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CBS News
21-07-2025
- CBS News
Etan Patz case: Pedro Hernandez found guilty of murder in boy's 1979 disappearance
Editor's note: On July 21, 2025, a federal appeals court ruled that Pedro Hernandez should have a new trial or be released. The Manhattan DA's office is reviewing the decision. NEW YORK -- A former store clerk was convicted Tuesday of murder in one of the nation's most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on the way to the school bus stop. Pedro Hernandez showed no reaction as jurors delivered their verdict. Another jury had deadlocked following 18 days of deliberation in 2015, leading to a retrial that spanned more than three months. Hernandez, who once worked in a convenience store in Etan's neighborhood, had confessed, but his lawyers said his admissions were the false imaginings of a mentally ill man. This time, the jury deliberated over nine days before finding Hernandez, 56, guilty of murder during a kidnapping in a case that shaped both parenting and law enforcement practices in the United States. Some of the jurors from the first trial attended the second one, and several of them wept Tuesday as the verdict was read. The slain boy's father, Stan Patz, was being comforted by the ex-jurors and appeared to wipe tears from his eyes. "I am truly relieved and I'll tell you, it's about time," Stan Patz told reporters. He said he didn't expect the first jury to deadlock, but said the prosecutors' presentation answered questions for him about his son's disappearance. "I needed to know what happened to my son," Patz said. "This great prosecution team finally proved it – at least I knew it back then, regardless of the verdict, at least I know what happened." Patz said he had spoken on the phone briefly with his wife. He said she was crying. In a statement, District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Etan's case "will no longer be remembered as one of the city's oldest and most painful unsolved crimes," CBS New York reports. "The disappearance of Etan Patz haunted families in New York and across the country for nearly four decades," Vance said. "Etan's legacy will endure through his family's long history of advocacy on behalf of missing children. However, it is my hope that today's verdict provides the Patz family with the closure they so desperately deserve." The Patz family and authorities may never know exactly what became of the boy. No trace of him has been found since the May day he vanished, on the first day he got the grown-up privilege of walking alone to the bus stop about two blocks away in the then-edgy but neighborly SoHo section of lower Manhattan. Etan became one of the first missing children ever pictured on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance has been designated National Missing Children's Day. His parents lent their voices to a campaign to make missing children a national cause, and it fueled laws that established a national hotline and made it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about vanished youngsters. And his disappearance helped tilt parenting to more protectiveness in a nation where many families had felt comfortable letting children play and roam in their neighborhoods alone. "It's a cautionary tale, a defining moment, a loss of innocence," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi said in an opening statement. "It is Etan who will forever symbolize the loss of that innocence." Prosecutors said after the verdict was announced Tuesday it provided some measure of justice for the Patz family. "I just want to thank God this jury has worked so hard to a just and truthful verdict for the Patz family, who has suffered so terribly for almost four decades," Illuzzi said. The decades-long investigation took investigators as far as Israel, but Hernandez wasn't a suspect until 2012, when renewed news coverage of the case prompted a brother-in-law to tell police that Hernandez had told a prayer group decades earlier that he'd killed a child in New York. Authorities would later learn that he'd made similar, if not entirely consistent, remarks to a friend and his ex-wife in the early years after Etan vanished. After police finally came to Hernandez' Maple Shade, New Jersey, door, he confessed, saying he'd offered Etan a soda to get him into the store basement, choked him, put him in a box — still alive, he said — and left the box with a pile of curbside trash. "Something just took over me," Hernandez said in one of a series of recorded confessions to police and prosecutors. He said he'd wanted to tell someone, "but I didn't know how to do it. I felt so sorry." Prosecutors cast his confession as the chillingly believable words of a man unburdening himself, and they argued it was buttressed by the less specific admissions he'd made earlier to his relatives and acquaintances. Defense lawyers and doctors portrayed Hernandez as man with psychological problems and intellectual limitations that made him struggle to tell reality from fantasy — and made him susceptible to confessing falsely after more than six hours of questioning before recording began. His daughter testified that he talked about seeing visions of angels and demons and once watered a dead tree branch, believing it would grow. "Pedro Hernandez is an odd, limited and vulnerable man," defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said in his closing argument. "Pedro Hernandez is an innocent man." Prosecutors have suggested Hernandez faked or exaggerated his symptoms. Defense lawyers also pointed to a different man who was long the prime suspect — a convicted Pennsylvania child molester who made incriminating remarks about Etan's case in the 1990s and who had dated a woman acquainted with the Patzes. He was never charged and denies killing Etan. Several jurors spoke to reporters, saying they overcame an initial split during the lengthy deliberations. "There had to have been a divide for us to deliberate that long," juror Cateryn Kiernan said. "…We approached it logically and compassionately. We were very nervous about making the wrong call." Another juror said the group did believe Hernandez suffered from mental illness, but said they ultimately decided he was not delusional and knew right from wrong. Stan Patz said he was confident the second jury's questions and requests for exhibits during the deliberations were "a positive sign they were concentrating on what I thought was the right thing."
