After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  Three years earlier, GraBois had met Jose Ramos in the same exact place and had seen firsthand that when the inmate became highly emotional, he dropped his guard. Now, apparently, just the sound of the prosecutor’s name made Ramos foam at the mouth. Maybe GraBois could use that blind hatred to his advantage. Who knows what would happen if I were actually in the room with him, he had wondered to Galligan. If Ramos went 90 percent of the way last time, maybe he could be provoked into giving up the final 10 percent.

  Both GraBois and Galligan believed that Ramos would act consistently with his past behavior in Pennsylvania, when he’d resisted pleading guilty right up until the very moment of trial. The only way he’d make a deal in exchange for a confession was if he truly thought he’d be indicted and go away for life otherwise.

  But even if Ramos didn’t confess, and went after GraBois as he’d threatened in the past, GraBois would just use that to his advantage. Assaulting a federal prosecutor could keep Ramos in prison five more years.

  Over the weekend, Galligan gave one of her profiler contacts a full account of the Friday session. While he marveled at how close she’d gotten, he felt Ramos had behaved exactly as predicted. In the agent’s opinion, Ramos had skated to the edge of admission, and then each time substituted the words “I put him on the subway” for “I killed him.” Ramos’s explanation that he “wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible” was also significant because it was the way someone would talk about a body. Galligan explained the plan for Monday and wondered what would happen when Ramos saw her in obvious cahoots with GraBois.

  “He’s going to be angry,” the man said, “but he’s going to focus all his emotions on GraBois. If you can, just try to use that too, like you did before.”

  Monday morning, Mary Galligan and Tom Moore, another young agent in her squad, arrived outside the U.S. Marshals’ holding area. They checked their 9mm semiautomatic pistols and went in to collect Ramos. Galligan always felt extra cautious in those moments when she went through the doors without her weapons for protection; some of these men were desperate and capable of deadly violence. But the last thing you want is for a motivated prisoner to get hold of your gun and demonstrate his capabilities. She looked Ramos over, as she and Moore prepared to move him outside the marshals’ confines. He was not a large man, but he wasn’t slight either, just an inch or so shorter than Moore. When Galligan had debriefed Jeremy Fischer two weeks earlier, she’d pooh-poohed his fears, thinking the pedophile was dangerous only to children. But since then, she’d spent several hours with him and personally heard him spew his hatred for Stuart GraBois. It was not, she now recognized, just your typical prison bravado.

  Galligan had heard back from Otisville, where they’d searched Ramos’s cell and had, in fact, turned up a topographical map of the area around Rockview prison. There was also a crude diagram in Ramos’s hand of several connected boxes, including three that seemed to be marked as Rockview, Otisville, and New York. Next to the box labeled “NY” was an equal sign and the word “Liberty.” Both informants had reported that Ramos talked incessantly of his escape plans, including the New York detour to kill Stuart GraBois. Galligan knew that the more specifically conceived a plan was—cutting holes in a fence, using compasses and maps—the more credible. Jose Ramos was proving himself one motivated son of a bitch.

  Leaving the holding cell, the two agents retrieved their guns and brought their charge into a nearby unused office where Stuart GraBois had just taken a seat behind a wooden table. As soon as Ramos saw him, the profilers were once again proved right. It suddenly didn’t matter what Galligan had said about her connection to the prosecutor. No one else in the room existed for Ramos except GraBois.

  “I want to go back. You can’t make me stay here. Get me out of here.” Ramos stood immobile, glowering, until the agents led him to an office chair on one side of the conference table.

  “Ramos, sit down,” Galligan said. “All you have to do is hear what this man has to say. The sooner you do that, the sooner we all get out of here.”

  When he sat, she uncuffed one hand and relocked the cuff onto the arm of his chair. Tom Moore sat down next to him. Galligan took the chair across the table from GraBois, flanking Ramos on the right. GraBois stood up, arms folded as he glared back at his subject. Once again, and for the last time, he began to advise him of his rights.

