The Adam Walsh Effect: 2016

The summer of 2016 must cause us to revisit the Adam Walsh Effect. 

Adam Walsh

Who was Adam Walsh? He was the son of John Walsh, best known for his successful series, America's Most Wanted (Fox, 1988-2012) and currently Hunted with John Walsh (CNN, 2014-Present). John Walsh was propelled into crime-fighting after the murder and beheading of Adam Walsh.

Adam John Walsh (November 14, 1974 – July 27, 1981) was a six-year-old American boy who was abducted from a Sears department store at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida, on July 27, 1981. His severed head was found a little over two weeks later, on August 10, 1981, in a drainage canal off of the Florida Turnpike.

During the 16 days he was missing, Adam Walsh's photograph, especially one of him as a tiny baseball player, was all over the media.

It became a memorable image, haunting parents for years to come.

Indeed, many point to the Adam Walsh beheading and chilling nature of the post-traumatic stress caused in repeated viewings of the photograph of Adam as leading directly into the era of the helicopter parents.

One mother, who identifies herself as "Marianne" wrote about the "Adam Walsh Effect" in 2013, as she struggled with letting her three sons get their pictures taken with their Little League teams:

As someone who grew up in the wake of the 1981 kidnapping and murder of little Adam, the image of the sweet little boy smiling from beneath his too-big baseball hat has haunted me for 30 years. This baseball picture was widely circulated throughout the media at the time of the kidnapping, and for many mothers, it served as a reminder to hold tightly to their kids and trust nobody.
As a mother now, I have forced myself to shake off some of my Adam Walsh fears. I realized that I needed to allow my boys to use public restrooms without screaming "EVERYTHING OKAY IN THERE?" every 10 seconds. I needed to learn to let them cross the street without my all-clear. I needed to fight the urge to homeschool them whenever I read a story of a shooting or child predator.
I started relying on statistical data and odds relative to stranger abductions in this quest. For the first time ever, I have consciously suppressed my helicopter tendencies. Most days, it is physically painful, but I am determined to ease up or I know my children will end up fleeing to Alaska to escape me.
I must say, though, this thing would be a whole lot easier if our last name wasn't Walsh. Source.

[As an onomatological aside, Walsh is a common Irish surname, meaning "Briton" or "foreigner," literally "Welshman," taken to Ireland by British (Welsh, Cornish and Cumbrian) soldiers during and after the Norman invasion of Ireland.]

During the summer of 2016, the Adam Walsh Effect - down to the similar photos and decapitations - are part of the news of some days.

After I posted this blog essay, I became aware that Time Magazine just published an article, "The U.S. Is Still Dealing With the Murder of Adam Walsh" on the 35th anniversary of the discovery of Adam's head, August 10, 2016. (August 10th popped up again this year as a focus date; see below.)

The Time article noted:

“[The Adam Walsh case] created a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents,” says Richard Moran, criminologist at Mount Holyoke College. “Kids used to be able to go out and organize a stickball game, and now all playdates and the social lives of children are arranged and controlled by the parents.”
Even despite the decline in actual abductions, Moran says, “the fear still lingers today.”

Lane Graves

You know the story of little Lane Graves and the Disney alligator(s), from a previous posting here. His picture was one of the first kids this summer you may have seen a great deal of, via the media.

Some of the Lane Graves images had a Adam Walsh reflective aura.

An alligator snatched the 2-year-old boy and dragged him under water in the Seven Seas Lagoon on the evening of June 14, 2016, between 9 and 9:15 p.m. at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Bay Lake, Florida. His father Matt desperately tried to rescue him, but was reportedly attacked by a second alligator and forced to flee. His mother, Melissa witnessed the attack as well and tried to save him too. Lane's four-year-old sister was standing there as well and saw the tragic event take place. The Orange County Sheriff's office and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission conducted a search and recovery effort to locate the boy's body, which was recovered on June 15, 2016, at approximately 1:45 p.m.

His body, which was intact, was found about 10-15 yards away from the location of the attack. It is believed that he was drowned by the alligator, which was 4-7 feet long. It took authorities about 17 hours to find and recover the body.

Some of the media montages were ill-conceived and in bad taste.

Brodie Copeland

On Bastille Day, July 14, 2016, a truck rammed through a crowd in Nice, France. The first two Americans identified as having died in that attack were a father and son from Lakeway, Texas.

Sean Copeland, 51, and his 11-year-old son Brodie were among the more than 80 people killed when the truck zig-zagged through a screaming crowd for more than a mile along the Promenade des Anglais.

