Tears of Rage

John Walsh

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781439136348
• eBook ISBN: 9781439189962

As the host of the immensely popular America's Most Wanted, John Walsh has been instrumental in the capture of nearly four hundred and fifty of this country's most dangeroues fugitives. However, few know the full story of the personal tragedy behind his public crusade: the 1981 abduction and murder of his six-year-old son, Adam. Here, for the first time, Walsh, his wife Revé, and their closest friends tell the wrenching tale of Adam's death -- and the infuriating conspiracy of events that have kept America's No. 1 crime fighter from obtaining justice and closure for himself and his family.
"I've never really spoken about these things to anyone before, but I want to talk about Adam before he died. I want people to know just exactly how horrible it is to lose your child, how painful it is. But I also want to talk about how people can help you, and how you can help yourself. About how to come to terms with life when you think you're dying of a broken heart." -- John Walsh
"I remember thinking, 'our son's been murdered, and now we've got to be the ones to do something about it' It was a sad thing for this country that the fight had to be led by two broken-down parents of a murdered child. But we had to, because no one else was going to do it." -- Revé Walsh

Book
Three

9

Upstate

PEOPLE COULDN’T STAND US.

They loved us, they were concerned for us, and we knew it. It was just that this was new territory for all of us. Revé and I were in a place that they didn’t know anything about, and they weren’t sure how even to be around us. No one knew what to do or say, and we couldn’t tell them because we didn’t know, either. Everyone was doing the best he or she could. But no one could look us in the eye. That’s how bad it was. So bad that people couldn’t handle the fact of us.

I was worried about Revé. I was really afraid that she was going to do something. If she didn’t actually die of grief, which I now knew was possible, I was afraid that she might do something crazy. So we stayed together, day and night.

And I was having a hard time even looking at my mother. She had just lived through the death of my father, and now there was this. All my life, I had always been her capable, handsome, charismatic son. Now I was just a brokenhearted shadow of that.

One day, Revé answered the door and it was Adam’s little buddy Jeremy, asking if Adam could come out to play. Jeremy had been away at summer camp, and I guess no one had had the chance to tell him. So Revé explained to him as best she could that Adam had died, and that he wouldn’t be here to play with anymore.

“Jeremy,” she said, “would you like to have Adam’s bicycle?”

He said that he would. So Revé went back out to the garage and found Adam’s bike. The police had dusted everything for prints, apparently with a firehose. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t completely covered with a sooty black powder. So she got some rags and cleaned the bike off and wheeled it out to the driveway.

People always wonder about what Revé did with Adam’s things. Well, now at least they’ll know what she did with his bicycle. She gave it to Jeremy.

• • •

By this time, Jeff O’Regan and I had been through everything together. Everything. He had seen me almost die, and now he saw what was happening—that I was slipping away. I don’t know how he knew what to do, but he came by one day and invited me up to the beautiful house that he and his wife, Karen, had in upstate New York.

“You’ve got to get out of here for a while,” he said. “And if no one else can be with you now, then you can come with me.” At the time, Jeff had started his own business as a construction contractor, and this was his busiest season. Without saying it, he let me know that he was willing to take time off, completely interrupt his life, and bring Revé and me into the middle of his and his wife’s lives so that he could be with us, day and night.

“Come on, come on. Let’s get you out of here,” he said. “You need some time to relax. I’m going to take you up to the house.”

So, after Adam’s funeral, we gave one last press conference to thank the Hollywood police and the media for all their help, and to try to express our appreciation to the thousands of people who had taken the time to look for Adam, and all the people from around the country who had wished the best for us and prayed for us and for our little boy. Then we flew up to Ithaca, to my friend Jeff O’Regan’s house.

The house itself was in the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, right on a lake and surrounded by woods. It was where Jeff and Karen spent part of every year, and he had boats and skis and all kinds of water toys there. We didn’t know how long we would stay. We didn’t plan anything. We just lived from day to day.

