In the three years since Etan Patz had disappeared, a lot of New York children had gone missing, but most were parental custody cases, and few remained a mystery. None of them had generated the public interest of this one blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. Miller was skeptical of such a tenuous connection, although now at least he was starting to understand why the top brass had been alerted, and why cops were still crawling all over the scene, carting out garbage.
From his years tracking the case, Miller was all too aware there had never been any real leads to follow. No witnesses, no good suspects. There wasn’t even a crime scene. If there were a connection to the Patz case, it would be big news. But he wondered if a stronger connection than the photos existed.
The day before, Assistant District Attorney Frank Carroll had picked up his phone to hear Bronx DA Mario Merola’s familiar rich baritone in his ear. “I want you to go talk to this guy they picked up in the drainpipe,” his boss had said with the air of a man who was obeyed without question. “No one else, not the cops, no FBI, no one in the room but our office. Don’t let anyone at him ’til you’re finished.”
“Hey Carroll,” another ADA in the Bronx County Courthouse office joked in passing, “who’s going to play you in the movie?” Clearly the word had leaked out that he was going to do the interview. Almost from the moment they’d brought the “drainpipe man” in earlier that morning, talk had been flying through the building. There were excited whispers of “We got the guy!” It was possible. After all, this office had been part of the high-profile “Son of Sam” prosecution just four years earlier. The skeptics argued, on the other hand, that this was “a bunch of bullshit, just more chasing tails.” But Carroll had a lot on his plate, and he couldn’t be bothered with either argument.
Frank Carroll had a few nicknames around the office. One of them was “Father Francis.” Defendants had a history of confessing to him—even, on occasion, from up on the witness stand in the middle of cross-examination. There was something about his easy, nonthreatening, seemingly nonjudgmental tone and signature handlebar mustache that disarmed bad guys. Soon after Merola’s call, Carroll took off the conservative bow tie he wore every day, except when he was in court or questioning a suspect, and left for the secondary courthouse nearby where the suspect was being held. The buzz met him over there too. As he sat in a side room debriefing the arresting officers, younger, overenthusiastic DAs would pop their heads in to be met with a cool, blank regard, and then duck back out. Carroll had the sense that the transit police who had actually brought the perp in were being pushed to the background, and now he listened carefully to their report. He wanted to give them their due.
The man had told the cops his name—Jose Antonio Ramos—but little else. One of the boys was clearly taking a huge risk, not by going in to retrieve his book, but by telling his parents what had happened. This boy, the cop told Carroll, was threatened by his folks with a sound thrashing if he ever went near those railroad tracks, and he’d had to rat himself out. “The kid’s the hero,” Carroll thought.
He looked through the photos the cops had found. Several of the faces looked well under ten years old; Ramos stood cheek by jowl in the pictures with a few of them. The towheaded faces of two different boys jumped off the paper. One, Carroll was told, had the look of, just might be, the Patz boy. The parents were going to be shown the photos soon.
It all did seem creepy, he admitted to himself, but he was not going in with preconceptions. All the talk of “breaking the case” was irresponsible. This could very well be a pathetic lost soul who had no life of his own, so he’d created a two-dimensional one out of other people’s families, to surround himself as he huddled alone in his cold, damp tunnel. Carroll had seen just this kind of thing before, and it was thoroughly unprofessional to assume anything else. He needed more information. At the moment all he had at best was a petty theft charge, maybe nothing more than simple criminal trespass. Not much to hold on to someone.
At 7:20 p.m., Carroll sat down with Ramos in a fourth floor lineup room, a desk between them, a video camera recording them. Carroll introduced himself and the audiotape technician and stenographer in the room with him. Behind the prosecutor, a one-way glass window also hid a revolving parade of onlookers, although Ramos stared over his shoulder often, so Carroll knew the man was aware of being watched.
