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PHOTOGRAPHS INCLUDED "Ocean racing superstar Don Aronow loved it
when writers called him a living legend. His life of adventure is
well known. It is his death that baffles police. "He was afraid of
nothing, no one. In his final hour, when a stranger spoke to him in
riddles and talked about killing, Aronow laughed. He felt no fear,
until he lowered the window of his white Mercedes and looked death
in the face. And then it was too late." -- Edna Buchanan, in The
Miami Herald Bordering a canal leading to Biscayne Bay, a short
dead-end stretch of Northeast 188th Street in Miami was the
crossroad of the Americas in the mid-1980s for the biggest drug
smugglers into the U.S.; the guys who ripped off the drug
smugglers; the biggest South American drug suppliers; competing
federal agencies investigating major drug trafficking and money
laundering; the CIA, covertly advancing the Contra war against
Central American land reform (which they called Cuban-sponsored
communism); some of the highest national politicians in the
country-and what attracted them all there, the most famous
fast-boat companies in the world. On that splashy boulevard of
(wet) dreams factories built marine magazine-ad ultra-sleek
gleaming speedboats ostensibly for racers, royalty to show off on
the Cote d'Azur, and wealthy divorced or divorcing middle-age
overweight men to pick up South Florida's sun-soaked hot chicks in
string bikinis (while the rest of us unwashed wondered how they did
it), but the boat builders' real business was fueling an arms race
between smugglers, who purchased them for cash, and Drug War feds
to catch smugglers. The storied creator of the quantum-leap faster
Cigarette boat, against which all other "penis" boats were
measured, as well as a two-time powerboat racing world champion and
the personification of a sport in which people crazily risked their
lives and bodies to win-not to mention a wicked ladies' man to
boot, Don Aronow was shot and killed in broad daylight in front of
his factory in 1987. Police found they didn't just have a murder
mystery-they had Murder on the Orient Express. FEBRUARY 3, 1987 USA
Racing Team, Miami, Florida Someone entered the front door and
walked in front of salesman Jerry Engleman's desk. He asked to
speak with Don Aronow, then looked right at him without recognizing
him. "What do you want?" Aronow said. "I've been trying to get
ahold of you," the man said. He said he worked for a very rich man,
with an Italian surname, who wanted to make an appointment to buy a
boat. "I never heard of him," Aronow answered. Engelman could tell
something else was happening, and he thought Aronow was trying to
find out what. Then the conversation got weird. He was proud of his
boss, he said. "He picked me up off the street when I was sixteen
and took care of me. I'd even kill for my boss." For the moment,
none of the observers thought anything more of it. Minutes later,
Aronow drove his new 1987 white Mercedes 560 sports coupe across
the street, found Mike Britton, a marine supplier, and asked if he
could help him at his new house. Driving out of his parking space
forward, with Aronow behind him, Britton saw a dark Lincoln Town
Car with tinted windows, about ten yards away, facing east as
Britton was about to head west. The driver's window was down, and
Britton could see the driver looking at him. At their closest, when
they passed, they were just a few feet apart, keeping eye contact
the entire time. Then Britton drove on, about fifty yards. Then he
heard gunshots. Britton finished parking his truck, then raced back
toward Aronow. In a hurry, the Lincoln passed him, going west. It
had turned around. By the time Britton got to the car, he found
Aronow's driver's side window down, the automatic transmission in
neutral, and Aronow's foot pressed against the accelerator like a
rock, forcing the engine to rev at its most shrill. Apparently,
Aronow had stopped to kibitz with his killer.
