As the days wore on, Bill Butler became Stan and Julie’s touchstone. He never raised an eyebrow or betrayed irritation no matter how far-fetched the “leads” they passed along from wacky tipsters and the ever-present psychics.
9:09 a.m. Jim X Kansas City Mo.—wife psychic—picture boy—brown hair—city sidewalk… boy alone—emotionally deprived—streetwise—undernourished,… man on 2nd floor 60’s—maybe alcoholic—sad and angry—E. calls him “Red” but his name is Paul
??? Gloria X: alive—Sexual abuse—held for long time unharmed—abductors now running scared… 2 people involved: 1 tall, 1 med—Etan knew person very well—will be all over by 5/15/80—1st news by April
15:40 [Julie’s] return call to Zora X—psychic—Etan alive in a province of Italy,—boat trip: Bermuda, S.A. then Italy. “a relative,” maybe distant knows more than telling—someone is watching our pain + won’t tell (vindictive)
—Patz logbook, various psychic calls, 1979–80
Over the first months an astounding three hundred psychics weighed in, with no two scenarios alike. The only thing any of them could agree on was the recurrent phrase that Etan was “near water.” Nonbelievers from the start, Stan and Julie realized how useless that particular spiritual guidance was—what wasn’t near water? Are we talking river? A lake? What about a bathtub? Stan would shake his head in disgust. But one after the other, the Patzes welcomed these psychics to their home… just in case.
Jack Lembeck, the father of Etan’s best friend Jeff, had been a steady, calming face in the loft throughout the initial onslaught. Tall and quietly commanding, he’d unknowingly passed himself off as some enigmatic FBI agent, and his presence was never questioned. As the real cops had drawn back, Lembeck had stayed on, finding himself an unofficial liaison to this growing legion of psychics. He drove them around the city so they could soak up their “impressions,” took notes, and reported back. It was the most productive thing he could think to do.
12:30—Julie call to Dorothy Allison.—4 people know what happened that morning and are not coming forward.—1 or 2 people took [Etan] out of love.
—Patz logbook, August 17, 1979
Lembeck spent most of his time with Dorothy Allison. The fifty-four-year-old mother of four was by far the most renowned of her profession, and she was quasi-legitimized by her reported past success. In her trademark overalls and red sneakers, she walked into the Patz loft and started the usual way, by running her hands over Etan’s toys and stuffed animals. Some in law enforcement revered her skills, but Allison was scorned by others as a classic psychic “retrofitter,” tailoring her history after the fact to appear more credible. But she came with a track record, genuine or not, and the Patzes jumped at the chance for a breakthrough. Jack Lembeck repeatedly drove her around the five boroughs. She kept Stan and Julie—mostly Julie—immersed in following up on her cryptic visions. When Allison saw the name “Scott,” it sent Julie to the phone book for days, making pages of lists; every Scott in the city; first name Scott, last name Scott—perhaps Scotty’s Bar was the key, or maybe Dr. John Scotti.
Julie would compile hundreds of “Scott” entries, with accompanying addresses, maps, and overlays throughout the city, and hand them over to the detectives for further pursuit, just in time for Allison to see the name “Ralph,” or “Gonzalez,” and Julie would start again. In one way, she didn’t mind—it kept both her and Stan occupied. They were also grateful for Allison’s telling them she thought Etan was alive. The reason she was having such difficulty, she said, was that her gift was communing with the dead.
In between servicing the psychics and passing along leads now coming in from around the country, Julie’s goal was to establish a routine and stick to it. She knew such routine was critical, and it soothed her. The home daycare center was gone, but she took back her household duties from friends, the cooking and mopping, dusting and laundry; all the rote work that put her body through the comfortingly familiar motions she could salvage from her life pre–May 25.
Stan had a harder time. He couldn’t concentrate, and work was scarce. His freelance assignments had dried up, clients going elsewhere while he was consumed by the initial search. Now there was nothing in the pipeline and the personal contacts that had fueled his business were shying away. His routine was different from Julie’s. Every day he’d hold fast to sobriety until six o’clock, then check out in a haze of marijuana smoke.