CBS News
21-07-2025
- CBS News
Etan Patz case: Pedro Hernandez gets at least 25 years in 1979 missing boy case
Editor's note: On July 21, 2025, a federal appeals court ruled that Pedro Hernandez should have a new trial or be released. The Manhattan DA's office is reviewing the decision. NEW YORK -- Almost four decades after first-grader Etan Patz set out for school and ended up at the heart of one of America's most influential missing-child cases, a former store clerk convicted of killing him was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison. In a few angry words, Etan's father condemned the convicted man. "Pedro Hernandez, after all these years, we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart," Stan Patz said. "I will never forgive you. The god you pray to will never forgive you. You are the monster in your nightmares." His wife, Julie Patz, wiped tears from her eyes as she witnessed the culmination of a long quest to hold someone accountable for their son's disappearance. The case affected police practices, parenting and the nation's consciousness of missing children. Hernandez, 56, didn't look at the Patzes, speak or react as he got the maximum allowable sentence: 25 years to life in prison, meaning he won't be eligible for parole until he has served the quarter-century. The lead defense lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, told the court Hernandez wanted to express deep sympathy to the Patzes but also to say "he's an innocent man and he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Etan Patz." Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience shop in Etan's Manhattan neighborhood when the boy vanished in 1979, on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop. Hernandez, who's from Maple Shade, New Jersey, confessed to choking Etan. But his lawyers have said he's mentally ill and his confession was false, and they vowed to appeal his conviction. In a sign of the case's impact on the law enforcement officials and everyday people enmeshed in it, the courtroom audience Tuesday included Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., police officers who worked the case and a half-dozen ex-jurors. Etan was among the first missing children pictured on milk cartons. His case contributed to an era of fear among American families, making anxious parents more protective of kids who many once allowed to roam and play unsupervised in their neighborhoods. "Through this painful and utterly horrific real-life story, we came to realize how easily our children could disappear," said Vance, a Democrat who made a 2009 campaign promise to revisit the case if elected. The Patzes' advocacy helped to establish a national missing-children hotline and to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to share information about such cases. The May 25 anniversary of Etan's disappearance became National Missing Children's Day. Still, Stan Patz said, he and his wife had doubted they would ever find out what happened to their child because there were "so many false leads, so many blind alleys. So many years went by." "Now," he said after the sentencing, "I know what the face of evil looks like." From the start, Etan's case spurred a huge manhunt and an enduring, far-flung investigation. But no trace of Etan was ever found. A civil court declared him dead in 2001. Hernandez didn't become a suspect until police got a 2012 tip that he'd made remarks years earlier about having killed a child in New York. Hernandez then confessed to police, saying he'd lured Etan into the store's basement by promising a soda and choked him because "something just took over me." He said he put Etan, still alive, in a box and left it with curbside trash. "I'm being honest. I feel bad what I did," Hernandez said in a recorded statement. His lawyers say he confessed falsely because of a mental illness that makes him confuse reality with imagination. He also has a very low IQ. They also filed a motion to throw out the conviction, arguing jurors who knew members of the first jury were in the courtroom audience and may have swayed their decision, CBS New York reports. The judge rejected the motion. "Unfortunately in the end, we don't believe this will resolve the story of what happened to Etan," Hernandez's attorney, Fishbein, said. The attorneys have vowed to appeal. The defense pointed to another suspect, a convicted child molester whom some investigators and prosecutors - and even Etan's parents - pursued for years. That man made incriminating statements years ago about Etan but denied killing him and has since insisted he wasn't involved in the boy's disappearance. He was never charged. Hernandez's first trial in 2015 ended in a hung jury, but the 56-year-old was found guilty in the second trial of the case in February. "I'm really grateful that this jury finally came back with what I have known for a long time," Etan's father, Stan Patz, said at the time, CBS New York reports. "That this man, Pedro Hernandez, is guilty of doing something really terrible so many years ago." Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley said Tuesday he'd found prosecutors' case against Hernandez compelling. Hernandez, he said, "kept a terrible secret for 33 years."
