After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  “Thanks for making us feel so safe.”

  “Thanks for being so patient when I lose my metrocard.”

  Julie circles the posters, nudging them with her stocking feet, pushing them apart to reveal more words. “These,” she says in wonder, “are the perks.”

  She reads out loud to her husband. Her eyes are shiny, but there are no tears.

  “You always make me feel good when I’m feeling bad.”

  “Thank you for covering my back all those times I did stupid shit.”

  “You are the mother of the school.”

  Finally her face gets damp. She holds up a poster for Stan to get a closer look at one particular message:

  “You’ve been nice to me since the first day of school. How come? No one likes me.”

  Julie shakes her head. “I can’t even think who this kid is.” She gives a small laugh. “But he’s my next project.”

  Postscript: After After Etan

  The phone rang way too early on Thursday morning, April 19, 2012, a month before the thirty-third anniversary of Etan’s disappearance. Three years had passed since the hardcover version of After Etan was published.

  “Hey, what’s going on,” I greeted John Miller, who was calling me from CBS News, where, after nine years off the air, he was back as a senior correspondent.

  “That’s what I was calling to ask you,” replied Miller. “Why are they digging up the basement of a building on Prince Street a block from the Patzes?”

  I answered reflexively. “That must be Othniel Miller’s workshop.”

  “Who’s Othniel Miller?”

  I explained quickly, since as far as I knew there wasn’t much to say about Othniel’s involvement in the case. He is in the index of this book—right below John Miller, in fact—but in the 2009 version, he had only one mention.

  Back in the seventies, and indeed for years after Etan’s disappearance, Othniel Miller had been a neighborhood handyman and carpenter, servicing the blocks around Julie and Stan’s SoHo loft. He’d worked on the oak doors of their co-op, and built the rough-hewn wooden bookshelves of the neighbors across the hall. An affable Jamaican immigrant, Miller was fondly regarded in the insular artist community, and Etan had sometimes done little tasks as a “junior carpenter’s helper.”

  Now, on this bright, clear morning, dozens of FBI agents and NYPD officers were setting up to excavate the basement where Miller had worked. Without warning, Othniel Miller was a person of interest in the case and about to become a household name. After John passed along my info, the New York local CBS affiliate tracked Othniel Miller to a Brooklyn apartment, racing a crew out there just in time to put the seventy-five-year-old man on camera as he was escorted from his home by FBI agents.

  The station immediately threw John Miller live on the air. Miller had practically cut his reporter’s teeth on the Etan Patz case, when he’d first interviewed Julie in the Patz loft the day after Etan went missing. For nearly a decade Miller had been out of the news business, hopping the fence to the other side—law enforcement—most recently as a Fed himself. He’d spent five years as FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs. But now, back as a newsman, he hadn’t seen this coming. Neither had I.

  Meanwhile, after I’d hung up from John’s call, the phone had promptly rung again—this time a CNN booker was on the line—and it didn’t stop for five days as the Patz case once again became national, front-page news. It was an irresistible lead story—finally, from a startlingly new direction, this iconic missing child case might be broken wide open, just blocks from the Patz home.

  But when nothing was found in the basement after nearly a week of digging, the news cycle ended. It appeared to be just an empty lead.

  A month later my phone rang again, one day before the May 25 anniversary.

  “They’ve got a guy in custody who says he killed Etan,” John Miller said, jolting me awake this time. “Who the hell is Pedro Hernandez?”

  I blinked and searched my mental files.

  “I wish I could help,” I apologized. “But I’ve got nothing.”

  Miller went on the air at 8 a.m. with news that turned the Patz case upside down. A New Jersey man had spent the previous night in police custody, thoroughly convincing detectives over the course of an emotional, several-hours-long interrogation that he’d murdered Etan, just minutes after the boy set off for the school bus stop.

  Pedro Hernandez told cops he’d been an eighteen-year-old stock boy in the bodega next to the bus stop when he’d lured Etan into its basement that morning. Hernandez said he’d strangled the boy and disposed of his body where no one had found it. Then he’d gone on to live the rest of his life, unnoticed. It all sounded so shocking, and random; could it be true?

