Ramos’s now grown would-be victim was transferred to Missing Persons and given a long lead with which to pursue his old neighbors. A detailed, painstaking search eventually turned up former tenants who remembered Ramos accompanying children up to his apartment. One even told detectives Ramos was spotted in their building with a young blond child around the day Etan disappeared. When this person asked Ramos who the “white kid” was, Ramos replied that his girlfriend took care of the boy.
It was a twenty-year-old memory at this point, but the new leads, added to the story Ramos had once told Jon Morgan about his work in the boiler, led Missing Persons to take another look at 234’s basement. Back in the ’90s GraBois and NYPD detectives had already sifted through the space for bone fragments and other evidence, before they’d eventually learned the boiler’s lining had long since been replaced. But by the summer of 2000, cops wanted to try updated DNA methods, so they hauled away barrels of ash and dirt from the basement floor there, and even brought in a cadaver dog. Ultimately they found nothing new, but Stan Patz was heartened by all the activity, and the new eyewitness reports.
When he heard that the district attorney remained unmoved to take action, Stan wanted to hear the reason why from Robert Morgenthau personally. A week after Etan was declared dead, Stan sent a letter to Morgenthau requesting a meeting. He’d been told by both federal and local investigators knowledgeable about the case, he wrote, that there was enough evidence to go after Ramos. He wondered if politics were playing a part in the DA’s inaction. He soon heard back from the assistant DA handling the case, Armand Durastanti, who offered to set up a meeting with Morgenthau’s number two. Stan demurred. After waiting ten years to learn anything from that office, he was looking for a dialogue, a real conversation to inform him of the hurdles and then give him the chance to clear them away. He wanted to make his case directly to the district attorney himself. Anyone below that, he felt, would simply parrot the party line.
At the end of the summer, Brian O’Dwyer was ready to file the lawsuit and serve Ramos. Then September 11 threw his time line into disarray. There were months of delay as the lower Manhattan office of O’Dwyer and Bernstien was shuttered and its staff dispersed. For six weeks, O’Dwyer operated out of a conference room in GraBois’s Benefit Funds offices. By the time the suit was once again ready to go, Stan had already mailed Ramos his October biannual reminder, the missing poster with Stan’s question on the back. For the first time in eight years, Ramos replied—in a jumble of semi-legalese—demanding Stan desist his “criminal harassment by mail.” Harassment, Stan thought; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. But he used the opportunity to prod the inmate into responding to the upcoming lawsuit.
“I see you fancy yourself a legal expert,” he wrote back, a few weeks before Ramos was served. “Okay, prepare yourself, because I will be seeing you in court. What will you say then? Are you going to come to tell the truth or spout more weasel words?”
Stan was referencing a Web page he’d discovered earlier in the year, entitled “To Tell the Truth,” which he’d been amazed, then outraged, to find was posted by Jose Ramos himself. A desultory essay that included yet another version of the “Jimmy” story, it offered the promise of more, upon demand. “As to what actually happened to Etan Patz,” Ramos had posted, “if any freedom-loving American wants the true story, I kindly ask that you send $2 to my snail-mail address.” Stan might have been willing to pay the two dollars, but he wanted the “true story” to be told under oath.
Jim Nauwens, the investigator who’d once chased Rainbows in Woodstock for GraBois, had long since retired from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But when GraBois called his friend for help, Nauwens didn’t hesitate, even though it meant a three-hour drive on a holiday week. This time it wasn’t a trip to Woodstock, but to SCI Dallas, near Scranton, Pennsylvania. A few days before Christmas 2001, while the Patzes were on their annual New England family trip, Ramos was called to the inmate interview room, where Nauwens, with GraBois at his side, formally served Ramos notice of the civil suit, then turned around and drove back to New York. Ramos had thirty days to respond or he’d lose the case by default, and the team waited to see if he would take the bait. All through the holidays, GraBois checked in with O’Dwyer.
“No mail yet, Stu,” O’Dwyer began to respond every time he picked up the phone. But with only a few days left before the deadline, a package of legal documents arrived from SCI Dallas. Thanks to Ramos, who had denied each cause for action included in the civil argument, the case could go forward.