A Millionaire Has An Affair. His Wife Throws Him Out. She Gets The
Mansion, The Business, The Cash. His Parents' Business. His
Parents' Cash. She Gets Shot And Doesn't Know It. The Bullet
Disappears. He Goes To Prison. His Parents Flee The Country. He
Weds The Other Woman Behind Bars. Has There Ever Been A Case Like
This? -The Miami Herald "Flower delivery for Marie Luskin " That
was a curious surprise. Her husband Paul used to send her flowers
all the time, but those days had passed forever. A year and a half
before, following Paul's affair with another woman, Marie kicked
him out of the house his parents had helped them buy-the biggest
house in Emerald Hills, which was the most luxurious section of
Hollywood, Florida-then filed for divorce. And what a spectacular
divorce. If nastiness could be judged quantitatively, the civil war
of the Luskins was the meanest, most aggressive divorce Broward
County had ever seen. "Who is it from?" "There's no name on the
card." "What florist are you from?" "Emerald Hills Florist." Still
apprehensive, she cracked open the wooden door just enough to see
him. With a sudden incongruous movement, the man stuck his foot in
the doorway and thrust the flowers at her with his left hand. As
she reached to take them, he stuck a silver pistol in her face.
Marie started shrieking uncontrollably. She tried to run inside,
but the man grabbed her, one arm around her neck, grasping for her
mouth with his hand. The flower pot fell to the black-and-white
marble parquet floor and shattered, pink petals scattering. "Shut
up Shut up " he yelled, closing the door behind him. "I'm not going
to hurt you. Shut the hell up, stop screaming " She finally stopped
when his hand formed a gag hard around her mouth, and she realized
the gun was at her temple. She couldn't stop looking at the gun,
which framed his cruel eyes. Then the man made an odd demand: "Give
me all your cash Give me all your cash Show me where you keep your
cash I'm not going to hurt you, but if you don't cooperate, I'm
gonna blow your brains out " With the man clenching her long blond
hair, the gun to the side of her head, she led him upstairs to a
small room where she showed him a hundred-dollar bill. "Where's all
your cash Give me all your cash " "It's in the bank " she whined.
"It's in the bank This is it. This is all I have at home, I keep
all my money in the bank " As the crescendo of voices in the Luskin
house rose to a climax, exactly what happened next remains in
dispute. Marie fell to the floor, a terrible pain in the back of
her head. She didn't lose consciousness, but pretended to. Meekly,
she opened her eyes and noticed there was blood all over her. She
thought she was going to die... The man had left without taking
anything. The issue would become, had she been hit like she
thought, or shot? That would seem to be the difference between a
robbery and an attempt to kill her that might have descended from
her husband. Doctors found three minuscule pieces of lead in her
bloody scalp. If they were fragments from a bullet, could she have
been shot without realizing it? Or were they from the gun or
whatever it was that hit her, or the decorative metal hair barrette
she was wearing that had broken, separating its clip that had been
held together by lead-based solder? Also, if a gun was fired in
that small room, where was the rest of the bullet? The police
didn't find it. And why hadn't it shattered one of the room's three
full-length mirrors? That would become the story's essential
mystery, and the answer would determine whether Paul and three
alleged accomplices would go to prison. It must have been a shot, a
federal court jury determined, because they convicted all four of
attempted murder-for-hire. Doubting it, to discover the truth for
himself, Miami true crime author Arthur Jay Harris went on an
Odyssey through the heights and depths of Miami and Baltimore. To
the very last page, what he found kep
"DAD, I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS CASE. WHAT SHOULD I DO?" A TRUE
STORY Breathless, a woman's call to 911 interrupted a quiet night
in the horse country suburbs: "I'm stabbed to death. Please " Did
somebody stab you? asked the operator. "Yes And my husband, my baby
" Within minutes, officers arrived at her remote ranch house but
didn't know whether an assailant was still present. Announcing
themselves, they got no response, then entered anyway, guns drawn,
and began a dangerous, tense search, room by room. Then they heard
a baby's scream. Although the house wasn't yet fully cleared, they
followed the wailing to the master bedroom where they found, tied
and gagged, her husband and elderly father-in-law. They and their
18-month-old all had been shot point-blank in the head-but were
still alive. Shocked, the officers called out to bring in
paramedics, who had to crawl through the living room because the
house still had not been completely cleared. Hurrying, and contrary
to usual procedures, the officers spread out. One found a locked
closet door; four officers gathered, and with guns ready, one of
them kicked it in. Behind it they found their 911 caller-still
holding the phone. "Oh, shit," said the kicker. In the history of
Davie, Florida, there had never been such a savage and sociopathic
crime, and police and homicide prosecutor Brian Cavanagh were
determined to resolve it. For three years, they had two suspects
under surveillance, then arrest. Both faced the death penalty. But
as the legal case progressed, Cavanagh began to doubt that the
defendants were partners. Possibly one had been a victim of the
other, as well. In 1963, Cavanagh's dad, Tom, a Manhattan
lieutenant of detectives, had a famous case called the "Career
Girls Murder," two women in their twenties found horribly mutilated
in their Upper East Side apartment. The newspapers played the story
big, a random killer on the loose, meanwhile Tom and his precinct
detectives had been unable to solve it. Months after the murder,
Brooklyn detectives declared the case solved; they'd taken a signed
confession from a man with a low IQ. Their additional proof was a
photo in his wallet; it was of one of the girls he killed, he said.
