Law Enforcement’s Go-to Guy

A cop was dead and the trail was going cold. The Texas Seven had disappeared without a trace--again. The rogue band of prison escapees had killed the policeman in Irving, Texas, on Christmas Eve, then slipped into the night.

So the law called John Walsh. The jut-jawed host of the “America’s Most Wanted” television series is law enforcement’s go-to guy, the one cops call when they’ve run out of clues for those particularly heinous crimes that are standard fare for the weekly Fox TV show.

And because of that, he’s the darling of cops nationwide. Walsh goes where other members of the media are banned; his arrival more often than not leads to a round of souvenir snapshots before work can begin.

Brief mentions of the Texas Seven on two previous episodes of “America’s Most Wanted” had turned up nothing. So television’s top crime buster opted to head for Texas, intent on dedicating most of his show to the gang he called “scumbags and cowards.”

And, as usual, Walsh was treated like royalty when he got there. He listened as the Irving police told him what the Texas Seven had done to Officer Aubrey Hawkins, who was slain when he came upon the escapees as they were robbing a sporting-goods store of weapons, cash and clothing.

“They said to me, ‘Let us tell you what these guys did to him,’ ” Walsh recalled. “They pulled him out of the car and shot him 12 times. They put their guns under his bulletproof vest and shot him. Then they ran over his head three times.”

Such is the grist of John Walsh’s life. Since it first aired in 1988, 650 criminals showcased on the program have been run to ground, most of them turned in by armchair detectives who recognized the crooks, many of whom had disappeared into the backdrop of ordinary lives.

These days, of course, there are many ways for law enforcement to highlight bad guys on the lam, ranging from traditional media to the Internet. Rare is the police department that doesn’t have a Web site, complete with missing-persons and most-wanted photos (the LAPD’s is particularly flashy). The FBI’s Web site gets more than 1 million hits a month, and the most popular mouse click by far is the modern-day version of the most-wanted fliers.

“It’s moving as fast as the changing media,” said Rex Tomb, head of the FBI’s fugitive publicity unit. Still, “America’s Most Wanted” remains the most efficient tool in electronic sleuthing, watched by more than 9 million viewers each Saturday night in its slot between “Cops” and the evening news. There have been other such programs, including “Unsolved Mysteries,” but “America’s Most Wanted” is the senior citizen of those still in production.

The product of the Fox Network’s infancy when there were only five outlets nationwide, it has endured 13 seasons and survived an abrupt cancellation (quickly rescinded) in 1996. Though never a blockbuster hit in the ratings wars, it has been a steady middle-of-the-pack moneymaker for Fox. And Walsh remains the staccato-voiced icon who leads his viewers each week through sordid criminal sludge.

That he was approached to do the show at all was because of a murder 20 years ago--his son’s.

The death of 6-year-old Adam Walsh is, in a tragic way, the point of origin for John Walsh’s celebrity. It has been like a row of cascading dominoes that has gotten him to this place where people recognize him in airports and line up for autographs.

At the time of the murder, Walsh was in the hotel business. Living in Hollywood, Fla., just north of Miami, he was the marketing and sales director for a hotel in the Bahamas. As the story goes, Walsh’s wife, Reve, and Adam were shopping in a Sears store when the two separated briefly--she to the lamps department, he to toys. And then the boy disappeared.

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In the weeks that followed, they mounted their own media blitz, culminating in an appearance on “Good Morning America.” But not before receiving some disturbing news. A boy’s decapitated head had been found by fishermen in a Vero Beach canal. A second call confirmed it was Adam Walsh.

First, John Walsh ripped apart his New York hotel room. Then he embarked--slowly at first--on a campaign to protect children. The hotel marketing man became a lobbyist for a law, passed in 1982, calling for the immediate investigation of any child reported missing. Two years later--in large measure because of his efforts--Walsh saw the creation of the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which has worked on more than 73,000 cases since its inception.

