After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  “How could she have known this?” Sheppard marveled. “You can’t even get to here without risking your neck.” The men looked back up the steeply graded hill toward the car now out of sight.

  “She’s got to know something,” GraBois asserted, circling around the cross for a closer look. “Where is she getting her information? It’s just too much of a coincidence, and there’s no way she could have gotten down this steep of an incline on her own to know about it otherwise.”

  “Come look at this,” Sillery called. He was standing in front of a flat-topped rock covered in graffiti. GraBois peered at it. His mind was racing. He was at a loss for words.

  “Does that say ‘Prince St. Kid’?” someone asked.

  When Cealie was brought down to join them, the others were busy looking around for any more traces that people had been there before them. Sheppard found a plastic bag filled with old clothes. But GraBois was staring at the rock. He just didn’t know what to think. There were some battered abandoned cars lying farther down the rocky shore. Was this a dumping ground, and if so, was it a convenient location for the dumping of human remains? Was this a makeshift headstone? And how could Denise Cealie have predicted this?

  “Did you know that Etan disappeared from Prince Street?” he asked Cealie.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  It was getting dark, and they were all frozen and splattered with mud. GraBois could see through the dim light that the woman was shivering. They still needed to sidestep their way back up the narrow incline and drive all the way down the length of Manhattan to GraBois’s office. He would have to arrange for photographs.

  “We’re going to need you back here in New York again.” He had a lot more questions for her now.

  “It’ll have to be after Christmas,” she replied, and he nodded.

  “This time we’ll fly you down,” he added.

  There was no way around it. They would need a polygraph, for many reasons, not the least of which was that GraBois wasn’t going to get anyone to authorize a dime spent on Denise Cealie’s information first. But they couldn’t let her know in advance. GraBois gave Bill Sillery a heads-up, so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise, but made him promise not to say anything. Sillery and Cealie arrived in New York the first week of January, and Cealie showed no qualms about going off with the FBI agent as soon as she walked in the door. I expected as much, she told everyone. She was gone for what seemed like hours, while the others speculated endlessly about what was really going on. When the agent returned without her, he looked a little taken aback.

  “She passed,” he said. “She appears to be telling the truth.”

  “Can she have figured out a way to fool the polygraph?” GraBois wondered.

  “These are highly sensitive systems,” the man said, “but they’re designed to pick up deception. If the subject truly believes he or she is telling the truth, they can pass, even if they’re spinning out-and-out lies. So this woman believes she’s a medium and has this gift. Whether she does…” He shrugged.

  GraBois didn’t have the answer to that, but at this point he couldn’t afford not to believe that Denise Cealie might somehow know there were remains buried where she said. That’s how he found himself on the next day, on a below-zero morning, stamping his feet and wincing as he sucked the icy air into his lungs. With the Hell Gate Bridge as dramatic backdrop, GraBois, Cealie, and Sillery watched as the NYPD divers adjusted masks and submerged themselves in the frigid waters off the Ward’s Island shoreline. Because of the temperature, the men could only stay down for a few minutes at a stretch before they were forced to surface and warm up at a nearby dive truck. Bundled into his heavy jeans and blue down parka, the hood pulled snugly around his ears, GraBois was still freezing and couldn’t imagine how the divers could force themselves into the water. But he heard no grumbling as the officers prepared to go back under. Denise Cealie feared they couldn’t help but miss the right spot, because they needed to wait until later in the year, when the shoreline receded in the spring. After repeated dives and what seemed like an eternity in the deep winter weather, a sampling of bones was recovered, but when later tested, they proved to be animal remains. Searchers returned days later to dig up long trenches in a wide swath around the cross site. Again, nothing. It all proved a futile exercise, just one more chapter in the long and storied case. But ultimately, as these things often happen, the voices from beyond inadvertently set off a chain of events and led to the most fruitful development in the case to date.

