywood Police nor the chief assistant Broward State Attorney believed Toole was guilty.

Through 2007, Harris continued to buttress his theory with new evidence. On ABC News’s documentary show Primetime, Harris reported he’d since found the first official documentation of Dahmer’s presence in South Florida. On July 7, 1981 – 20 days before Adam was taken from the mall – a Miami-Dade County police report found in that agency’s microfilm had Dahmer reporting the discovery of a dead homeless man in the alley behind the sub shop where he worked. He knew that the man had slept in an electric meter room steps away. Although the man had no obvious trauma and an autopsy determined that his probable manner of death was natural, there was evidence in the police report of a struggle; he was wearing just one tennis shoe, and an officer had found the other in the meter room.

On the theory that Dahmer, admittedly homeless then himself, may have then moved into the meter room on the man’s demise – natural or otherwise, ABC hired Jan Johnson, a crime scene investigator retired from the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement, to inspect the room. While ABC’s cameras rolled, she found a corner with a spatter pattern of cast-off stains rising from the floor, indicative, she said, of homicidal chopping. A phenylthaline field test she did confirmed that the stains were blood. She took samples so a lab could attempt to create a DNA profile, however the testing failed because the sample was degraded. Nor was she able to determine whether or not the blood was human. Next to the corner stood upright a rusty lumberman’s axe and a sledgehammer. As well, there was an entry in the floor to a 3-foot high gravel crawlspace beneath. In the crawlspace of his home in Bath, Ohio in 1978 Dahmer had used a sledgehammer to crush the bones of the man he said was his first murder victim.
Although the shopping center management had allowed ABC initial access to that room, they denied them further permission to do a fuller examination and take more blood samples in the hope that a DNA profile could still be made that might then be compared to a hair sample of Adam’s, kept all these years by the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office. ABC showed its results to Hollywood Police but they did not seem to show much interest.

Was this the blood of Adam Walsh, killed by Jeffrey Dahmer? The answer at this time remains tantalizingly inconclusive.
Harris’s three published true crime books are Until Proven Innocent, Flowers for Mrs. Luskin, and Speed Kills, all stories which took place in South Florida, where he lives.

FOOTNOTES
1. Who killed Adam Walsh? A case for serial slayer Jeffrey Dahmer, Miami Daily Business Review, December 4, 2006. http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/news.html?news_id=41218

2. Milwaukee mutilation suspect lived briefly in Dade, The Miami Herald, July 27, 1991.

3. Adam Walsh found dead, Discovered in Vero canal, Hollywood Sun-Tattler, August 11, 1981

4. John Walsh, Tears of Rage, Pocket Books, New York, 1997, Paperback p. 267

5. Callers tip police to dozens of blue vans, The Miami Herald, August 17, 1981

6. Did Dahmer Confess To All His Crimes? WISN-TV (Milwaukee), February 2, 2007. http://www.wisn.com/news/10914431/detail.html

7. http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/news.html?news_id=41218

8. Did Dahmer Do It? WSVN-TV (Miami), February 1, 2007. http://www1.wsvn.com/features/articles/investigations/MI38867

9. Did Dahmer Have One More Victim? Witnesses Say They Saw Dahmer in Mall Where Adam Walsh Disappeared, WISN-TV (Milwaukee), February 1, 2007.
http://www.themilwaukeechannel.com/video/10903516/index.html

10. Jeffrey Dahmer-Adam Walsh Connection? Anderson Cooper 360, February 5, 2007. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/05/acd.01.html

11. Nancy Grace, February 5, 2007. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0702/05/ng.01.html

12. Did Jeffrey Dahmer Kill Adam Walsh? Inside Edition, February 6, 2007. http://www.insideedition.com/ourstories/inside_stories/story.aspx?storyid=592

13. Walsh, officials not swayed by author’s Dahmer theory, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, February 14, 2007

14. Dahmer Did It. Why won’t Hollywood police take seriously the best chance at solving Adam Walsh’s murder?, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, February 22, 2007. http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2007-02-22/news/dahmer-did-it/

15. http://www.wisn.com/news/10903529/detail.html

16. http://www.amw.com/features/feature_story_detail.cfm?id=1421

17. Convicted arsonist is held in Adam Walsh’s murder, The Miami Herald, October 22, 1983

18. Adam Walsh police files to be made public today, The Miami Herald, February 16, 1996

19. Broward County’s John Walsh turns tragedy into triumph on “America’s Most Wanted”, South Florida, July 1992

20. “You never forget about it”, Palm Beach Post, November 6, 1994

21. Police chief says investigators let emotions get in the way, The Miami Herald, February 7, 1996

22. America’s Most Frustrating, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, November 13, 1997. http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/1997-11-13/news/america-s-most-frustrating/

23. Decades Later, New Clues in a Cold Case. Could Jeffrey Dahmer Be to Blame for Adam Walsh’s Murder? ABC News Primetime, August 14, 2007. http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id3473665&page1

24. http://www.amazon.com/Until-Proven-Innocent-Arthur-Harris/dp/0380777339/refsr_1_1/105-2069442-6078066?ieUTF8&sbooks&qid1192135380&sr=8-1

25. http://www.amazon.com/Flowers-Mrs-Luskin-Arthur-Harris/dp/B000NQ1X2K/refsr_1_2/105-2069442-6078066?ieUTF8&sbooks&qid1192135380&sr=8-2

26. http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Kills-True-Crime-Books/dp/0380781832/refsr_1_3/105-2069442-6078066?ieUTF8&sbooks&qid1192135380&sr=8-3

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