After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  The prosecutor was slowly but surely working his way through every open-ended file, no matter how unlikely the prospect of a payoff. There was the Earth Room, an art installation around the corner from the Patz loft that consisted of a 3,600-square-foot second-floor room packed with two feet of dirt. The “sculpture” had been on exhibit since 1977, two years before Etan disappeared. GraBois’s investigators learned that the building’s custodian at the time of Etan’s disappearance was a convicted pedophile, who’d allegedly made remarks suggesting that Etan was buried under the 280,000 pounds of dirt. GraBois wrote up a search warrant. Then he had to lobby, over the protests of his superiors, to bring FBI specialists and ground-search radar equipment from D.C. to sweep the room for any remains. Rudy Giuliani stepped in again and approved it. The men flew up, and after some selective digging, the Earth Room was eliminated as Etan’s grave.

  GraBois also returned to Etan’s two afterschool playmates, this time hypnotizing Chelsea Altman and Kyra Simmons, whose memories of encountering different people on the way home from school with Sandy Harmon in 1979 again contradicted Sandy’s version. There were certainly other reasons she could have lied to police, having nothing to do with Etan—fears about losing Bennett, mistrust of law enforcement, covering up some less egregious misconduct. But what if she’d inadvertently passed on information about Etan’s wish to walk to school alone to the real suspect? She could have been directly involved, or the connection was much more innocuous but nonetheless could advance the investigation.

  GraBois wanted to go at Sandy Harmon as hard as he had the Patzes, but she remained elusive. She was asked to take another polygraph, but she refused. Not even an offer of immunity changed her position. She had nothing further to add, she maintained. But GraBois was convinced she really did. It was a frustrating impasse, and it nagged at him.

  He also didn’t want to rule out any link to the extended Patz family members. While in Israel, Ruffo had obtained a list from the Israeli National Police of Rabbi Norman Patz’s many visits. Throughout the next several months FBI agents pulled passport applications and overseas travel records for both Stan’s and Julie’s families. Stan and Julie weren’t told about any of this, of course, but it was clear to them that everyone they knew and loved was under renewed suspicion, and the federal presence meant a more powerful microscope than ever before. Stan was especially sensitive about the shadow that continued to be cast on his brother Norman, who as a highly respected rabbi traveled widely, especially in Israel.

  A rabbi’s reputation is based on the strength of his character, Stan complained to an interviewing FBI agent. He was firm that under no circumstances would his brother have abducted Etan to be raised in a different environment. When GraBois told Stan agents were planning a trip to Massachusetts in the fall of 1986, he erupted.

  “You’re going to go harass my sick, elderly, grieving parents.” Stan’s normally calm voice was pitched higher as, a year after their first meeting, he sat in GraBois’s office again. He was alone this time; Julie had begged off from the meeting.

  “My mother is seventy. She has cancer. She has never gotten over losing Etan. If you grill her the way you grill us, it could kill her.” Both Stan and Julie thought GraBois’s efforts against the family were a huge waste of time, but Julie had given up trying to tell the prosecutor that.

  “If we end up going, we’re not going up there to harass anyone,” GraBois countered. “Someone might be able to tell us something, some little throwaway piece of information that to them means nothing, but it could turn this case. It’s not fun. I don’t enjoy it. But we have to be thorough.”

  “You’ve gone after Julie and me for months; I know you think I’m turning out kiddie porn in my darkroom. Now you’re telling us that you’re spending more time and money, traveling hundreds of miles away, to go after the rest of our family? What am I supposed to think?”

  There was a brief silence, as though both men were going to their mutual corners, to be toweled off and await the bell for the next round. Since GraBois wasn’t planning to divulge anything to the Patzes, he felt like a fighter with one hand tied behind his back. Still, he wasn’t worried about the outcome of this match.

  “My men are heading up to Massachusetts soon, that’s all I can tell you.” The irony was that Stan Patz’s family was of little concern to GraBois. His men were primarily chasing another angle altogether, but he couldn’t tell Stan and Julie about it. GraBois had strict rules about sharing information with the family, at least until he could cross them off his own personal suspect list. He knew it drove the Patzes crazy, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “You’ve spent more than a year looking at just me and Julie, and you’re obviously not finished with the two of us,” Stan Patz said before he got up and left the meeting. “When is this going to end?”

