Etan Patz was a beautiful American boy of 6 when he disappeared from his Soho neighbourhood in lower Manhattan on May 25, 1979. His disappearance created the missing children movement, including new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children, such as the milk-carton campaigns of the early 1980s. Poor Patz was the first missing child to be pictured on milk cartons. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated the anniversary of Patz’s disappearance (May 25) as National Missing Children’s Day in the United States. Watch a documentary about Patz here.
On the morning of May 25 1979, Patz left his home alone for the first (and last) time to get on a school bus. For months little Patz had been pestering his parents to walk alone to the bus. It was two blocks away. At the time, the public loudly criticized the Patzes. That was how it was back in the day: the victims were always blamed.
At school, Patz’s teacher noticed his absence, but did not report it to the principal. Certainly her carelessness contributed to the amount of time the perpetrator had while abducting the child, but by that time it was possible that Patz was already dead. When Patz did not come home after school, his mother called the police.
An intense search began that evening, using nearly 100 police officers and a team of bloodhounds. The search continued for weeks. Neighbors and police covered the city with missing-child posters featuring Patz’s face, but this resulted in few leads. The child’s body was never found.
Stan Patz, Etan’s father, was a professional photographer and had a collection of 
photographs he had taken of his son. His photos of Etan were printed on countless missing-child posters and milk cartons. After receiving the case in 1985, Assistant United States Attorney Stuart R. GraBois identified Jose Antonio Ramos, a convicted child sexual abuser who had been a friend of Patz’s former babysitter, as the primary suspect. Ramos had dated Patz’s caretaker around the time the boy vanished. Some boys had accused Ramos of trying to lure them into a drain pipe in the area where Ramos was living in 1982. When police searched the drain pipe, they found photographs of Ramos and young boys who resembled Patz. GraBois eventually found out that Ramos the Rapist had been in custody in Pennsylvania in connection with a child molestation case.
When first questioned by GraBois, Ramos stated that, on the day when Patz disappeared, he had taken a young boy back to his apartment to rape him. Ramos said that he was “90 percent sure” it was the boy whom he later saw on television. However, Ramos did not use Patz’s name. He also claimed he had “put the boy on a subway.” Eventually he admitted he tried to to have sex with the 6-year-old, but the child refused and he put him on a subway to Washington Heights.
Decades later, in 2001, the Patzes finally had their child declared legally dead.They hoped for decades that their son would one day appear at the door and couldn’t bring themselves to declare him dead for 22 years. They never considered moving from their loft.“We always thought we should be here for him,” Stan Patz said. “At some point, he must have realized that things were going bad and I still gag with the fear that this child must have felt when he realized he was betrayed by an adult.” Stan Patz sobs and collects himself. It’s been two decades and the pain is still fresh. The guilt is still in the forefront of his mind.
Ramos was declared to be responsible for Patz’s death in 2004 in a New York civil case but he has never been prosecuted criminally for it. Every year, on the anniversaries of Patz’s birthday and disappearance, Stan Patz sent Ramos a copy of his son’s missing-child poster. On the back, he typed the same message: “What did you do to my little boy?”
Etan’s parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, pursued a civil case against Ramos. They were awarded a symbolic sum of $2 million, which they have never collected. They had the 2004 judgment dismissed after the 2015 trial of Pedro Hernandez convinced them that Ramos was probably not responsible. Hernandez told investigators he lured the boy into the bodega basement, strangled him, stuffed his still-breathing body into a produce box and dumped him in an alleyway a block and a half away. But his lawyer Fishbein argued that authorities coaxed the confession from a man with low intelligence and a history of mental illness during a 6.5 hour interrogation.
On May 24, 2012, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced that a man was in custody who had implicated himself in Patz’s disappearance. According to The New York Times, a law enforcement official identified the man as Hernandez of Maple Shade, New Jersey, age 51, and said that he had confessed to strangling Patz. According to a 2009 book about the case, After Etan, Patz had a dollar and had told his parents he planned to buy a soda to drink with his lunch. Hernandez was an 18-year-old convenience store worker in a neighborhood bodega at the time of the child’s disappearance. Hernandez the Horrible said that he later threw Patz’s remains into the garbage.
A New York grand jury indicted Hernandez on November 14, 2012, on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. His lawyer stated that Hernandez was diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, which includes hallucinations.The lawyer also said his client has a low IQ of around 70, “at the border of intellectual disability.”
On December 12, 2012, Hernandez pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of kidnapping in a New York court. The case resulted in a mistrial in May 2015 after the jurors deadlocked 11-1 for conviction A retrial began on October 19, 2016, in a New York City court, with jury deliberations in February 2017. The juror who held out explains himself in this news clip.
The extensive media attention given to Patz’s disappearance has been credited with 
creating greater attention to missing children, resulting in changes such as less willingness to allow children to walk to school, photos of missing children being printed on milk cartons, and promotion of the concept of “stranger danger“, the idea that all adults not known to the child must be regarded as potential sources of danger. Technology and laws have moved forward to try and reclaim missing children and punish those who would hurt them: Megan’s Law, the Amber Alert, FBI intervention, Holly’s Law, and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children are but a few organizations/laws that have forwarded the cause of abducted children. Meanwhile, the Patz case seems to have stalled.
Jury deliberations about Hernandez continue while the world – and Patz’s parents – await the verdict.
Deaths, Abductions and Deviants....oh my! 