The first picture shown of Brodie was of him in his Little League outfit. 

Caleb Schwab

Then the boy with a bat returned in a big way when on August 7, 2016, Caleb Schwab, the 10-year-old son of Kansas state representative Scott Schwab, died riding when he was thrown from the Verrückt. Schwab was decapitated. He was one of three passengers on a raft with two women, one of whom suffered a broken jaw, and the other a broken bone in her face requiring stitches in her eye. The park was closed for two days following the incident, pending inspection results that took place during the time. The park reopened on August 10 but the ride itself has been shut down indefinitely (at least for the rest of the season), pending further investigation. (Graphic details of Caleb's death were carried by some media.)

The Schwab family lives in Olathe, Kansas. 

Olathe was one of the towns attacked by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson's and William Quantrill's raids in "Bleeding Kansas." Anderson "is known to have personally executed several people during William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, and his unit’s savage tactics reportedly included cutting off enemies’ ears, decapitation and scalping." Source.

The first published photograph of Caleb Schwab showed him in his Little League outfit, baseball bat in the resting position, a la' Adam Walsh.

In an unfortunate photo montage, a news picture shows Caleb Schwab's headshot floating above the waterslide ride that resulted in decapitating him. Unconsciously, other media outlets did the same thing.

Caleb Schwab was the son of a state representative in Kansas. He was decapitated on a water slide. The name of the slide caught Andrew B's attention: "The Guinness World Records has certified the ride called Verruckt — or German for 'insane' — as the tallest in the world." Source.

Declan McClain

Declan McClain, 3, of Jeanette, Pennsylvania, fell from a 78-year-old wooden roller coaster at Idlewild Park and SoakZone at about 1:00 PM, on Thursday afternoon, August 11, 2016.

The McClain incident was the fourth amusement park accident in five days when a boy apparently fell out of roller coaster in Pennsylvania.

In the other recent accidents around the country, one child has been killed, another suffered a brain injury and at least two others were hospitalized.
Idlewild and SoakZone spokesman Jeff Croushore provided few details regarding the accident, but he said it happened on the Rollo Coaster, an old-style wooden ride, about midway to the finish, CNN-affiliate WTAE reported.

Recent Incidents:

Recent accidents of amusement park rides have been summarized by CNN (with dates added by me to clarify the chronology):

The Pennsylvania amusement ride accident comes after several others across the nation.
A 10-year-old boy died on a water slide at the Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City, Kansas, on Sunday, August 7, 2016.
Two riders were injured when a launch cable detached at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, that same day, August 7, 2016.
Three children fell from a Ferris wheel at a Tennessee county fair on Monday, August 8, 2016, critically injuring two of them.
On Thursday, a 6-year-old girl remained in critical condition with a brain injury and a 16-year-old girl had been upgraded to stable condition.

Other Incidents:

A soldier who lost both legs serving in Iraq fell to his death from a roller coaster in upstate New York in 2011. Sgt. James Hackemer, 29, was riding the Ride of Steel roller coaster at Darien Lake Theme Park Resort when he plummeted about 200 feet to the ground. Hackemer's remains were laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. 

A teen was decapitated by the Batman roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia in 2008. He was struck by a train after he scaled two fences around the ride to retrieve his lost hat. 

Kaitlyn Lasitter lost both feet when a free-fall thrill ride malfunctioned at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom Amusement Park in Louisville in 2007. A cord wrapped around the then-13-year-old's feet and severed them at the ankles on the Superman Tower of Power. 

A group of high-schoolers' pre-graduation outing turned into a nightmare when a water slide collapsed at Waterworld California in 1997. The accident injured at least 30 people and killed a teenage girl. The girl's family settled a lawsuit against Waterworld USA and its parent company Premier Parks Inc. for $1.7 million three years later, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

James A. Young II, a 45-year-old special-education teacher, lost his cell phone and wallet when riding a roller coaster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, in 2015. When Young jumped over a fence into the restricted area under the roller coaster to look for his belongings, he was hit and killed by a coaster train. 

In 2013, Rosy Esparza was thrown out of her seat on the Texas Giant roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas and died from multiple injuries. Her family filed a civil wrongful-death lawsuit accusing Six Flags of negligence. The ride was closed for nearly two months and reopened in September 2013 with improved safety measures.

The Adam Walsh Effect: 2016 Edition

In a year that is rapidly becoming filled with terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and violent incidents, it remains to be seen what impact this new wave of publishing young boys' photographs who died tragically will have. The public's attention is being overwhelmed with dreadful news, and the overall ripple repercussions of the Adam Walsh Effect revisited are unknown.

