Case Closed

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/17/us/17adam.html?hp

MIAMI — The murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, which raised awareness about missing children and led to television shows like “America’s Most Wanted,” has been solved, authorities said Tuesday.

At a news conference, the police in Hollywood, Fla., announced that Adam was murdered by Ottis Elwood Toole, a drifter who confessed to the slaying and then recanted before dying in prison in 1996. .

the above does not really jive with this part of the linked article.....

In October 1983, Mr. Toole told the police that he had abducted Adam from the mall and drove for about an hour to an isolated dirt road where he decapitated him.

why is this case just being closed today? I must have missed some major detail.

Investigators lifted bloodstained carpet from Mr. Toole’s white Cadillac. But DNA testing then was not as advanced as it now, and investigators could not tell if the blood was Adam’s.

When a detective assigned to the case in 1994 went to order DNA testing on the bloodstained carpeting from Mr. Toole’s car, the carpeting and the car were found to be missing.

I'm guessing they just found the carpet in some evidence room somewhere, bothered to do proper DNA testing on it, and officially confirmed what everyone already knew.

Shame that it's taken so long. I saw one of the interviews with John Walsh on tonight's news. It was very sad.

Sky News is running a focus on "the missing" this week.
The figures are scary. Not just children of course, but run-away teens and adults too.
Surely they can't all be living on the streets - there must be a lot of unmarked graves out there.

Hmm, I forget which source I found the article in, but that version of the article stated there was no new evidence or breakthrough in the case. It sounded more like the family wanted closure, the department wanted to close the case, and the drifter was dead so couldn't recant again. They just formally named him and closed the case.

I also saw an article this morning and it specifically said that there was no new DNA evidence. The guy confessed twice and they found a sandal like the kid's sandals at his house. Seems likely that he did it.

Sundae Girl wrote:

Surely they can't all be living on the streets - there must be a lot of unmarked graves out there.

I once found myself on a state government website documenting "Jane/John Does," i.e. unidentified bodies. It's not like they were all mutilated or decomposed beyond recognition; there were perfectly recognizable (if still obviously dead) photos of most of them. And yet they could not be connected to any missing persons case--these people had not one person in their life who cared enough to notice they were gone. There were hundreds of them.

It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to develop software to match up faces from the Jane/John Does databases to photos in the missing person's databases.

That's just it, a real person (granted, a state employee, but they're sort of like real people) has already tried to match the faces and come up with nothing. These are dead people that no one ever reported as missing. I suppose it's possible they were reported missing in another state, but I'm pretty sure they at least try to cross-reference that sort of thing.

But do they use a Ouija board? If they combined a Ouija board with face recognition software they could probably ID most of the John/Jane Does, and find out what happened to them.

They could probably clear up half of the cold cases in a long weekend.