The grand jury that reviewed Adam Walsh's evidence but issued no indictment

On July 27, 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was watching television with other children in the Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida.

His mother was shopping nearby in the same store.

A security guard escorted him from the store after finding him misbehaving.

The guard was later cleared.

The boy was never seen alive again by his family.

This is the moment that would be examined for decades.

What happened after he left the store is the question at the heart of the case.

What exactly happened after the security guard escorted Adam from the store is not established in the record.

The television set was on.

The store was open.

A child was watching cartoons, or something like that, while his mother looked at clothes a few aisles over.

Then a guard took him by the hand.

Then the door.

Then nothing.

That nothing — the gap between the store and the canal — is where the case would live for twenty-seven years.

THE DISCOVERY

On October 10, 1981, Adam's severed head was discovered in a drainage canal along Florida's Turnpike near Vero Beach.

That was about 120 miles from the Hollywood Mall where he had vanished.

The rest of his body was never found.

The initial investigation focused on the Sears store and its employees.

Police questioned the security guard who had escorted Adam from the store after the boy was found misbehaving.

The guard was cleared.

The case went cold for years.

For more than a quarter-century, the case remained unsolved.

The medical examiner who examined Adam's remains testified before a grand jury that the cause of death was homicide.

The exact manner of death was not determined.

That would require evidence that the record does not establish.

The canal gave back only a head.

It gave back no body, no weapon, no witness to the act itself.

Not because the investigation was idle.

But because the trail, such as it was, had gone cold.

The gap between the store and the canal remained a blank.

It was a void the case would occupy for twenty-seven years.

THE CONFESSIONS AND RECANTATIONS

In 1983, Ottis Toole began confessing.

Toole was a drifter, a serial killer, already in prison in Florida for other crimes.