The day of Stan Patz’s tortured polygraph was the one-week mark. The media thrives on anniversaries, and the next day John Miller was back to update his reporting of the previous weekend. He checked in with the new mobile command post, two vans parked on Prince Street in front of the building, after it was finally decided to cede their home back to the Patz family. Seven days was an eternity in the city’s news cycle, but Miller could understand why this case was still playing in heavy rotation. The press rarely covered a missing child case while the child was still missing, only once he was found, or the body recovered. And if they did, there was usually no eloquent spokesperson, no citywide mobilization, no meticulously shot pictures. By now, Stan Patz had mounted a series of his photographs to make it as easy as possible for the camera crews. It was drive-through TV production.
This was a beautiful boy, a white child—and there could be no denying that it was a factor in the level of both predominately white public and press interest. He lived in a neighborhood where criminal acts were uncommon. And no one yet knew where this story was going to end. Both of the Patzes were likable and articulate, speaking in perfect soundbites with a high tolerance for the endless loop of boundaryless questions. And Julie, at least, wore her heartbreaking emotions openly.
Most reporters were respectful, kind, and did their job. But by definition, in a story this sensitive almost any question risked crossing the line to inflict pain. What were Etan’s likes and dislikes? Do you miss him? What does your gut tell you happened to your son? And the ubiquitous “How do you feel?” One tabloid photographer didn’t even bother with a pretense of civility. He just went straight for the bottom-feeders line. “Would you mind working up a few tears for me now,” he asked Julie, adding words she would never forget, “so I don’t have to come back and bother you again when they find the body?”
Reporters were confined to the front room, but they infiltrated the private back area, even finding their way into Stan and Julie’s bed one morning, when their private line rang sometime around 6 a.m., waking them up from a rare moment of the sleep that largely eluded them. Stan’s heart immediately went into his throat at the thought someone was calling with news that couldn’t wait for a decent hour. Fumbling for the phone, he managed a groggy hello. A cheery voice answered, identifying himself from an unfamiliar radio station, “… and we’re live on the air. We want to know how you’re holding up?” Stan went from shock to rage in an instant, and glanced over at his wife’s drawn face. “Are you recording?” he asked the DJ. “Yes, we are,” was the reply. “Well, then record this,” he said, and let loose with a few choice words of his own before hanging up.
Stan vented to the station manager later that day. “Just because we’re a news story doesn’t mean we should have no privacy.” The man, dutifully apologetic, agreed, but those words were to become a mantra in the Patzes’ lives. During moments like these, they regretted opening the Pandora’s box of press coverage. But there was no turning back. For all the lunatics and the invaded privacy and the sudden need to “manage” a public persona—not too morose, but God forbid, no laughter, not even nervous laughter—the trade-off of Etan’s face in every local press outlet, reaching millions of readers and viewers, had to be worth it.
Except on those days when the press coverage completely defeated their efforts. In its one-week anniversary coverage, the New York Post published a story whose explosive headline alone threatened to derail the search. is missing soho boy with kin in boston? it asked. “According to sources close to the investigation,” the article read, “detectives have received information that Etan is safe and staying in Massachusetts. The tip, which police sources describe as ‘strong,’ came from a resident of SoHo.”
In fact, the same tipster had also contacted other papers, including the SoHo Weekly News, which had offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to Etan’s recovery. The man asked if he could collect the reward even though he’d already given his story to the Post reporter.
Within hours of the article’s appearance on newsstands, Stan Patz had seen one area resident ripping down a missing poster. Throughout the next days more posters were struck, and many people abandoned the hunt. Rumors circulated that the boy’s Jewish grandparents, unhappy with his secular upbringing, had taken him, or that his parents had orchestrated a stunt, perhaps a deliberate attempt to further Etan’s imagined “modeling career.” But while the “tip” had no basis in fact whatsoever, the rest of the article construed what factual information it did contain to hint that the Patz family was under a cloud of suspicion: “Julie Patz, Etan’s mother, underwent a lie detector test yesterday. The results were kept confidential…. Police have been re-interviewing the parents separately.”
