He’s guilty.
A Manhattan jury on Tuesday convicted the confessed killer of little Etan Patz, whose disappearance became one of New York’s most heartbreaking murder cases.
The panel deliberated for nine days before finding Pedro Hernandez – the bodega worker who had made disputed confessions to the 1979 slaying – guilty of second-degree murder and kidnapping. They acquitted him on the top charge of intentional second-degree murder but he faces life in prison.
The courtroom audience gasped as the verdicts were read.
As the jury left court, Hernandez shrugged and his lawyer patted him on the back.
His sentencing was scheduled for Feb. 28.
Prosecutors had to overcome significant hurdles in trying the old case. Etan’s body was never recovered, there are no eyewitnesses and police were unable to gather any useful forensic evidence.
Etan vanished from a Soho street the first time he walked alone to the school bus stop on May 25, 1979. Police canvassed the neighborhood for days but turned up nothing.
It wasn’t until 2012 that authorities got a tip that led them to Hernandez, 56, of Maple Shade, New Jersey.
His brother-in-law told cops that the former stock clerk, who worked at a bodega next to the school bus stop at the time Etan went missing, had once confessed to killing a little boy in New York City.
After a 6 1/2-hour interrogation, Hernandez confessed on videotape to luring the child into the bodega basement with the promise of a soda and strangling him until he went limp.
“When he went in front of me, I grabbed his neck and I started to choke him. I was nervous. His legs were jerking,” Hernandez said in the chilling video as he placed his own hands around his neck to demonstrate.
“When I choked him, I tried to let go but my body was shaking and jumping at the same time,” he said. “I wanted to just let him go but there was something that took over in me, and I squeezed him more and more.”
He described in detail putting Patz’s still-breathing body into a plastic bag then into a produce box before dumping it in an alley two blocks away.
The defendant offered no motive despite being pressed by police and prosecutors.
A jury 21 months ago, fell one vote short of convicting Hernandez, prompting Manhattan prosecutors to seek a re-trial.
During summation in this re-trial, Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon played a montage of the defendant’s many confessions to police, prosecutors and psychiatric experts since his arrest.
She reminded the jury that he had also told his ex-wife, a church group and a pal that he killed a boy in New York — however, these admissions were vague and inconsistent.
“It’s hard to explain away 30 years of confessions,” the prosecutor said.
“Maybe the defendant tried to sexually assault him but realized Etan was fighting back,” she suggested, offering no evidence to backup the claim.
She told jurors that Etan’s disappearance “represented a loss of innocence for this city and this country” and made the public “sadder, more cynical.”
The prosecution put on a very similar case in the second trial but added five psychiatric witnesses to challenge Hernandez’s claims of debilitating mental illness.
Defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein argued in his summation that the real killer is convicted and currently imprisoned child molester Jose Ramos, 73, who was a longtime suspect in the case.
He was dating a woman who at some point had been hired to walk Etan home from school in 1979 and had a relationship with the Patz family.
Ramos even made a partial confession, telling a federal prosecutor he was “90 percent sure” he was with Etan the day he vanished.
Fishbein called Hernandez an “unreliable and inconsistent man” and said the only evidence against him “is his own words.”
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