When he began counting down the minutes until the hour hand hit six, he knew it was time to stop. Both he and Julie realized neither one could afford to lose their health—it would be too much to bear this alone. Besides, Shira couldn’t stand the smell of the tobacco pipe and wouldn’t sit next to him when he puffed on it. Sometime in late summer he quit both pot and tobacco on the same day, struggling more with the latter.
Instead, Stan spent a hundred dollars on a used three-speed bike, deliberately choosing one with peeling black paint, dilapidated-looking enough to deter thieves. In the days before bicycle safety was an issue, he fashioned helmets out of cast-off hard hats and, buckling Ari into the child seat behind him, Stan rode the length of the empty, under-repair West Side Highway with Shira. The exercise calmed Stan and gave Julie some downtime. They’d strap on their cameras—Shira had continued with her hand-me-down Argus and Ari toted a toy with plastic lenses that nevertheless took real pictures. Once, pedaling around Battery Park, they rode past members of the task force, and everyone exchanged waves. If I’m still under suspicion, Stan thought, this Father Goose and his goslings scene might sway them in my favor.
But often, when he biked alone, Stan would go for miles at top speed, and to distract or punish himself, he’d ride in the highest gear, deliberately making his muscles scream. Like a self-flagellating monk, he welcomed the physical pain. He was angry at the person responsible for his son’s disappearance, at the world, at himself, and he couldn’t vent on Julie or the kids. So he took out his fury in rants on unsuspecting pedestrians and cyclists who crossed his path.
Both Stan and Julie worked hard not to blame themselves for what had happened, and they never blamed each other. There was enough of that coming from outside the loft, especially toward Julie. Did she murder her own child, went the nasty gossip, or did she just somehow manage to lose him? And if she dared be seen in public—at the park or playground—with a smile or a laugh for the two children she was still trying to mother, she was the woman who didn’t care that she’d lost her son. She chuckled at some little joke one of the kids told, and strangers walked over to interrupt. They told her if she was so unfeeling about her missing son, maybe he was better off missing.
Stan and Julie weren’t imagining the widespread speculation that had been there from the beginning among their own community, even among their friends. For every awkward, heartfelt offer of help, there was a hushed whisper or unspoken thought about neglect or irresponsible parenting. Some of the parents who were saying, “There but for the grace of God go I” were simultaneously thinking, “It could never happen to me—I would never let Johnny walk by himself.” It was a common enough phenomenon, this mental trick designed to provide insulation from the tragedy of others. Recognized in psychology and even law enforcement as the “just world” theory, it was one reason prosecutors sometimes struck women from rape juries. If the world was just, so the theory went, you got what you deserved. If you can find any way to blame the victim, you yourself will feel less vulnerable.
So a neighbor who’d brought food over to the Patzes allowed herself to voice her thought to her husband—“How could she be so stupid?”—before feeling instantly ashamed at the words coming out of her mouth. And one June morning during the last few weeks of school, Karen Altman had been incensed as she waited with her daughter Chelsea at the bus stop, to hear another mother disparage an absent Julie for letting Etan walk alone. This was a woman whom, like most of the parents standing there, Karen had never seen at that bus stop before May 25.
Once, Julie took Shira and Ari t
o Little Italy and a group of mamas approached, tongues clucking, to offer their condolences. “How terrible you must feel,” one said, “especially since it was all your fault.”
“It’s almost like we have a communicable disease,” Stan told a reporter. “Like we’ve been touched by something very ugly and if people get close, it will rub off.” But, in fact, no isolating quarantine could keep this epidemic from spreading. Everyone had been touched.