The police immediately issued a statement denying the Massachusetts part, but couldn’t say the same about the separate interviews. Of course they were being questioned separately. That was standard procedure.
Not long afterwards, a few of the detectives with whom Stan had grown marginally comfortable invited him for a tour of their station house. Over the previous days, he’d talked shop with them some, yearning for a sense of affiliation to the investigation, and he was eager to stay occupied, so he went down to the First Precinct, “to see where they worked.” It was after hours, few personnel were on duty, and the gritty second-floor squad room where they sat was empty. The conversation started off in neutral, but devolved quickly from “Who do you think could have done it?” to “Did you ever hit your son?”
“I don’t think I ever did,” Stan answered. “He never needed it. The others, yes, but him? Never.”
The line of questioning continued and sharpened. “Did you ever get so angry at Etan that you wanted to hit him?” “Did you have any reason to hurt him?” “Did you beat Julie?” It went on and on, with an intensity he’d yet to experience. Most were not new questions, but this time it was relentless and repetitive. “Did you fight with your wife?” “Do you have a lover, problems in the marriage?” “Are you the real father?” “How badly did the family need money?” Sitting in the empty, sterile squad room, Stan Patz felt his steely reserve crack.
He was mortified to realize he was crying. He had never thought it was proper for a man to cry in public. But now he was bawling like a baby, the tears pouring out like blood from a severed artery, draining from such a large open wound that it threatened exsanguination.
In all the time since his son had disappeared, he’d presented his detached stoicism. But inside, he’d been silently going mad from the terror, the guilt, and the muscle-clenching helplessness. Talking to the press and sorting and handing out photos had given him a concrete task, one that even felt marginally productive, and helped override the internal voice screaming in self-condemnation, “DO SOMETHING! FIX THIS! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?”
Now, aloud, he pleaded to the detectives that they were wasting their time. “Look somewhere else,” he said. “I don’t care what you’re doing to me, but you’re taking up precious hours, and I promise you it’s fruitless.”
In one way it wasn’t fruitless. As the detectives watched Stan display the emotion they expected from an innocent, grief-stricken father, they finally began to suspect him less. Not enough to take him or Julie off the list, but enough to convince them to widen their focus.
The problem was, despite the massive police investigation, there was nothing to focus on. For all their looking, the police had actually seen nothing that gave them a clue about what had happened after Etan crossed Wooster Street.
And now that the first, second, and third round of combing all thirty-seven blocks of SoHo had been completed unsuccessfully, the police occupation began to decamp, to move on to someone else’s battlefield. As cacophonous and disorienting and outrageous as the whole invasion into their lives had been over the last few weeks, for Julie and Stan, this evacuation was worse.
CHAPTER 4
A Year for the Books
Missing Persons Unit Case #8367: As of June 4
: 688 manhours on telephone… 2,760 manhours on 345 search assignments… 880 manhours on 110 investigations, not including emergency service, harbor unit, aviation unit and missing persons…. Daily aviation unit aerial searches since May 26th…. Over 500 DD5 [detective interview forms] have been filed, 10,000 circulars have been distributed.
—June 4, 1979, NYPD Status Report on its two-week emergency response to the disappearance of Etan Patz
By the start of week three, with still no sign of Etan, the emergency response phase was called off. The centralized Missing Persons Unit would take over the case.
On the eleventh floor at Police Headquarters, the twenty-detective MPU oversaw some thirty-thousand new reports each year; people of all ages who’d disappeared in New York City, and whose descriptions were cataloged in drawer after drawer of four-by-six-inch cards. A specially created five-person task force would exclusively investigate Case #8367, Missing Person Etan Patz. Detective Bill Butler was “taken off the chart” for any other cases at the First Precinct and loaned indefinitely to Missing Persons.