In the mornings, Jeff knocked on our door and came in and said, “You look terrible. You’re losing weight. You can’t eat. You’re going to get up and we’re going to get into the canoe and we’re going to go out and paddle.”

And I would say, “I can’t. I can’t do it. I cannot get out of bed.”

He ignored me. “We’re going to get in that canoe and we’re going to paddle across the lake and you’re going to talk to me, and I’m dragging you out of this bedroom. You’re going to get up. Come on, come on, come on . . .”

Then, in the afternoons, he found me wherever I was and said, “I’m going to sit here with you, and I’m going to listen to you. I’m not going to pontificate, not going to tell you any bullshit. I’m going to sit here and listen to you.”

And that’s what he did. For hours and hours.

I wasn’t sleeping. Couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t function. All the classic symptoms, although I didn’t know it at the time, of someone who is suffering from profound grief. Day and night, the only thing I thought about was Adam. Everything about Adam.

It took every bit of mental power that I had not to dwell on what his last hours were like. I tried desperately not to think about it or to discuss it or to wonder about it. Not to speculate, not to let Revé talk about it. Because I knew that kind of thinking could destroy me.

Anytime I lay down, the thoughts would start: “What did he go through? How painful? How long? Why?”

Nope. No way. None of that. I kept telling myself, “If you let them, those thoughts will kill you.”

Revé and I had brought along a picture of Adam with us. We put it on the mirror in the bedroom, and that’s what we did for a lot of the time: we would lie in bed together and look at him.

But there would always be a knock on the door—Jeff again, making sure that we were okay in there, and telling us that it was time to get out of bed, even when we thought we couldn’t. There was always something for us to do, because Jeff always invented it. He forced us to eat, to go places, to do things.

He saved my life.

Jeff had a huge hang glider that he used to tow behind his powerboat out on the lake, and one afternoon he and I went hang gliding. I suppose it’s a dangerous thing to do, because if anything goes wrong, you dive into the water at about ninety miles an hour, from way high up. But I was doing lots of dangerous things at the time. Riding motorcycles, being the daredevil.

On this day, I was strapped into the glider, being pulled behind the boat, really soaring out at the end of the tether. And then, all of a sudden, I crashed. I didn’t lose consciousness, because I remember hitting the surface of the water, hard, and then the sensation of sinking. Settling down toward the bottom of the lake. I was all tied up in the towline and the glider’s harness, hanging upside down, maybe twenty feet below the surface, tangled and drifting. Most people would probably have panicked. All I felt was suspended in time.

Throughout my life, I had survived so many close calls, so many brushes with death. Every time, I had struggled and fought against it. But now, this time, as I looked down at my chest to where the clasps and fasteners were, there didn’t seem to be any point in unbuckling myself. I was calm. I felt no urgency about lifting my arm up to free myself. That far down in the ice-cold water, drowning didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.

And then, I don’t know why, but just as I was beginning to run out of air, I watched my hand come up and unfasten the harness. I held my breath, unbuckled the belt, and slipped out of the rigging. It was me who did it: I swam to the surface.

At some point after that, Jeff and Joe came up to me one day in the driveway and Jeff said, “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re not fooling us. I can see right through you, and if you do it, you’ll break my heart. You’ll break everybody’s heart, and you’re not going to do it. You’re not going to get away with it.

“We know you. You are thinking that you can’t deal with this. I’ve seen you in a lot of bad situations, and this time you want to leave the world because it’s just too painful.

“But if you do that, you’ll be a coward, John. That would be a coward’s way out. And I won’t let you do that to me, to your mom, to your brothers and sister. That would be the most selfish thing of all. And you’re not like that. You’re not selfish. You never have been. You’ve always looked out for everyone else.

“I’ve seen you beaten to a pulp and washed away in the ocean when everyone thought you had drowned. But you never gave up. Your dad was a fighter, and you’re a fighter, too. You can’t give up now. I’m not going to let you.”

