After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  For his part, GraBois looked straight ahead, but he was acutely aware of the white-hot rage spilling off of the man next to him. Ramos was now swaying slightly from side to side. Growing up in his Bensonhurst neighborhood, GraBois had learned from experience that such body language sometimes signaled an impending attack, and he moved into a defensive stance, raising his arms slightly and leaning back. One of the sheriff’s deputies stood up and walked purposefully toward Ramos, as his voice rose and took on a keening quality. Ramos motioned him back.

  “You don’t have to stand here like he’s going to hit me or something, I’m not going to do nothing,” Ramos said to the deputy.

  Marylou Barton also stood up to her full five-foot-three height and walked to stand between the two men. She would tell GraBois later she’d expected at any moment both of them to be rolling on the courtroom’s thinly carpeted floor.

  “I’m just upset because nobody helped me when I asked for help,” Ramos said. “Mr. GraBois accused me of molesting everybody in the United States, well, if that’s the case, you know, well, charge me with that, too.”

  Ramos was defiant but he was now also weeping openly. “Where’s the justice at? I’m asking for justice, I’ve been asking it for three years now,” he wailed. His eyes raked the front of the courtroom, moving from the judge to the other officers of the court.

  The deputy had moved up to Ramos’s other side, and he reached out to put his hand in restraint on the prisoner’s shoulder.

  “No.” Ramos pulled away. “I want to say what I have to say, I have a right to say what I have to say.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” said the deputy. “Just settle down.” Ramos seemed to compose himself, but another officer standing outside in the gallery area quietly undid the latch and cracked open the gate in readiness. Everyone who worked here knew the last time things had turned violent in this courtroom. Forty years earlier a divorce hearing had ended badly when the plaintiff, Norman Moon, shot and killed Judge Allison Wade as he dived under his bench, then later turned the gun on himself. Bullet holes in the desk and wall were a prominent reminder of the first and only assassination in Pennsylvania of a sitting judge.

  But Ramos had lost his fire, and he slumped into himself, his voice dropping back down. “I don’t know how to express my hurt inside me, I don’t know how, I’m trying to ask the Court for help. I’m trying.”

  “All right,” Judge Wolfe responded, his voice devoid of all sentiment. “Is that all?”

  “Yes sir.” Ramos sounded defeated, as though he could tell the judge was unmoved by his emotional outburst. It had been emotional, gut-wrenching to listen to, even coming from the mouth of a serial child molester. Some in the court simply thought it was manufactured, a calculated ploy to sway the judge or bolster Ramos’s claims of mental illness. GraBois himself thought it was real. He’d seen Jose Ramos emotionally implode in similar situations—when he first admitted he was 90 percent sure that the child he took back to his apartment for sex was Etan Patz, and again just one month earlier when he’d finally agreed to the plea. But his breakdowns evoked no sympathy from GraBois. He reserved his sympathy for Ramos’s victims.

  Before pronouncing his sentence, Judge Wolfe took some pains to explain his decision. He had read all the paperwork, the pre-sentence investigation, the half-dozen multipage letters Ramos had sent directly to the judge, and now he cited specifically the clear admissions Ramos had made in those letters of his sexual abuse against children.

  “You have indeed told the Court,” began Judge Wolfe, “in your own writing, of your sexual activity prior to this charge with male juveniles.”

  The judge had also read in great detail the examining psychiatrist’s report, and referred to the doctor’s conclusion that Ramos could not rest on a mental illness diagnosis to mitigate his criminal history.

  Citing directly from the psychiatric evaluation, the judge acknowledged Ramos’s reports of childhood abuse, then read aloud the doctor’s assessment that nevertheless, “there is no evidence that he was psychologically impaired at the time of the assault in any way that would make him any less responsible for his actions.

  “In the Court’s opinion,” the judge now told Ramos, “you’re a predator upon young males, and your writings have acknowledged that.”

  Predator. As soon as GraBois heard that word, he knew the judge was going to come down hard.

