6 True Crime Stories From The 1980s

I love the 1980s, but like any other decade, it had plenty of dark moments. Here's six true crime stories from the Reagan era that shaped the America we live in today.

1981: The Kidnapping of Adam Walsh

On July 27th 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh and his mother Reve went to Hollywood Mall in Florida. She left him at a video game kiosk with other slightly older boys while she went to go shopping. After the boys made a ruckus, the security officer kicked them all out, including the shy six-year-old, who didn’t speak up that his mother was shopping in the store. Adam stood alone outside of the mall and was never seen alive again. Adam’s parents and local authorities posted a $100,000 reward for details leading to his safe return. Two weeks later, Adam’s decapitated head was found in a drainage canal nearly 130 miles away from Hollywood. Police investigation pointed to a drifter and serial killer named Otis Toole, who claimed he lured Adam into his car with promises of toys and candy. During the course of the investigation, police lost evidence, including the car, which had an unidentified bloodstain, and the machete Toole claimed to use. Because Toole kept retracting and confessing his statement, along with the lost evidence, he was never charged in Adam’s case. Toole would not be officially announced as the killler until 2008.

Adam Walsh’s parents became fierce advocates for missing children, who along with other parents, like Etan Patz’ family, pressured Congress to pass the Missing Children Assistance Act in 1984, leading to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. His father, John Walsh, went on to host America’s Most Wanted. The 1983 made-for-tv movie on the tragedy, named Adam, was viewed over 38 million times during it’s first airing. It aired twice more, with each broadcast followed by photos of missing children and descriptions of them, along with a hotline number. This next part is crazy. The movie is credited with finding 13 of the 55 children shown, including Bone Thugz N Harmony’s Bizzy Bone.

Before he became a bestselling rapper, in 1980 at 4 years old, Bryon Anthony McCane II and his two sisters were abducted. Sadly, he was snatched by his stepfather, a former Pittsburgh Steeler fullback named Bryon McCane, and held captive for two years. His babysitter saw his picture at the end of the Adam movie and called police, who then reunited him with his mother, where he continued to be a victim of abuse at the hands of his new stepfather.

While the Adam Walsh case was important and helped change the course of other people’s lives, racism permeated police investigations of non-white children. On October 12 1981, an 8-year-old girl named Gina Garcia was abducted from outside of a mall in Orlando, Florida and sexually assaulted in a case so similar to Adams that John Walsh believes the kidnapper was Otis Toole. The Orlando Police Department told Gina and her parents to not tell anyone about the assault and to just move past it. They designated the investigation just 14 days later as “inactive.” Meanwhile, in Atlanta, though Wayne Williams would be convicted of two adult murders in the 30 Atlanta murders that took place between 1979 and 1981, and was linked to a few of the children, most of the black children did not receive justice, let alone a TV movie, and the Atlanta PD investigation from then beginning was not handled with much care or attention.

1982: The Tylenol Cyanide Murders

From September to October 1982, the city of Chicago saw seven random murders occur from poisoning. Someone had laced Tylenol-branded acetaminophen with potassium cyanide. The first victim was a 12-year-old. Three people from the same family shared one bottle, and they died shortly after. Realizing a pattern, warnings were issued to those in and around Chicago to stop buying Tylenol. Chicago police literally went out into the streets with loudspeakers and told people not to take any Tylenol they had at home while people freaked out and called the local poison control center.

Johnson and Johnson issued a nationwide recall in October 1982 for an estimated 31 million bottles in circulation. The tainted capsules had been produced in both Pennsylvania and Texas, leading investigators to believe that someone in Chicago had taken the bottles off of shelves, laced them, then returned them back to stores for customers to buy. As a result of the poisonings and wanting to avoid a shareholder meltdown, Tylenol developed tamper-resistant packaging for its most popular product. But observers noted that the problem was also capsules, not just the packaging.

The tragedy was followed by more sadistic copycat poisonings, including tampered Tylenol in Yonkers and Excedrin in Washington State. In the case of the Yonkers death, the Tylenol bottle had been in a tamper-resistant seal inside of a sealed box. Denying that the capsules had been poisoned before leaving manufacturing facilities, Johnson and Johnson and other Pharma companies went on to phase out capsule products, which were cheaper than pills but more easily tampered with than pills. Product tampering was also made a federal crime. The person or people who poisoned the seven victims was never found, though one man, a Massachusetts tax consultant and former murder suspect named James Lewis, tried to extort Johnson and Johnson for $1 million to “stop the killings”. He spent 12 years in federal prison for extortion, but could not be linked officially to the murders.

