Adding to the chaos was the shrill sound of the phone trilling nonstop. Next to Stan’s pastel blue office phone, whose number was now published in every New York newspaper, the police had installed a dark red handset with the phone number that was printed on the bottom of Etan’s missing poster. As soon as it was replaced on its cradle, it rang again. There were no typewriters—just notepads—but each call was logged with a two- or three-line description. Rather than disregard the clearly crazy ones, the police had to scrupulously track them, since, in the upside-down logic of child abductions, only a crazy person would kidnap a six-year-old.
There was always the chance one of these would be the magic ransom call. But the majority of the approximately five hundred calls a day were useless—“I saw a blond kid with a woman,” or “I saw a boy with an older black man.” Then there were sightings that accurately described Etan coming from everywhere in the city and then beyond, placing him in fifty different places at the same time. There were the awkward solace calls as well, and the occasional vindictive frame jobs to falsely accuse an enemy.
At first Stan and Julie jumped to answer every one, but after the first day or so that was no longer allowed. This was partly because some cops increasingly viewed the parents as suspects, and because the sheer volume required shifts. But mostly, Stan and Julie were made to sit out the calls because no parent in their place should be subjected to the false hopes many of these strangers inflicted, or the vicious intent of others. Indeed, Stan picked up one call to hear a boy’s voice—clearly not Etan’s—yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, help me, help me.”
To keep from scaring away the real perpetrator, male and female officers took shifts, assigned to play the telephone voices of Stan and Julie. On top of all the other confusion in the loft, listening to a pair of faux parents was so perplexing to two-year-old Ari that he believed the cops when they told callers they were his mommy and daddy. After all, his own parents were acting so strangely, and the police kept taking them away from him to talk to them alone.
The holiday weekend over, anxious adults lined Prince Street, and a human chain ran down to the bus stop, like a bucket brigade handing off water to put out a fire. As neighborhood children got on the bus and went back to school, mothers, and some fathers, were firmly fixed at the corner of Prince and West Broadway, sentinels now, guarding the bus stop.
Julie was back at the apartment surrounded by police officers plotting out search areas. In rare solitary moments, she could be seen outside walking the length of the fire escape, smoking her Mores and peering the length of the street, in her own hellish version of a widow’s walk. Her daycare center would have started back up that Tuesday, but it was gone. May 25 was its last day of operation. Julie could not keep it going anyway, but it was a moot point. What parent, she could understand, would ever entrust their child to a woman who had lost her own?
Her other children weren’t even in her care. Neither she nor Stan had spent any time with Ari and Shira the whole weekend, and the days to come were no better. The two siblings were being shunted off to neighbors and friends, as Stan and Julie answered more questions. “Do you know this guy?” “Did Etan know him?” “Could this have happened?”
The Patzes were told to make lists of everyone they knew, or even came in contact with, as potential suspects. As they attempted this impossible task—looking at their friends, their relatives, their business associates with fear and mistrust—it skewed every one of their well-grounded beliefs. Already, authorities were eyeing so many: from next-door neighbor Fred Cohn, who turned out to have been safely packed off to a college reunion in Ohio by the time Etan disappeared; to the free-spirited longtime family friends who had taken Etan on a camping trip at what his parents now learned was a nudist camp; to the Jamaican handyman who had given Etan his dollar wage the evening before. Othniel Miller had just laid a cement basement a few doors down from the Patz loft, and there was talk of jackhammering it in search of a body.
“You want to break it up,” Miller said wearily, “you go right ahead. But someone’s going to have to pay for it.” He himself was stunned by the loss of his little friend. The idea was ultimately abandoned, but Miller’s name remained on the growing list of friends, family, and acquaintances who were under suspicion. Miller’s basement office operated out of the same building as the city’s first gay erotic art gallery, whose owners were also questioned with some intensity. The area’s flourishing gay community was targeted in general, by old-school investigators to whom the words “gay” and “pedophile” were, if not synonymous, then largely overlapping.
Some of those investigators even wondered if Stan Patz was connected to that scene. The same morning that Etan’s classmates returned to school to be greeted by plainclothes detectives who interviewed them, as well as the teacher and the bus drivers, the New York Post published a full-column, front-page photo Stan had taken of Etan. Straddling the top of a ladder, one arm bent on his knee, Etan gazed directly into the camera with a look of pure pleasure. He wore a pair of blue jeans, but no shirt. To anyone familiar with such things, it was a classic pedophile’s pin-up.
What wasn’t in evidence was that the photo was taken in Etan’s own home, where just prior to the shot he’d been running around playing with his brother, and the idea of wearing or not wearing a shirt had seemed inconsequential. He’d been helping his father prepare for a much taller adult model, so the ladder had been brought in to approximate the right height. Besides, Stan wasn’t responsible for the pose; Etan had scrambled up and goofed around in a variety of stances, sticking out his tongue, waving his arms.
