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And there were problems with the suspect. Two years after the kidnapping he'd voluntarily confessed to killing Adam -- as well as literally hundreds of other people. But his details on the Walsh case and all the others were always vague, and the Walsh detectives could never confirm anything he said that they hadn't already told or showed him about the case, hoping to prompt him. In 1984 they'd dismissed him as a suspect. When police in 2008 announced that he did it, they were forced to admit they had no new evidence.

By then, True Crime journalist Arthur Jay Harris had already investigated the Walsh case for a decade. He'd found and published compelling evidence that Adam's kidnapper wasn't the drifter but rather was Jeffrey Dahmer, who when Adam went missing lived only miles from the shopping mall. Harris told the story on television on ABC Primetime, Anderson Cooper and elsewhere, and wrote it in The Miami Herald.

After he published his Dahmer theory, Harris got a stunning Facebook message: a man claimed to him that he was Adam Walsh, and that he'd been kidnapped and tortured by Dahmer. Rather than dismiss him, Harris listened. He realized it wasn't a hoax, but was the man deluded? He decided to try to prove him wrong by asking for the medical examiner's case file; with the police case closure, all the official case files had finally become public record. No one else in the public had ever viewed it. He expected it would prove that the 1981 identification of the found child was clearly Adam, and therefore this man couldn't be him.

What he found was even more stunning: the most crucial documentation that should be in every M.E. file was missing. The medical examiner who did the autopsy had never written an autopsy report, and eventually admitted so in writing. The ID of the child as Adam had been made strictly by teeth, but the file didn't have Adam's dental records or dental X-rays, a report of any forensic dental examination, or photos of the autopsy.

At a murder trial that was now precluded because the potential defendant was dead, if the state couldn't have proved that the found child was Adam and that Adam was certainly dead, they never could have proved that the drifter was Adam's killer.

From the police, Harris got crime scene photos of the found child. In his since-famous last photo in a little league baseball uniform, Adam at 61/2 endearingly had neither top front tooth, which was age-appropriate. But in the police photos the found child had a top left front tooth mostly in. When had Adam's last photo been taken? His father, John Walsh, wrote, the week before Adam disappeared. He'd been missing exactly two weeks when the head was found. Pediatric and forensic dentists told Harris that wasn't nearly enough time for a front tooth to come in as far as seen in the police photos.

Now convinced that this rabbit hole could lead him to the possibility that the man might in fact be Adam, Harris put him to two ultimate tests: he put him together with Adam's closest childhood friend, and a man who had survived long-term torture by Dahmer. If he wasn't Adam, it was impossible to understand how he knew so many small, real event details that only friends can recall, none of which had been published anywhere, or intimate things about Dahmer, also unpublished anywhere, that another survivor of his could confirm.

Could the man actually be Adam, still alive? Harris chronicled the story in a two-book series. This Special Single Edition is a shortened versi