John Walsh offers praise for Carona

The news business sometimes produces the surprise phone call, and I surely wasn’t expecting to hear John Walsh’s voice on the line Wednesday. Not the day after Hollywood, Fla., police announced that, as had long been suspected, a demented drifter killed 6-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981.

And I most certainly wasn’t expecting Walsh to be calling in support of Mike Carona, Orange County’s former sheriff now on trial on federal corruption charges.

After his son’s murder, Walsh became a national crime-fighting figure as host of TV’s “America’s Most Wanted.” He said the police announcement Tuesday “was probably the best thing that’s happened to me in 27 years, as it relates to Adam’s murder.”

But even while making the media rounds in New York City the day after the announcement, Walsh said he wanted “to step up to the plate” and praise Carona, who once served on the board of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which Walsh co-founded.

“He came on the board and he served very well,” Walsh said. “He was kind of the gold standard for a sheriff dealing with missing kids. Just by coincidence, I’ve suffered at the hands of some bad police work for years in Adam’s case and was always looking for sheriffs or police chiefs who did a good job. . . . He did a great job on the Samantha Runnion case, although it had a terrible outcome.”

He was referring to Carona’s national TV appearances after 5-year-old Samantha was abducted outside her home in Stanton and killed in July 2002. Talk show host Larry King dubbed Carona “America’s Sheriff” because of his impassioned comments after the kidnapping. The girl’s body was discovered the day after her abduction and, within days, the man later convicted of killing her was arrested.

Walsh made it clear he doesn’t know Carona well and isn’t up to speed on the particulars of the government’s case against him.

He described Carona as “very active” on the center’s board and involved in setting policies both for training law enforcement personnel and on improving ways to conduct future searches for missing children.

For some obvious reasons, Walsh’s call was a curious one. The judge in the Carona case reminds jurors daily not to read news accounts of the trial, so Walsh’s remarks theoretically won’t reach them. Nor will Walsh be a defense witness. He more closely fits the bill of someone who’d be a character witness during sentencing, should things reach that stage with Carona.

Who asked him to phone me? Walsh said it wasn’t the defense attorneys and suggested it was mutual friends of his and Carona’s. He didn’t want to identity them and said repeatedly that his sole motivation was to draw attention to Carona’s professionalism and commitment on the missing-children issue.

“I’m not a personal friend of his, I have no personal agenda,” he said.

But because “America’s Most Wanted” has given him a platform, Walsh said, he felt that “someone ought to talk about the good things this guy did.”

We talked about the case briefly and how former colleagues of Carona have cooperated with the government in providing details of the alleged misdeeds.

Walsh bridled at that, saying he knows that’s how authorities sometimes make their cases but added, “That’s always not set right with me.”

Walsh also alluded to a lucrative offer a Florida businessman reportedly made to Carona several years ago to work as a consultant for a software company. Talk of that offer surfaced briefly during the trial; Carona turned down the job.

“It seems incongruous to me,” Walsh said, “that he’d be in the shape he is, when he turned down money to be a consultant and chose to be on the [missing children] board for nothing.”

The Florida businessman whom I’m pretty sure Walsh is referring to has also served on Walsh’s missing children’s board. I’ll take a wild guess he’s the link.

If so, the businessman may have asked Walsh to put in a good word for Carona, and he obliged. But that doesn’t make the call any less surprising, especially in light of the more important swirl of news surrounding Walsh this week, which he described as “ending 27 years of torture.”

No pithy observations from me on this one. As the saying goes, it is what it is.

Still, in a case in which Carona’s former closest associates have played key roles in trying to do him in, I’m sure the beleaguered defendant would be pleased to know that he’s still got friends out there.

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dana.parsons@latimes.com