Decapitations, Dawns, Masked Men, and Tridents

September 9-11 Alert:

How is it that we find ourselves here? At this juncture of history, after recent years of writings on red dawns, auroras, beheadings, dark knights, masked men, and tridents, we rush towards an exact moment in time foreshadowed in our nightmares (predestined for madness?) by the Libyan Dawn, the Masked Men Brigade, ISIS, and indirectly, the Rapid Trident exercise.

An Islamist fighter from the Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn) coalition flashes the V sign for victory at the entrance of Tripoli international airport on August 24, 2014 - and his truck has an enigmatic "17" painted on its door. (For more on the synchromystical significance that some give to the number 17, see here.)

What hellish path brings us to this temporal point, with September 9th to September 11th on the horizon for the Mideast? And what is to occur with a mid-September "Rapid Trident" exercise in the Ukraine?

Masked men belonging to various Palestinian factions announced in Hebron on Dec. 15, 2012, the establishment of the National Unity Brigades and the beginning of a third intifada against Israel. Source.

Decapitations

Beheadings are in the news, thanks to ISIS. And thanks to tabloid journalism. These acts of terror have been placed to the forefront of news reportage for over a decade. They are graphic, individual attacks of terror. The list is growing long.

Steven Joel Sotloff, abducted August 4, 2013, beheaded around September 2, 2014.

James Foley, abducted November 22, 2012, beheaded around August 19, 2014.

Kenneth John "Ken" Bigley, abducted September 16, 2004, beheaded on October 7, 2004.

Jack Hensley, beheaded on September 21, 2004.

Owen Eugene "Jack" Armstrong, abducted September 16, 2004, beheaded on September 20, 2004.

Paul Marshall Johnson, Jr., abducted June 12, 2004, beheaded around June 18, 2004.

Nicholas Evan "Nick" Berg, abducted around April 9, 2004, beheaded on May 7, 2004.

Daniel Pearl, abducted January 23, 2002, beheaded on February 1, 2002.

Are you aware there have been three US/UK decapitations/beheadings in the last few days? (There have been several, historically, needless to say.)

On August 29, 2014, an unidentified man, formerly of Chicago, conducted a self-decapitation (with a cable tied to a tree, wrapped around his neck) in Yorktown, Virginia. Source.

On September 1, 2014, using a similar method - a cable, a wooden pole, and a car - Tomas Rivera, 51, of Port Jervis, New York, decapitated himself in Hunts Point, Bronx, New York. Source.

Both news reports used exactly the same wording that the men "hit the gas" before killing themselves.

An unnamed elderly woman was beheaded in the garden of a north London, UK, house, and her body found on September 4, 2014. Source.

Tragic and horrible, of course. Perhaps the American suicides are related to the copycat suicidal atmosphere in the USA, in the wake of the Robin Williams self-hanging? Perhaps the UK beheading is stimulated by the beheadings in the news of Sotloff and Foley?  But is there something more wicked this way coming?

Libyan Dawn/Masked Men Brigade

Eleven - yes, 11 - commercial airliners have been stolen by the Masked Men Brigade or the Libyan Dawn or both in Tripoli. And where does ISIS fit in this picture?

Tripoli International Airport was overtaken by the group Libyan Dawn in August 2014, and now 11 aircraft for Libyan Airlines and Afriqiyah Airways are missing. 

Members of the Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn) coalition guard the entrance to the Tripoli International Airport on August 24, 2014.

September 9-11 Anniversary Syndrome

There is great concern for what might be ahead for next Thursday, on the anniversary of September 11.

But the focus on the 11th could be a danger, in and of itself.

This year's Supermoon on September 9th is metaphorically creating a tidal wave of human emotions in ways unimagined. But astronomy is not the key. It is the human elements in play that will cause what we see unfold.

The 13th anniversary of 9/11 is reinforced with the second anniversary of the attack on the American embassy on September 11, 2012, and killing of former Navy SEALS and American diplomats at Benghazi, Libya.

Human behavior forecasting is not a parlor game. It is a real life exercise to attempt to predict real time behaviors (actions, conduct, performance) that call forth protective factors that should be put in place, and prevention measures to employ to keep our friends out of harms' way.

The anniversary syndrome is strong at this time of year. You can actually "feel it in the air," with the changing seasons.

