NEW YORK — A former store clerk was convicted Tuesday of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz on the way to the school bus stop 38 years ago.
Pedro Hernandez showed no reaction as jurors delivered their verdict. A 2015 jury had deadlocked following 18 days of deliberation, 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, resolving a case that shaped both parenting and law enforcement practices in the United States.
“The Patz family has waited a long time, but we’ve finally found some measure of justice for our wonderful little boy, Etan,” his father, Stanley Patz, said afterward, choking up. “I’m really grateful that this jury finally came back with which I have known for a long time — that this man, Pedro Hernandez, is guilty of doing something really terrible so many years ago.”
He added: “I am truly relieved, and I’ll tell you, it’s about time. It’s about time.”
The verdict spurred tears even from some of the jurors from the first trial, who had attended the second one. In the first trial, all but one juror had voted for conviction.
The current jury’s foreman, Thomas S. Hoscheid, said deliberations had been difficult, but “we had constructive conversations, based in logic, that were analytical and creative and adaptive, and compassionate.
“And, ultimately, kind of heartbreaking,” he said.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said the jury “affirmed beyond all lasting doubt that Pedro Hernandez kidnapped and killed the missing child” in “one of the city’s most famous and formative cases.”
Still, the Patz family — which focused for years on another suspect before Hernandez’ 2012 arrest — 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 a then-edgy but neighborly part of lower Manhattan.
Hernandez’s lead lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, said he would appeal.
“In the end, we don’t believe this will resolve the story of what happened to Etan back in 1979,” Fishbein said.
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 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.”
The decadeslong 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 — still alive — in a box and left it 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. 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,” 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. For years, Stan Patz sent him notes annually in prison asking, “What did you do to my little boy?”
The man was never charged and denies killing Etan.
Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this story.
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