on the now 30-year-old disappearance of Etan Patz. The article is worth reading, and I’ve copied the whole thing below, followed by an e-mail I wrote to the author with some questions about the article (which, of course, she has not answered).
CHILDHOOD’S END
THE KIDNAPPING OF ETAN PATZ CHANGED WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A KID—AND A PARENT—IN NEW YORK CITY
By GINGER ADAMS OTIS
May 2, 2009
Thirty years ago this month, six-year-old Etan Patz ran down the three flights from his SoHo loft, kissed his mother goodbye, dashed out his front door to head west on Prince Street, vanished somewhere on the next block as he approached West Broadway, and changed New York City forever.
That day—May 25, 1979—was tow-headed Etan’s first solo walk to the school bus stop on the corner. When he didn’t return, the sleepy city, emptying ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, jolted awake.
Police fanned out in a massive hunt through lower Manhattan, tearing through basements and sewers and closets of family friends.
As news of a possible child abduction spread from the close-knit artist community of SoHo through the city, it also put an end to a way of life—one that allowed kids to run to corner stores, play unsupervised in neighborhood parks and dart around streetlamps and stoops for untended nighttime games of hide-and-seek and stickball.
Etan Patz was a child of a different city—the looser, bohemian Manhattan that today’s residents often regard with misty-eyed nostalgia. But that Manhattan also had frightening pockets of human depravity. Police, unequipped with computers, high-tech radios and quickly updated central databases, relied on beat smarts and word of mouth to investigate crimes—and all too often were defeated by the chaos within their own overworked system.
It was into that dark city that Etan Patz disappeared.
*
Ramshackle 1970s SoHo was a perfect fit for Stan and Julie Patz. The young couple, married in 1965, scraped together $7,500 for an empty shell of a loft and gradually renovated it for their growing family, adding plumbing, floors and walls.
In their airy haven was space for Stan, 37, a commercial photographer, to carve out a personal photography studio, which Julie, 36, also used to run a day-care center for toddlers.
Their kids, Shira 8, Etan, 6, and Ari, 2, went to local schools. Their neighbors were of a similar pioneering mindset, fashioning homes out of abandoned industrial buildings.
Nine weeks after her son vanished, Julie would relive the experience of Etan’s abduction with an NYPD hypnotist, according to a new book out this week by journalist Lisa R. Cohen. “After Etan” (Grand Central Publishing) opens with Julie’s recovered memories of her last moments with her son.
That day, Julie woke around 7 a.m. and prepared for a busy morning. As always, self-sufficient Etan dressed himself, donning blue pants, a T-shirt and sneakers, light blue ones with fluorescent green racing stripes up the sides. He threw on his favorite hat—a Future Flight Captain’s pilot cap from Eastern Airlines—and padded into the kitchen to eat his cereal.
Stan and Julie had been debating if it was time to let Etan walk to the bus stop unaccompanied—a privilege he’d been begging for all year, Cohen writes.
Now, this day, Etan was to make the trek alone, and he raced to the front door ahead of his mom. He was too short to reach the lock, and had to wait for Julie to turn it before he could head outdoors.
“I’m kissing him and I give him a hug. I say so long, tell him to have a good day. I watched him for a little while, and I went in the door and flipped the lock and closed it. I ran upstairs,” Julie says, according to a transcript of the hypnosis session obtained by Cohen.
Revealed in the session is an important detail: With two-year-old Ari upstairs with a toddler friend, and a crew of her day-care charges expected any moment, Julie didn’t—as she initially told police—return to the apartment and then step onto the front fire escape that has a view of Prince Street to watch her son reach West Broadway and turn the corner.
“Her mind had played a trick on her. Perhaps her unconscious had wanted her to have gone out on the balcony so badly, it had given her a false memory,” Cohen writes.
In reality, Julie had gotten on with her busy day almost immediately—and nobody knows for sure the precise path taken by Etan that drizzly May morning.
By 3:30 that afternoon, Julie was starting to feel the first prickles of panic.
She called neighbor Karen Altman. “Is Etan over there with you?”
Altman turned to her daughter Chelsea, who was in the same class, to ask her if she’d seen her friend after school.
The answer, Cohen writes, filled Julie with dread.
“Etan wasn’t in school today,” said the little girl.
Within hours, NYPD cops and detectives had descended en masse on the Patz’s loft—and soon would commandeer it as their communications center.
A team of investigators, led by detective Bill Butler, scrutinized Stan’s commercial photos and asked repeated, insistent questions about relatives and friends who could be harboring personal vendettas. Police dogs sniffed pieces of Etan’s clothes, but were unable to pick up his trail beyond West Broadway.