  When he got home, he said to Julie, “This guy is the worst.”

  In recent years Julie had let her husband take over as point person to the investigation, around the time she’d begun to understand her further efforts wouldn’t bring Etan home. Once she decided she couldn’t be of any use to her eldest son, she’d retrenched, to tend to her remaining children, who needed her as badly as she needed them. Now Stan went to the meetings, talked to the cops, and reported back.

  “You’ve got eight brothers and sisters,” he said to Julie now, “and by the time he’s figured out they’re clean, Etan will be sixteen, and he’ll just drive himself home.”

  In his moments of clarity, Stan understood he was directing his anger at the wrong person. There was a faceless demon somewhere out there who had stolen his son, but Stan had to settle for raging at Stuart GraBois.

  United States Attorney’s Office

  Southern District of New York

  Attention: Mr. Rudy Giuliani

  re: Mr. Stuart GraBois

  November 10, 1986

  Dear Sir

  My wife and I respectfully request that Mr. Stuart GraBois, of your office, be removed from active participation in our case.

  In the time Mr. GraBois has been assigned to us, he has managed to antagonize all of my family, numerous law enforcement officials here and possibly some abroad. For the past seven and a half years, the time my son Etan has been gone, we have freely cooperated with almost anybody who could conceivably help us find our boy…. We are now openly hostile….

  … Ostensibly, we all have the same goal: to find out what happened to Etan…. We are anxious for an answer, yet we do not want to pursue that solution at any cost.

  If your office expects willing cooperation from us, relieve Mr. GraBois of his assignment.

  Sincerely yours,

  Stanley K. Patz and Julia B. Patz

  cc: S. GraBois

  cc: Howard Wilson

  cc: K. Ruffo

  GraBois took his copy of the letter and walked up to the eighth floor, to Giuliani’s office. Rudy was finishing a conference call, his feet perched on the desk. Standing in the door, GraBois held up the letter. Rudy Giuliani looked at him, and as he hung up the phone, he nodded. “If you don’t get complaints, you’re not doing your job.”

  GraBois didn’t need to hear any more. Giuliani’s message was clear, and besides, GraBois already knew it: Stan Patz was looking for sensitivity and respect. Stuart GraBois was looking for a killer. As he headed back down the hall to the stairs, Giuliani’s last words caught up to him: “Keep up the good work.”

  Back in his office, GraBois leafed through the documents spread out on his desk, detailing a cluster of Etan sightings in the Massachusetts area. He looked down at the handwritten list of possible suspects that he’d been compiling over the last year and a half. Stan Patz was on it but so were a dozen others. If and when Stan’s name came off the list he’d be able to talk to him about the rest, and how he was working on them with the same force he had used on the Patz family. That’s how GraBois could feel so confident that he was going to crack this case. He didn’t care what they thought of him. He h
oped someday the family would understand, but if they didn’t, well, that was all right too.

  CHAPTER 11

  Welcome Home

  We, Sisters and Brothers, Children of Light, friends of nature, united by our love for each other and our yearning for peace, who call ourselves the Rainbow Family Tribe, humbly invite everyone everywhere to join us in expressing our sincere desire, through prayers, for peace on earth and harmony among all.

  —invitation to the Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes, Pennsylvania, July 1–7, 1986

  When the whole world is invited, anybody is likely to show up.

  —”Quester,” one of many Rainbow Gathering organizers

  Welcome home, brother!” “Welcome home, sister!”

  Before Barry Adams had fully positioned his ten-year-old, mud-splattered Chevy van into the Rainbow Gathering’s designated parking, off a soggy stretch of dead-end dirt road, he and his family were besieged.

  “We love you!”