  “I don’t need an attorney, ’cause I’m not going to say anything.” Ramos almost seemed insulted, as though he felt he could fend for himself just fine. After all, he’d been a jailhouse lawyer now for years.

  GraBois put his hands on the table and leaned toward the man who had vowed to blow him into a million pieces.

  “I want to give you one last chance.”

  Ramos barely looked at the prosecutor.

  “You think you’re through with me. Well, you’re not. You think we don’t have enough on you, but you’re wrong. Let me lay it out. I want you to understand exactly what’s in store for you.”

  “Go ahead, indict me,” Ramos scornfully threw at GraBois. “If you’re gonna do it, then do it.”

  “You have a pattern of molesting young boys—so many boys, Jose, I’m sure we don’t know half of them. But we know about a boy in New York; there’s the Erie boy and Bennett Harmon and a number of people whose names you don’t even know; and of course Joey Taylor on that bus in Pennsylvania. We’ve got a pattern of violence; the voices who tell you to hurt people—the ones you reported during your Bellevue stint in 1982. Then there’s the time you spent in Jacobi Hospital; it’s in the records—you were in danger of hurting yourself and others.

  “We’ve got a motive—Etan said what you were doing to him wasn’t good, or else his mother and father would have said it was okay. You were afraid he was going to tell on you. You couldn’t afford that, so you had to stop him, didn’t you, Jose?

  “Come on, Jose, this is your one chance to make amends and do something to benefit society,” GraBois urged. “Don’t throw it away. Do the right thing.”

  “Just indict me,” Ramos repeated.

  GraBois spoke in a calm but more disgusted tone. “You think you’re some kind of hero, that you’re such a big man? You’re not. The only thing you’re bigger than is a helpless child, because anyone else would beat the crap out of you. But I’m not one of those little kids you abused, Jose—”

  It happened so fast that later no one could say exactly what triggered Ramos’s move, but suddenly he was up and out of his seat, straining toward GraBois and pulling the heavy leather and wood chair into the air by his handcuff. He swung out at GraBois with his free hand, but didn’t connect, and in the same instant the two agents were out of their own seats. Galligan pushed Ramos down with full force into the chair, which was propelled back to the ground with a loud crash. As she noted the strength behind the man’s fury, Moore restrained him in a headlock.

  “Ramos,” Galligan said as he continued to struggle, planting herself in front of the inmate to make him meet her eyes, “you’re going to make this worse. You touch anyone in this room, you’re going to be in jail a lot longer.” At her words, Ramos went slack. There was a brief silence, broken finally by Moore, looking down at his prisoner.

  “Man,” he said admiringly, a trace of humor in his voice. “The stuff they teach you in Quantico really works.”

  Ramos was unrelenting; he wanted to go back to his cell and he wanted an attorney now. The meeting—which had lasted all of ten minutes—was over anyway, and the agents led him away. He wouldn’t be returned to Otisville, though; from MCC he was heading to his old cell at Rockview, in Pennsylvania. Once Galligan had handed him back to the marshals that morning, she sent Ramos an assignment of counsel form. Then she and GraBois put in a call to Jack Allar, the superintendent’s assistant at Rockview, to tell him what had just happened and relay the evidence of Ramos’s planned jailbreak. Allar promised them Rockview would take steps to deal with what they also perceived as a viable threat.

  Go ah
ead, indict me,” Ramos had said. The “I dare you” was silent, but clearly implied. Despite what GraBois had said, that wasn’t going to be so easy. Although it was still possible Ramos had crossed state lines with either Etan or his body, which would constitute federal kidnapping, they had nothing to support that. Indeed, every piece of evidence authorities had amassed, especially in the last six months, pointed gruesomely in the opposite direction, toward an apartment, and a boiler, in lower Manhattan. At this point, there were no federal grounds to charge him. Murder was a state crime.