Then Joe said, “You’re my brother, and my whole life I’ve always looked up to you. And if you do this to yourself, you’ll destroy all of us. We can barely deal with losing Adam as it is. And if, in your own sneaky, stupid way, you figure out how to kill yourself, then there will be nothing left.

“Dad is watching you, and Adam is, too. We all know what it is that you’re trying to do.”

It was stupid. Very, very stupid. But I was hurting so much that I wanted to take the easy way out. I now believe that, at the time, what I was thinking was that I could kill myself and make it look like an accident. I could fool them so that they would never know. That way, Revé and my family wouldn’t be destroyed, and I could go on to the next life and see Adam and my father and be out of my horrible pain.

Because I was already dying. Absolutely dying of a broken heart.

I thought that I could find a way to get rid of my pain so that no one would ever know. No one except Jeff and my brother Joe. But they caught on pretty quick.

It was Jeff who said, “I won’t let you leave us.”

And my brother Joe—so young—who said, “You cannot do this to yourself.”

And Revé, who kept telling me, over and over, “John, we were not the victims here. Adam was.”

And all of them were right.

Jeff had graduated from Cornell, and the campus wasn’t far from his house. I needed to keep my mind occupied, and I decided that this would be a good time to find out about some things. I asked Jeff about it, and he said that he was sure that Cornell would let me use their library.

One morning I went over and said, “I’m the father of a little boy who was murdered. I don’t go to classes here or anything and I don’t have a card. But I was wondering if I could use the library?”

Ithaca wasn’t that far from Auburn, and I guess there had been some coverage in the local press. Because they said, “Sure. Absolutely. We know who you are. Come on in.”

I spent hours in the library in the microfilm collection, looking at newspapers, magazines, and statistical reports. I wanted to find out about the kidnapping of children, how often it happened and what had been done to prevent it. One of the things I pulled was the FBI’s annual uniform crime report. In it, I was amazed to see that there were no official statistics on child abuse, missing children, or even kidnapping.

I found some magazine articles about the case that Les Davies had mentioned to the press. About how the FBI had gone in to investigate the disappearance of a $500,000 horse from a breeding farm in Kentucky. The Bureau assumed it had jurisdiction, said a spokesman, “because of the value of the horse.”

Then I looked up the actual law that covered kidnapping, something called the Federal Kidnapping Act, which authorized the FBI to enter a case if someone was unlawfully abducted and held for ransom—“or otherwise.”

So what I had suspected all along was true: the Bureau could investigate a kidnapping case—even of an animal—without a ransom note or proof that state lines had been crossed. They could basically get into a case if and when they felt like it.

Next, I tried to find out how the FBI had gotten jurisdiction over kidnappings to begin with. That was when I found an article from the New York Times, dated July 30, 1933: “J. Edgar Hoover heads new crime bureau. A division created by President Roosevelt will war on kidnappers.” And another article from the following year: “The Lindbergh Law and the activity of federal agents threaten to kill kidnapping.”

As it turned out, the Federal Kidnapping Act was also known as the Lindbergh Law because it was passed by Congress—as a result of sheer public outrage—not long after the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932. The statute made it a federal crime to send a ransom demand through the mail. And it did something else, too.

From the time it was first founded, the FBI had basically been just a small, do-nothing agency that could investigate only crimes committed on federal land. But the Lindbergh Law gave it power outside those jurisdictions; it was this law that gave Eliot Ness and his G-men the green light to hunt down all the mobsters and crime gangs who were abducting people and then fleeing across state lines. In other words, the federal kidnapping statute was what had put the FBI on the map.

What all of this meant to me was that the FBI—whose agents had stood in the Hollywood Police Department and told me to my face that they had no authority to search for my son—was only in business in the first place because on a cool spring night fifty years before, someone had broken in through the second-floor window of an isolated house in the New Jersey countryside and kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby right out of his crib.

We stayed at Jeff’s place for a few weeks and finally decided that it was time to go home. We got back to Hollywood at the beginning of September. Maybe that was too soon. We didn’t know what the right time would be. There was no one to ask.