  The astonishing news reverberated worldwide: “APÓS 33 ANOS, POLÍCIA FAZ PRISÃO NO CASO ETAN PATZ”…“Il bambino scomparso a New York 33 anni…” “… un coup de fil a lancé la police sur une nouvelle piste, celle de Pedro Hernandez…” “… ha confesado el crimen…” “… 33 Jahre lang versuchte die Polizei, Etans Mörder zu fassen…” “… previous attention had mostly focused on the figure of convicted paedophile Jose A. Ramos.”

  Over the following week, when a succession of newscasters like CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked me whether I was surprised, I said, “Yes, absolutely.” In more than twenty years of reporting this story, I told them all like a broken record, I’d never heard or seen Hernandez’s name.

  On the one hand, the news astonished me. On the other, it didn’t. One of the many reasons I felt compelled to pursue this story for two decades was because of its remarkable, ever-surprising narrative. In that way, the recent developments were just more of the same. Astonishing, yes, but all part of the long, tangled thread that started on May 25, 1979, and continues today.

  This book was originally published in May 2009, and it ended with hints that Stuart GraBois and Stan Patz would push to make the case an issue in the upcoming election of the first new Manhattan District Attorney in thirty-five years. As Robert Morgenthau prepared to retire at the end of 2009, a few strong contenders for his replacement emerged, including long-time prosecutor and former judge Leslie Crocker Snyder.

  GraBois and Crocker Snyder had known each other for years, starting back when they’d first faced off in court—he as a fledgling public defender, she as a young assistant DA. GraBois brought Stan Patz to meet her, and Stan was impressed. She’d had her legal people read up on Ramos, and she was encouraging enough to pledge that if elected district attorney, she’d consider the evidence thoroughly with an eye to putting the case before a grand jury. Baby steps, but it was forward motion, and Stan endorsed her one blazing summer morning in June 2009 in front of City Hall.

  “After decades,” Stan described the hopeful meeting to the handful of reporters gathered that day, “someone outside of my dedicated team was saying, ‘Yes, you may have a prosecutable case!’ ” Despite his reticence to ask for favors, he finished his short statement by “encouraging” New Yorkers to join him in voting for Crocker Snyder.

  “We need a district attorney who will be tough on criminals and will be a sensitive advocate for the families of crime victims,” finished the father of one of New York’s most well-known crime victims.

  Stan’s sense of urgency was heightened by the disturbing revelation a few months earlier that Jose Ramos would max out on his Pennsylvania prison sentence sixteen months sooner than expected. Altogether, Ramos had been convicted of three separate consecutive charges, ranging from indecent assault of a minor to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. The sentences added up to twenty-seven years, with a maximum release date of 2014. A long list of infractions hadn’t earned him any time off for good behavior. But Ramos had petitioned for a recalculation, demanding time served for the months he’d been locked up awaiting trial. This time the law was on his side. His release was moved up from 2014 to November 2012.

  So right up until New Yorkers voted in September, and he accompanied Leslie Crocker
Snyder to his neighborhood polling place, Stan pushed at every opportunity for the thirty-year-old crime to be front and center in the race.

  When another candidate—Morgenthau’s anointed successor, Cyrus Vance Jr.—handily beat Crocker Snyder, Etan’s father felt it was a giant step backward. Stan had met with Vance during the campaign, introduced by a former neighbor who’d been in law school with the veteran prosecutor, but Vance had been more noncommittal than his opponent about tackling the Patz case.

  So Stan was taken aback when, in early 2010, both he and GraBois were invited to the new district attorney’s office. Using detailed notes typed from memory, with his neat handwriting scribbled in the margins, GraBois gave a methodical rundown of the case against Jose Ramos that was met with thoughtful, engaged questions. While they all exchanged the obligatory business cards as the meeting ended, Vance asked GraBois for a copy of the notes. It was a promising sign, and if nothing resulted from this milestone day, Stan Patz was at least moved by the respectful, compassionate reception.

