INTERVIEW: Callahan Walsh focuses on missing person cases for new ‘In Pursuit’ special
Photo: Callahan Walsh is the host of In Pursuit: The Missing. Photo courtesy of ID / Provided by press rep with permission.
Callahan Walsh, son of legendary child advocate John Walsh, is back on television with a new special called In Pursuit: The Missing. The documentary, now available to stream on discovery+ and Investigation Discovery, investigates the troubling stories of several missing persons, including 29-year-old Lauren Dumolo from Cape Coral, Florida, and 15-year-old Sophie Reeder from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
The TV special serves as a spinoff of the popular ID show In Pursuit With John Walsh, which features both Callahan and his father. There is a hope that this documentary will spark enough interest for an entire series that can be a permanent companion to the main show.
“I was a producer for America’s Most Wanted for a number of years, so I followed my father around producing the show, watching him catch bad guys,” Callahan said in a recent phone interview. “And I left television about six years ago and made it over to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the organization my parents co-founded after my brother, Adam, went missing. While I had thought I was going to be wiping my hands clean of television, when I got there, they said, ‘Hey, would you mind going on television and telling our story and telling your story?’ So I was sort of thrust back into it.”
Callahan started taking requests for media interviews and became the new face of the National Center, and he began building an online presence, all with the intention of driving attention toward missing and exploited children. His brother Adam’s case inspired his father to lead a life fighting for children and other victims of crime, and Callahan followed in his footsteps.
“My father around the same time started a new show called In Pursuit With John Walsh on Investigation Discovery, and it was ID’s idea to see if I would co-host with him,” Callahan remembered. “I was sort of earning my chops on the interview circuit with local and national media and mostly news outlets. This would be my first time hosting or co-hosting the show, and I loved doing it. I loved working with ID. I loved the platform that they gave us. I like the format of the show, and it was successful. We caught 23 bad guys.”
Season three is on the horizon for that show, and in the interim, Discovery pitched the idea for The Missing. Callahan almost immediately said yes. “I thought that was a great idea, something I had been wanting to do, and it was perfect already having a presence on ID,” he said. “One of cases is a case that I’ve been covering at the National Center for quite some time since she went missing. It’s a teen named Sophie Reeder who went missing in South Florida in 2017, so it was a case I was very familiar with. And when talking to ID about which cases we should do for the special, that was one that was immediately at the top of my list, and I’m so glad that we’re able to cover it on the special.”
The skills needed to find a “bad guy,” as Callahan put it, are similar to what’s needed to find a missing person. But the unique difficulty with missing persons cases is that they have not been adjudicated yet.
“These haven’t gone through the court process, which is very different from most other true crime shows,” Callahan said. “Most true crime shows are going over a case that’s already happened, that’s gone through the court system; all the information is out there. With In Pursuit With John Walsh, we’re going after wanted fugitives. [But on The Missing], these are un-adjudicated cases, which make it much more difficult to handle. We want to make sure we’re not bungling the case, we’re not divulging too much information that law enforcement doesn’t want out there, that we’re not interviewing the wrong people or saying the wrong things. There’s a lot of sensitivity around those cases.”
Callahan said that he needs to work with families who are going through the worst experiences in their lives, and, of course, he can sympathize with their predicament because of his brother’s own case. But what he and the network are able to offer is a relentless pursuit to find answers.
“We’re working with law enforcement, and we’re using the show as an investigative tool,” he said. “With The Missing, there’s even more intrigue and mystery around these cases because we don’t know exactly what happened. With In Pursuit With John Walsh, when we’re going after a fugitive, we know who that fugitive is. This is their name. They’re this tall. They weigh this much. They’ve got tattoos here and there. With The Missing, we know who the missing person is. We don’t know how they went missing or why they went missing or who’s responsible, so there’s a lot more mystery, a lot more intrigue. And that’s what’s perfect about getting this information out there to the public because that’s what we do. We harness the power of the public, shine a white-hot spotlight on these cases to get as much attention as possible.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
In Pursuit: The Missing, with Callahan Walsh, is now available to stream on discovery+ and Investigation Discovery. Click here for more information.