He was a dark, bedraggled creature, hunched into his seat, arms akimbo. He certainly looked the part of a vagrant living amid garbage in an abandoned drainpipe. “Rasputin” was the name that popped into Carroll’s head when he first saw the long, flowing black hair and bushy beard. Indeed, Ramos could pass for an ancient master of the dark arts if not for his modern-day headgear, a trademark of sorts. A flat leather newsboy-type cap with a brim, it was nearly obscured by the buttons covering it, a collection of pop culture found among the junk he claimed to forage for a living. There were peace signs, a Rolling Stones tongue, photo buttons, and slogans, all crammed against each other, with no visible space underneath.
Was he a sinister malevolent or an odd, harmless throwaway? When he began to speak, it was even less clear. His voice was disarmingly soft, almost sweet. At one point, the audio technician taping the proceedings asked him to speak up. “Okay,” he responded helpfully, raising his voice only slightly. “Testing… Is that all right?”
But it was his eyes that drew Carroll. The prosecutor always liked to fix in on his man’s eyes. These were dark and flat, disturbing and furtive. Carroll shuffled through several matchbook-sized photos, retrieved from the Gucci wallet Ramos was carrying, as he read Ramos his rights and did a round of routine questions. The man spelled out his name and gave Carroll his birthdate, July 23, 1943, at a hospital in the Bronx. Did he have any other names? Carroll asked. No, Ramos assured him. They went through his past addresses, tenuous as they were for a frequently homeless man. Before the tunnel there was a Manhattan address where he’d lived for a time in the late seventies. Before that, nothing, other than the four-year Navy stint right out of ninth grade, and the Bronx apartment he’d left at the age of fourteen. Otherwise, he moved around a lot.
The conversation quickly turned genial, almost convivial. Ramos started off defensive, but then seemed to relax, with the air of a colleague aiding the investigation. He explained that he was “self-employed,” reselling junk he collected all over New York. Most of his sales were in Greenwich Village, where he’d been based for twenty years, he said, usually from a ware-laden blanket on the street.
Carroll was struck by the complexity of this man’s existence. Ramos listed a storage space in Brooklyn where he kept more junk, and where he often slept several times a week. He wasn’t homeless, thought Carroll, just homeless-like. He’d set up the drainpipe with all the amenities of home, describing a bed, and night table, an assortment of Bibles and a crucifix. Ramos had even been tapping into a power source to siphon off amperage for a bedside reading lamp. This is not your typical bum sleeping on a cardboard box over a vent, thought Carroll. He’s got a very viable life, and the ability to slip from place to place unnoticed. He cuts a wide swath.
The junk-selling business paid off pretty well, Ramos boasted. He’d even taken a recent trip to Europe from the proceeds—a three-week jaunt to London, France, and Morocco. “I only took a twenty-two-day vacation,” he said.
“You mean there have been others?” Carroll acted impressed.
“Oh, yeah,” Ramos responded to the man’s feigned envy. “The first time, I went for six months… that was a booming year. I had a lot of trash that year.”
“I’m in the wrong business,” Carroll cracked. The two men laughed, and Ramos agreed. He told Carroll that after a short, unhappy stint in the corporate advertising world he had vowed to be his own boss for good. He was so miserable at one point, he said, that he’d “had a nervous breakdown, as a matter of fact.” He went on to describe various rounds of psychiatric treatment, including an involuntary ninety-day inpatient stint, thanks to his mother. Recently, he�
�d been going to the clinics again, he said, to help him beat back the voices in his head. Like the voice that “would try to force me to get violent.”
“Okay,” said Carroll, and waited. He was rewarded for his patience.
“And I had to hold it back,” Ramos continued. He spoke matter-of-factly, calm, like he was telling a charming anecdote. “I had to do a lot of really forceful holding back,” he said, “ ’cause I was ready to explode.”
The mention of aural hallucinations exhorting violence can raise the frightening specter of a man overtaken and out of control. But Carroll wasn’t buying it. Voices, he thought immediately, that’s bullshit. This was not the delivery of a lunatic driven to murderous rages. This was the crazy-like-a-fox sound of an insanity defense being seeded, a common ploy for anyone who knew how to play the system. And defense to what? Carroll wondered. You don’t need a psych defense for stolen property. This guy might well be into something much more. Carroll played with the photos and wondered if any of this was the truth.