  Turning to Ramos’s tearful assertions of remorse for what he had done to young Joey Taylor and his family, Judge Wolfe said, “The Court does accept the Commonwealth’s position that you have shown no remorse whatsoever. You haven’t denied your acts; you haven’t justified your acts except by attempting to shift the responsibility to your victim and his parents. This Court concludes from all of the evidence: Yes, you do know right from wrong; you know these acts are wrong and you continue to do them.”

  The judge pointed out that this was not Ramos’s first offense, and he signaled the need to protect society against such repeat offenders.

  “For these reasons, Mr. Ramos, you are sentenced to pay the cost of prosecution; you will stand committed to the Western Diagnostic and Classification Center at Pittsburgh for a minimum period of ten years to the maximum period of twenty, that sentence to run consecutive and not concurrent to all of the sentence that you are now undergoing.”

  Ten to twenty, consecutive. GraBois was exhilarated. The judge had ruled in favor of every one of the prosecution’s wishes. Standing there, he told himself it had all been worth it.

  He thought about Joey and Etan and Bennett, and all those boys in the little photo-booth pictures from the drainpipe. Ramos would serve the full twenty, GraBois promised himself. He’d do whatever he could to make that happen. And because the sentence was consecutive, it meant, at the very least and barring parole, that Jose Ramos would sit behind bars well into the next century, possibly until 2014. He’d be at least seventy years old then, if he lived that long. Joey Taylor would be thirty-six, and hopefully he’d spend the interim growing up and out of his trauma.

  GraBois glanced toward the gallery. Barry Adams had that face-splitting grin, and he flashed a thumbs-up. GraBois felt himself grinning back. He exchanged congratulations with Marylou Barton, and they gathered up their papers to leave.

  As he was leaving the courtroom, GraBois asked Tom Bonavita whether he and his client would meet with him again in the law library, just to listen to a final offer. All along, GraBois’s bargaining chip on the Patz case wasn’t how much time Ramos would do, but how he’d do that time—hard or easier. There was no easy. But the federal prosecutor could arrange for Ramos to serve his sentence in a federal rather than state facility where there was less overcrowding, healthier food, and a better all-around class of criminal. Most murders, rapes—all the worst violent crimes—came through state court, so those murderers, rapists, and an entrenched gang network were for the most part in state prisons. For a child molester vulnerable to attack, a forty-seven-year-old thinking about how he’d be spending his next twenty-four years, this was far more than a simple quality-of-life issue.

  “Jose, you’re going away for a long time,” GraBois said. “I’m willing to try to see that you do federal time. I can also reach out to your family and put you together with your parents. I know you haven’t seen them in a long time. But you have to do the right thing and help the Patz family.”

  He half expected to hear Ramos tell him to fuck off, but the man said nothing, simply stood there, glowering. He had clearly heard the offer, but he was either not going to give GraBois the satisfaction of acknowledgment, or he was in understandable shock. When all of this had started in GraBois’s office back in June 1988, Jose Ramos had been looking forward to the possibility of parole in November 1990. Instead, with one day left in that month, twenty-plus more years now stretched bleakly ahead of him.

  “I don’t want an answer now. Just think about it,” GraBois said as he ended the brief meeting. Ramos was then led out of the courtroom, and t
he press crowded around, eager to get his reaction. John Miller’s question followed Ramos down the hall.

  “Do you think this ten to twenty might give you an incentive to consider a deal on the Etan Patz case?” That was exactly what Miller thought the prosecutor was going for in the Pennsylvania courtroom.

  “I got no comment on that.”

  “Do you think you got that stiff sentence because of the Patz case?”

  Ramos had nowhere to go with the cameras trained on him as he waited for the elevator. “Yeah,” he said. “But I have no comment whatsoever on the Patz case.” At the shouted follow-ups, he stepped into the elevator. “Why don’t you ask GraBois about that? Why don’t you ask GraBois why he had me arrested…” The door closed on his words.

  When GraBois spoke to the reporters some twenty minutes later, the question was asked again about the Patz case and its connection here, but he echoed Ramos.