  Joe Veltre, a supervisor in the Federal Probation Office, was an old friend of Stuart GraBois’s. He and GraBois had known each other for years, and he was one of the legion who would stop by from time to time to fan the prosecutor’s heated interest in the Patz case. What’s new, he’d ask, and then sit back while GraBois thought out loud, hashing through the latest piece of the puzzle together. Veltre was a good listener and made helpful suggestions whenever he could. When he could lend a hand with a little extra fact-finding, GraBois was always happy to let him. He would take all the help he could get.

  The license plate number Denise Cealie had envisioned did in fact turn out to be a registered plate, but it had been reissued more than once. By this point, GraBois had stopped caring about where the medium got her information, he just knew it needed to be checked out. Maybe Cealie was trying to signal she really knew someone with a car who’d been involved in the kidnapping. Or maybe bigger forces were trying to tell him something. Cealie had also envisioned an Hispanic man and Veltre was on the trail, looking for the particular Hispanic man to whom the plate number had been registered. Veltre had invested considerable time in the project, his own time, just like all the other cops and government officials who volunteered their experience and insights gratis.

  Veltre was in GraBois’s office one day with the latest results of his search, and he picked up some of GraBois’s case material lists, leafing casually through them.

  “Who’s this Jose Ramos character? What’s his story?” Veltre asked the prosecutor.

  “Yeah, he’s always been interesting to me. He dated the babysitter, but it looks like it was so he could get to her four-year-old son,” GraBois replied, looking over Veltre’s shoulder.

  “Have you ever talked to him?”

  “Don’t know where he is. He’s a transient; went to ground before I got the case, and no one’s seen him for years.”

  Veltre wrote down Jose Ramos’s name and date of birth. “I’ll nose around a little and see if I can find anything.” He knew a lot of people, who in turn knew a lot of people. “Have your guys run a rap sheet on him? I’ll take a look.”

  “Let me check the files, and I’ll get it to you.” GraBois started toward one of the cabinets where he stored his paperwork.

  Veltre waved him off. “Don’t bother. I’ll just run it again.”

  He called GraBois a few days later. The excitement in his voice was palpable.

  “I found him,” he told GraBois. “Jose Ramos is in.” It was much easier to track someone down who had a prison address.

  Between the time investigators had last come up blank on Ramos’s whereabouts and the moment in 1988 when Joe Veltre ran his rap sheet, Jose Ramos had preyed on the Rainbow Family of Living Light, and they had put him somewhere Stuart GraBois could easily get his hands on him. With one look at his rap sheet GraBois could now pinpoint Ramos’s exact whereabouts—the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, Pennsylvania.

  Veltre brought the sheet over. GraBois saw the Erie misdemeanor sentence, which would hold Ramos in place for at least one more year. But when he turned to the sheet’s last page, he saw an entry that interested him just as much. There was another charge, a felony rape, which had been dropped the previous year. The sheet didn’t reveal the whole story of Joey Taylor and the suppressed confession, but it raised some interesting questions that bore further research. While the prosecutor immediately began to make plans to writ Ramos into federal custody so the two could meet,
he also wanted to know more about the charge that had gotten away.

  The next week was exhausting. Knowing that a potentially promising suspect was so close, GraBois began the necessary paperwork to have him brought closer. But that was just part of his workload. In just that week, he appeared in court against a defendant so unruly he had to be carted to his hearing in a wheelbarrow, and questioned a suspect in a grisly sadomasochistic murder involving bondage masks and violent sex games. By Friday, GraBois was grateful for the weekend break, as he left his office early to pick up his family and get back into Manhattan in time for a Passover seder there. He’d been feeling under the weather for a few days, which he credited to his hectic schedule. But by the time he arrived home, he was having searing chest pains and trouble breathing. A trip to the local ER was reassuring—it looked like nothing more than a pulled muscle, and he went on to his holiday meal.

  GraBois took it easy that weekend, and would have stayed home Monday morning, but members of his task force were bringing him a suspect to interview. By the time he drove home afterwards, the pain had returned, now so severe he was forced to pull off the road and wait until the worst of it subsided. He made it inside his apartment before collapsing on the living room floor. This time the hospital stay was weeks, not hours, as doctors shook their heads, fed him more antibiotics, and ordered more tests. IVs laced around his supine body, and an oxygen tube was his lifeline, as his lungs grew weaker, ravaged by the worst case of double pleurisy his physician had ever seen. GraBois spent the days in a fog, although he remembered the hospital clergyman leaning over him at one point.