The man quickly recanted, although that didn't much matter to the
Brooklyn detectives. As soon as he heard some of the details of the
confession, Tom disbelieved it; the man didn't fit the profile.
Needing to work quietly under the most difficult of circumstances,
Tom sent out his own detectives to do the impossible: identify the
girl in the picture. It had been taken in some sort of park
setting. They first showed it to botanists, who recognized the type
of trees in the background and where they grew. From that they
could guess at where the park was. Targeting nearby high schools,
the detectives then showed the photo to teachers to see if any
could recognize the girl. One did. When they found the girl, she
asked, "Where did you get that?" After all that impossibly good
work, Tom and his detectives caught a break and found the real
killer of the Career Girls. Until then, Tom said, he hadn't
believed that police could make such mistakes. Afterward, as a
result, New York State outlawed the death penalty. As well, this
remarkable story inspired a TV movie and series starring a
character playing Cavanagh's role. His name was Lt. Theo Kojak. As
a child, Brian Cavanagh had watched his dad's anguish throughout
that situation. Now, he had a case that was remarkably
similar-except that he was potentially on the wrong side. Once his
confidence level in the guilt of one of his defendants dropped to a
level of precarious uncertainty, Brian showed the same courage as
did his dad so many years earlier-proving that the son was the
equal of his father. Arthur Jay Harris is the Miami author of the
investigative true crime books Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The
Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, Speed Kills, and Flowers for Mrs.
Luskin.
INCLUDES PHOTOS AND DOCUMENT EVIDENCE FROM PUBLIC RECORDS THIS
SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION IS A CONDENSED VERSION OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO,
FOR BRIEFER READING: "FIRST THE POLICE FOUND THE BODY. THEN THE
KILLER. NEITHER WAS RIGHT." "A TRUE STORY" The medical examiner
misidentified the body. The cops blamed the wrong suspect. What
really happened to Adam Walsh? In 1981, America was captivated-and
horrified-by the kidnapping and reported murder of six-year-old
Adam Walsh. Florida police ultimately identified the decapitated
head of a found child as Adam, and implicated an out-of-town
drifter as the murderer. But something about the investigation was
incomplete. And wrong. In this special Single Edition of his
controversial two-book chronicle, journalist Arthur Jay Harris
reveals that Walsh's kidnapper was actually the notorious serial
killer Jeffrey Dahmer, that the body found by police was
misidentified, and that Adam Walsh is quite possibly-even
probably-still alive. FOR MORE OF THE DETAILED STORY, READ BOOKS
ONE AND TWO: BOOK ONE, FINDING THE KILLER: "WAS THE MAN IN THE MALL
THE MOST NOTORIOUS MURDERER IN HISTORY?" It was the crime of the
decade -- and the murderer may have been the most notorious serial
killer of the century. In 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished
from a Sears department store in South Florida. Two weeks later, in
a canal, fishermen discovered a severed head that was identified as
Adam's. Police concluded that the murderer was a deranged drifter
named Ottis Toole, but lacked the evidence to convict him. Toole
died in 1996. Enter Florida journalist Arthur Jay Harris, whose
ten-year investigation of the unsolved case now reveals the
shocking identity of the kidnapper: the late mass-murderer Jeffrey
Dahmer, whose obsession with imprisoning his victims, dismemberment
and cannibalism made him the most feared criminal of the 20th
century. BOOK TWO, FINDING THE VICTIM: "THE BODY IDENTIFIED AS ADAM
WALSH IS NOT HIM. IS ADAM STILL ALIVE?" Thirty years after he was
reported as dead, could the Walshes' little boy, Adam, actually be
alive? In Book One of this compelling crime investigation,
journalist Arthur Jay Harris reveals that serial killer Jeffrey
Dahmer kidnapped six-year-old Adam Walsh, and that police named the
wrong suspect in Adam's presumed murder. In this shocking
conclusion to the story, Harris reveals his secret encounters with
a 38-year-old man who contacted him with an astonishing claim: that
he is Adam Walsh. Could it be true? Could Florida police have
actually misidentified the found child as Adam? Through detailed
interviews, tireless probing and the discovery of a never-released
piece of information-that Adam's teeth did "not" match those in the
severed head of the discovered corpse-Harris at last untangles the
story of a gruesome crime whose solution has eluded investigators
since 1981.
INCLUDES PHOTOS AND DOCUMENT EVIDENCE FROM PUBLIC RECORDS THE BODY
IDENTIFIED AS ADAM WALSH IS NOT HIM. IS ADAM STILL ALIVE? A TRUE
STORY ALSO READ BOOK ONE, FINDING THE KILLER: WAS THE MAN IN THE
MALL THE MOST NOTORIOUS MURDERER IN HISTORY? THERE IS ALSO A
SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION, A CONDENSATION OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO, FOR
BRIEFER READING: FIRST THE POLICE FOUND THE BODY. THEN THE KILLER.
NEITHER WAS RIGHT. BOOK ONE shows that in 1981, in Florida, serial
killer Jeffrey Dahmer kidnapped 6-year-old Adam Walsh and that
police named the wrong suspect in Adam's presumed murder. BOOK TWO
begins with a Facebook friend request after I'd published Book One:
I thought you might be interested to know that J. Dahmer did kidnap
me... I have to give you credence outright for laying most of the
blame on the man behind my own abduction. Sincerely, Adam J. Walsh
Wasn't Adam Walsh dead, wasn't that what this story was all about?
Two weeks after Adam had been last seen at the Hollywood Mall, a
severed head had been found in a canal 125 miles north, and a
medical examiner there said it was Adam. Nothing else of him was
ever found. He'd had a funeral service, the community and his
parents cried their eyes out, and the Walshes dedicated themselves
to helping find other missing children. And at a 2008 press
conference, they'd endorsed the Hollywood Police chief's decision
to finally close the case by declaring that Ottis Toole, not
Dahmer, killed Adam. For a week, I listened to the man who said he
was Adam Walsh. So much of everything else in the story had turned
out contrary to what the police and the Walshes had insisted on.
How could I just dismiss this? The man said Dahmer had kept him for
possibly a month. He let him hear the news about the discovery of
Adam, dead. After that, Dahmer tortured him horribly and left him
near-dead himself. Unconscious, he'd been rescued but knew no
details. Another family took him in and raised him, with their
surname. The man was clearly sincere, but was he self-deluded?
Could I possibly verify anything he had said? It seemed impossible.
Dismissing him would have been the easiest thing. Rather than prove
that he was Adam Walsh, I first tried to prove that he wasn't. The
upstate M.E.'s report was in public record. He'd made an ID by
comparing the teeth in the head to Adam's dental records. Also, a
Walsh family friend had made an ID. But John Walsh wrote that the
friend didn't immediately recognize him, he said it was Adam only
after seeing that he was missing a top front tooth. When police
closed the case, all the Walsh case files became public record. The
child's autopsy was done in Ft. Lauderdale and I got to see the
file. It was stunning: it had no report of the autopsy, no forensic
dental report, and no copy of Adam's dental records. Nor were they
in any other official file. The M.E. who did the autopsy responded
to me only in writing that he never wrote a report. There were some
photos of the child's teeth, though. They showed, as the upstate
M.E. wrote, that of the child's top two front teeth, the left was
in most of the way, and the right had just erupted. But Adam's
famous Missing photo clearly showed that he had neither of his top
front teeth. That picture, I found, had been taken about a month
before he disappeared. In the police file was the best last seen
alive description of Adam. Of his top front teeth, it said that his
left had just emerged, and his right was missing. In the found
head, the top front tooth that's mostly in is the left, and it's
the right that just erupted. Could Adam's teeth have grown in that
much in the 14 days after he disappeared? Unlikely. Plus, the M.E.
