John Miller looked more like a college sophomore reporting for his student paper than a jaded New York street reporter. That’s because the twenty-one-year-old was a college sophomore, commuting down from Emerson College every weekend for the last couple of years to cover the gritty New York crime beat. His father was a well-connected national gossip columnist in the tradition of Walter Winchell, and the younger Miller had been kind of a child prodigy news junkie. He unconsciously affected a tough, old-school street reporter’s manner, and his competitors liked to joke that he’d show up someday in a fedora with a press card tucked into his frizzy blond ’fro. But the crusty style, along with his droll charm, worked for him by disarming the news gatekeepers, and he often got the last laugh, and the scoop.
This time, all the television crews seemed to arrive simultaneously, reporters in an assembly line of microphones and notepads as the press breached the loft. Miller pulled up behind a bakery truck, one of many now sharing the crowded curb with cop cars and TV production vans. Usually the delivery trucks owned the streets, as all night and day they moved breads and rolls out of the R&K Bakery diagonally across the street from 113 Prince, delivering wholesale to a tri-state clientele. This was not one of Miller’s usual neighborhood haunts. He surveyed the makeshift residential real estate where the commercial space was clearly being overtaken by New Yorkers desperate for affordable housing, and wondered who the people making their homes here were. Then he walked up the stairs into the apartment and took his turn to interview Stan and Julie Patz.
The loft was crawling with cops, and Miller waited patiently for the parents to disengage from an exchange with one of them before getting their comments. He’d reported on his share of grieving parents, and these two did not seem like media grandstanders, primping before their shot or speaking in hollow platitudes. He was impressed with Julie’s teeth-gritting eloquence and grateful she was willing to oblige the crew by posing on the balcony. He wondered if that’s where she had spent most of her time in the last twenty-four hours anyway.
Spreading the word, it soon became clear, had its drawbacks. Sometime in the afternoon, even before the local news segments and the sensational headlines, Stan Patz had his first taste of life without filters to screen the rest of the world. A fleshy white woman of indeterminate age climbed the stairs, accompanied by a man Stan assumed was her husband. “I have important information that I can share only with the parents,” she announced importantly to the cops. They didn’t know what to make of her. The police had an understandably tough time differentiating between concerned neighbors and the mystical seers, curiosity-seekers, and just plain kooks who were beginning to show up. The problem was, anyone might present a viable clue, so in the first days no one was discounted. Soon afterwards, a “cops only” policy was instituted in the loft, but when this woman announced she had “information,” she could have been E. F. Hutton. She was the first of countless psychics, and as the first, the cops gave her a free pass.
Stan led the woman next door to the Cohns’ and sat with her on the couch. Her husband said nothing. She appeared to marshal her forces, then intoned dramatically, “I see a hand.” Then a long pause. “I see water.” She didn’t say much more, just shook her head, sighed, and looked profoundly sad. It didn’t sound good, or particularly helpful. Stan politely said goodbye, frustrated, angry at the vagueness of her “information,” and no more informed. But he was so desperate for something constructive to do, he knew he wouldn’t turn away the next fruitcake with a vision.
Back in the loft, Bill Butler was cursing the holiday weekend, with its tightly shuttered storefronts. Then a call came in, the first real spark of hope. One of the few businesses open was the hardware store, with the lumber yard the bloodhounds had liked. Now manager Howard Belasco had been questioned, and yes, he remembered seeing two boys playing in the lumber yard around 4:30 or 5 o’clock the previous afternoon. This could close an eight-hour gap, and Butler rushed to question Belasco, showing him Etan’s photograph on the newly created cards Stan had made him from four-by-five prints. Butler carried them everywhere with him now. The two boys had been playing in a dumpster, Belasco told Butler, and then had bought a few boxes of nails. He looked at Etan’s photo and was sure it was one of the boys. Butler was elated. Someone else identified the other child, and he was tracked down. But Belasco was wrong. The boys had bought the nails to build a stall for the upcoming St. Anthony’s festival, and then they had gone home. The manager was very apologetic, but Butler thanked him for his help.