Stan was gratified by the progress, but he was willing to make a trade-off. In a second letter he sent in early 2002 to the Manhattan DA he wrote, “I do not want the civil action to hinder your investigation, or cause problems for your department. I would appreciate a response and would make myself available for a meeting at any time.” In other words, bring a criminal indictment and I’ll happily drop the suit.
By this point, Stan Patz had heard plenty of speculation from other, third parties—friends, cops, or reporters—who could rattle off a list of reasons why the DA might balk at an indictment. He knew the difficulties of prosecuting a case with no body; but both he and Stuart GraBois had been encouraged by the DA’s recent conviction of Sante Kimes and her son, two grifters who’d killed an elderly New York woman and disposed of her body to appropriate her home. Stan also understood all too well how old the case was, and that Jose Ramos was already locked up for more than twenty years. Why put all those resources into a case that might result in a concurrent sentence or, worse, an impolitic acquittal? Stan knew how long the odds were, but they’d always been long. He still wanted to talk about it, strategize, understand. Besides, Stuart GraBois had also faced such odds, and that hadn’t stopped him from pushing the case as far as he could.
A meeting with Morgenthau’s chief assistant was again offered up, and this time Stan went to see what he would say. But James Kindler only sat impassively while Stan made the points he’d spent hours preparing, listing the evidence he felt was substantive enough to indict and hopefully convict Jose Ramos. When he finished talking, Stan waited for Kindler to engage his arguments. But he heard nothing more than a terse acknowledgment that the District Attorney’s Office would not be proceeding. Stan was caught off guard. He’d expected at the very least a show of sympathy, a wish that more could be done, but there was nothing. He had the sense that he faced a stone idol who gazed back at him with unseeing eyes. Flooded by a mix of fury and frustration, he felt the tears leak out despite his best efforts to will them away.
“I just want to get the bastard who fucked over my son!”
The shocking words broke from him before he could rein them in. He struggled to hold his composure, calling on almost sixty years of innate passivity and his cherished sense of propriety. But he was overtaken by a surge of emotion. It recalled the sense of helplessness and failure he’d felt that first night, pacing the sidewalk outside his Prince Street loft in the rain. At least that night, hundreds of other people had swarmed around him, mobilizing the search, desperate to help. Now, ADA Durastanti politely saw him out and murmured mildly hopeful words. But Stan knew that as long as Robert Morgenthau was in office, the Manhattan district attorney would never prosecute this case.
With no apparent chance for a criminal prosecution, Stan Patz was left to fashion whatever justice he could from the civil case. But the wheels of justice move even slower when obstacles are hurled under them. Over the next two years, Ramos ducked and weaved as Stan’s legal team tried to force the true story from him. In Brian O’Dwyer’s first attempt to depose him, O’Dwyer and GraBois arrived at the prison only to hear that Ramos refused to answer any questions without a lawyer of his own, even though, unlike criminal cases, the plaintiff in a civil suit doesn’t have the right to counsel. Ramos could have lost the case on those grounds alone, but Judge Barbara Kapnick gave him another chance, warning him that if he continued to refuse to cooperate, she’d rule for the Patzes. Once again, G
raBois and O’Dwyer made the three-hour trip to Dallas, Pennsylvania, GraBois driving and prepping O’Dwyer with mock scenarios. At the prison, they joined a stenographer in the small room provided to visiting attorneys and waited for Jose Ramos. His appearance had changed little in the twelve years since GraBois had watched FBI agents restrain him in his chair. The hair under his yarmulke was longer and grayer, the beard snow white.
Both men took pains to present a solicitous front when Ramos arrived. They couldn’t risk giving him grounds for a harassment claim. GraBois even remained silent throughout, mutely passing O’Dwyer the occasional note to add a point of information. And while at first Ramos angrily objected to the former prosecutor’s presence, he ultimately acceded.
