The moment when the chance of obtaining a verdict in the Etan Patz murder trial—which ended in a hung jury, on Friday afternoon—slipped away may have come on the sixth day of deliberations, when the jurors asked to re-hear the testimony of Chelsea Altman. The prosecution had called her to give jurors a picture of the day, May 25, 1979, when Etan, who was six, was allowed, for the first time, to walk alone around the corner to his school-bus stop, in SoHo, and was never seen again—a disappearance that transfixed the city. Altman was a small child then, too, and, she said in court, "Etan was my best friend." She remembered having saved a seat for him on the bus, and how it stayed empty. She also remembered the call from Etan's mother, Julie Patz, that afternoon, asking if he was with her, and Julie's shock when the answer was no. Altman lived across the street from the Patzes and remembered how, as she grew older and Etan remained missing, their "house was in a state of grief."
But there were other things that she did and didn't remember, which Harvey Fishbein, the defense lawyer, highlighted in cross-examination. The defendant, Pedro Hernandez, was eighteen and worked in a bodega near the school-bus stop when Etan disappeared. The case against him rests on a full confession he gave to detectives in May, 2012, after hours of interrogation, and on partial ones that he had made over the years in prayer groups and to family members. But he has since recanted his confession, and the defense says that he is mentally ill. And, for years, there was a different prime suspect in the case, a man named Jose Ramos. He, too, once confessed to kidnapping a boy who, he told a detective, he was "ninety per cent sure" was Etan. (He denied killing him; he said that he’d put him on the subway.) Ramos is a serial pedophile currently serving a prison sentence in Pennsylvania. He was also someone with a connection to both Etan and Chelsea Altman—he was the boyfriend of a woman named Susan, who had been hired to walk the children to school during a bus-driver's strike earlier in 1979.
At the trial, Altman testified that the Patzes and her family had been planning to go away together for a weekend in the country, and that this worried Etan, who told her that he had already made a plan to see an older friend, a man with a van. His name was Johnny, and he had candy. On the stand, Altman said that she thought that Johnny was an imaginary friend, but Fishbein read back to her notes from a conversation that she had with a detective in the nineteen-eighties, which suggested that she had thought that Johnny was Susan's boyfriend—that is, Ramos. She said she couldn't remember telling the detective that and didn’t believe that it was true. But it would be natural not to remember; she had, after all, been a child, and how much can even adults swear to about things that happened thirty-six years ago? Altman's testimony was, at a minimum, a reminder of how hard it is to bring a case after so much time has passed. But it also pointed to the defense's strongest argument: the case against Hernandez was no more solid than the one against Ramos. “Two confessions,” Fishbein said in his closing argument. “One by Pedro Hernandez. One by Ramos. Both can’t be true.”
The doubt in this case was not just reasonable. It was, and is, profound. There was no real physical evidence. Etan's body was never found. Ramos is a frightening figure, who once tried to lure children into a drainpipe in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. He’d been living in the drainpipe, and police found pictures of boys Etan's age among his possessions. So many people were so sure, for so long, that Ramos was guilty that the failure to prosecute him became an issue in the 2009 election for Manhattan District Attorney. Leslie Crocker Snyder, one of the candidates, held a press conference with Stanley Patz, Etan's father—who had previously obtained a default wrongful-death judgment against Ramos in civil court—and she pledged that “as district attorney, I will work to insure that justice is finally served in this tragic case." In response, Robert Morgenthau, the retiring district attorney, angrily told reporters, “We spent a huge amount of time on that case. If we could go to a grand jury, we would in a minute.” Snyder lost, but not before the winner, Cyrus Vance, Jr., promised to take another look at the case. His office reopened it, and the resulting publicity led a man named José Lopez, who had been married to Hernandez's sister, to call the police and tell them what he knew.
And that is the other side of it. Hernandez's confessions are compelling. “He continued to explain to me that something terrible had happened when he was in New York," his first wife testified, and then Hernandez described strangling a boy. This conversation would have taken place just a couple of years after Etan disappeared, and there were similar ones, which seemed sincere to the people who heard them. Whatever earlier thoughts Stanley Patz had about Ramos, he was persuaded by the evidence against Hernandez. (After the mistrial was announced, Patz told reporters, “How many times does a man have to confess before you believe him and it’s not a hallucination?”) A member of Hernandez’s prayer group said on the stand, “He had told me that he was working in a supermarket and a boy threw a ball at his throat and he lost it and he retaliated and strangled the kid.” It was years before José Lopez, to whom Hernandez also confessed, in similarly vivid detail, connected the story to Patz’s name. “It was like a puzzle to me. I had to put every piece together before I could do anything about it,” he told the jurors.
The jurors may have felt the same way. Before hearing Chelsea Altman's testimony again, they asked questions about, for example, the evidentiary status of confessions. Afterward, they asked questions about almost everything else—they asked for read-backs of hours of testimony, for every exhibit, for permission to use Excel to make spreadsheets to organize their deliberations. Twice, they sent notes to the judge saying that they were deadlocked, and he sent them back with what's known as an Allen charge—telling them to listen to one another and try harder, and that there was no reason to expect that things would be clearer to a different jury—a risky move that can open the door to an appeal. (Jessica Schneider, of WCBS, has had informative live tweets of the proceedings.) The jurors deliberated for eighteen days, which, as far as anyone can tell, is a record for a criminal trial in New York City. In the end, as they said at a press conference at the courthouse on Friday, eleven of them voted for a guilty verdict. But juries in New York must be unanimous, and the twelfth juror, as he told reporters, could not put aside his doubts. And so the jurors had to come back a third time and tell the judge that they could not decide what had happened to Etan Patz. As they walked away from the courtroom, one of them shouted, “Pedro Hernandez, you know what you did!”
