Suspect in custody in decades old N.Y. missing boy case
Written by on May 24th, 2012 in Latest News.
A person in custody has implicated himself in the death of Etan Patz, the six-year-ancient boy whose disappearance 33 years ago on his way to school helped launch a missing children’s movement that place kids’ faces on milk cartons.
New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement that further details would be released later Thursday.
An unidentified law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the suspect was picked up late Wednesday in Camden, N.J., and has been tied to the case in the past. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing probe by the FBI and police into the boy’s disappearance.
Etan Patz was one of the first missing children to appear on a milk carton. His disappearance helped launch a national movement on the issue of missing children. The date May 25 was declared National Missing Child Day in his honour. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)
At the time of the boy’s disappearance, the man in custody lived in the same Manhattan neighborhood as Patz. He had been known to detectives for years, but it was unclear what brought them back to him this week.
The man was being questioned Thursday by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and investigators are still trying to confirm details of his tale.
The development came one day before the anniversary of the boy’s disappearance, when detectives traditionally receive a landslide of hoaxes and fake leads related to the case.
Wearing a backpack, the boy with sandy hair and a toothy smile vanished May 25, 1979, while walking alone to his school bus stop for the first time, two blocks from his home in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.
There was an exhaustive search by police and a crush of media attention. The boy’s photo was one of the first of a missing child to appear on a milk carton. Thousands of fliers were plastered around the city, buildings canvassed, hundreds of people interviewed. SoHo was not a neighbourhood of swank boutiques and galleries as it is now, but of working-class New Yorkers rattled by the news.
The April excavation of a Manhattan basement yielded no obvious human remains and small forensic evidence that would help solve the decades long mystery of what happened to the boy.
His parents, Stan and Julie Patz, were reluctant to go or even change their phone number in case their son tried to reach out. They still live in the same apartment, down the street from the building that was examined in April. They have endured decades of fake leads, and a lack of hard evidence.
The family did not immediately return a message requesting comment.
“I hope this is the end of it,” said Roz Radd, who lives a couple of blocks from the Patz family and knows Etan’s mother casually from walking dogs in the neighbourhood. “There’s going to be hopefully closure to her, to know what happened to her son.”
Jose A. Ramos, an admitted child molester, was dating Etan Patz’s babysitter at the time the boy disappeared. Ramos denied killing the child, but in 2004 a Manhattan civil judge ruled him to be responsible for the death. (Pennsylvania Department of Corrections/Associated Press)
Etan’s disappearance touched off a massive search that has ebbed and flowed over the years. It also ushered in an era of anxiety about leaving children unsupervised.
In the past, the case seemed to have been largely focused on Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester, now serving time in Pennsylvania, who had been dating Etan’s baby sitter at the time the boy disappeared. In 2000, authorities dug up Ramos’ former basement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but nothing turned up.
Stan Patz had his son declared legally dead in 2001 so he could sue Ramos, who has never been charged criminally and denies harming the boy. A civil judge in 2004 found him to be responsible for Etan’s death, largely because he did not contest the case.
More recently, the focus had shifted to a 75-year-ancient Brooklyn resident, though he was not named a suspect and denied any involvement. In 1979, he was a handyman who had a workspace in the basement where the April excavation occurred.
A person familiar with the investigation said the emergence of a suspect was not related to the search of the basement.