Neighbors and friends launched their own frantic searches, and Stan churned out prints of his elfin son’s face for cops to use on missing persons posters that show Etan smiling widely under a thick mop of blond hair, alongside the words “Lost Child Etan Patz.”
Even those without strong ties to the Patz family pitched in. Not far from the Patz loft, Sandy Harmon, a young single mother hired by Julie to walk her kids home from school during a recent bus strike, watched the evening news report on Etan’s disappearance, Cohen writes. Her boyfriend, Michael, stood up and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Sandy asked.
“Out to help look for that little boy,” Michael answered.
*
Days became weeks. A local Jamaican super who regularly shared jokes and greetings with Etan fell under suspicion because he worked out of a building that housed the city’s first gay erotic art gallery. At one point, investigators zeroed in on an art installation around the corner from Etan’s loft. The custodian of his building was a convicted pedophile, cops learned, and had made remarks suggesting Etan’s body was buried inside the 280,000 pounds of dirt in the “Earth Room” still on display in SoHo today. But an FBI sweep came up clean.
The leads were fruitless and, one by one, the detectives were reassigned. Friends gave up their searches, and Stan and Julie were left to piece together their fractured family.
Then, a few years later, police finally caught a break: They stumbled across the “drainpipe man.”
In March 1982, a long-haired drifter with a striking resemblance to Charles Manson was discovered living inside a muddy drainpipe in The Bronx. Among his sodden belongings were pictures of small boys, some blond, and one that looked like Etan.
The drainpipe man was hauled in for questioning. The vagrant, whose name is Jose Ramos, denied knowing Etan. Cops Cops asked Stan and Julie to review the pictures found in his lair. The couple was devastated—and simultaneously relieved—to find their son’s photo was not among them.
But cops found there were things about Ramos that didn’t add up.
For one, he sometimes went by the name Michael and—under interrogation—admitted to dating Sandy Harmon, the same Sandy who had sometimes walked Etan and other neighborhood children to school in 1979.
It was “Michael” who had watched the evening news with Sandy the day Etan vanished, and abruptly decided to look for the missing boy.
Detectives were skeptical. Were these the actions of a guilty man running to hide something before police found it? Or the selfless act of caring neighbor, as Ramos claimed?
The NYPD pushed for a stronger tie between Ramos and Etan, but turned up nothing. The drifter was allowed to go.
Stan and Julie asked to be allowed to see the children’s toys that had been collected from Ramos’s drainpipe hideout—they would recognize Etan’s playthings, they argued. But the cops refused, afraid to give the parents false hope.
The couple wondered why police didn’t contact Sandy Harmon, Cohen writes. They wondered who was keeping track of Ramos—had he just disappeared, like Etan, into the darkness of the city?
*
In fact, for several months after his arrest, Ramos lived within 10 blocks of the Patz family, Cohen later discovered.
After cops released him, Ramos went to a storage facility he had in Brooklyn, emptied it of his belongings, and moved into an empty store space in the West Village.
He might have stayed lost forever, if his own perverse needs hadn’t driven him to the Crossroads of the World, then a nexus of sex shows, strip clubs, drug addiction and prostitution. And Times Square had a special corner—known as Playland—set aside for pedophiles.
It was there, on a hot August night in 1982, that a newly-transferred vice cop named Joe Gelfand grabbed the drainpipe man for a second time, five months after Ramos was first collared. Caught in the act of soliciting sex from three male minors, Ramos was back in police custody.
Gelfand remembered that Ramos had a possible connection to Etan Patz and contacted NYPD detectives to let them know he had the drainpipe man.
A young city lawyer put Ramos in Rikers Island on a psych evaluation, and he spent several months under jailed observation. After Ramos was given a clean bill of mental health, however, prosecutors dismissed his case instead of charging him with a sex crime—and all without consulting Gelfand.
Vice detectives later explained to an enraged Gelfand that “The Manhattan [district attorney’s] sex crimes unit didn’t like pedophilia cases,” Cohen writes.
Ramos disappeared once again.
Five years passed before something changed in Etan’s case. An aggressive new US attorney—known for blasting Pavarotti arias from his office every morning and pursuing indictments with a reformer’s zeal—had taken over.
Rudy Giuliani, already gunning for the seedy Times Square businesses he’d later wipe out as mayor, wanted to crack the seemingly impenetrable, high-profile mystery. One of his best assistant US Attorneys was on the case: Stuart GraBois. A native New Yorker, GraBois grew up hearing about “L’Affaire Dreyfus” from his Jewish immigrant grandfather. He’d gotten his start in Legal Aid, moving to the US attorneys office in 1982.
Giuliani encouraged GraBois to reopen every possible avenue that might lead to Etan and fought for money and manpower so his assistant could track down even the most farfetched leads. Giuliani signed off on a trip to Israel for GraBois, after a rumor surfaced that a rabbi uncle kidnapped Etan and took him there.
