Happy True Crime Thursday and Day 5 of True Crime Week!
I've covered the cases behind the Amber Alert and Code Adam, so today I thought I would cover one of the first children who's face was put on milk cartons everywhere after he went missing.
Today's story is about Etan Patz.
As usual these cases are really difficult to read and write about, but the reality is that they happened and that there are real monsters out there that would harm our children given the right opportunity.
Little Etan had blonde shaggy hair and blue eyes, he lived with his family in Manhattan, New York. The day he went missing he was only 6 years old.
On Friday, May 25, 1979 he had finally convinced his mom Julia (although she was reluctant) to let him walk to the bus stop by himself, it was only 2 blocks away. In his black baseball cap and striped sneakers he grabbed his elephant tote bag with a couple of his favorite toy cars, a dollar to buy a soda and stepped outside to begin his solo journey to the bus stop. Unknown to Julia that this would be the last time she would see her son.
Julia soon learned that Etan had been marked absent that day after she made a phone call when he didn't come home that afternoon. He didn't even make it to his bus. "My legs started giving out," she once said. Before long the police were dispatched and the families apartment became a command center where volunteers, journalists and investigators assembled. The New York Police Department spared no expense, 100 officers with bloodhounds and helicopters were sent to search for Etan. Going door to door and conducting room to room searches.
Etan's picture was splashed across the front page of newspapers, telephone poles, the screens of Times Square, television newscasts until his picture eventually ended up on milk cartons in every state.
Sadly 5 years passed and still no Etan, any leads that police had went cold.
President Reagan designated May 25th as "National Missing Children's Day." Etan's case was also instrumental in founding the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984. The organization quickly adopted the milk carton strategy to get the word out about missing children.
Despite all the attention to Etan's case, no answers were found. Different theories and suspects came forth, one in particular was a convicted child molester named Jose Ramos, he was in a relationship with one of Etan's babysitters. They pursued him for years. In the year 2000 investigators spent 8 hours scavenging through Jose's living space, but found nothing. Decades went by without any justice or answers for Etan and his family.
In 2012, investigators came across some new information. Othniel Miller, who was a handyman had known Etan and even poured a concrete floor shortly after Etan disappeared. They did some digging and searching, but again found nothing. They may not have dug up anything, but it put Etan's name back out there.
To investigators surprise just a few weeks after this they received a phone call from a man who believed that his brother-in-law, Pedro Hernandez, could have been responsible for Etan's disappearance.
On May 25, 1979, Pedro was 18 years old and worked as a stock clerk in a grocery store near Etan's bus stop. Not to long after Etan disappeared he went back to New Jersey and got a job in a dress factory. He started to tell people that he had killed a child in New York City, one was an elder from his church group at a retreat as well as confessing to a prayer group while falling to his knees in tears. He also confessed to his former wife before they married, but in each confession there were differences.
Police brought him in for questioning and it was then that he told detectives that he had lured Etan into the store's basement that he worked at. "I grabbed him by the neck...and I started to choke him," he said. He claimed that the boy was still alive when he put him in a plastic bag that he put inside a box and threw away. After 33 years police made an arrest.
The trial was lengthy, because it was based on Pedro's statements alone. The defense argued that he suffered from mental illness and had an IQ of 70, which made it difficult for him to distinguish between fiction and reality. His lawyer suggested that police had used questionable tactics when interrogating the mentally ill man. In 2015 the trial ended in a deadlock with one jury member believing he was innocent. However, in 2017 the jury was convinced. He was found guilty of kidnapping and murder on February 14, 2017. And after decades Etan got his justice.
Today the faces of children may not be on milk containers, but alerts are now sent directly to people's phones, as well as being plastered all over the news, social media and billboards. These tactics have a great success rate.
Resources:
