John Walsh on AllMovie

A living testament to how one man can take a devastating experience, turn it around, and use it to change the world, John Walsh entered the public eye on a heartbreaking note. He was employed as a hotel entrepreneur during the '70s and very early '80s, and a very profitable one at that, with a $26-million resort project in the Bahamas, multiple business partners, and a bright future ahead. The course of Walsh's life, however, drastically changed on July 27, 1981, when six-year-old Adam Walsh -- the only child he had with wife Reve -- was abducted from a Sears department store in Hollywood, FL, and turned up brutally murdered 16 days later. Despite the emotional cataclysm into which the Walshes found themselves irrevocably plunged, they channeled their anger and devastation into a productive outlet by co-founding the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and lobbying for the creation of the Federal Missing Children Act (ratified in 1983). Around six years after Adam's abduction and murder, the then-fledgling Fox network contacted Walsh and asked him to emcee one of the first reality programs in years: America's Most Wanted. Debuting April 10, 1988, it presented detailed accounts of psychopathic criminals still on the loose -- with a heavy emphasis on kidnappers, serial killers, and rapists -- enhanced by photographs of the individuals, interviews with surviving victims, and frequent dramatic reenactments. By the mid-'90s, the program (which worked in tandem with the FBI and other local, state, and federal agencies) helped bring in over 400 such individuals. A follow-up series, The John Walsh Show (2002), visited the other end of the equation by teaching parents and guardians how to keep children safe from predators, and he also traveled around the country profiling real-life heroes. Unsurprisingly, Walsh's involvement in America's Most Wanted drew wrath from untoward numbers of criminals who blamed him for their vile actions and made him increasingly susceptible to predation; it required the Walshes (with three additional children, all born after Adam) to hire an army of bodyguards and take an extreme number of additional personal security measures.

The acclaimed network telemovies Adam (1983) and Adam: His Song Continues (1986) dramatized the Walshes' story. The films cast Daniel J. Travanti (Hill Street Blues) as John Walsh and JoBeth Williams (The Big Chill) as Reve.

The Adam Walsh case remained officially unsolved for 27 years, until 2008, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation definitively concluded what John Walsh had been arguing for some time: that Ottis Toole -- a convicted serial killer and pedophile -- was responsible for Adam's abduction and murder. Toole died while serving a prison sentence for an unrelated crime in 1996.