The phones at the Patz apartment were still ringing in tandem on the table in the front room, but soon there would be no team of cops, pretending to be Stan and Julie, to answer them. Instead, a yellow legal pad and pen sat next to Stan’s powder blue phone.
“When you take a call,” Butler instructed Stan and Julie, “you need to mark it in the book. We need a date at the top of each page, and a time stamp next to each entry. Friends, heavy breathers, hang-ups, psychics. If it looks like something, you contact us and we’ll follow up immediately. But every single person who calls should go down in the books.”
The succession of notepads and then spiral notebooks—once the pads were found to shred their pages all over the loft—would go on to track not just the case, but the Patz family’s life. In the beginning, the overwhelming majority of callers were cranks, and one departing detective suggested maybe it was time to change their phone number. Stan and Julie found that inconceivable. They had taught Etan those seven digits—although, they regretted, not his area code—and they would never cut off his one sure avenue of contact. If he were out there trying to reach them, they wanted to be as reachable as possible. In the meantime, from the late-night caller who was sure Etan’s attacker had just tried to kidnap her own son, to the overwrought, misinformed folks who thought they’d found the quickest way to get in touch with the cops when they dialed the number on Etan’s missing poster, Stan and Julie took turns noting the times and taking down the messages. Julie wrote in a neat, rounded, clearly legible hand, and the dots over her i’s sometimes formed a perfect circle. Stan’s words were more crabbed and hasty, the letters often slurred together.
2:30 a.m. Mrs. Widholm [from a NJ number]; she was at Yankee Stadium—someone tried to grab her blond 10 year old—[she] has description
2:51 p.m. Jan [NY number]—Call Life Institute; re: Dr. Massy—psychic—he spoke last nite, and feels he can help us
4:21 p.m. Sel Raab, NY Times
4:39 p.m. $10,000? No money? No talk? Hispanic male—Info on your son
5:06 p.m. got a big fire in the project—get the police, please.
—Patz logbook, June 21, 1979
A few days after the crush of regulation blue had cleared out, Stan and Julie dared a first family outing to the nearby annual Feast of St. Anthony street fair a few blocks away. It felt terribly strange and inappropriate to be going somewhere so festive, and they were all too aware of the irony that St. Anthony was the patron saint of lost objects. But neither Stan nor Julie had spent any time in the last frantic weeks with their two other children. They felt a strong need to at least pretend normalcy, for Shira and Ari’s sake. The festival was an annual event and the kids always looked forward to it. For days now the aroma of Italian sausage and peppers had been drifting into the front room from the balcony windows, beckoning them out of doors. Julie strapped Ari into the fold-up stroller, and they set off.
As the family walked four blocks west on Prince Street to Sullivan, they passed the new round of Etan’s posters replacing ones that had been mistakenly torn down. Earlier in the week, Stan had bought ink pads to hand-stamp them with the urgent red message “Still Missing,” hoping to dispel the misperception that Etan was back home.
On this sunny early summer day, the three blocks of Sullivan Street south from Houston Street—where St. Anthony’s Church was—down to Broome Street were blocked off. Vendors wheeled their carts through the streets and hawked marzipan, pistachios, and torrone, the chewy Italian nougat and nut confection. Doughy balls of zeppole bubbled in huge vats of oil. Once fried to a crisp brown, they were swirled in powdered sugar and sold six to a bag. Squealing neighborhood children played water-pistol games for cheap polyester-stuffed animals, or rode the creaky Tilt-a-Whirl. One of the big annual draws was the three-story Ferris wheel that towered over Houston Street, its colored lights twinkling in the dusk.
As Stan and Julie carefully eyed their children, they became aware that they too were being watched, as though they were the fair’s new attraction. Some in the crowd had never met the Patzes but recognized them from the press coverage, which had conferred on them a macabre celebrity. Stan and Julie were equally nonplussed to recognize some of their neighbors, and then receive no return acknowledgment. It suddenly felt as though people they knew were shrinking from them. They felt badly to disappoint Shira and Ari, but it wasn’t long before the Patzes fled back to the relative safety of their loft. They felt branded as neglectful parents or, worse, suspected murderers.
