After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  “Good luck with everything,” he told Jose Ramos. He shook his hand, then turned to let the guards cuff him.

  “Hey, Jon,” Ramos called, as Morgan was led out. “Next time you’re at MCC, will you send me a bunch of magazines? Especially the fashion magazines.” What a nutcase, Morgan thought, as the door closed behind him.

  As soon as Morgan got back to the compound, he would take a long shower to wash off the dirt of the cell, and the stench of his cellmate. But first he called Stuart GraBois. Then after his shower he called him again, just because he could.

  CHAPTER 25

  Debrief

  Mr. Fischer is a New York State parolee who has been charged with violation of the terms and conditions of his parole release….

  The Division of Parole has scheduled a final parole revocation hearing for him. It will be held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center at 10:00 am on Tuesday, May 14, 1991…. Under the circumstances I am asking that you appear at his scheduled hearing so as to alert the parole authorities to the fact of and value of Fischer’s assistance to your office.

  —letter from Jeremy Fischer’s attorney to Stuart GraBois, May 13, 1991

  I‘m telling you, if I had to go back in there, I’d hang myself.” Jeremy Fischer was one month away from being a free man, with a lot to say about the price he’d paid for it. He was sitting in one of the drab, institutional interview rooms in the MCC that reeked of ammonia, with FBI special agent Mary Galligan and another agent who was present as a corroborating witness. Two weeks had gone by since his last contact with Ramos, but Fischer looked like he continued to feel the effects. Although he still sported the ponytail, he was thinner than the first time Galligan had met him before he’d gone to Otisville, and paler, from the weeks in sunless segregation. There was a weakness about him now, and there was something about his eyes. They were duller. The cocky air he’d radiated that first time was dimmer, dialed back to just above zero.

  Galligan was finally getting her chance to sit face-to-face with Fischer, to get her own read on whether or not he was full of shit, and so far he wasn’t winning her over. She already knew that Fischer had been busted by Ramos—two weeks earlier they’d heard from Jon Morgan about the letter Fischer had written and Ramos had then found in the law library. It sounded like something from The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

  To hear Fischer tell it now, he had barely escaped mortal injury while locked in the cell with Ramos. Galligan recognized he’d been in danger, but she didn’t believe it was more than any con faced in prison. Prison was a dangerous place. Either Fischer was bragging or vying for extra brownie points to bolster his chances that the parole violation would be dropped. Blah, blah, blah, she thought. Let’s get to the reason we’re here. She wanted to understand the context of all these damaging admissions Ramos had supposedly made to Fischer.

  Special Agent Jim Fitzgerald was the second agent in the interview. He was also from the Bank Robbery Squad, but his eventual goal was the special profiler team down at the FBI Academy in Quantico, the Behavior Analysis Unit. Fitzgerald had little previous knowledge of the case, but he’d been tasked with a very specific job.

  “I want you to go in there without knowing everything and just assume he’s lying through his teeth,” Galligan instructed him. “Watch him, listen, and see if he can convince you that he’s not.”

  Jeremy Fischer had handed over pages of scribbled and tattered notes when he’d arrived; she’d read through some of them and would examine them more closely later; they’d be important for double-checking consistency. But of course the most helpful factor on that score would be Jon Morgan’s account. He had just gotten out of seg with Ramos, and she was hoping to get him down here the following week. She wanted to match up the two stories and see where the holes were, if any. She knew that GraBois believed Fischer was telling the truth, but she needed to be convinced too. Her ass was also on the line if Fischer proved to be lying about every single thing he’d said, as he’d often done in the past. Besides, GraBois had been on the case three years longer than she had, and he’d lived it and breathed it. He’d already come to the conclusion that Ramos was guilty. She, on the other hand, wasn’t yet certain about Ramos or Jeremy Fischer.

  Describing the sexual offender workbook Ramos had been working on, Fischer said this had been his “in.” He explained how the book was a key part of the course Ramos had to take to qualify for parole, and how it created the therapist-patient dynamic.