  Still, Vance acknowledged he was willing to take a fresh look at the case, and he walked the two visitors out of his office area himself. GraBois was pleased.

  “What a classy guy,” he told Stan after they left. Patz agreed.

  Although the Patz case had never officially been closed, Vance’s renewed interest meant all the old files would be reexamined yet again, from scratch. During the next several months, a joint NYPD–FBI team of investigators brought in everyone who’d played a part in the case over its decades-long span, from SoHo neighbors to the Patzes themselves, from the Rainbow Family of Living Light to Jon Morgan and Jeremy Fischer, the informants planted in Ramos’s cell.

  Two thousand twelve—the target year for Ramos’s release—began with no sign of a grand jury, and Stan was preparing to write the whole thing off as a stunt. But he realized there were aspects of the investigation to which he hadn’t been privy when the FBI broached the prospect of very publicly digging up a basement a block down Prince Street. In their thorough rehash of the case, investigators found that some details of Othniel Miller’s alibi that day didn’t add up.

  Miller had been looked at over the years. He was one of the last people to see Etan the night before he disappeared, giving the six-year-old a dollar for some child’s version of “help” on a carpentry job. It was that very dollar Etan had clutched the next morning on his way out the door. And it was Miller who had repaved his basement workshop with a fresh layer of cement soon after Etan’s disappearance.

  He’d claimed to be in another part of town when Etan disappeared, but in a report filed in the early weeks back in 1979, a Patz neighbor had told police she’d seen a black man entering the basement workshop at around 8 a.m. that day, carrying some kind of paint cans or other paraphernalia consistent with Miller’s work. A van, the neighbor recently retold current investigators, had been parked at the curb.

  Authorities spoke to Miller’s ex-wife, who dropped a bombshell—she claimed he’d molested his niece years earlier. If true, the alleged assault raised more suspicion. When cadaver dogs signaled the possibility of human remains at the handyman’s former workspace at 127B Prince Street, it was enough to secure an affidavit to start digging.

  When he was briefed in advance about these developments, Stan Patz asked for an “undercover” operation. “Considering the amount of construction that goes on in New York,” he reasoned, “it could look like any civilian renovation, using plainclothes agents and unmarked Dumpsters.” A nonstarter, he was told, especially since the agents would require hazmat suits. The authorities also worried about the press response to a covert plan, though Stan knew open activity would raise eyebrows anyway. “The FBI–NYPD digging one hundred yards away from our home? That’s going to explode in the press, like a bomb.”

  Even he was overwhelmed by just how right he was. That first morning, Thursday, April 19, hours after I got the call from John Miller, police and FBI in trademark lettered windbreakers were still prepping the basement to begin. But cameras, remote TV trucks, and amateur citizen-journalists alike were already gathered at the site’s perimeter, flush up against the metal police barricades that closed off the entire block of Prince Street between Wooster Street and West Broadway. Bright blue tarp had been fashioned into a canopy fronting the building’s entrance to conceal the action inside, but by the end of the first day, and on into the next three, agents were visible coming and going, crating away plastic bags by the Dumpster-full.

  Half a block away, the Patzes were in siege mode. Stan could look out the window of his third-floor loft and see press vans lined up around the corner. At one point, standing in his front office, out of the corner of his eye he spied a metal arm rising up from below, up, up, to window level in front of him. His first thought—that the press had installed cameras on a crane to peer into his inner sanctum—was replaced, thankfully, with the realization that a TV news truck below was only raising its satellite dish to feed video back to the station. But the sensation of being scrutinized like animals in a cage was a real one, and the family stayed away from the windows as much as possible.

  Again, pages and pages of media calls filled the phone book the family still kept. Reporters who wouldn’t take a polite no pressed the front bell. Trapped in their home, Stan and Julie didn’t leave until days into the dig. Stan finally appeared briefly to run errands and to post a sign at the entrance to his building:

  “To the hardworking and patient media people, the answer to all your questions at this time is no comment,” read the handwritten note. “Please stop ringing our bell and calling our phone for interviews.”

