Decades after six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared while walking to school in New York City, stirring widespread public fear in the US about leaving children unattended, his family felt they got some justice when Pedro Hernandez was convicted of murder in 2017.
Now that closure has also vanished.
On 21 July, a federal appeals court overturned the guilty verdict. The court stated that the judge in the murder trial was “clearly wrong” and “manifestly prejudicial” in his response to a jury note concerning Hernandez’s alleged confessions.
Hernandez should either face a new trial or be released, the court ruled. And so, it is again an open question of whether there will ever be a resolution to Etan’s case, which was a seminal event in US criminal history as it started a movement to help find missing children and caused many Americans parents to watch their kids more closely.
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“This case has endured for so many decades, it’s almost like there are generations of people that learn about it all over again,” said Lisa R Cohen, a journalist who wrote After Etan: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive.
“It’s going to have an effect on any young parent,” Cohen added.
On 25 May 1979, Etan’s mother, Julie, allowed him, for the first time, to walk to a bus stop just a couple of blocks away in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. After he didn’t come home at 3.30pm, Julie learned he never made it to school and reported him missing. Police spent weeks searching for him. His body has never been found.
“I’m not sitting around doing nothing but mourning and thinking of revenge,” Etan’s father, Stan, said, according to an excerpt from Cohen’s 2009 book. “But I’ve also waited 30 years to get justice for Etan. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
The stories of Etan and another child, Adam Walsh, inspired a movement to prevent the abduction and murder of adolescents, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In 1983, then president Ronald Reagan marked the anniversary of Etan’s disappearance by declaring the date National Missing Children’s Day. Etan’s face also appeared on billboards and milk cartons.
Before Etan’s disappearance, “kids played after school and came home for supper and no one was tracking every move”, Cohen said. “And then there is the time after Etan, when everything changed. It was a zeitgeist moment.”
A suspect, Jose Antonio Ramos, emerged a few years after Etan went missing, but law enforcement officials initially declared that he was not connected to the crime. A federal prosecutor later treated him as a prime suspect and pursued him. A convicted pedophile, Ramos admitted that he tried to molest the child but said he did not kill him.
He was never charged with Etan’s disappearance, but his parents won a $2m wrongful death lawsuit against Ramos in 2004.
Then, in 2012, Hernandez, who worked at a bodega near the Patz’s home, confessed that he lured Etan to his store by promising him a soft drink and took him to the basement and strangled him. His parents became convinced that Hernandez, not Ramos, was the killer,
A jury deadlocked on the Hernandez murder trial in 2015, but in a 2017 retrial, the jury found him guilty.
“The Patz family has waited a long time, but we’ve finally found some measure of justice for our wonderful little boy, Etan,” Stan Patz said at the time. “I’m really grateful that this jury finally came back with which I have known for a long time that this man, Pedro Hernandez, is guilty of doing something really terrible so many years ago.”
But during the investigation, Hernandez had initially confessed after seven hours of questioning from police, who did not read him his Miranda rights against self-incrimination, according to court documents. Only afterwards did police issue them, and he then repeated his confession.
During the second trial, the jury asked the judge to explain whether, if the jury found that Hernandez’s first confession was not voluntary, it must disregard the later confessions.
The judge said no.
The appeals court ruled that the directive was wrong.
David Schwartz, a former prosecutor in New York, said the judge’s answer “was certainly not harmless error” and “really is contrary to the law of confessions”.
“You certainly want justice to be done for this tragic case, but on the other hand, we have to uphold the integrity of the criminal justice system and fair trials,” he said.
Etan’s parents have not commented on the case since Hernandez’s conviction, the New York Post reported, and it does not appear that they have responded publicly to the appeals court ruling.
Louis K Meisel owned an art gallery on the block between the Patz’s home and the bus stop and knew the family “very well”, he said.
“It’s one of the biggest mysteries, and we’re never going to know the end and the answers,” Meisel said.
Cyrus Vance Jr, the former Manhattan district attorney who oversaw the two trials, told the New York Times after the ruling that he was “surprised and saddened for the Patz family”.
“I was certainly convinced myself that Pedro Hernandez killed Etan Patz, and I think that today,” Vance said.
Emily Tuttle, a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney said: “We are reviewing the decision.”
Schwartz, the former prosecutor, thinks the district attorney would have a difficult time retrying Hernandez.
“The confession was really at the heart of the case,” Schwartz said. “Unless there is new evidence somehow, which is very unlikely, I’m not sure they are going to be able to retry.”