During the time that we were gone upstate, Gram had stayed at our house to keep an eye on things. And when we got back, Revé asked her not to leave. Not for Gram’s sake, but because Revé was so used to Adam and all the activity of his life—his school, swimming, baseball practice—that she just couldn’t stand the thought of the two of us being left together, alone. Things were too quiet without Adam.

So Gram stayed. She never asked why or said, “I’ve got to get back to my house.” That was Gram: unconditional. If you didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t want to know. She was there. Solid as a rock. Gram stayed with us for almost a year. She says that we went to Ithaca to try to save our souls, and when we came back, she was afraid that neither one of us was going to make it.

We both were getting thinner by the minute, and she was genuinely afraid that Revé was going to have a nervous breakdown. Some days, I might be able to function when Revé couldn’t, and then if Revé came around and had a fairly decent day, it was my turn not to be able to do anything at all.

Gram understood how deep our grief was. In the middle of the night, Revé and I would get up and go into Adam’s room to sit on his bed. And through the wall, Gram would hear us crying.

At first, I went to different religious people for help. But ministers couldn’t help me, and neither could rabbis. “It’s God’s plan.” What kind of bullshit is that? Even my cousin Father Mike, who had delivered Adam’s eulogy and later became a monsignor, had his faith shaken to the roots by Adam’s death, to the point that he started to question both God and his religion.

Priests don’t have children. They’ve never been married. Most of them have never had sex with a woman. They don’t know that intimacy. They certainly don’t know how it changes your life to have a child. The clergy had no answers for me—and they were supposed to be the experts.

So I tried it: I went to this well-known therapist down in Miami whose son had been murdered. Everyone I knew recommended this guy—a psychiatrist whose specialty was grief counseling. At the beginning of the first session he set the clock and said, “You’re a very special patient. I don’t even think I’m going to charge you.”

I said, “Well, you know, I certainly don’t expect you to do this for free.”

“Tell me about it. I know that your pain is unbearable.”

By the second session he was sitting there, tears in his eyes, talking about his son’s death. About how it had destroyed him and cost him his marriage. Across the desk from me, crying.

I was thinking, “I am not supposed to be the counselor here. You’re the psychiatrist.”

I never went back.

I knew what had helped me: it was Jeff O’Regan saying, “I’ll sit with you for hours and I won’t say one word.”

And my brother Joe saying, “We love you.”

As for Revé, she was always so afraid to do anything that might reflect badly on me or tarnish my image. But she went to a therapist, too, and in typical Revé fashion cut right to the chase. She went in and sat down and said, “You know, I was having an affair, and then my son was murdered.”

“My God,” the woman said. And then she put her hand on Revé’s arm to comfort her.

• • •

We were searching. Completely desperate.

People said that we should give his things away. Start our lives over. But we didn’t know how. One of the things we needed to know was whether we would be allowed to have Adam’s remains cremated. We wanted to scatter his ashes out over the ocean because he loved it so much.

During the two weeks that Adam was missing, Dr. Ronald Wright, the Broward County medical examiner, was the one who had reached out to me and said, “You must come to grips with the fact that Adam may be dead.”

He was the first person I trusted. He understood what it means to have a child. And now, he was the one who had official custody of Adam’s remains. So that was where I went one night: to the morgue to see Ronald Wright.

The first thing he said to me was, “You look terrible. You look like a ghost. You’re not dealing with this well, are you?”

I had been trying so hard to keep the stiff upper lip after finding out about the FBI. I was so bitter and so angry. Mad at everyone. My days were filled with crying. I couldn’t stop throwing up. No one was giving me any advice. No one knew what it was like. I was an intelligent person. But I felt that no one had walked in my shoes. I was so desperate for someone to tell me, “You will survive this.”

By this point, I had learned about reali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Book One
• Book Two
• Book Three
• Book Four
• Appendix
• Photographs
• About John Walsh and Susan Schindehette
• Copyright