  “He had to do these exercises,” Fischer said. “And here I was, someone he knew from before, a fellow Jew, so to speak, who was willing to help. I have a background in psychology. I knew the buzz words. It didn’t take long before I was pushing all the right buttons. And as he grew to trust me, more and more spilled out.” Fischer knew the agents were interested in Ramos’s different admissions, so he skipped over most of the histrionics as he told them what he learned in the most incriminating “therapy” session.

  Until now Galligan had only heard this story in a truncated form that had sounded bombastic and incredible, during the terse, time-limited phone conversation from MCC. Now the details were vivid and expansive, and came from a man directly in front of her, his eyes never wavering, his manner straightforward. Retold in context, they rang truer than before.

  Fischer had no hesitation about offering up the most graphic material, as he talked about how Ramos remembered “the taste of the boy’s penis.” Galligan wrote it down as a lurid but telling detail. She didn’t think a heterosexual nonpedophile male would come up with that on his own, no matter how long he spent scheming in his cell. If he were fabricating this, she thought, he might say something like “the kid was hot” or he “was turned on” by the child’s hairless body, something in his own realm of experience.

  “And he said he remembered the breadth of his penis,” Fischer continued. “I remember that clearly because at first I thought he said ‘breath,’ and I was confused. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized what he meant.”

  She wrote it down in quotes, again, struck by the clear language and the way Fischer was so matter-of-fact as he detailed the story. Breadth, she thought, caught off guard for a second. This is a little kid, for God’s sakes. She tried to stay mechanical, even as Fischer told them Ramos admitted to penetrating Etan.

  “I asked him,” Fischer said, “ ‘Can you penetrate a child?’ because I couldn’t imagine such a thing, and Ramos said, ‘Yes, but not too far,’ and then he said the most awful thing. ‘That’s what separates the men from the boys.’ I’ll never forget that, because I couldn’t believe he would make such a sick, disgusting joke.”

  Most of what Fischer was telling them now echoed his written notes, including that anecdote. It didn’t prove he was telling the truth, but at least he was consistent. Galligan would never forget the next thing Fischer then told her. When Etan protested, Ramos said, he told the boy it was okay, lots of people did these things. And Etan had countered that if it was nice and okay, then his mommy and daddy would have told him about it.

  “Ramos was quick to add that he didn’t molest Etan,” Fischer went on, “because he didn’t use any force. So in his mind he justified it. It was all right if the boy ultimately let him do it. That’s the way he saw things. And that’s what he said about all the boys. That he never forced anyone. And there I was, agreeing with him. The whole thing made me feel pretty slimy.” Fischer squirmed involuntarily in his seat, as though shaking off the memory.

  “Hey, you’re talking about one of the most horrific things an adult can do to a child; don’t start questioning your own morality,” Galligan said. “Look what happened. You asked him and you got an answer you didn’t expect. Now we have another piece of information. Often we have to say things that make us sick to our stomach when we’re talking to a subject.”

  Fischer described Ramos’s account of having seen Etan before, with Sandy, so that when Ramos introduced himself that day as “Sandy’s friend,” the boy ca
me with him willingly.

  “He was very smug about how the papers got it wrong that he’d picked up Etan at Washington Square Park.” Fischer handed over the map that Ramos had drawn, explaining that at first Ramos had penciled a sketchier version.

  “I told him it was garbage, so he started over. He very carefully drew a map of the whole Washington Square area. It took him at least forty-five minutes to make it look this neat and intricate, and he talked me through it afterward.”

  Galligan was looking at a detailed map of Prince Street and the surrounding area, encompassing Washington Square Park to the north, and Avenue B to the east, near where Ramos had lived in 1979. The tidy lines denoting the street blocks suggested Ramos had used a straight edge to draw it, and they’d all been correctly labeled. She’d have it checked out, but it looked like Ramos’s handwriting. She remembered Morgan had mentioned Ramos drew him a map too, and wondered if he did it often.