Life had changed irrevocably not only for the Patzes, but for every neighborhood family. Etan’s face, in the posters that now hung on every SoHo storefront, lamppost, and blank wall space, was an ever-present, unavoidable reminder of the new reality. Fear was the prevailing emotion, as parents accompanied their children to the school bus stop, or better yet all the way to the schoolhouse door. Seven-year-old Vanessa Spina’s mother had been promising to let her walk to the corner bodega by herself for weeks. Soon, she’d said, soon. Soon was unforeseeable now. A young boy from a few blocks over, Etan’s age and also blond, rang the Patz buzzer one morning and tearfully begged Julie to tell police to stop pulling him aside for questioning.
Parents worked to shield their children and talked over their heads, with unsettling glances that were arguably worse. As a result the kids were often either confused or blissfully unaware. But the parents themselves were in panic mode. No one could say that the person who took Etan wasn’t still out there, an unknown, real-life bogeyman, poised to strike again. A few weeks before the end of school, a simple misunderstanding led Etan’s friend Jeff Lembeck to stay on the school bus past his stop. In the brief moments before all was well again, his terror-stricken parents felt the blood draining to their toes.
Even as the local media blitz was subsiding, national magazines and television had picked up the story and Etan’s image was reaching outside New York City. A U.S. representative from New York, Peter Peyser, read the story into the Congressional Record at the end of July. “I am asking all Members to do an act of kindness for a family in New York…. It is now assumed that Etan may have been taken away from the New York area and is somewhere in the United States. A poster is being delivered today to each Member’s office…. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has seen this young man and can help bring him back to his family.” A SoHo travel agency volunteered to send the poster to sixty foreign countries.
While at a standstill in New York, the investigation was also extending beyond the city. In July, a Missing Persons detective went to Rabbi Patz’s New Jersey synagogue for an unannounced visit and discovered from his secretary that the rabbi was on his annual six-week trip to Israel, leading a group of American schoolchildren to summer camp. The news raised eyebrows among investigators, who knew that in kidnapping cases, statistics showed a family member was the most likely culprit. The speculation was fueled by the unfounded rumors about religious differences in the family. Had Etan been spirited far away to a more religious environment?
The NYPD turned to Israeli authorities, who told them forty-one children had passed Israeli frontier control. All forty-one children were vetted, and every one of them returned to the United States six weeks after they’d left.
The FBI was tapped to interview Stan’s parents as well as Julie’s sizable family in Massachusetts, and they were ruled out as suspects. There was talk of a reward, but Stan and Julie worried the prospect of money might encourage copycats. The police adamantly advised against it. Already overwhelmed by false leads, they felt a reward would just elicit more crazies, offering information tainted by profit motive.
The summer ended and other children went back to school, including Shira and Ari. The little boy started part-time at a preschool in a church basement near Washington Square Park, where Julie then took to volunteering. It gave her an outlet for her natural affinity for children, and the little ones welcomed her unreservedly. It also gave her a sentry post from which to guard Ari.
Ari at bedtime: “I don’t like my bed anymore ’cuz Etan won’t come sleep with me.” Crying.
—Patz logbook, October 8, 1979
With the change of season, even the most stalwart civilian foot soldiers were overtaken by battle fatigue. Jack Lembeck turned to his wife, Mary, one morning and told her he just couldn’t do it anymore. Until then, he’d been propelled by the notion that he and his neighbors were no different than the Patzes. His mantra throughout the summer—it could have been our son—propelled him to drive the streets, answer calls, and search playgrounds. It could have been Jeff wearing his jacket instead of Etan who walked out the door into nothingness. But Lembeck had begun to realize his family differed from Stan and Julie’s in one critical way. He and his wife woke up every morning, and their child was still safe with them. The Patzes did not. At the risk of his family’s health, he and his wife decided they had to acknowledge that difference and move on. Mary Lembeck took her son out of state to stay with relatives for a few months.
