John Walsh lost his six-year-old son Adam to a brutal murder in the summer of 1981 in Hollywood, Florida. The shock and devastation of that experience culminated in Walsh creating and hosting the wildly popular television program America’s Most Wanted, beginning in 1988. Willis Morgan was an eyewitness at the mall the day six-year old Adam Walsh was taken, but rather than feel relieved when the Hollywood Police Department convicted suspect and serial killer Ottis Toole in 2008, he felt sick and frustrated that eyewitness testimony of Jeffrey Dahmer being at the Hollywood Mall the same day was disregarded. Morgan joined Dave Schrader (email) to discuss the compelling evidence that it was Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, who killed Adam, and not Toole. Other eyewitnesses shared their testimony that agrees with Morgan's.
What is undisputed is that Adam Walsh was at the Hollywood Mall with his mother on July 27, 1981. She left him alone for a few minutes and he disappeared. Sixteen days later, his severed head was found in a drainage canal some 120 miles away. Morgan was in the mall that day and says he talked to the suspect, who he has positively identified as Dahmer. He recalled a "bizarre encounter with a person who tried to start a conversation with me" and "who was very dangerous and very strange" and who appeared "disheveled and reeked of beer." Willis extricated himself from the encounter, but followed the man as far as the Sears store, and lost him in the toy department. Later, when mugshots of Dahmer were released after his 1991 arrest in Milwaukee, Willis was sure that it was the strange man he had encountered in 1981.
Other witnesses emerged who saw a mugshot of Dahmer that was taken in 1981 when the abduction occurred and were certain that he was the suspect they had seen in the mall. Morgan contacted them to obtain statements, and three appeared on the program to corroborate the identification. First, Mia Taylor recalled a strange and frightening man who "had a weird look on his face and smelled like alcohol" tried to talk to her 10-year-old brother in the Sears store. Ginger Keaton and her son Terry (who was 10 at the time) recalled a strange man who Terry said was "looking at him funny" and scared him so badly that he ran to another adult for help. Ginger is now "100% sure on my heart, my soul and my God it was Dahmer."
To answer allegations that Dahmer only preyed on gay and African American men, Morgan also pointed out the killer's history of arrests for indecent exposure and allegations of child molestation, as well as suspicious episodes indicating a history of homicide from his stint in Germany while enlisted in the U.S. Army. He claims that he has been continually stonewalled and ignored by the Hollywood P.D. as well as John Walsh himself over the years, but continues his quest because he "knows what happened -- I know who I saw." Dave Schrader also provided alternate coverage here.