who did the autopsy estimated that the child (Adam, he said) had
been dead possibly all of that time. Now I had to keep going, could
I determine if this man indeed was Adam Walsh? There were many more
su
BOOK ONE: FINDING THE KILLER WAS THE MAN IN THE MALL THE MOST
NOTORIOUS MURDERER IN HISTORY? A TRUE STORY ALSO READ BOOK TWO,
FINDING THE VICTIM: THE BODY IDENTIFIED AS ADAM WALSH IS NOT HIM.
IS ADAM STILL ALIVE? THERE IS ALSO A SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION, A
CONDENSED VERSION OF BOOKS ONE AND TWO, FOR BRIEFER READING: FIRST
THE POLICE FOUND THE BODY. THEN THE KILLER. NEITHER WAS RIGHT. In
summer 1981 6-year-old Adam Walsh, son of John Walsh, vanished from
a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. After two frantic weeks in
which the entire community searched for him, a child's severed head
declared to be Adam's was found 125 miles north in a drainage area.
No other body parts were ever found. In 1991, Milwaukee police
arrested Jeffrey Dahmer and found 11 severed heads in his
apartment. He admitted then that in the summer of 1981 he'd lived
in Miami 15 minutes from the Hollywood Mall. Dahmer denied killing
Adam because, he said, he didn't have his own vehicle. But
immediately after Dahmer's arrest two separate insistent witnesses
went to Hollywood police and identified Dahmer as the man they saw
at the mall on the day Adam disappeared. In 1981 they'd both told
police what they'd seen but police had kept no record of their
tips. One said Dahmer had approached him inside the mall in a
drunken, threatening way. He'd followed him at a distance into the
toy department of Sears, where Mrs. Walsh had said she'd left Adam.
The other witness said he was outside and saw Dahmer grab and
violently throw a protesting child into a blue van that screeched
away. That matched what a 1981 witness had said about a blue van,
and for the first month of the case, police had stopped every blue
van they saw. Yet without seriously checking, Hollywood police
simply believed the word of a manipulative serial killer when he
said he didn't kill Adam Walsh. Investigative author and journalist
Arthur Jay Harris did what Hollywood police wouldn't do: he traced
Dahmer's movements in Miami and built a case against him. He
learned that at the sub and pizza shop where he worked there was a
blue van for deliveries that employees often took for their own
use. Also, Dahmer often showed up for work in the morning drunk and
was sent home. As well he discovered a police report dated 20 days
before Adam's abduction in which Dahmer reported finding a dead
body of a homeless man in the alley behind his shop. Dahmer had
never mentioned this. When ABC Primetime and Harris entered a meter
room in the alley behind the shop, where Dahmer said the homeless
man had slept, they found an old lumberman's axe and a sledgehammer
next to a huge amount of what a retired crime scene investigator
identified as blood spatter. The homeless man had not bled. Was
this evidence of other extreme violence by Dahmer? Even after an
ABC producer informed Hollywood Police, they never bothered to
enter that room, much less test the blood evidence. In 2008
Hollywood police announced the case was finally solved-incredibly,
they said the killer was Ottis Toole, a drifter who in 1983 said
he'd killed Adam but soon after had been dismissed as a suspect.
Police presented no new evidence. Toole had not been able to tell
police any specific true thing about the case, and much of his
initial information was painfully wrong. He'd blamed Henry Lee
Lucas for killing Adam, but Lucas was in jail that day. He said
Adam's murder happened around January and he was wearing mittens It
was July in sweltering South Florida. No DNA evidence was ever
matched to him. Further, Toole had also confessed to hundreds of
other murders for which he was never charged. But in closing the
case police made public its entire case file. In it Harris found
four more insistent witnesses who had also seen Adam, Dahmer, and a
blue van in the same precise spot at Hollywood Mall that day in
1981. Inexplicably, Hollywood police had turned them all away.
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