  “I cannot comment on that” was all he’d say. Instead he talked about his satisfaction at the sentence, and what it would mean to the victim.

  “A little boy was injured,” he said. “Psychologically, emotionally, physically, and this was judgment day. For a man that thought he could get away with it, he was now humbled by the judge.”

  In his last comment to one local Erie reporter, who persisted in asking about the Patz case, he finally gave her what she needed, the soundbite guaranteed to make it on the air.

  “The U.S. Attorney’s Office is not finished with Jose Ramos.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Another Door Opens

  Dear Stuart,

  Hi, hope that this letter fines [sic] you and your family well and a merry Christmas, this coming new 1991 New Year. My family and I wants to thank you very much for all your help.

  —Cherie Taylor’s Christmas card, December 20, 1990

  To Mr. Stuart R. GraBois and Family

  “Especially for You:

  May Hanukkah be a season of beauty, shining with warmth, joy and love.”

  [handwritten:] “Thou shall take no Vengeance (Leviticus 19:18)”

  —Jose Antonio Ramos’s Hanukkah card, December 28, 1990

  The year wound down slowly, compared to the pace of the fall. Little could compete with November’s crescendo in the courtroom. Jose Ramos remained safely locked away at Rockview state prison, serving out the last four years on his Erie conviction. Any chance for early parole on that charge was blown to pieces by this new conviction. Ramos was working himself into a state, trying to find a loophole in the sentence he’d just been handed. Within days he’d filed an appeal, then furiously filled even more long yellow sheets with invective and pleadings to the judge, citing mind-numbing precedent, the Greek goddess Themis, and Plato. Jose Ramos held one person responsible for his personal nightmare, and boxed up in a fifteen-by-ten-foot world at SCI Rockview, his enmity was festering.

  Stuart GraBois stayed in touch with the Rockview administrators. Once again, GraBois’s ability to see setbacks as opportunities kept him moving forward. The fact that Ramos hadn’t broken down further and coughed up the missing pieces to the Patz case was a bitter disappointment. But it was mitigated by the prospect that far into the foreseeable future, GraBois could count on dealing with a stationary target. GraBois hoped it wouldn’t take twenty-five years, but he wouldn’t think that far ahead, just to the next step in his work-in-progress.

  There were other payoffs, smaller perhaps but powerful in their own right. GraBois opened a stack of Christmas mail in late December 1990 to find a card addressed from a rural route postbox in a small midwestern town. “May the faith and hope of Christmas light your way the whole year through” was the inscribed message. The Jewish prosecutor was touched by the sentiment beyond the words. A long, heartfelt note was folded into the card.

  Cherie Taylor thanked him not just for taking on the court case, but because “it was also a part of our life that made my family stronger and closer together in love and in heart.

  “Thank you very much once again,” she wrote in a large, loopy scrawl. “I am sending a school picture of Joey and William for you.” Thirteen-year-old Joey was still a round-faced, cherubic-looking seventh grader; at twelve, Billy’s eyes were warier. The typical overlit, stilted studio photos portrayed two scrubbed innocent faces. GraBois had spent the previous months with these boys, and knew it wasn’t like that; you can’t go back and change things. But, he now thought, their expressions hinted at a life retrieved.

  “When you look at them,” Cherie wrote, “remember that the hope and faith we put in man’s law is really the love God has for his children.”

  It was a slightly garbled but lovely thought. Cherie had talked before about how this prosecution had given the Taylor family a new, if guarded, belief in the law, and that’s how GraBois interpreted this sentiment. Prosecutors aren’t often afforded such appreciation, he thought, and he tucked the note away in his files.

  It helped rinse away the bitter taste of GraBois’s most recent exchange with Jose Ramos. The week before Cherie Taylor’s letter arrived, GraBois had taken his last shot of 1990, launching the next phase of his campaign. In search of a bargaining chip, GraBois’s investigators had tracked down Jose Ramos Sr. at his Florida home. He was deeply ashamed of his son, Ramos Sr. told GraBois over the phone. In fact, the family had had nothing to do with him since the early seventies. He often wondered if his son’s problems stemmed from an accident during his Navy stint, some kind of explosion on board ship that might have damaged him this way. “He was regular before that,” said Ramos Sr. As GraBois filled him in on recent events, he sensed a dignified elderly man whose family had thrown up their hands. Ramos Sr. told GraBois that his wife was very ill in Florida, but if the prosecutor thought he could help, he would make arrangements to travel to New York.