  The sign didn’t work as well as the torrential weekend rains did. The deluge shut down the dig, as well as the press barrage at the Patzes’ door. On Monday the sky cleared as agents carted away the last vestiges of Othniel Miller’s basement workshop, with little to show for their five-day effort. To the Patz family, it was a relief as much as a disappointment. The media circus had come to town and now it left, leaving nothing behind. Or so it seemed.

  Four weeks later, life felt relatively back to normal for the Patzes, who were on a rare road trip to the Boston area, celebrating their daughter-in-law’s graduation from Harvard. Friday would mark thirty-three years since Etan disappeared, but at Wednesday’s lazy afternoon picnic in the grassy quad behind son Ari and his wife’s postgraduate housing, they were happily focused on the next day’s festivities.

  At 6 a.m. the next day in Stan and Julie’s hotel room, Stan’s cell phone rang, waking him up. Disoriented, he thought it was the alarm, and groggily tried to turn it off. But it kept ringing. When he finally answered, it took a moment for him to realize someone was talking on the other end.

  “A man has confessed,” said Lieutenant Chris Zimmerman, head of Missing Persons, calling from the office of Armand Durastanti, the ADA in charge of the case. Zimmerman and his partner had been up all night. “We wanted you to hear it first from us.”

  Stan tried to clear his head as he listened, and he looked around to see that Julie, as was her habit, was already up and out. When she returned, he filled her in. She turned on the TV to hear the news repeated, while he took to the Internet. Neither Stan nor Julie saw the new development as any reason to get excited—it was just one more thing coming at them, like the basement dig.

  They decided to hold off calling Ari—no need to spoil his wife’s special day. But as they sat together in Radcliffe Yard on this beautiful spring afternoon, watching the graduates move across the stage to collect their diplomas, Julie told Ari something was breaking; the details were unclear. They soon became clearer.

  A few minutes after 6 p.m., New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stood at the podium in front of a packed press room at One Police Plaza. Fresh off a transatlantic flight from London, where he’d been advising British leaders about upcoming Olympic security, Kelly looked wide awake and businesslike, a white pocket square peeking out of his dark, tailored suit.

 
“This evening,” he read from a statement, “the NYPD is announcing the arrest of Pedro Hernandez, age fifty-one, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, for the murder of Etan Patz. Hernandez confessed to choking Etan thirty-three years ago tomorrow.” The date’s proximity was lost on no one.

  Pedro Hernandez mugshot, May 2012.

  The previous day, Hernandez had told police his story—that he’d been eighteen when he’d briefly lived in SoHo, working at his brother-in-law’s bodega on the northwest corner of Prince and West Broadway. It was the bodega Etan had been heading toward with his hard-won dollar, to buy himself a soda before getting on the school bus. The bus stop was less than a hundred feet north of the bodega’s basement entrance, where Hernandez had spent the previous month stocking merchandise.

  The redbrick corner store was a neighborhood fixture, predating the SoHo residents, who by 1979 ducked in daily for coffee and smokes, or a lunchtime sandwich and Coca-Cola, as advertised by the big letters bordering its grimy front windows. With its shabby neon beer signs blinking through the night, it was taken for granted, like hundreds of nondescript bodegas scattered on New York street corners throughout the five boroughs. Parents instructed their kids to take refuge inside if an adult was running late for bus pickup.

  If the bodega was little more than a hole-in-the-wall in 1979, the basement entrance was little more than a hole in the ground, accessed by two metal doors that swung open, then folded outward, with ladderlike steps leading down. Hernandez, emotional at times, told NYPD detectives that on May 25, 1979, he’d lured Etan down the basement steps with the promise of the soda he sought and strangled him.

  Hernandez had come to the cops’ attention in the wake of the Othniel Miller publicity. It’s a common occurrence—press attention churns the waters. People who’ve been sitting on information are motivated anew to come forward, whether it’s good information or bad.

  At his press conference, Commissioner Kelly parsed the news carefully. In years past, he quoted Hernandez family members as saying, Hernandez had told them he’d “done a bad thing and killed a child in New York.” One of them, watching the basement being dug up, Kelly said, had been spurred to alert the NYPD.