It was immediately clear, however, that Ramos’s cooperation was a sham. He denied every accusation, and then minutes later would say he couldn’t recall the same incident. He refused to answer many of the questions, pleading his Fifth Amendment rights, even after O’Dwyer explained several times that the Fifth Amendment wasn’t applicable in civil cases. Amid his various obfuscations, Ramos defaulted to the Jimmy story.
In the past dozen years since Ramos had begun telling this tale to authorities and the press, it had changed several times. In this latest incarnation, the Jimmy story had become not just a convenient way to explain away his appearance with a young boy that day. Now it was his alibi, backed up by no less than the NYPD. The new version put Ramos, as always, with a boy named “Jimmy” in Washington Square Park the day Etan disappeared. There, Ramos told O’Dwyer, a patrol car from the Sixth Precinct approached the two, and the cops compared Jimmy to a photo, quickly concluding he wasn’t Etan Patz.
“They showed me the photograph,” Ramos said to O’Dwyer. “ ‘We’re looking for this boy, have you seen him?’ And I told him, no sir. Then they left, and I took Jimmy to my place.” Like the Seventh Avenue subway clerk from Ramos’s 1991 account to FBI agent Mary Galligan, the canvassing officers of the Sixth Precinct would clearly be able to exonerate him.
“I don’t know who they were,” Ramos told O’Dwyer, “but I’m sure you could find that record.”
Ramos’s alibi, however, was less than airtight. He put the time of this encounter at late morning, “between 11:15 and 11:30,” several hours before Etan was even discovered to be missing, long before any patrol cars were on the streets looking for him.
After reading the deposition transcript, the judge agreed with Brian O’Dwyer’s motion that Ramos didn’t get to pick and choose the questions he would answer. His refusal to comply with Judge Kapnick’s previous order prompted her to strike his entire testimony, and in late April 2004 the judge ruled on the case in a summary judgment that found Jose Ramos legally responsible for the death of Etan Patz.
When Stuart GraBois got word, he immediately called Stan.
“It’s good news, thanks,” Stan said, brightening first, before his customary caution returned. “I guess we won the consolation prize.” Now Ramos would never be able to help someone write the Pulitzer Prize–winning book he’d once boasted about, and any chance of him getting out before 2014 was next to impossible. But in practical terms, Stan wondered what they had really gained.
“In practical terms,” GraBois replied firmly, “Jose Ramos is sitting in prison for more than twenty years, and he won’t go anywhere else before then. If you’re Jose, and you’re in a cell the size of a bathroom twenty-three hours a day, that is your number one most practical consideration. And in practical terms, this case is what put him there.”
“I do get satisfaction out of that,” Stan said. “But you know I was hoping for more; that this would move us closer to a criminal conviction.”
“There may never be a criminal trial, and sometimes that really disappoints me. But I want you to hear me on this, Stan. When I told the judge in 1990 this guy was a monster, it was the most accurate word I could come up with. And because of Etan, this monster hasn’t been near a child since he was arrested almost twenty years ago. A whole generation of victims were spared. That’s Etan’s legacy.
“Now we’re doing everything we can to make sure he’s locked away as long as possible. And in very practical terms—it’s something to feel good about.”
Stanley Patz took his obligations seriously. It went along with his sense of propriety and his natural self-effacement. The specific obligation he felt toward Etan was enormous, but it wasn’t his only one. Stan was a very conscientious man, and ever since the loss of his son, a sense of debt had been slowly piling up. And it wasn’t just the gratitude he owed Stu GraBois and Brian O’Dwyer now, or to the men and women who’d spent twenty-five years searching for Etan, first to try to get him back, and eventually to answer the question Stan had written on the back of his annual posters to Jose Ramos. All those people had tried so hard, with nothing to show for it. Many still bore the burden of those failed efforts, some long after they’d turned in their badges and guns, and some never even got the chance, like Detective Bill Butler, who’d smiled reassuringly while he walked the streets for years, foraging unsuccessfully for clues. In 1986, two years after he’d been transferred off the Patz case for good, Butler had been found by his daughter on the floor of the family kitchen, where he’d shot and killed himself with his own service revolver. Neither the family nor the NYPD, citing “personal problems,” ever mentioned the Patz case as a factor, but Stan and Julie remained unconvinced. They’d witnessed and been the beneficiary of his personal attachment to their son and seen his despondency as the investigation had languished.