  GraBois thanked him, and the next day he called Jose Ramos Jr. It was a terse, awkward exchange.

  “I had a long talk with your father,” GraBois started. “Your parents are willing to come up to see you. I would bring them up.” But the Patz family need something as well, he went on. They need to hear about their son.

  “I am no longer interested in prosecuting you in New York,” GraBois continued, which was not the truth. He simply wanted to know if Ramos would take any kind of bait, whether there was even any point to keep on fishing. Given the decades facing Ramos, “to try to prosecute you here on something else makes little sense now. And we think you can help us out on this end.” The prosecutor offered to get Ramos a lawyer to work out a deal.

  “So I throw that out to you, for what it’s worth. If you want to tell me to go to hell, go ahead.”

  Ramos listened in silence, but he wasn’t buying it. “You have a Happy Hanukkah, yourself and your family,” he replied. “I have nothing else to say to you. I don’t know what you want and I’ve told you I don’t have anything more to offer you.”

  “You certainly do.” GraBois wasn’t going to just let that go. “Look, I’m talking about the Etan Patz case, you know that and I know that. You told us what you told us… and I have other facts too, now. You could help to put this case to rest once and for all for that family, and I could help put you together with your family. That’s your call. I’m not dealing with you here, I’m just asking you to listen.” GraBois gave him new contact numbers and could hear the sound of Ramos writing them down. “You can call collect anytime.”

  GraBois hung up in frustration. The phone rang a few minutes later. “I don’t know what you said to him,” Jack Allar, the Rockview superintendent’s right-hand man, reported, “but he was crying when he got off the call.” Some small satisfaction, thought GraBois. This is working on him. I just need to find more of the same.

  When the card arrived from Ramos just days later, wishing him and his family a Happy Hanukkah, GraBois felt sure that the inmate wasn’t ready to walk away from their game just yet, which was good because GraBois wasn’t either. He left for the holidays, after making an appointment for January w
ith the FBI agent currently assigned to the case.

  “Does this mean you’re going to have to get him a gift?” Special Agent Mary Galligan had just read Ramos’s greeting card and it made her laugh out loud. She was twenty-seven years old, and just two years out of the training academy. She was now juggling the Patz case with several others, but it was particularly close to her heart. Galligan had only assisted on other investigations before this one, her first solo flight.

  Galligan’s parents had worked hard to send her to the Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls Long Island college prep school where the sisters didn’t use rulers, just plenty of rules. No clogs, no dark nail polish, no listening to Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young.” There was no rule, however, that a girl couldn’t do a boy’s job, because there were no boys to cede to. Tall, strong, and athletic, with wavy brown hair and a scathingly sarcastic wit, Galligan had been the editor of her school newspaper and a standout on the swim team. At Sacred Heart she’d developed the inner confidence that would allow her to handle a position with the prestigious FBI Bank Robbery Squad only a year after she joined the Bureau. Timing played a major part too—the only woman on the squad, Lisa Smith, was leaving, so there was room for her replacement. That’s how things worked back then in the most sought-after ranks of the Bureau. Named when stickups—white-collar and otherwise—were the most serious crimes in the FBI’s purview, Bank Robbery would later be rechristened Violent Crimes, and include interstate kidnappings, extortions, and product tamperings.

  As a rookie agent, Galligan had inherited the Patz case sometime around its ten-year anniversary from Smith, the departing agent. Growing up on Long Island, she was only vaguely familiar with the name Etan Patz. But her mother, who’d raised four kids, knew it by heart. Read up on the files, Galligan’s boss told her, and sent her to the twenty-seventh floor where the research was kept in floor-to-ceiling rotor cabinets.