Etan’s seventh birthday, October 9, came and went, bringing a spike in press calls and ensuing wackos. Police released the one and only sketch of a possible suspect, to another flurry of press, but this portrait was based on the flimsiest of connections, more a mark of the authorities’ desperation than anything else. A woman had seen a strange-looking man talking to a little boy near the Patz apartment on the morning Etan had disappeared. She’d come forward the very next day with a description. She had no idea if the boy was Etan—he’d had his back to her. She didn’t know if the man was doing anything nefarious. She wasn’t even sure her sighting was from the right day. But in the four-month interim she’d been questioned repeatedly, and finally hypnotized to provide a vague picture of the man’s features. Now his crude sketch was in every New York newspaper as a potential suspect. Nothing came of it, except for the predictable burst of false leads.
18:49 Ina X: [The first name of the man in sketch] has “D” and “V”; David Divine, etc…. [The man is a] surrogate who took Etan to someone else.
19:34 Pathmark, Bronx—looks like our kid—distressed w/a man who mishandled him.
16:16 You need a psychic witch—can break evil spells—their whole family has evil spell and cannot succeed.
—Patz logbook, various, October 1979
Tips trickled in on the answering machine now attached to the phone or in letters from all over the world, along with well-wishes and prayers. Stan Patz, who had always disdained organized religion, was deeply touched if not slightly bemused at the thought of strangers uttering his son’s name in their churches and synagogues. Then there were the fervent believers who blamed the Patzes, who, they rationalized, must have lost their child because they’d lost their faith.
If there is a God who punishes me this way for not believing, Stan thought when he read those letters, what kind of a stupid, jerky God would he be? It seemed specious logic to Stan, who felt God must have far more important things to deal with than one inconsequential nonbeliever. He wrote back to a few of the correspondents, but he never responded to those condemnatory notes.
There was even a religious/con artist combo variation: a man who guaranteed their son’s recovery if they slaughtered a sheep in their living room, after having a “good Muslim woman” clean and prepare it first. “You have to eat some of it,” he called back to say later. He would supply the sacrificial lamb for just $125, but he required an additional $2,000 after Etan was safely returned. The cops, who had begun to feel protective of this family battered on all sides by the press and the prying public, hated the idea of anyone taking advantage of their charges and instructed the Patzes to call the man back and set up a meeting. Then the detectives, who’d been hiding in the apartment, emerged with guns drawn and led him away. Julie felt a little sorry for him.
1:28 female, 20’s (?)—heavy N.Y. accent—well-wisher (at 1:28 a.m.!!)
23:20 Man—rang bell—on drugs?—came about Etan—had seen him once in Wash Sq—very emotional—had tattoo on left forearm
—Patz logbook, September 8, 1979
The prepon
derance of log entries were of angry or lonely or disturbed individuals who took advantage of their easy access to the Patzes. The most obsessive ones called repeatedly. Stan and Julie recognized they might be the only people these callers talked to. Sometimes the police were able to track down their therapists or counselors and Julie would get on the phone with them, to try to mediate a cease-fire of sorts. She didn’t just want to leave such a troubled sympathizer hanging. Once, a man actually appeared in their home, beaming at Stan and Julie.
“You are not going to believe me,” he said, in the only believable part of his remarks, “but I have become your son and I have come home for dinner.” Who, they would shake their heads in amazement, would leave the angry message “I fucked and killed your son”? But as dreadful as those were, perhaps the toughest were the ones Stan and Julie came to call the “look-likes.”
15:43 p.m.—anonymous, boy, blonde, pilot’s cap in courtyard behind Lex Ave everyday—not noticed before Etan reported missing—never leaves yard.
23:25 Anthony, on 5/31/79… NY upstate… picked up boy and 21 yr old w/girl hitching… almost positive was Etan… exit 113 dropped off 3 people.
2:05 Lisa from VA… female—approx 50 years old… boy looks like Etan and not belong to woman. [Woman is] nut—from Greenwich Village… boy was in 1st grade in public school system,…—boy called “Erin”—boy beautiful.
—Patz logbook, various, 1979–80
The intricate stories took up pages and pages in the Patz logbooks but never panned out. They exacted the biggest emotional cost, riding Stan and Julie on a steep vertical incline up the tracks, to plunge straight back down to hell every time.
After Etan Page 7