After all these years, Stan felt an obligation to Butler, and to all the others in between, the cops like Bobby Shaw and Owen Byrne, the FBI agents like Ken Ruffo and Mary Galligan. For years after the Feds had stepped back, Galligan had made a special request, despite several career moves, to keep the Patz case among her files. When she was promoted to supervisor in 2001 she’d called Stan and told him she was finally being ordered to officially hand off the case.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “it’s being reassigned to another agent. And I’ll always keep an eye on it.” Just months later she was sent to Washington to head up PENTTBOM, the FBI’s 9/11 investigation. In her improvised basement office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, she propped one of Etan’s original missing posters on top of her bookcase.
But the searchers and seekers who’d given their time and their sweat were just the most visible links in the chain that tied so many more to this case. For twenty-five years, people had been moved to action by the sad story: the friends and neighbors, some he barely knew or could remember, the ones who’d brought the casseroles, and cared for Etan’s brother and sister; who with great trepidation had scoured the darkened basements and abandoned elevator shafts of SoHo. All the strangers over the years who’d written him unanswered letters, who’d whispered unanswered prayers, lighting their candles in church sanctuaries around the country, around the world. All those people had given their time and gotten nothing back and Stan believed Jose Ramos should be held responsible for that too. In the meantime, Stan himself felt responsible for coming up with an answer.
Almost seven months later, Etan’s father sat on the witness stand and looked down at the sketch artist in the front row of the lower Manhattan courtroom. From upside down, it was hard to tell if she was drawing a good likeness. He tried to twist his neck around without revealing his wandering eye. Checking himself out on the page was a welcome distraction from the attack of nerves—or was it vertigo he felt, sitting up high in the chair with everyone looking at him? Fortunately, the courtroom was smaller than he’d expected, and the turnout was even smaller. Judge Kapnick looked comforting yet businesslike in her brown bangs and pearls, sitting even higher than Stan.
Today, November 22, 2004, for the first time ever, Stan Patz was in court for Etan, in the damages phase of the civil suit. This morning Stan’s testimony would help the judge put a dollar figure to the family’s pain and suffering over the past two and a half
decades, if such a thing were even remotely possible. It struck him as obscene, but Stan couldn’t tolerate the even more obscene thought that Jose Ramos might profit from Etan’s death, so money damages had to be assigned. Stan struggled to pull his gaze away from the artist’s broad pencil strokes as she filled in his navy jacket and matching tie. Putting on the tie that morning had helped the day’s importance sink in, maybe even more than the hours of preparation at the lawyer’s office; more than the New York Daily News headline—“Finally, Etan’s Family Gets a Day in Court”; more than fielding the phone calls such headlines had inevitably prompted. For Stan, a tie meant serious business: weddings, funerals, and now court appearances.
Stuart GraBois sat a few seats down the row from the sketch artist and watched Stan easily answer preliminaries—name, address, profession. Then, as O’Dwyer prepared to ask the next question, GraBois leaned closer to hear Stan’s answer and caught his eye, nodding in encouragement. The two men had spent a few hours together that morning while Stan had one last chance to practice what he’d say, and GraBois knew that talking about Etan in open court was going to deplete his inner resources. He had faith in Stan, though, because he’d come to recognize his quiet strength.
From their first hostile days, through the gradual thaw, then hours of tactical meetings, the two had forged a friendship out of mutual admiration and respect. When GraBois had the Carpenters Union give office space to the New York chapter of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, he’d also arranged for Stan to sit with him on their New York advisory board. At their infrequent lunches the two fathers talked about other subjects besides the legal intricacies of the case. Ari Patz, now living in Hawaii near his girlfriend’s family, gave his father tales to tell of his exotic new life. Andrew GraBois was a recent third-generation law school grad, an associate at O’Dwyer and Bernstien. The baby who’d helped spark his father’s interest in the case was now helping prepare the briefs for this damages phase.
After Etan Page 45