  Galligan made note of the X marked on Prince Street, showing where the Patzes lived, the X showing where Ramos told Fischer he’d picked Etan up near the bus stop a block and a half from home, and the X at the location of Ramos’s own apartment on East Fourth Street, several blocks away.

  “What else did he say about Etan?” Galligan asked.

  “He said that he honored him every day, whatever that means.” Fischer shrugged. Then he told her about the other children Ramos said he’d “never forced.”

  “He talked about a kid named Peter James,” Fischer told the agents. “I’m not sure where he was, either Atlanta or Ohio. He talked a lot about Sandy’s son Bennett.”

  When Galligan heard these names, she recognized insider information. No one had ever publicized the existence of P.J. or Bennett, and Fischer had Ramos referring to them extensively.

  “Ramos said Sandy didn’t know he was molesting Bennett before he took his European trip; that she’s nothing but a drunk. He used to take him to the movies, to dinner and the Empire State Building. He told me he had sex with Bennett a lot.”

  The rest of the list included a boy in Pennsylvania, one boy in New York named Ron who’d be sixteen or seventeen now, and some mentally retarded children Ramos had preyed on when he’d lived close to a hospital in New Orleans.

  It was Galligan’s turn to recoil, but she was careful to show no visible signs of a reaction.

  “But the one he loved to talk about was P.J., because he got such a kick out of GraBois thinking P.J. might be Etan Patz. Ramos said he knew P.J. wasn’t Etan. Said he’d known P.J. since he was a little boy.”

  Each piece of information that Fischer couldn’t have gotten from anyone except Ramos added up, each a drop in the bucket until it finally spilled over. Okay, Galligan finally thought, this man is not lying to me.

  “When I get out, he wants me to send him some watch that costs thirty dollars and has a compass in it,” Fischer added. “He’s going to use it when he’s sent back to Rockview, ’cause he’s going to escape. He told me his whole plan—how he’s going to cut a hole in the fence, then use the compass watch to find his way away from the prison. He says he’s already got maps of Pennsylvania squirreled away somehow back in his prison cell. Then he says he’s going to go to Venezuela and no one will be able to find him. That’s after he comes to New York to kill Stuart GraBois.”

  Fischer gave a sample of the threats his cellmate had made against the assistant U.S. attorney. “He’s got a different plan every day,” Fischer said. “No one will ever find GraBois when he’s done with him—he’ll be in little pieces spread all over. He wants to know where he lives, so he can go after him. He hates the man completely and absolutely. I used that hatred against him. I would prod him with all the things GraBois has on him, and he’d come back with, ‘GraBois doesn’t know anything that I haven’t told him,’ and eventually he said, ‘GraBois knows I did it, and it’s killing him because he can’t get it out of me.’ ”

  At various points, Jim Fitzgerald asked Fischer questions designed to get a sense of both Ramos’s mental state and Fischer’s: questions about Ramos’s demeanor and his hand movements, the way he talked. Might Ramos have been acting? Fitzgerald was also interested in Fischer’s own mind-set, asking questions about his motivation.

  Fischer was clear. “Obviously, my own self-interest got me into this. But at a certain point it was more. I know there are lots of people in the world who do bad things, and I’m the first to admit, I’ve been one of them. But what he did is awful. It’s sick.”

  What Fischer didn’t tell the agents was that by the time he’d gotten out of the cell, his own part in this morality play had begun to sicken him as well: the trickery, the deceit, the betrayal, even of such a beast as Jose. As Fischer described to the Feds the admissions Ramos had made in the false therapy, he also remembered the occasional remorse in Ramos’s voice, and the shred of humanity that he thought he’d glimpsed at those moments, in such tight quarters. And while Fischer still blanched at the memory of his time in seg with Jose Ramos, it wasn’t because of the threat to his physical safety—Mary Galligan had been right to think he was laying it on thick in advance of his appearance before the judge. His own deception, and the depravity that had rubbed off of Ramos, had left a residue he still felt. He might have done some good with this particular con game, but he did it with his bad side, and it felt pretty crappy. He suspected it would take a long time for the feeling to go away.