He let GraBois use the US attorney’s clout with the mob to get help from Matty “The Horse” Ianniello, who controlled several bars along Prince Street where Etan vanished.
But even with GraBois’ work, several more years passed with no discernible progress, with investigators resorting to a psychic who led police on a wintery chase down to the East River.
After nearly three years of re-investigating old NYPD evidence, GraBois made a decision: It was time to look into the drainpipe man again.
This time, luck was on the prosecutor’s side. A few years earlier, Ramos had been arrested for preying on young boys within a traveling hippie group known as the Rainbow Family of Living Light. He was in Rockview prison in Pennsylvania, doing time on a child molestation conviction.
GraBois arranged to have Ramos transported to his Manhattan office in Federal Plaza on June 28, 1988.
Ramos was handcuffed to a heavy chair in GraBois’ office. The suspect appeared excited to be back in New York City and at times answered questions in a sing-songy Jackie Mason-esque Jewish accent. Ramos initially thought he’d been called into talk about taxes—he never paid them—because in his earlier interrogations with police he’d revealed that he made money by selling garbage he collected from the streets.
GraBois let him think that, encouraging Ramos to talk about his salvage business and his life on the streets. Then GraBois picked up a piece of paper and pretended to be looking at it carefully.
“How many times did you try to have sex with Etan Patz?” he demanded.
Ramos went white.
“Don’t lie to me, Jose.”
Ramos started to talk about a small blond-haired boy he’d picked up in Washington Square Park the day Etan went missing. “We talked a little, and then I asked him if he wanted to go back to my apartment,” Ramos said.
“Why would you bring [Etan] back to your apartment?” GraBois demanded.
“For sex,” Ramos replied.
GraBois was convinced he had Etan’s killer, but Ramos, terrified, stopped cooperating. Ramos spun a convoluted tale about putting the child, unharmed, on a subway to Washington Heights. He refused to admit to more.
But on their way to the elevators to transport Ramos back to Rockview, the inmate teased GraBois about the blockbuster revelations to come in New York’s most famous missing-person case.
“You’ll be famous. You’ll have Giuliani’s job,” Ramos said.
Seconds later, the elevator doors opened to reveal Giuliani himself inside. “Mr. Giuliani!” Ramos hailed him. “I seen you on TV. The camera makes you look heavier.”
Giuliani, who didn’t recognize the suspect, shot GraBois a look that said, “Who is this guy?” Cohen writes.
*
Since that day in 1988, GraBois has tried to wring a full confession from Ramos—with limited success. GraBois even set up elaborate jailhouse stings with snitches. Without a new indictment, Ramos will be up for parole in Pennsylvania in three years. Originally scheduled for parole in 2014, in the last month Ramos has gotten his sentence recalibrated, and could now be back on the streets by 2012, Cohen has discovered.
Ramos has unwittingly dropped several incriminating details—including a likely scenario for what happened to six-year-old Etan’s body. According to author Cohen, New York investigators suspect that Ramos burned Etan’s remains—probably in the basement boiler at the East Fourth Street slum where he had an apartment in 1979. But none of the findings have been enough for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau—who has refused to convene a grand jury.
To prevent Ramos from trying to profit from his “If I did it” confessions, Stan Patz had his son declared legally dead in 2001. Three years later, a judge ruled in civil court that Ramos was legally responsible for Etan’s death.
Stan and Julie have pushed initiatives to help missing children, including helping to create a centralized database of their cases.
Etan’s neighborhood is now considered one of the safest places to raise kids in the city. A coordinated effort by multiple NYPD law enforcement agencies to crack down on quality of life crimes, as well as the bigger challenges of drugs and prostitution, championed by Mayor Giuliani, has produced a safer and saner Manhattan than the one Etan knew. It is still not a city, perhaps, where a parent feels comfortable letting their six-year-old walk to the bus stop. But a crime like Etan Patz’s kidnapping shocked an establishment out of the attitude that the metropolis couldn’t change, that we couldn’t have a better life.
For Stan Patz, there’s only one thing left—get justice for Etan. After nine terms in office, Morgenthau is retiring this year. He’s been in office since 1975, four years before the child’s disappearance. Perhaps another DA will feel differently about the case.
“I am more hopeful now than I have been for a decade. I think Robert Morgenthau is the roadblock to getting an indictment on Jose Ramos,” Patz said. “The facts have been out there for 10 years. I want an indictment.”
But Morgenthau, while sympathetic, says his office was never able to “figure out” who was behind Etan’s disappearance.
“We spent all kinds of time and effort on that case, but we just couldn’t come up with anything,” he said. “There are cases where you know who did it but just can’t prove it.”
gotis@nypost.com
Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton.
[end of Post article]