1983: Diane Downs

On May 19, 1983 in Springfield Oregon, mother-of-three Diane Downs entered an emergency room with a gunshot wound in the arm, claiming that a man with “shaggy hair” had tried to carjack her before fatally shooting her 7-year-old daughter and shooting her 8-year-old daughter and her 3-year-old son. Hospital staff was creeped out by her calm nature and “unsettling statements.” Witnesses would say they had seen the mother driving to the hospital at 5-10 mph, not like a person in a rush to save her children’s lives. After police did some digging, they found that Diane was having an affair with a married man and former co-worker in Arizona, who told her that he did not want any children. She had also been stalking the man before moving to Oregon. Along with the physical evidence, it was determined that Diane had shot her children and herself.

Her three-year-old, Danny, was paralyzed from the waist down. Christie had a stroke. Nine months after the incident, she was arrested, and her conviction was partly successful because of the testimony of the 8-year-old, Christie. While in custody, Downs gave birth to a baby she had agreed to be a surrogate for in exchange for $10,000. Downs was convicted of all charges of murder and attempted murder in 1984 and sentenced to life in prison. Because Downs’ ex-husband and the father of the two children refused to take custody, they were adopted by the lead prosecutor of Downs’ case. In 1987, Diane escaped from prison by climbing an 18-foot fence, spending 11 days on the lam before being apprehended after a 14-state manhunt. The Diane Downs case signified that in a culture increasingly terrified of Stranger Danger, a lot of child abuse and murder was carried out by parents.

1986: The Preppy Killer

In 1986 New York had 1,907 murders alone. But one in particular stood above the rest because of the victim and the suspect. Robert Chambers was a 19-year-old who had grown up going to Upper East Side prep schools and mingling in the right social circles with the aid of scholarships. His father was an alcoholic, and Chambers did drugs and struggled to fit in. He eventually started stealing, got kicked out of multiple prep schools, and acquired a reputation as a burnout. Petty thievery turned into burglaries and alienation from his peers turned into a desire to prove himself to his peers. In 1986, Chambers was dating a 16-year-old, who broke up with him at a bar, and he took 18-year-old Jennifer Levin to Central Park. Jennifer had been living with her father and stepmother while attending Baldwin Prep. She and Robert had a sexual relationship, and she mentioned to friends wanting to have sex with him that night back at her apartment.

She told a friend to leave the key under the mat. When Chambers and Levin left the br, named Dorrian's Red Hand, Jennifer had minimal amounts of alcohol in her system. She was found dead two hours later. Chambers insisted that Jennifer Levin assaulted him after he rejected her advances, trying to arouse him with panties tied around his wrists until he “reached up with his left arm and pulled back on her neck as hard as he could, eventually flipping her over him.” A jogging doctor saw the couple appearing to be having sex thirty minutes before her estimated time of death. Another jogger said Chambers joked with him. Chambers claimed not to know she was dead and did not attempt to call for help, watching from a few yards away as her body was discovered by a cyclist, who phoned police. Chambers went home and went to sleep, where he was arrested soon after.

The city, and observers, divided into predictable stances. Because both Chambers and Levin belonged to an affluent social circle and went to prep schools, tabloids dubbed him the Preppy Killer. The full expose on the case, and by extension, the Upper East Side world of white teens, divided readers. It detailed Robert’s life sympathetically. Robert himself maintained a group of supporters. Jack Dorrian, owner of the bar, put up his house as collateral for part of Chamber’s bail, because Robert was his son’s friend. The Archbishop of Newark, a man named Theodore McCarrick, who is now disgraced because of his sexual assault of numerous boys, wrote a letter to the judge asking for Chambers to be released on bond. When Chambers' bond was set at $150,000, and his parents couldn’t pay it, some Catholics began raising money. His parents hired Jack Litman, a lawyer who in 1977 defended a Yale student who bludgeoned his ex-girlfriend to death and confessed to a priest about it the next day. Litman had worked his magic to get the Yale scholarship student, Richard Herrin, off with a manslaughter sentence.

Part of his defense strategy was claiming that Levin had a kinky sex diary, which actually did not exist. Newspapers like the Daily News led with headlines like “How Jennifer Courted Death.” The trial brought up discourse about slut shaming, victim blaming, female-on-male sexual assault, and privilege. There was also awful footage of Chambers popping a head off of a Barbie doll in his late teens, saying “Oops, I think I killed her.”  The jury disagreed on a verdict, prompting Chambers to accept a 5-15-year plea deal for manslaughter. He was required to say he had intended to hurt Jennifer significantly enough to cause her death.

Chambers was released from prison on Valentine's Day, 2003, but would later earn 19 years for selling drugs in 2008.  As for the bar that was serving underage teens alcohol, it was reported in 1987 that it’s liquor license was suspended for 10 days and fined $1,000.” The Jennifer Levin case would be referenced multiple times in pop culture and showed how Americans and the law were accommodating to rape culture. It also demonstrated the white privilege, because while Robert Chambers actually harmed a white woman in Central Park, nobody took out a newspaper ad calling for his death.

