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Product Description
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 dangerous 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 Reve, 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. At the time of Adam's disappearance from a Hollywood, Florida, mall, there was no system for tracking kidnapped children. The FBI was reluctant to get involved, and local police had more information on stolen cars than on missing kids. Two weeks later, when Adam's remains were found in a drainage canal more than one hundred miles from home, John Walsh had already begun his nightmare journey into a criminal justice system that would work against him in ways he never could have imagined. This is the powerful story of Walsh's transformation from grieving father to full-time activist, and how he enlarged the search for Adam's killer into an exhaustive, sixteen-year battle on behalf of thousands of missing and abused children.
Amazon.com Review
In this aptly titled book, John Walsh traces the steps that led him from being a grieving father to becoming a grieving father who hosts TV's America's Most Wanted, the Fox true-crime show that hunts down bad guys every week through a toll-free tip line. Walsh, however, seems ambivalent about the fame he's been granted. He presents a somewhat halting, uncertain narrative in this autobiography (cowritten with Susan Schindehette), and he makes it clear all the way through that his life is really only driven by one thing: the still-unsolved 1981 abduction and murder of his 6-year-old son, Adam.
Walsh's anger and frustration over a "bumbling" police investigation of his son's murder is evident throughout. According to Walsh, the Hollywood, Florida, Police Department should have arrested a drifter named Ottis Toole--a convicted serial killer who played sidekick for many years to the notorious killer Henry Lee Lucas. Walsh speculates that the police had "formed their own ideas" about who killed Adam and didn't want to believe Toole could have been responsible. But Walsh is convinced, and he presents a large amount of evidence to support his case. Unfortunately, it's too late: Ottis Toole died several years ago in prison. This is not an easy book to read, and one imagines it wasn't an easy book for John Walsh to write, as he describes, with a staccato style reminiscent of Jack Webb, the probable sequence of events of Adam's disappearance as well as the manner of his death. The bulk of Tears of Rage concerns Adam's abduction and its aftermath and the impact the Walsh family has had since in helping to pass various victims' and children's rights legislation. --Tjames Madison
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