  Over the next weeks, as they’d done since they’d begun working together, GraBois and Galligan sought a creative way to pursue federal charges, and came up blank. GraBois was disappointed when his superiors shot down charging Ramos with attempted assault of a federal officer. He knew there were some people who thought he was overinvolved, but he didn’t care. They didn’t know the case like he did, nor had they grown to know and respect the family the way he had. A few weeks earlier, he’d been interviewed by ABC News PrimeTime Live for the same story Ramos had boasted about to Mary Galligan. The correspondent, Jay Schadler, had waited until almost the end of the conversation before asking GraBois the inevitable.

  “The plain and simple truth,” Schadler had said, “is a lot of people think that you’re obsessed with this case.”

  “I understand that some people have said that.” GraBois had suspected the question would come up, but the answer wasn’t difficult for him. “I define obsession as an abnormal feeling. I personally do not think it’s abnormal to feel for the Patz family, nor is it abnormal to try to find out what happened to their son.”

  One month later, Schadler asked Jose Ramos the same question, in the only television interview Ramos had ever granted.

  “Is Stuart GraBois obsessed with you?” They were sitting in a visiting room at Rockview prison. Ramos had been back at the Pennsylvania prison for three weeks, since his last confrontation with the prosecutor in New York.

  “If he’s obsessed, that’s his problem,” said Ramos.

  “Well, perhaps, but it’s also your problem,” Schadler countered, “because he’s the man who put you in jail here.”

  As the producer of this story, I was sitting in the room too, off camera and equidistant to the two men. I’d tried for several months to “book” Ramos for an interview, knowing nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in segregation. After several letters and phone calls, he’d remained reluctant but had never said no. I’d figured he was going to string me along until airtime just to keep me off balance, and was shocked one day at the end of May when he said yes.

  He told me he’d been craving a New York hero sandwich since he’d been in prison and if I brought him one, he’d agree to talk. I was doubtful, fearing this was yet another game he was playing.

  “All right, I’ll bring you your sandwich,” I said, “but let me make this clear. Several people have to travel hundreds of miles to the prison for this interview, as many as six, including myself, two camera crews, and Jay. If we get there and you’ve changed your mind…” I had no idea what to say next, since nothing would happen if he said no. “… It will be a very bad thing.”

  “No, no, I agreed. I keep my word.”

  On the day of the interview, he shuffled into the visiting room impeded by leg irons and dressed in his prison browns. His cotton workshirt was open at the neck to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the mysterious handwritten letter M probably the M in Ramos. His hair was tidily trimmed, beardless, with just the full mustache. Despite being handcuffed, he was laden with paperwork. Occasionally during the next several hours, he presented an odd picture as he peered at documents through broken brown plastic aviator-style reading glasses, masking-taped at the temples and attached to a dirty string he wore slung over the back of his head. He had deep, dark circles under his eyes, which roved around the room. Schadler couldn’t hold his gaze through any exchange.

  As it turned out, the sandwich with which I’d kept my word was deemed contraband and stayed in the car, but the guards allowed Ramos soda from the visiting room vending machine, which he threw back, one can after the next. He seemed more pathetic than scary, and right from the start he rambled disjointedly, sometimes incoherently, although he was often perfectly intelligible. He immediately made such disparaging remarks about the story on the Patz case in Vanity Fair’s June issue that I quickly understood the reason we were there. He was outraged at how easily Stuart GraBois had been able to publicly make his case in that article while he, Ramos, hadn’t. This was his chance to set the record straight.

  But he didn’t do a stellar job defending himself, other than to deny he’d ever met or known what had happened to Etan Patz. He said he’d been sleeping in his apartment at 8:00 a.m., when Etan Patz set off for the bus stop. As for the child in his apartment that day, Ramos stuck to his story that “Jimmy” had been older than Etan.

  “I would put him between eight and nine,” he told us, “and he was a very, very open person.” Despite that “openness,” Ramos maintained, the boy did not respond to his sexual advances.

  “I tried, you know,” he said. “The child refused to have sex with me, okay, and so I took the child and put him on the subway.”