Here are some events tied to incidents in the past that jumped out during my examination of the dates September 9-11:

September 9 ~
1970 – A British airliner is hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to Dawson's Field (a remote desert airstrip near Zarka, formerly used as a British Royal Air Force base) in Jordan.
2001 – Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan by two al Qaeda assassins who claimed to be Arab journalists wanting an interview.
2004 – A bomb explodes outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, killing 10 people.
2012 – A wave of attacks kill more than 108 people and injure 351 others in Iraq.

September 10 ~ 
1898 – Empress Elizabeth of Austria is assassinated by Luigi Lucheni.
1939 – World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy's first loss.
1976 – A British Airways Hawker Siddeley Trident and an Inex-Adria DC-9 collide near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, killing 176.
2000 – Operation Barras successfully frees six British soldiers held captive for over two weeks and contributes to the end of the Sierra Leone Civil War.
2001 – Antonio da Costa Santos, mayor of Campinas, Brazil is assassinated.
2003 – Anna Lindh, the foreign minister of Sweden, is fatally stabbed (assassinated) while shopping, and dies the following day.

September 11 ~

1922 – The British mandate of Palestine begins.

1939 – Iraq and Saudi Arabia declares war on Nazi-Germany. 

1968 – Air France Flight 1611 crashes off Nice, France, killing 89 passengers and 6 crew.
1970 – The Dawson's Field hijackers release 88 of their hostages. The remaining hostages, mostly Jewish and Israeli citizens, are held until September 25.

The origins of the Black September movement began with Arafat's clashes with Jordan, intriguingly due to hijacked planes. On September 6-12, 1970, four TWA, Swissair and BOAC planes were hijacked (the El Al one failed), destroyed, and this was directly tied to Palestine civil uprisings and the resulting suppression that was to be called Jordan's "Black September." 

1972 – The Munich Summer Olympics end. At this Olympics the "Black September" terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes, on the 5th.
1974 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashes in Charlotte, North Carolina, killing 69 passengers and two crew.
1976 – A group of Croatian nationalists plant a bomb in a coin locker at Grand Central Terminal. After stating political demands, they reveal the location and provide instructions for disarming the bomb. The disarming operation is not executed properly, killing one NYPD bomb squad specialist.

1994 – A private plane attempts to crash into the White House.
2001 – Two hijacked aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, while a third smashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in a series of coordinated suicide attacks by 19 members of al-Qaeda. Altogether, 2,996 people are killed.
2003 – Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh dies from her assassination stabbing of the previous day.
2012 – The U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya is attacked, resulting in four deaths. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors and former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed during the series of raids, commencing at nightfall and continuing into the next morning.

11s

There is something special about the number 11 to terrorists, no doubt about it. Such incidents as the 3/11 [2005] Madrid, 7/11 [2006] Mumbai, and 9/11 [2001] terrorist attacks serve as misnamed “celebrity events” that become models copied by other Islamic extremists.

Pakistani Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged Al-Qaeda mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, was quoted as saying after the failed 1993 attempt that they would do it right the second time. He was also the brains behind the elaborate Bojinka, translated as “the explosion.” This was a plot to place bombs on 11 American jetliners and have them all explode on the same day, over the Pacific Ocean. 

Yousef carried out a test run for Bojinka by planting a bomb that detonated on Philippines Airlines Flight 434, on December 11, 1994. One tourist was killed, ten injured. Yousef called the Associated Press after this bombing, to give credit to Abu Sayyaf. His friend Khalid Sheik Mohammed would launch the deadly September 11 terrorist attacks, which were built from parts of Operation Bojinka.  

It does not seem to be a coincidence that the first airliner to crash into the Twin Towers (a symbolic 11) was American Airlines (AA = 11) Flight 11.

The flight number for the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Pentagon was 77.

As noted in the opening of my 2004 book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines, September 11th was the date of an assault by a private plane on the White House, in 1994, although the attack is little remembered today. 

September 11th is not to be ignored. But is there a growing "danger zone" around that date now?

For this September 2014, avoid letting your guard down on the 9th and 10th, just because you know you should be on alert on the 11th. Also, realign the hot spots of awareness from land-based sites, and think outside the box. While watching Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, be careful of soft symbolic targets linked to those that are identified with, for example, the U.S. Navy (tridents), political figures (dark knights/assassinations), and auroras (red dawn attacks). 

A storm is coming. The Dark Knight still rises. We are at a concurrence of circumstances that will be revealed, soon enough. It is up to you to prevent them. Yes, you. Be alert, be safe, and be proactive.

+++

Upon reading the above, the following was sent in response:

"Sometimes these days when I wake up, I think I must have

been dreaming, and it is still the 12th century." ~ Brad Steiger, September 5, 2014.