1987: The Kidnapping of Carlina White

On August 4, 1987, 16-year-old Joy White and 22-year-old Carl Tyson took their 19-day-old baby Carlina to Harlem Hospital because she had a fever, caused by an infection at birth. While staying for an IV of antibiotics, early the next morning during a shift change, a woman dressed as a nurse stole her, reportedly leaving out with the baby concealed in her clothing. It was the first ever kidnapping from a New York Hospital, but in the second half of the 80s, there were a total of 51 kidnapped babies from U.S. hospitals. Only four were not found, including Carlina The woman had comforted the parents, and had been seen around the hospital for the previous three weeks. While there was video surveillance, it was in disrepair that day— so investigators had to rely on witness descriptions.

Meanwhile, the woman took the kidnapped baby 45 miles away to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she was renamed Nejdra Netty Nance. The woman who took her was Annugetta Pettway. They later moved to Atlanta, Georgia.  Netty grew up wondering why she didn’t look like her mother Ann, and eventually, in 2005 when she was pregnant with her own child, and in need of her birth certificate, Ann told her that her biological mother had given her up. Netty, aka Carlina, would not find out that Ann had kidnapped her until 2010, when she stumbled across a picture of 19-day-old Carlina on a missing children’s website, incidentally solving a 23-year-old mystery. As New York Magazine reported, “No child in American history had ever been missing longer before being reunited with her parents.” Ann Pettway, whose lawyers would argue she had suffered years of miscarriages, would receive 12 years in prison for federal kidnapping and was released in April 2021.

1989: The Yuppie Murder

There were a total of 100 murders in Boston un 1989. On October 24, 1989, Furrier manager Charles Stuart was driving his pregnant wife Carol from a birthing class through a black neighborhood, Mission Hill, when a raspy-voiced man robbed and shot them at a red light. Charles got a stomach wound and Carol was shot in the head. The 30-year-old called 911 on his car phone and told them about the shooter before passing out.

William Shatner and the tv crew for Rescue 911, a new reality series, was in the vicinity and captured the Stuarts getting medical attention, guaranteeing that this case would become national news. Carol died and her son, born by c-section two months premature, also died. Boston police flipped the city upside down, implementing stop and frisk, looking for black men as Charles Stuart laid in a hospital bed for six weeks, receiving two operations. The mayor, Raymond Glynn, ordered 100 extra cops to search the streets. Recalled an observer, “During those first few days, African American men were lined up on street corners with their pants pulled down as officers searched their trousers and underwear for drugs, guns or any excuse to arrest them.” Black men were being rounded up and strip-searched, naked. Per the Boston Globe, “Community leaders estimated that starting in October 1989 there were more than 150 stop-and-frisk searches in the neighborhood each day through November.” Others mentioned their homes being unconstitutionally searched. Governor Michael Dukakis, who had been blamed for the escape of and subsequent rapes committed by furloughed prisoner William 'Willie' Horton, sat there at Carol’s funeral and ate his food while Boston continued it’s manhunt and citizens called for a reinstatement of the death penalty.

The media, meanwhile, speculated on the squalor and violence of black neighborhoods, and the case was compared to the Central Park 5. While some citizens and politicians began calling for a return to the death penalty, police eventually settled on a suspect named William Bennett, who fit the description of the raspy-voiced man who had robbed and shot the young urban professional and his pregnant wife.  Bennett was a career criminal with 38 arraignments and 60 arrests confirmed by his own lawyer, including shooting a cop in the 70s, for which he served 5 years. So police really wanted to make him fit. Charles identified Bennett as the robber in a line up. The problem with this whole story was that Charles Stuart had made the whole story up.

During that widely televised phone call to 9/11, he had never spoke his wife’s name or tried to comfort her as she died. A few siblings knew that Charles had sinister intentions for his wife, and somebody revealed Charles had expressed a desire to kill her before to other relatives. One friend told the New York Times that, “Mr. Stuart was upset that his wife had refused to get an abortion and he was worried that she would not go back to her job as a lawyer after giving birth, lowering the couple's income.” Charles may have been a yuppie earning $100,000 a year, but he was born blue-collar— and had only been making $4/hr as a short-order cook a decade previously. Charles’s brother Matthew, who had agreed to help, came clean in early January 1990. Stuart would die by suicide on January 4th, jumping into the Mystic River just days after spending part of his wife’s $83,000 insurance policy payout on jewelry and a $22,000 Nissan Maxima. The Boston police would continue using stop and frisk and never faced consequences for their treatment of the people of Mission Hill. William Bennett said the accusation ruined his life, and went on to prison for holding up a video store.

One good thing came out of the event. Carol’s brother Carl would set up the Carol Dimaiti Stuart Foundation, which for 25 years helped send finance some Mission Hill high school students’ college educations. Said Carl, “We always felt that we were victims and so was the black community,” Dimaiti said. “What better way to reach across and acknowledge their pain.”

Did you learn something new about True Crime History? Check out more stories from the 1980s in the following video!

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