As the day waned, Jack and Jeff Lembeck turned home too, abandoning the futile search. Nearing their apartment, Jack began to see the posters more frequently on streetlamps, parking meters, and storefronts. He heard the voices, amplified by megaphone, of other searchers.
“We’re trying to locate a lost child by the name of Etan Patz,” one man’s voice boomed. “He’s only six years old. Blond hair and blue eyes. He was last seen wearing a black cap, blue pants, blue sneakers, and blue jacket.”
Jeff’s jacket, thought Jack Lembeck. It so easily could have been Jeff. Stopped at one corner, Jack was aware of a couple staring, then pointing at his son. “He looks just like the picture,” Jack heard the man say. As Jack rode past the next poster, he focused on Etan’s image. Seeing the boy’s face was like lightning striking the roof next door.
CHAPTER 3
The Occupation
Reporter: If you could speak with the persons who may… have your son, what would you say?
Julie: I would simply say we hold no malice towards them, all we want is our boy back. We have no intention of prosecuting, we just hope that they treat him nicely and get him back to us somehow, anyhow. If they want to walk right up here, they can walk back out as far as I’m concerned. Right now we have absolutely no clues—nothing to go on.
—Julie Patz, May 27, 1979, interviewed in her apartment by Channel 5 WNEW
From pulpits around lower Manhattan on Sunday morning, parishioners heard about Etan in earnest appeals and prayer. Folks who may have skipped church got the word on the street, when police on loudspeakers trumpeted a detailed description of the boy. The NYPD had also notified transit authorities, who broadcast Etan’s description over their radio frequencies every half hour.
New Yorkers who were out of earshot or who hadn’t tuned in to local TV news the night before read the first newspaper accounts on Sunday morning, either in the tabloids or the hefty Sunday edition of the New York Times, which carried a brief account buried among the full-page Memorial Day weekend blowout furniture sale ads.
Stan’s sister-in-law Naomi Patz was at home in suburban northern New Jersey when she learned the news leafing through her Sunday paper. Stan had left a message for his brother, Rabbi Norman Patz, after calling their parents the day before, but no one had picked up the message yet. Naomi immediately called the synagogue, and her husband rushed into the city.
At the apartment, neighbors were moving quietly through the front room with food offerings: home-baked bread and fruit. Stan sat with detectives at the table or listlessly on the couch, puffing mechanically on a pipe. Julie intermittently couldn’t seem to move, then couldn’t seem to sit, pacing the room, arms wrapped around herself. She would burst into tears, then pull herself together, trying to ignore reality so she could continue to function. Both parents had had next to no sleep since Friday morning, and now as they waited, the hours stretched on unendurably. Stan had lost the ability to distinguish between one minute and the next, to logically feel time passing. Each minute took forever, and like a grade-schooler waiting for the three o’clock bell, he agonized through each one, never sure if he’d still have his sanity sixty seconds later.
Taking Barry Ensminger’s advice, Stan managed to find respite, as he always had, in the darkroom. There he’d begun making actual prints from his proof sheets. He and Julie handed these out to the TV crews and reporters, and when the supply ran low, Stan simply stepped into the darkroom he’d built adjacent to the
front room to print out a hundred more. And what pictures.
As a commercial photographer, Stan Patz conducted some of his photo shoots right in the loft, with the kids hanging around. Off-hours, he turned his 105 Nikkor lens on the family, so there was a trove of captured moments in his darkroom files. Most were of Etan.
Etan relished posing for the camera, and the camera loved him back. Even in his work, Stan would save hours and money by using Etan to light the room before a real model arrived. Toddler Ari wouldn’t sit still, and Shira was old enough to be jaded and bored. But Etan was just the right age, had the best temperament to stand in, and loved to mug.