VA Tech Students Slain ~ Again

A new tragedy has hit Virginia Tech.

Authorities are stepping up patrols near an area of Jefferson National Forest where two VA Tech students were found slain, during this first week of school.

A man walking his dog in the forest's parking lot section of the Caldwell Fields area, Blacksburg, Virginia, early Thursday, August 27, 2009, found the bodies. They were 19-year-old David Lee Metzler of Lynchburg and his girlfriend 18-year-old Heidi Lynn Childs of Forest.

When deputies arrived they found Metzler's body sitting in his car (a 1992 blue Toyota Camry), while Childs's body was on the ground nearby. The gravel parking lot of the campground and wildlife viewing area is popular among Virginia Tech students.

A suspect has not been identified.

Metzler was a sophomore industrial and systems engineering major and Childs, a sophomore biochemistry major.

Caldwell Fields is a peaceful area away from the hustle and bustle of campus life, a hangout site for students, especially on the weekends. Caldwell Fields is 15 miles west of Mason Cove and Hanging Rock, which are on Catawba Valley Drive, and five miles NW of Lafayette, which is on Interstate 81. The area where the students were killed is about 15 miles from the VA Tech campus.

The forest is technically named the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, consisting of two U.S. National Forests that combine to form one of the largest areas of public land in the Eastern United States. They cover 1.8 million acres (7,300 km²) of land in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

One victim's name Metzler has origins in German (Middle Rhineland), as an occupational name for a butcher, Middle High German metzeler, from Latin macellarius "dealer in meat," from macellum "stall (at a market)," "meat market."

In a statement released from the Virginia State Police, it has been learned that Childs is the daughter of a state police sergeant.

It reads in part… "Tonight, the Virginia State Police grieves with Sgt. Donald Childs and his family during this deeply difficult and painful time."

Childs, home-schooled in Abingdon, moved to Forest, Virginia, with her family about four years ago. Her father, Sgt. Donald Childs, has been a helicopter pilot with the Virginia State Police for 20 years. She had seven siblings, and fell somewhere in the middle.

Childs had met Metzler at Heritage Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Autopsies were being performed, but Montgomery County Sheriff Lt. Brian Wright said both students appear to have been shot sometime late Wednesday night (August 26) or early Thursday morning (August 27).

Heritage Baptist Church pastor Gerald Kroll said Friday, August 28, 2009, both had been active in the church for a long time and were members of Campus Crusade for Christ.

Two years ago, on April 16, 2007, a student gunman killed 32 others and then himself. On January 21, 2009, a doctoral student beheaded a fellow student in a campus cafe in the Graduate Life Center.

As blogger Thuth has previously pointed out in his research:

The northwestern corner of Virginia Tech is located upon an old historic site called Draper’s Meadow - bordered on the south by Stroubles (Troubles?) Creek...On July 8, 1755 a group of Shawnee Indians entered the sparsely populated settlement and brutally killed five of the settlers that lived there in what eventually came to be known as the Draper’s Meadow Massacre. Draper’s Meadow became the town of Blacksburg. The incredible synch here is that one of the settlers that was killed – the oldest of the five, one Philip Barger, was decapitated by the Shawnee. They put his head in a bag and sent it to a neighbor, telling them a friend had come to visit.

Today, few at Blacksburg, Virginia's well-known university are aware of this history. The community members have their hands full dealing with current unfortunate traumatic events, of course. Nevertheless, the past is prologue to the future.


"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana.


"I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so, myself. To some degree I do not. I offer the data." ~ Charles Fort.



Credit: Gary Varvel

Mad Butcher

The reign of terror ranks up there with Jack the Ripper's, but few today have heard of the decapitating legacy of the "Mad Butcher."

January 26, 1936

On this day 73 years ago, police found the third dismembered victim of the so-called Mad Butcher, sparking a citywide panic in Cleveland.

The body of Florence Polillo, 42, was discovered in a basket and several burlap sacks behind a downtown business. Like the others, she was beheaded and cut with precision.

The official count is 12 victims between 1935 and 1938, although the lead Cleveland detective believed the Mad Butcher could have been responsible for more than 40 deaths around Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio.

The victims were usually drifters whose identities were never determined. Sometimes the torso was cut in half; in many cases, the cause of death was the act of decapitation itself.

One suspect, an actual butcher named Frank Dolezal, was interrogated for 40 straight hours until he confessed to killing Polillo. However, he changed his story and killed himself in his cell. Few authorities believed Dolezal was actually the killer.

The true identity of the Mad Butcher remains a mystery.

Washington D. C. Examiner, January 26, 2009.