  He talked about the “old Jose,” long gone, who harmed children; the Jose sitting in front of us had been healed. He made the point forcefully when Schadler leaned over to ask another question. The two men were sitting facing each other, close enough to touch.

  “Don’t put your hands on me!” Ramos barked. “Don’t put your hands on me, now, because I have my own energy. And don’t take your energy off of me.” He pulled back in his chair, wild-eyed and wary.

  “I’m curious that you’re so appalled at the possibility of me touching you,” Schadler pursued, “which of course I’m not interested in doing. You’re the man who molested children.”

  “I don’t do that anymore,” Ramos said, raising his voice as he motioned with his own hands as much as the limited range his handcuffs would allow, “and I don’t want you to put your hands on me because that’s where it starts, okay? Now, you get that straight.”

  “That’s how you started?”

  “That’s how I started and I don’t want that anymore, okay?”

  “By putting your hands on children?”

  “Right! Right.”

  Even though he’d just admitted to putting his hands on children, he also claimed he’d never been a child molester, which he defined as “someone who does it continuously to one person.” Nor, he said, was he a “total pedophile.”

  Schadler raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that like saying, ‘I’m just a little bit pregnant’? Either you’re a pedophile or you’re not a pedophile, which is it?”

  “If they put a label on me to say that I’m a pedophile,” Ramos reasoned, his gaze flickering to the intrigued Schadler, then down to his lap, “that’s the label they want to put on me. I’m putting a label on me saying that I was”—he searched for the right words—“a little mentally unstable.”

  At one point Schadler, annoyed with being run in circles, asked Ramos to simply “tell me what you feel about all this.”

  “No, you don’t want me to do that.” Ramos’s voice went even lower.

  “Why?” Schadler looked like it was one of the first genuine-sounding responses he’d heard.

  “ ’Cause then I’d pick up this chair, smash it against the wall, smash those cans. Smash everything, you understand? And I don’t.” Ramos appeared suddenly aware of his tone and brought it back down. “I’m not violent. I don’t want to be violent.”

  At this point he seemed less pathetic and more alarming, and I was grateful for the cuffs and the burly guards nearby. I knew nothing of the threats the informants had reported, or even the very existence of informants. Nor was I aware of the recent attempted assault on GraBois, although Ramos himself hinted at it.

  “If Stu is watching tonight”—he looked straight into the camera—“I
apologize for my actions, Mr. GraBois. I know I got out of hand with you and I should have been a little bit more professional.”

  On June 26, less than a week after the PrimeTime interview, Jose Ramos was transferred to Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security facility, Graterford Prison, just outside Philadelphia. The authorities at Rockview felt that his risk of escape required the higher security. GraBois had marked the date on his calendar, so that he would remember to call the warden and give him some background on his new inmate.

  Within days, a copy of the Vanity Fair article was making its rounds of the Graterford guards and inmates, and Ramos was soon placed in protective segregation after he received death threats. He wrote to the Warren County judge who had presided over his case, begging to be transferred back to that area. He complained that he couldn’t be considered for parole if he didn’t attend counseling, but he couldn’t attend counseling while in protective custody. And he couldn’t leave protective custody because he feared for his life.

  The day after Ramos wrote those words, Jeremy Fischer, who was now a free man, put on one of the many blue Brooks Brothers suits preserved from his previous life, carefully adjusted the red tie over his freshly ironed white shirt, and brushed his newly shorn hair before walking into the U.S. District Courthouse to appear in front of a federal grand jury. This wasn’t the first time he’d testified at such a proceeding, but he was still awed by the majesty of the building’s marble-lined halls. He couldn’t help but contrast the bright, high-ceilinged surroundings with the dark, close hole of a cell that had brought him here today.

  GraBois had explained that this wasn’t a grand jury convened to indict Ramos; Fischer’s sole purpose for being here was to preserve his testimony for possible future use. Fischer didn’t blame Stuart GraBois for assuming he might be hard to find up the road. He didn’t plan to continue with his checkered past, but, well, better for GraBois to cover his bases.