In the first years after Adam’s death, the Walshes’ story became the fodder for two made-for-television movies. Reve Walsh bore the first of three more children a year after Adam died. And, in 1987, the Fox recruiters flew to Florida in an attempt to convince Walsh that he should host “America’s Most Wanted.” In well-rehearsed fashion, honed by years of telling the story, Walsh recounted how he didn’t consider himself a television kind of guy, how it didn’t seem like a good fit. But then the Fox executives made a proposal Walsh said he couldn’t resist: The first episode would feature David James Roberts, wanted for numerous crimes, including the rape of a woman and leaving her 1-year-old baby to freeze to death on a highway.

“So I did the pilot,” he said. “It was an amazing experience. My heart was in it because I really wanted to catch him.”

When the show aired, the phones began to ring. Three days later, Roberts was arrested. He had been working as a coordinator for a homeless shelter in New York’s Staten Island. It was the first of hundreds of captures. And as Walsh and his crew went to work on the Texas Seven show, his hope was to add them to the list as well.

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Larry Todd, a spokesman for the Texas prison system, said it was only natural that “America’s Most Wanted” would be called when it was obvious that the escapees weren’t going to be captured immediately. Texas law enforcement had, after all, worked with the program many times before.

So when the camera crew from the program first showed up at the Connally maximum security prison in rural Kenedy, Texas, the warden personally escorted the show’s cameraman as he filmed his footage. As Todd put it: “He was afforded every courtesy.”

“America’s Most Wanted” highlighted the Texas Seven twice and hit pay dirt when a woman in Woodland Park, Colo., recognized the fugitives. Walsh was on a plane to Dallas when the first of the arrests was made. He said three Delta Airlines ground employees were waiting for him when he deplaned. “They said, ‘Mr. Walsh, Mr. Walsh, your show has caught five of the Texas Seven.’ ”

Notch another one for “America’s Most Wanted.” Not that the show has gone all these years without criticism, from appealing to the lowest common denominator to being too violent. But Gail Berman, Fox’s president for entertainment, said the bottom line is that the program is “real and important and not baloney.”

So on it goes, one year after the next of combining crime reenactments with Walsh’s on-camera steely-eyed outrage. The FBI’s Tomb said he had no hint he would still be working with the show when he was assigned to the fugitive publicity job in 1988. “I thought it would be a six-month tour and then I’d go back to what I’d done before,” said Tomb.

For all the criminals who have been caught over the years, there is one case that has not been solved: that of Adam Walsh. Walsh, though, thinks he knows who it was--a now-dead criminal named Ottis Toole, who once sent the true crime host a grisly note proposing to tell him “where his bones are” in exchange for $50,000. Walsh said Toole confessed that he “killed the little boy” on his deathbed.

“In our minds, there’s no doubt Ottis Toole killed Adam,” Walsh said. That knowledge has brought a certain amount of closure to John and Reve Walsh. And Walsh said helping others do the same thing is one reason to keep doing the show after all these years.

Lance Heflin, the show’s executive producer and the person who actually assembles each week’s offering, said the hardest part “is saying no to people. We get a lot of letters and calls not only from law enforcement but also from victims.”

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The world of crime has gotten meaner since the show’s inception, Walsh said, citing the number of high school students killed by their peers over the last several years as one example. “The disturbing part is that looking back over the cases, the crimes against people have become so much more violent,” he said.

Over the years, the show has changed Walsh’s life, changed the way he lives, the way his family lives. Always, he said, a bodyguard is not far away from him and his family. Even where he lives is not made public. “I’ve had so many threats over the years, but it comes with the turf,” he said. “Judges get threats. Cops get threats. And I’m on television every week.”

Last week, he was in Los Angeles filming in a seedy warehouse on the eastern edge of downtown. The show’s theme that evening was serial killers. A few minutes into it, Walsh, dressed in a black leather jacket and turtleneck, stared into the camera.

“Get ready,” he intoned. “We’re sweeping the dirt bags off the street, and this is the next one going down.”