  “Get your affairs in order,” the man counseled.

  Two weeks after he was stricken, doctors tried one last test and discovered the reason he wasn’t responding to treatment. It was a rare case of Legionnaires’ disease, contracted either on the icy Ward’s Island shoreline, or from a germ-filled air conditioner in the Syracuse hotel room where he’d gone the previous month to question a small group of Denise Cealie’s fellow mediums. GraBois made steady if slow progress after that, but it would be two months of bed rest and working from home before he was back in the office and operating at full capacity. During those months, Jose Ramos had gotten a brief reprieve. As GraBois was heading to the emergency room, Ramos was being upgraded to a coveted new status that allowed him to work outside the prison fence.

  “It means that I now have a little more freedom,” Ramos wrote to a pen pal. “Thank God for this.”

  CHAPTER 14

  90 Proof

  SUBJECT: MISSING PERSON ETAN PATZ M/W/6

  CONTENTS: INTERVIEW OF JOSE ANTONIO RAMOS

  1. On this date the undersigned and Detective Cavallo interviewed Jose Ramos. Also present at the U.S. Attorney’s office where this interview was conducted was US Attorney Stuart GraBois….

  3. Ramos at the end of the interview slouched down in his chair and said he was glad to get this off his chest. He then said that he never told this to anyone else.

  —DD5 Report of NYPD Missing Persons detective Robert Shaw, June 28, 1988

  Stuart GraBois walked into the U.S. Marshals’ holding area on the third floor, four flights down from his office, accompanied by two NYPD detectives. Three months had passed since GraBois had first looked at Jose Ramos’s rap sheet and learned Ramos was just a writ of habeas corpus away. Now, in late June, GraBois was returned to his full strength; he was back pitching for the office softball team, and the only remnants of his near-death encounter with Legionnaires’ disease were a lingering shortness of breath and scar tissue in the lower left quadrant of his lung. As he had reviewed Ramos’s background in the weeks since he’d come back from sick leave, he’d become increasingly convinced that the pedophile was the biggest potential lead in the Patz case thus far. The previous week, Ramos had finally entered federal custody, arriving at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, adjacent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, from Pennsylvania’s Rockview state prison.

  Normally, the detectives would bring a subject upstairs to a prosecutor waiting in his office, but this time GraBois had come along for the pickup. He was sure he would recognize Ramos immediately, even though the videotapes he’d been studying all weekend were six-year-old grainy black-and-white VHS, at least a few generations degraded from the originals. He’d pulled the two nondescript tapes, marked simply “Ramos Q&A,” out of a file the previous Friday before leaving the office. On the tapes were Bronx ADA Frank Carroll’s March 1982 session with Ramos—the one and only time he’d been questioned by a prosecutor about the Patz case—after two boys said he’d tried to entice them inside his drainpipe home. Over and over that weekend, GraBois had hit rewind, scribbled notes, and mulled them over with his social worker wife, Bonnie. Two things in particular had struck him. The first was that on the tape Ramos claimed to have heard voices back in 1979, inner voices that goaded him to violence. “I had to hold it back,” Ramos had told Carroll, “ ’cause I was ready to explode.” To GraBois, this predilection to violence was key—Ramos was someone capable of harming a child.

  The second revelation on the tape was Ramos’s direct connection to the Patz family. Listening to him volunteer that he’d dated a woman who had cared for Etan, GraBois was amazed. Ramos had even claimed on tape that Etan Patz had played with Sandy Harmon’s son Bennett, and that Ramos himself babysat for Bennett on numerous occasions. To GraBois, when Ramos said “babysat,” it was easily broken code for “molested.”