In the same way that disseminating Etan’s personal family photos got the word out, publishing this photo under the headline “Dad’s Portrait” got a different word floating in the air. Even before the picture was made public, a number of cops and press moving in and out of the loft had been uncomfortable with Stan’s cool manner. Unlike Julie, he’d displayed no outward signs of distress—the tears and emotion you’d expect. He was calm and seemingly unaffected, other than the skin stretched taut over the cheekbones now protruding from his gaunt face. And he was almost clinical in the way he’d unearthed his collection of photos and discussed their merits in helping the search.
“If it were my kid, I’d be a basket case,” was the start of more than one conversation among observers. So this half-naked, perched-suggestively-on-a-ladder series of photographs—and there was an entire proof sheet of them—caused an even bigger stir.
As the week passed, Stan and Julie were taken out of their home to be interviewed over several days at more than one police precinct. This immediately felt different, and not just because they were on the cops’ turf. Homicide detectives at the 13th Precinct were brought in at the end of the first week, since by that point the missing child case was starting to look like something even worse. The detectives’ curt demeanor hit the Patzes as coldly as the word “homicide” on the door of their squad room. At first the detectives asked all the same questions that elicited the portrait Stan and Julie had already painted numerous times of Etan, as a sunny, well-adjusted first grader, an average, healthy child. Yes, he knew his own address and phone number. His mother feared he was trusting enough that he might conceivably get into a car with a friendly stranger. He might balk, she said, at taking the subway, which he had always disliked, clinging to her until they were back aboveground. No, he’d never tried to run away, but Julie recounted his newfound desire for independence, how he’d taken to walking ahead of her instead of staying at her side, how he chafed at holding her hand. He negotiated for free run of Washington Square Park, the concrete-and-grass landmark six blocks from their home, known as much for its bohemian flavor as for the seventy-seven-foot version of the Arc de Triomphe that marked its northern entrance. Julie often took the children there to play among the folk musicians, chess players, and street vendors who sold Italian ices in summer, fragrant roasted chestnuts in the chill air, and sinsemilla year-round. She resisted Etan�
��s demands for more freedom, but he just pushed harder.
Julie told police that the evening before he’d disappeared, Etan and his little neighbor Vanessa had skidded their matching Big Wheels through the rain puddles on the sidewalk outside their building. Etan loved racing his plastic quasi-tricycle, customized with Shira’s handpainted hearts and a big “I love you, Etan” on the seat. His boundaries were Wooster and Green streets, at either end of the block, but Julie had ducked off the fire escape at one point to tend to Ari and came back to find only Vanessa.
“Where is he?” she’d yelled down, and Vanessa had explained that he was taking a turn around the block, overstepping his bounds. He’d bristled at the stern reprimand he’d gotten when he’d reappeared, but obeyed when Julie admonished him not to go out of sight again.
The detectives noted these memories, but also asked the Patzes a probing series of questions about their own history, and made note of their empty savings account and modest annual income—under $20,000. As the story took hold of the city, theories abounded as to why this one case deserved so much attention, and some attributed it to the rich, white, privileged Patz family background, which would have made Stan and Julie laugh, if they’d been able to laugh. Instead, they gave the detectives a truer picture.
Stan Patz’s father, they explained, had put three sons through college driving a cab in downtown Boston, until he’d sold his taxi medallion and retired young on careful investments in the late sixties. Stan and his two brothers had grown up in Mattapan, a section of Boston that was largely home to immigrant Jews. He’d arrived in New York in 1963, after graduating from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in sociology, although he’d spent less time taking classes and more time taking pictures for the school newspaper. That’s where he’d met Julie. Growing up in rural Sudbury, Massachusetts, only half an hour west of Boston but a world apart, Julie often talked about raiding the local watermelon fields in summer, to cut open the sun-warmed fruit and eat her fill on the spot. Folks there, especially women, were born, married, raised children, and lived out their entire lives without ever venturing elsewhere. Not Julia Place. As a schoolgirl, she’d been bused into Boston to appear on a local “Whiz Kid” radio show, and later she’d left home to go to college, one of only two in her large band of siblings ever to do so.
For Stan it was classic “love at first sight,” or at least “love at first date.” He fell hard for the attractive, spirited woman who was so good with children. So what if she wasn’t Jewish—that kind of thing barely registered on his radar.
They began dating in her junior year, but Julie, needed at home to attend the other children when her mother gave birth again, left school soon afterwards. She got a job back in Sudbury and thought only in vague terms about a future with her boyfriend, until the next year when Stan coaxed her to join him. “You can come marry me,” he cajoled, “or you can stay home and raise your mother’s children.” Julie arrived in New York a few weeks before the wedding, and after converting to Judaism in deference to her mother-in-law-to-be, she and Stan were married by Stan’s brother, the rabbi. The honeymoon was on West 85th Street, a night in.