There he was, a toothy grin close up into the lens, the rest of his face hidden under winter layers, his knit cap weighed down by clumps of melting snow from the great blizzard of ’78. There, with wads of stuffing peeking out of his shirt for the great “indoor” blizzard of ’79, created by Julie, who’d spent several long days patiently ripping up pounds of old newspaper into “snow.” Etan cavorting in an open fire hydrant with family friends. Etan with Grandpa at the World Trade Center.
Shira, who was learning to share her father’s love for the medium on a cheap, refurbished Argus camera, had snapped one of the standouts. In that timeless image, taken at his Halloween-themed sixth birthday party in October 1978, Etan sits in Julie’s lap surrounded by cardboard witches and black-cat party favors. Their arms enfold each other, and their eyes are closed; Etan’s small face, bearing an openmouthed smile and a rapt expression, rests on his mother’s neck. Julie’s smile is more enigmatic—a classic Madonna with child.
The cops and neighbors joining in the search were now well supplied with Stan’s handiwork. In any missing child case, a photograph is the surrogate for the real boy or girl, giving the public a compelling reason to remember him, to keep the search alive. Most missing kids’ pictures are indiscernible, blurry photo-booth snaps, or two-year-old class portraits that no longer bear a resemblance to the child, and maybe never did. Not Etan Patz. Grinning out from his father’s portraits, each strand of his hair finely rendered in the sharp focus of Stan’s professional cameras, you could literally see the sparkle in Etan’s eyes. These pictures brought him to life more tangibly than most other missing children.
By the end of the weekend, Stan’s evocative photos were on new posters going up all over New York. Eventually there were versions in five languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish, and Chinese. When one of Etan’s neighbors told police he wouldn’t recognize the boy without his favorite hat—the one he’d worn when he’d left home on Friday—an NYPD helicopter was dispatched from the Eastern Airlines terminal at JFK with a duplicate Future Flight Captain cap. Bill Butler crumpled up the stiff new black hat, then a police artist graphically added it to one of Stan’s most recent photographs and lengthened Etan’s hair for the next round of posters.
On one of those first nights Sandy Harmon was watching a breathless news report when her boyfriend, Michael, joined her. Sandy, who’d been hired by Julie, Karen Altman, and one other mother to walk their three children home during the six-week school bus strike, may have watched with the strange sense that comes when you see a bit of your own life unfold on the screen. She told Michael how terrible she felt for the boy she had safeguarded every afternoon for six weeks.
Her own four-year-old son, Bennett, was safe, hopefully fast asleep in the tiny room at the back of her cramped apartment on East 13th Street, a mile or so northeast of the Patz loft. While her connection to the Patz family was tenuous—the strike had ended the week before, and with it her employment with them—it had been one of Sandy’s few paying jobs during the hard-luck period since she’d brought Bennett to New York from her home in Augusta, Maine. For that brief stretch, Sandy had been drawn into the warm climate of 113 Prince Street. She and Julie had talked about Sandy’s staying on, helping out at Julie’s daycare center, maybe as a trial run that could lead to something permanent. Now while half the city was out looking for the boy, there was no way to know how it would end, and how all this mess would affect Sandy’s chances. She and Michael listened in silence as the broadcast detailed the extensive search.
“Where are you going?” Sandy asked the man as he stood up and walked to the door. “Out to help look for that little boy,” Michael answered, and he was gone.
As the Memorial Day weekend ended, neighborhood residents made their way back into town to learn the news, and the search party swelled again. Neighbors now recovered from their initial reluctance to interfere congregated on the street below 113 Prince and canvassed passersby, stopping friends and strangers alike. At this point, it wasn’t just about Etan. The first settlers of this urban frontier already shared a sense of community born of close-knit, shared hardship, of watching out for each other’s unconventional backs. SoHo residents now felt like they were banding together to beat back an unseen enemy invasion, with the dawning knowledge that something sinister may have happened to one of their own.