  This, from old friends and passersby alike, was the traditional opening line of a Rainbow conversation. Rainbow brothers and sisters of every shade and hair length shouted greetings and extended their arms to the Adams kids piling out of the van. The exuberant welcome party was a fraction of Barry Adams’s “extended” family—the Rainbow Family of Living Light—who would come together this year, as they did every July, for a weeklong “spiritual event, an absolutely free, non-commercial celebration held for the healing of all minds, hearts, bodies and souls.” Thus proclaimed the hand-lettered, hand-circulated brochure for the 1986 Fifteenth Annual Rainbow Gathering of Tribes. “Come bring your light,” it declared. “Let it SHINE!”

  Like many veteran Rainbows, Adams, his wife, Sunny, and their two children were arriving ahead of time to Heart’s Content, a remote outpost of northwestern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest where white-tailed deer and black bear roamed freely under 400-year-old beech, hemlock, and sugar maples. Shielded by the protective embrace of these secluded old-growth forests and the anonymity of their Rainbow nicknames, some seven thousand pilgrims would soon be assembled, to let their freak flags fly. There’d be few outsiders on hand to be offended by the casual drug use, mostly pot and the psychotropics that Rainbows viewed as healing herbs or religious sacrament; few nonbelievers to gawk at the nudity that was neither de rigueur nor discouraged. Here, the Rainbows would say, they were in the sanctity of their own home.

  Barry and Sunny unpacked the van between the breath-stealing, all-enveloping bear hugs from old friends they hadn’t seen for a year, the “you’ve grown so tall” exclamations over their eleven-year-old son and six-year-old daughter, the gossip about goings-on that had preceded their arrival. Not all of it was lighthearted banter.

  “There’s some guy who’s been giving off a negative vibe,” someone told Adams. “He’s handing out little toys and candy to the kids here. His energy is all wrong.” A few other people had heard or seen this, and Sunny looked around to check that their own children were in sight.

  They were still an hour away on foot from the Gathering’s Main Meadow, deliberately chosen for its remote location, as far as possible from cars and highways, TV and money, and all the other strictures of mainstream society, or what Rainbows called Babylon. But after six long days on the road from Missoula, Montana, Adams knew the final destination was worth it.

  He breathed deeply and soaked up the vibe. An infectious grin split his freckled, open face, recalling a hippie Howdy Doody. Clad in his signature outfit of handmade vest and buckskin chaps—with matching breechclout modestly covering the crotch—Barry Adams was a landmark at these Gatherings. He wore his long brown hair in twin plaits, clamped tightly to his head by a multihued bandana and his tortoiseshell Buddy Holly glasses.

  In Babylon, Barry Adams’s look stood out; here alongside brothers like Buffalo and Quester and Peace Ray, Barry “Plunker” did not. His Rainbow nickname derived from the single-stringed instrument that doubled as a walking staff he strapped across his back. The four-foot, feather-trimmed wooden “plunker” was the musical accompaniment to his Rainbow “hipstory” lessons, rambling discourses to extol “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world.” Adams would never call himself a Rainbow leader—he’d be the first to say the Rainbows had no leaders—but he was an elder, a passionate devotee who’d helped organize the very first Gathering in 1972. Inspired by Native American prophecies, some two thousand hippies had climbed high into the Colorado Rockies to sacred Arapaho ground. Since then, the Rainbows had journeyed annually to far-flung sites—the Burnt Coral Canyon of New Mexico; the Virgin River of Utah; the Antelope Hills of Wyoming; a different National Forest wilderness every year.

  Today, Adams looked up and down the line of vehicles with a mixture of pride and wonder, and thought of how the Gathering had evolved since that first Rocky Mountain high. Now the Day-Glo VW buses held together by strapping tape and karmic energy were just as likely to be parked head to toe with a late-model four-by-four, a suburban family wagon, or a Harley hog. Adams watched approvingly as the all-volunteer parking crew motioned vehicles into neat slots and delivered their orientation, “Rap 107,” which laid out Rainbow doctrine to each newcomer.

  “Keep the balance,” the crew recited earnestly. “Earth, Sky, Trees, Water, and People!” Old-timers who arrived mid-rap joined in. “Alcohol is discouraged, guns are inappropriate, violence is contrary to the Spirit.”