Ramos rambled on. He wasn’t clear about the time sequence of his violent voices, but he knew he’d had a run of them three years earlier, back in 1979. They came and went, he said, but sometimes they were with him all the time, telling him to hit people, push them. That was why he’d moved out into the woods. With no people around, the voices subsided. He’d been living in the drainpipe off and on for about six months, after he’d gotten back from his European vacation.
Ramos was looking to wind up his story. “I think you got everything down,” he said, “unless you want me to sign the biography now. I wanna write a biography. ’Cause you ever heard of anybody digging garbage, and going to Europe with it?”
“No,” said Frank Carroll. He never had. That was one of the reasons he wanted to keep this discussion going.
They moved on to his arrest, and Ramos explained what a big mistake it was. In his version, the two boys had discovered his drainpipe and were pilfering his inventory, stuffing jewelry in their pockets. When Ramos appeared they ran, dropping their schoolbooks. Ramos pursued them to give the books back, but they kept running, all the way to the cops. “Listen, I woke up, my hair was straggly out like that.” Ramos gestured good-naturedly. “They probably got scared. That’s why they ran. And here I am, trying to give them the book bags.” It was all just a silly misunderstanding.
Carroll let him finish his spiel, thinking of the kid whose parents had probably walloped him good for disobeying their orders not to play near the tracks. It would have been infinitely easier for the boy to feign the loss of his book, but instead he had confessed his sin. This was no misunderstanding.
“Now, you know what they say?” Carroll finally countered. “They say that you stole the bags from them.”
“But I have no need for children’s book bags!” Ramos appeared to consider this from a business standpoint. “There’s no monetary value, whatsoever, in two kids’ school bags… I just left them where they had left them.”
The man was indignant. “I have no need to do that,” he repeated, “to do any harm to any child, whatsoever.”
More than an hour into the conversation, Frank Carroll finally worked his way around to the pictures of the little boys. Carroll held each tiny paper square delicately between his thumb and forefinger. They were so small, he had trouble handling them as he passed them over, but one after the other, Ramos went through them, describing the subjects as his friends and companions; he said one boy, who looked no more than ten, was his “Dianetics instructor.” Ramos himself appeared in three of the photos, an arm draped around the boy in each one. In all three cases Ramos made it clear the child had asked to have the picture taken.
Ramos talked about knowing one boy from time spent in New Orleans, but most of the boys were in New York. He described these as nurturing friendships, reaching out to needy youngsters who valued their time with him. One boy had junkie parents, he said, and several had no fathers around. He filled a void, Ramos suggested, giving them support and affection, returning one child who’d gotten lost to the arms of his grateful mother, rescuing another from a fall from his window. A self-described mentor and father figure. That kind of description was enough to raise Carroll’s hackles, but then Ramos told the prosecutor he took the pictures in a Times Square movie lobby. Carroll blanched inwardly—what kind of “father” takes his kid to the movies in Times Square? In 1982, the only movies screening there were triple X. And what kind of mother was letting this man take her kids to hang around there?
When Carroll held out the next picture, Jose identified him as Bennett, the son of his former girlfriend Sandy, a woman he had met in the welfare office, had dated back in 1979, and still saw occasionally. The boy was around five years old when the picture was taken, he guessed, living with his single mom. Bennett had given him his school picture because “he considers me a good father for him,” Ramos told Carroll. “We did everything together,” Ramos said. “Even looking in garbage and selling together.”
When Carroll had worked his way through all the photos, he finally asked the question on everyone’s mind. “Did you ever know a kid named Etan Patz?”
Even though, like most people, Carroll mispronounced the unusual last name, calling him “Etan Potz,” Ramos immediately knew who he was talking about. “No, no,” he said quickly, and gave a funny little laugh. It was almost as though he’d been waiting for the question, like, Here we go, of course you’re going to ask that. Without pausing to take a breath, Carroll moved on to ask about another name, then asked Ramos if he ever read the papers.
“Oh, yeah,” said Ramos, he read the New York Times every day, and the Wall Street Journal—a well-read tunnel dweller. Then Carroll came around a minute later to try again, asking about Etan Patz.