The people here lived their life organically, and in the same way, the search for Etan moved block by block, spreading and growing. The police eventually went down to City Hall’s archives to pull out the blueprints for every building in the area, and the search became more organized, although its obstacles also became more evident. These were hundred-year-old buildings, many former factories that had never been designed for family living. Their labyrinthine architecture precluded a methodical sweep.
Up in the loft, even though Julie and Stan Patz had both lost their sense of time, they were acutely aware of the urgency of the massive manhunt blanketing the city for their little boy. Every day, every minute that passed decreased the likelihood of Etan’s safe return. He could be hurt, lying wet and shivering in the bottom of a construction site or huddled in the basement of an abandoned building; the possibilities were too numerous and disturbing to dwell on any one scenario. On the outside, their shock was evident, but they maintained a veneer of calm, even good cheer. It was a survival tactic, the alternative to total hysteria.
“I have to keep going,” Julie told a group of neighbors meeting to organize their search effort, “or else I’m not going to get through it.”
Stan Patz, always more the commanding officer to his wife’s efficient master sergeant, now alternated between short periods of formulating strategy and much longer moments of paralysis, which in turn fomented a brew of impotent rage. When Julie wasn’t providing information, describing Etan’s identifying characteristics—the baby teeth all still intact, including the one in the back that wore a stainless steel crown; the mole on his back just above the buttocks; the place on his forehead where he might still have scar tissue from a long-ago automobile accident—she plunged into self-distracting tasks. She had always been a doer, a coordinator; it came naturally to this eldest of nine children, who had grown up the mother hen corralling her brood of younger brothers and sisters. It was the way she ran her daycare, and the way she related to the uniformed troops now camped out in her front room. As shock bled into abject denial, she rushed around in a diminutive blur, providing an extra notebook, maps, directions; it was like navigating tourists through her family’s world.
“Is there anything I can do?” Karen Altman would ask her, wanting to help share the load, yet aware she was posing the most clichéd and useless of questions. But Julie would always have an answer.
“Yes, go down to the bodega and get everyone a soda.” She would wave her hand at the cops bent over the maps. Move things forward. Take action, no matter how inconsequential. Julie herself couldn’t leave to fetch her own beverages—she and Stan were virtually under house arrest, needed by the phone, answering an onslaught of questions, questions that were becoming increasingly insistent. The longer Etan was gone, the less likely it seemed he had merely wandered off or been hurt. The police were now looking at a darker scenario, and they were looking specifically at Stan and Julie. They were separated from each other by the wary watchers, even assigned their own personal
detectives, who followed them outside the apartment on the rare occasion either parent did leave.
Of course we’re suspects, Julie told herself over and over. They’re playing the percentages. Parents kill their children. That’s how most of these cases end. I was the last known person to see Etan alive. With no other evidence, we both have to be suspects. It was by far the least of their problems, and she didn’t take it out on her minders.
“You have to eat,” she’d say to the officers, even as concerned friends were saying the same to her; even as she herself was eating nothing. Other close neighbors—Jack and Mary Lembeck, Peggy Spina, and a handful of others—hovered around, clearing and replacing food, doling out large homemade platters and casseroles that kept arriving from other neighbors pitching in from home.
One woman who lived below the Altmans in the building across the street had a similar view to Larry and Karen’s into the Patzes’ front windows. She sent over a huge Thanksgiving-size feast—her way of giving thanks—and later told Julie she just hadn’t been able to stand the way the men were eating anymore. “I can see them—they’re all going to die, eating nothing but junk. And all that smoking!”
Stan wasn’t conscious of much, but he was a creature of habit—healthy habit—and it disoriented him even more than he already was to see cops sitting in his living room, munching potato chips and swilling soda. All those caffeinated, carbonated, sugary beverages, he found himself thinking, and anything that came in a bag you could rip open and jam your hand into. How could these guys subsist? How could this be his home? As he looked around his loft, it felt like an occupying army of foreigners with strange, alien ways had moved in. His personal landscape had become empty junk food wrappers as far as the eye could see, and big men with guns.
After Etan Page 4
