Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America

Today’s post is on Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction That Changed America by Les Standiford and Joe Matthews. It is 291 pages long and is published by Harper Collins. The cover is a picture of a single child’s swing with the sun setting in front of it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime. There is foul language, sex, sexuality, rape, and violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the blurb on Hoolpa- There are two periods of history that pertain to missing and endangered children in the United States: before Adam Walsh, and after Adam Walsh. In the aftermath of that six-year old's abduction and slaying in 1981, everything about the nation's regard and response to missing children changed.
The shock of the crime and the inability of law enforcement to find Adam's killer put an end to innocence, and altered our very perception of childhood itself - gone forever are the days when young children burst out the doors of American homes with a casual promise to be home by dark. And, due in large part to the efforts of Adam's parents, John and Reve Walsh, the entire mechanism of law enforcement has transformed itself in an effort to protect our children.
Before Adam went missing, there were no children's faces on milk cartons and billboards, no Amber Alerts, no national Center for Missing and Abused Children, no national databases for crimes against children, no registration of pedophiles - in fact, it was easier to mobilize the FBI to search for a stolen car or missing horse than for a kidnapped child. Such facts may be sad testimony to the weariness of a modern world, but there is also an uplifting aspect to Adam's story - the 27 years of undaunted effort by decorated Miami Beach Homicide Detective, Joe Matthews, to track down Adam's killer and bring justice to bear at long last.
Bringing Adam Home tells the story - the good, the bad, and the ugly - of what it took for one cop to accomplish what an entire system of law enforcement could not. Matthews' achievement is a stirring one, reminding us that such concepts as hard work, dedication, and love, survive, and that goodness can prevail.

Review- This is an in-depth examination of the Adam Walsh case and all the people involved from John and Reve Walsh to the individual cops who handled or mishandled the case. We start at the beginning of the story with Adam’s last day and go all the way to Detective Joe Matthews proving that Ottis Toole was the man who kidnapped, raped, murdered, and decapitated Adam. It is an exhausting read in many ways- from all the details, the reports, the pictures, and following Toole’s life from beginning to end; I was exhausted when I finished reading this. Standiford does not hold anything back to give definitive proof of Toole’s guilt. This is not a book for the faint of heart. Reading about the Walsh’s personal anguish that lasted for over twenty-five years; reading about how badly the police dropped the ball during the early day so the investigation and how those mistakes made this case take so long to solve. Moving, troubling, and enlightening this book gives the reader so much but the tragic death Adam Walsh has affected more than just true crime but the whole way that missing children are seen. Good read but only for the most hardy reader.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library’s Hoopla account.