  Preparing for today’s interview, GraBois had reread the files with new purpose. He’d always known the cops had questioned Ramos back in 1982; that they’d felt they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. He also knew that when they’d talked to Sandy Harmon ten months later, not only had she failed a lie detector test, but her son had revealed to police that Ramos had abused him. At that point, GraBois thought, Jose Ramos should have been the number one suspect. But he also recognized that he was looking at the situation in hindsight, with nine years of fragmented information gathered neatly together for him and fresh in his mind. What was so clear now would have been less obvious at the time. He didn’t even know if anyone else had ever seen this tape. But now that he had, he was looking forward to his meeting with Ramos.

  Charles Manson. That was GraBois’s first reaction as the detectives cuffed Jose Ramos to take him upstairs. In person, Ramos’s resemblance to the serial murderer was uncanny. The same narrow, dark face, the same beard and hair, the same disturbing look in his eyes, like he was inwardly laughing at a cruel joke no one else would ever find funny. Eyes that darted from side to side, evasive and restless. Standing in front of him, GraBois once again had the thought he’d been harboring all weekend—how could a man who looked like this win the trust of children? Of their parents?

  “Mr. Ramos, my name is Stuart GraBois.” GraBois always started politely. “I’m an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Do you mind if I call you Jose?”

  “No, go right ahead,” the man replied, with a cavalier smile, “and I guess I’ll call you Stuart.”

  Ramos’s menacing appearance was tempered by a softly melodic voice, warm and soothing; a kid-show host’s dream. That’s how he does it, GraBois thought as the men ushered Ramos upstairs. Charles Manson meets Mr. Rogers.

  In GraBois’s office, Ramos sat with one hand cuffed to a heavy metal chair, directly in front of the prosecutor’s desk. NYPD detectives Bob Shaw and Dan Cavallo sat in chairs flanking their subject. As they all made preliminary small talk about his background and his family, GraBois again was struck by what he was hearing, and not just the soft-spoken voice. Ramos was also much more articulate than he’d expected. He was in visibly high spirits—like a schoolboy on a field trip. He seemed happy to be back in his hometown of New York City, no matter the circumstances. At certain points he even affected a Jackie Masonesque New York Jewish accent.

  “So what’s new?” he asked in broad tones. GraBois just sat there and looked at him, not sure how to answer. He wa
s saving that for later.

  At first, GraBios had the odd sensation he was convening a collegial business meeting. There was the chitchat about the weather, about Ramos’s trip up to New York, how things were for him in prison, his entrepreneurial previous life. He boasted of his past success: how he’d once found $4,000 in a trash can, which funded a lengthy European vacation. Then Ramos got a knowing expression on his face, a preemptive “I know you’re going to get me so I’m going to beat you to it” look.

  “I betcha I can tell you why you guys brought me here,” he said.

  “Oh, why’s that?” GraBois asked. This might be even easier than he’d anticipated.

  “Okay… I guess I forgot to pay my taxes on that stuff I sold on the street.” He had the mischievous, confessional look of someone who’d been caught with his hand in a very small, inconsequential cookie jar.

  No need to disabuse him of his theory, GraBois thought, and he used it as an opening into his interrogation.

  “Well, we would like to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay with you,” he began.

  “Sure, fire away,” Ramos answered.

  GraBois waited as Shaw read Ramos his rights and then asked if he wanted a lawyer. The prosecutor was praying the interview wouldn’t end with Ramos’s next word.

  “Nah, nah,” Ramos said. “That’s not necessary.” GraBois inwardly exhaled.

  “So, Jose,” GraBois said, starting with a blunt warning. He picked up the dense, softcover U.S. Code book lying open on his desk at the relevant page. “If you’re willing to talk to us, you need to understand one thing. If I catch you in a lie, I will prosecute you to the full extent of the law under Section 1001, Title 18 of the United States Code.” The “thousand and one,” as it was known in shorthand, worked like the threat of a perjury charge in court. GraBois read aloud about the five-year sentence for lying in a federal inquiry. He placed the open book back on his desk, and paused to check his subject’s reaction. Ramos looked surprised that the mood was suddenly so serious, and GraBois backtracked, to cushion his threat with a string of softball questions.