  Adams soon added his distinctively hearty western twang to the chorus. “Freedom with responsibility,” he’d preach to the uninitiated, strumming the plunker for emphasis. “Common sense, faith, and elbow grease.”

  Indeed, everything at these Gatherings was free or bartered, a “Magic Hat” routinely passed through the crowds to subsidize food, entertainment, childcare, security, sanitation, and medical attention. It often did seem like magic, but peel back the anarchy and the Rainbows hid a surprisingly complex infrastructure. Every year a shining new, fully functional paradise rose from the dust, complete with consensus government, nursing stations, slit-trench latrines, and dozens of individual camps centered around communal kitchens, with names like Moondancer’s Enchanted Forest or Earth Mothers’ Kitchen.

  Adams finally hoisted a spartan mess kit onto his back and disengaged from the group around him. Trained nurse and midwife Sunny gathered her homemade liniments, antibiotic tinctures, and bottled oxygen for the Rainbow version of a M.A.S.H. unit called the Center of Alternative Living Medicine, or C.A.L.M. Then she rounded up the kids and they all headed down the trail.

  The path that led to Main Meadow was deliberately long and meandering. Folks needed the time and distance every year to shake off societal layers, to make the transition into a holy place. Rainbows saw the Gathering as a sanctuary. “How would you feel if we brought a rifle into your church?” they would say to the uniformed officers who inevitably hovered near the scene. With thousands of transients massing in their backyard, authorities saw it differently, and as at past Gatherings, state troopers in Pennsylvania had established a mobile outpost some three miles away, ready to move in if necessary.

  Rainbows had little use for the law enforcement officers, or “LEOs,” who flashed their guns, took pictures, and otherwise killed the buzz; although to be fair, the troopers largely ignored the illegal herbs. The Rainbow Family looked to their own internal security force, Shanti Sena—Sanskrit for “peacekeepers”—armed with little more than goodwill and, occasionally, walkie-talkies. In theory everyone at the Gathering was a Shanti Sena peacekeeper, but a small band of stalwarts, like Barry Adams and his compadres, held a certain status born of experience and commitment.

  Over the next few hours, Adams and his family made slow progress toward the Gathering’s center. At every turn of the path there were more old friends and new strangers to embrace, including the roving Hug Patrol. As the group drew nearer, they breathed the pungent smoke from the kitchens and campfires mingling with the aroma of damp earth and incense. The muffled patter of dr
ums and the occasional strum of a solo guitar broke the silence from time to time, but otherwise the forest’s natural tranquillity prevailed. Finally, the four skirted an industrial-looking gate that had been transplanted mid-forest to straddle the dirt path, marking the official entrance. A street sign fluttering above, with an arrow pointing forward, proclaimed freedom.

  They were home.

  Main Meadow—already dotted with tents, teepees, even a wood-framed, open-roofed yurt or two set into the spongy field—stretched ahead. The surrounding trees were draped with tarps for simpler cover.

  A scraggly-bearded young man passed by, blowing footlong soap bubbles; a bare-breasted woman suckled her child nearby. Days of rain had created natural mud baths, and one group now lay in the hot sun clad only in dried clay, ferns tied to their hair.

  Adams split off from his family as they headed to C.A.L.M. and he to Shanti Sena camp. He stopped to check the Welcome Center, a battered surplus NASA trailer once used to store missile launch tracking equipment. Flower garlands and an ancient Sanskrit banner now replaced the hardware. A rainbow of colored posters announced the week’s offerings: ayurvedic yoga classes, tantric meditation workshops, herb walks and woodcarving, acupuncture, massage, and more—all free.

  Adams planted stakes at the Shanti Sena camp, and ran into his old friend John Buffalo, who’d driven in from San Diego a few days earlier. With a solid two hundred pounds on his nearly six-foot frame, fiery red hair, and full beard, Buffalo was a security force unto himself. While the two men caught up, Adams related the unsettling report he’d heard in the parking lot, about the mysterious man handing out toys and candy to the Rainbow kids. He and Buffalo talked about the best way to check out the rumor, and in the meantime they’d be on the lookout.