His disappearance changed childhood forever. Now this decades-old case has been reopened

8 hours ago 4

New York: When six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared off a New York street on his way to school in 1979, he helped catalyse a national missing children’s movement, and changed childhood forever.

The six-year-old was one of the first children whose disappearance was publicised in what became a high-profile way: on milk cartons. His case also ushered in an age of parental anxiety.

A photograph of Etan Patz at a makeshift memorial in the SoHo neighborhood of New York in 2012.

For decades the case remained a mystery, until eventually, police arrested a former New York convenience store assistant, Pedro Hernandez, in 2012. Five years later, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in jail for Etan’s kidnapping and murder.

But on Monday, a federal appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial for Hernandez, now 64, reopening a case from 46 years ago.

One of the original missing posters for Etan Patz.

A boy vanishes and a movement begins

Etan disappeared while walking to his Manhattan school bus stop alone for the first time on May 25, 1979, igniting an exhaustive search and helping to make missing children a national cause in the United States.

The anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day. His parents helped press for new laws that established a national hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about missing children.

The movement grew after the 1981 kidnapping and killing of six-year-old Adam Walsh in Florida. Frightened parents soon stopped letting children walk alone to school and play unsupervised in their neighbourhoods.

“It was a zeitgeist moment that changed the way we deal with our kids,” Lisa R. Cohen, the author of After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive, told The New York Times. “And then it never stopped.”

Professor and author Jonathan Haidt told The New York Times that the deaths of the two boys in 1979 and 1981 “changed the way we raise kids” in a way that was “very damaging to human development”.

“It was a terrible mistake,” he told the Times. “Children need to play.”

Investigation spans decades

Etan’s body has never been found, but his family had him legally declared dead in 2001.

The investigation spanned decades and even reached Israel.

Hernandez worked at a convenience store in Etan’s neighbourhood, and police noted meeting him among many people they encountered while searching. But he wasn’t a suspect until 2012, when police got a tip that Hernandez, then living in New Jersey, had once spoken to a relative about killing a boy in New York City.

Pedro Hernandez appears in Manhattan criminal court in New York in 2012.

A disputed confession

There was no physical evidence against Hernandez, but police said that during a seven-hour interrogation he confessed to attacking Etan.

In recorded statements, Hernandez tranquilly recounted offering a soft drink to entice Etan into the basement of the convenience store where Hernandez was then working as a teenage stock clerk. Hernandez said he choked Etan, put the still-alive boy into a plastic bag and a box, and left the box in an alley.

Hernandez’s lawyers said the admissions were the false imaginings of a man with mental illness and a very low IQ.

A makeshift memorial in the Soho neighbourbood of New York, where Etan Patz lived.

The defence also urged jurors to consider another long-time suspect who had dated a woman who had sometimes walked Etan home from school. That man was later convicted of molesting boys in Pennsylvania. He told federal authorities about interacting with a child he was all but sure was Etan on the day the boy vanished. But he was never criminally charged.

Prosecutors maintained that Hernandez’s confessions were credible and suggested he faked or exaggerated symptoms of mental illness.

Appeals court ruling

In its ruling on Monday, a federal appeals court overturned Hernandez’s conviction because of the original judge’s response to a jury note during a 2017 trial.

The appeal revolved around the police interrogation that Hernandez underwent in 2012. Police said he initially confessed before they read him his rights. Hernandez was then given a legally required warning that his statements could be used against him in court, then repeated his admission on tape at least twice.

At the trial, the jury sent a note to the judge asking whether it should disregard the two recorded confessions if it concluded that the first one – given before the Miranda warning – was invalid. The judge answered “no”. The appeals court ruled that the jury should have gotten a more thorough explanation of its options, which could have included disregarding all the confessions.

The court ordered Hernandez to be released unless he received a new trial within “a reasonable period”.

The 2017 trial had been Hernandez’s second; his first ended in a deadlocked jury in 2015.

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