If nothing else, many of their neighbors had been struck dumb by the understandable fear of saying the wrong thing. But until that moment, the Patzes had been cocooned by friends who’d wanted to show them nothing but humanity to counter their despair.
The newly created Etan Patz Action Committee, spearheaded by Sally Gran, a neighbor with a seemingly infinite amount of energy and organizational skills, would eventually swell to 170 members. Each had delegated tasks. There were poster “depots” sprinkled around SoHo where volunteers could pick up flyers to distribute. There was a message center, a media coordinator, even someone in charge of vehicles for transportation. Teams solicited donations from local businesses to keep the search going. A few neighbors even turned detective, seeking out the hidden sweatshop workers who might have seen something but would be reluctant to come forward to the cops.
Many of the Patzes’ friends were fellow freelancers, who took extended time off from work to devote themselves to the search. There were volunteer cooks and housekeepers, a babysitting network, and a team that brought groceries. People considered canceling summer vacations, and the Patzes began to feel like the neighborhood quicksand pit. “It’s a trap,” Julie told a reporter several months later. “You get caught up in it and you can’t get out.”
Julie sometimes wondered how much the parents who were helping her and her family were glad to be distracted from new fears about their own children’s safety. But when a neighbor’s nine-year-old daughter who’d been left in charge of her siblings called the loft one day, Julie became aware of some of the collateral damage their crisis had generated.
“Can you please let my mother come home for a while?” the girl asked plaintively. So some six weeks in, Julie called her friends together and sent them home. “Your own children need you,” she told them, “and we need to take care of ourselves.”
Both Ari and Shira had been left to struggle with their fears, nightmares, and confusion at a time when their parents were least able to help them. Their brother was suddenly gone, their parents were like strangers, and a rotating cast of caregivers couldn’t answer their questions. Assurances felt hollow, because they were. As uncomfortable as their own parents were about saying the wrong thing, Shira’s friends either shunned her or, too young to feel the discomfort, said the wrong thing.
“Your brother’s not coming back,” they’d blurt out, in the blunt way of children. “He’s probably dead.” Some
who only knew Shira because of the newfound attention were jealous. “I wish my brother would disappear so I could get on television,” she was told.
Ari took to wearing Etan’s clothes, and, not yet three, he toilet trained himself almost overnight. He slept in the bottom bunk, below the empty one, and worried about playing with Etan’s toys. When Shira went up to Massachusetts to spend time with Julie’s family, Ari was terrified that she too would never come back. It was a logical conclusion. One of his well-intentioned minders had told him in the earliest days of the search that everyone was busy looking for Etan, who was “lost,” and he didn’t understand why his parents, who always found his lost toys and stuffed animals, couldn’t just do the same with Etan. Young children need the security of believing their parents are all-powerful, and it was devastating for both Shira and Ari to plainly see that their parents were completely powerless instead.
Ari seemed to pin his hopes on Bill Butler, the most familiar face, who stayed on the case when the larger police presence ended. At first, the revolver tucked into Butler’s ankle holster at toddler-eye level had frightened Ari, who thought his parents were about to be arrested—or that he was. But eventually, he grew convinced that if Stan and Julie had failed in their parental responsibilities, then the kindly hulking detective would bring his brother home. He would call “Policeman Bill” on his plastic play phone every day for an imaginary update.
Butler called the family for real every day too, and several times a week he could be seen walking the blocks surrounding Prince Street. He would start his canvass at 7:30 a.m., in hopes of meeting someone whose regular route would have crossed Etan’s path at that hour. In those first months, Butler worked the case seven days a week. He and his wife had long-standing plans to attend a wedding out of town over the summer, but his wife boarded the plane alone.
After Etan Page 6