  There is so much here, I don’t even know where to begin,” Galligan said as soon as the two agents had quit the interview room. She was talking very fast, the adrenaline kicking in as she finally dispensed with the reserve she’d maintained throughout the last few hours.

  “When he said the part about Peter James, I almost fell off the chair.”

  Fitzgerald looked at her blankly. Galligan had forgotten he had no prior knowledge of the case, and no idea who P.J. Fox was.

  “But based on what I do know,” Fitzgerald told Galligan, “I think he’s telling the truth.”

  Stu, did you ever tell Jeremy Fischer about P.J.?” The following Monday Galligan was in GraBois’s office.

  “Of course not; you know I would never do that,” GraBois said.

  “I didn’t think so, but I had to ask. Who knows, you could have said something like, ‘If he talks about a kid named P.J., it’s really important to pursue that.’ I mean, it was wild to hear him say the name—and not just the initials—he knew what they stood for. I checked the records and he had it right.”

  Galligan had dictated her notes to the steno pool the day after Fischer’s interview, and now she’d walked the written report over to GraBois, but he preferred to hear her tell it, especially the next thought.

  “I gotta say, Stu, what I heard last Thursday is starting to make a believer out of me.” In fact, Mary Galligan’s earnest delivery made GraBois smile—not in an “I told you so way,” but as an expression of satisfaction that his judgment was being confirmed.

  “I’m glad to see you get to this point,” he said. “Especially since you got there on your own, with the facts.”

  He put up his hand before she could state the obvious. “I mean, look, is Fischer a con man? Absolutely. But he’s come up with some good information.” He held up the map she’d given him with the report. “This didn’t just come from Fischer’s devious mind.”

  “All the same, I’m going to have the guards search Ramos’s cell.” Galligan stood up to leave. “There better be a map of Pennsylvania in there, or Jeremy Fischer’s going to have some explaining to do.”

  “And once you hear from Morgan tomorrow,” GraBois said, “I think you’ll find some of the things he says back Fischer up too.”

  The next day would mark Jon Morgan’s second debrief with Galligan. Back in April, when Morgan had left segregation the first time and they’d all thought he was finished with Ramos for good, he’d sat down with Galligan and walked her through his stint. Since he’d gone back in a second time, both GraBois and Galligan had received sporadic phon
e updates from him. The “sex therapy” book Morgan had retrieved from Ramos’s cell was a particularly important find. With such a blueprint to work with, it helped explain why Fischer had extracted more of the sexual admissions out of Ramos than Morgan. But still, the bottom line was that only Fischer claimed to have heard these most damning admissions, not Morgan. Galligan would be looking for anything Morgan could offer that would give Fischer’s account the verification it needed.

  You see, Ramos got his hands on this typewriter ribbon from the law library. I think he fished it out of the trash can, but I was never sure.”

  Jon Morgan was sitting in Stuart GraBois’s office. He’d been out of seg now for almost a week. He was giving GraBois and Galligan a much clearer account of how Ramos had discovered he had a snitch in his cell.

  “I don’t know how he got it past the guard, but when he came back into the cell with me, he must have had this little bundle hidden on him.” Morgan was warming to the topic. “You should never put a single-strike cartridge in a prison typewriter. This typewriter, I think it was a Royal, with a daisy wheel, and it was supposed to use a multistrike ribbon so the words get covered over, but maybe someone was cutting costs. They’re a lot more expensive than single-strike. Or they should have used a cloth ribbon, at least it’s better than those single-strike carbon ribbons. You try reading a cloth ribbon, it’s next to impossible.”

  Morgan certainly knew an awful lot about the most esoteric of topics, and Galligan couldn’t help thinking he’d make a good Jeopardy! contestant. Someday.