“Yeah,” Ramos responded immediately this time. “That was in the papers, in ’79.”
Carroll always felt that if you didn’t get the answer you were looking for at first, deflect it, then circle back. And give the person a way to tell you something that doesn’t incriminate him right off the bat. But none of those pictures could possibly be of Etan, Ramos made clear, because he had never met the boy, only read about him, like everyone else.
Then, moments later, Ramos offered up a connection, with no prompting, that stunned the room.
“Sandy used to take care of him,” he volunteered.
Sandy, his old girlfriend. Sandy, the woman from the welfare office.
Sandy, Bennett’s mom. Bennett was picture number three, the boy who Ramos had just said “did everything” with him.
“Bingo,” Carroll thought. Suddenly what had been a fishing expedition transformed into a hard lead, the first in years, clearer than the blurry figures in the photo-booth squares who bore a faint resemblance to Etan. But was this link real? Frank Carroll made excuses about needing to put fresh tape in the camera and stopped the interview, to confer with detectives on the other side of the glass.
He walked out of the room. “What’s this name, Sandy Harmon?” he asked the detectives congregated around the viewing area. “Is this a good name? Or is this more bullshit?” There were hurried instructions to get someone down to the Patz home with the photos. “We need a handle on this Sandy woman, too.” Cops scattered, as Carroll went back into the lineup room for another round of show-and-tell.
Carroll walked back into the interview room and started again with a fresh tape, but he could tell Ramos was just about done. They went around again on the Patz questions, and Ramos tangled himself up a bit more as he pointed to one of the blondest boys. “People told me that this one looks like him—this one, Justin,” he said. “But I couldn’t see no resemblance.”
Maybe, thought Carroll, we can go somewhere here. “What’s the difference between him and Etan Patz?” he ventured.
“The smile, I think,” Ramos said.
“Does he have the same color hair?” Carroll asked, thinking that newspapers don’t publish color pictures. But Ramos wasn’t taking the bait.<
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“I never saw Etan. I never met him. But, from the photographs I saw of him, in the paper…” Ramos paused and Carroll tried, “Did Etan look like this in the papers?”
“No,” responded Ramos. “He had a bigger head, Etan.”
“He had a bigger head?” Carroll repeated. That would be a hard thing to measure by newspaper photos.
“Yeah,” said Ramos, but he’d had enough. “I never saw Etan Patz in my life… They didn’t describe too much in the newspaper. I didn’t pay attention to it that much.”
Ten minutes and a round of terse monosyllabic answers later, Carroll ended the interview. He walked out of the room, and into the hall to a crowd of question marks.
“He’s involved,” Carroll pronounced. “I’m convinced of it.” But this was a one-off deal, and he knew his part was over. Carroll had gone into this with a clear understanding that if he succeeded in pushing the Patz case along, it was not going to go anywhere in the Bronx. The best he could do, and had done, he felt, was to lay groundwork for the Manhattan DA’s Office. Some ADA down there was going to benefit from this lead, and when they contacted him to follow up, he just hoped they’d be appreciative.
20:05 Det. Gannon—coming by with photo to be checked
—Patz logbook, March 18, 1982
The phone rang and Stan Patz picked it up in the studio, where he often worked late. The voice identified himself as Detective Gannon, and Stan assumed it was a “heads-up” call. Three years on, these calls came much less frequently, but every once in a while the Patzes were still dragged into the nightmarish arc of a new lead. The detectives had taken to deliberately leaving them out of the loop on most of these. Among the succession of cops cycling through this investigation, there were the occasional few who still saw the parents as suspects. Others withheld information to avoid unnecessary grief, on the theory that there was already enough to go around in the Patz house. But sometimes the media, followed quickly by the public, got involved. A heads-up call would come in, that Channel 4, or the New York Post, or any one of ten other local press gangs was getting ready to go with their “exclusive,” to be quickly followed by the others running, pushing and shoving, in close step behind. The cops and the family had agreed that in those cases, it was kinder not to be blindsided.
After Etan Page 11