They eked out a meager living, as young newlyweds do in New York. Soon after Julie gave birth to Shira, the Patzes started looking for more room. One day in 1971 Stan brought some photo equipment down to his boss shooting an assignment on Prince Street and discovered SoHo. Serendipitously, the shoot was for a local real estate developer, and not three days later, Stan had found a new home, in a building attached to two others that together comprised a residential co-operative. Previously, the space had housed a range of concerns: a leather finishing company was on the farthest west third floor; ladies’ undergarments were sewn on the second floor; and the Patz apartment itself, one floor up, was reborn from a hand luggage manufacturer, where Stan imagined underpaid seamstresses jabbing thousands of pins into the oak woodwork on the front windows, rendering it unsalvageable when he began his renovations.
The storefront ground floor of the three buildings was commercial retail space, like the label maker who left behind stacks of Davy Crockett iron-on transfers when he eventually vacated, or the artist whose “art aquarium” consisted of one small shark and assorted other tropical fish swimming in a giant wood-and-fiberglass pond. But by the time residents began moving in, the upper floors were deserted and raw. The landlord used the center second-floor area to dump the ashes from the basement coal boiler. Along two walls of an otherwise empty room, literally tons and tons of ashes were piled halfway to the ceiling.
The upper floors, as Stan liked to say, were a bum’s paradise. Most of the individual front doors were broken open, and an assortment of street people had taken up residence. One wild-eyed soul, nicknamed “Hemingway” for his looks by incoming neighbors, made a rat’s-nest-like haven out of knee-deep newspapers in what later became the Patzes’ living room. He could often be seen around the neighborhood, railing about the Supreme Court, and ultimately about the people who’d shooed him from his home to make it theirs.
The Patzes’ new homestead was typical of the neighborhood—the proverbial loft that Stan built. He and Julie paid $7,500 for twenty-one hundred square feet, and that’s all they got for their money—square feet. It was the rawest of raw spaces: no electricity, no plumbing, no heat, no running water. While renovating, Stan washed in the fire hydrant out front and his toilet was a paint can. When they finally got indoor fixtures… then they really needed walls. Stan raised them himself, carving one room at a time. He built a raised sleeping area along one eight-foot brick wall, eventually adding handmade bunk beds. Etan slept on the top, contained by guardrails made of iron plumbing pipe. Stan laid the floors too, pulling maple strips off of a truckload ordered from a neighborhood flooring distributor. He liked to joke that when Shira was one year old, her play space grew plank by plank every day.
Julie filled that play space with the fruits of her own creative labor, improvising with industrial castoffs that were found treasure on the streets three floors below. The Patz loft was a focal point for neighborhood art projects. A nearby paper factory threw away its mill ends, twenty-foot rolls that didn’t make it into a customer’s order, and now they served as canvas for the apartment’s colorfully painted murals. Sometimes the children would simply coat themselves in washable finger paints and body surf on the giant sheets. There were strips of tinselized paper to bend into fantastical shapes for an imaginary circus. Once, the kids themselves gathered giant cardboard boxes, added a plastic tarp lining, and attempted to fill it with the hose to make a swimming pool in the family room. They were caught before leaping in, and the whole messy venture had to be carefully drained out the front window.
Now the detectives were talking about examining the murals for leads. When Etan drew his fanciful trip around the world with superhero Johnny France-America, did he leave any clues as to his destination in the real world? Are you sure he never talked about running away? Are you sure you never gave him a reason to run away?
Suddenly Stan and Julie weren’t sure of the answers to any of these questions. Their whole reality, their sense of self and of each other, was being called into question. Etan was so young and tentative in so many ways, but maybe he had run away. Had they missed the signs? They had encouraged his open, trusting nature. Had they failed to prepare him for the danger he might now be facing? Could either of them in fact be in some way culpable? It was a small step from the crushing guilt they already bore to outright blame and suspicion.
If the session at Homicide had left them drained and disconsolate, both Stan and Julie were relieved when Bill Butler tentatively approached them with the idea of a polygraph.
“We thought you’d never ask,” they said, wanting desperately to get it over with, to clear themselves and focus attention on the real culprit, whoever it might be. That was before they knew what the polygraph actually entailed, or how it could interpret the data.
“Don’t call them lie detector tests,�
�� Stan would later insist. “They measure three things—perspiration, respiration, and pulse. Not the truth.” If you were a sociopath, you could sail right through, as long as you believed your own lies. Used only as a guide, they were never admitted as evidence in court. Julie passed with flying colors, but Stan did not immediately exonerate himself.
When he walked into the room, the officer in charge pointed to what looked like an old electric chair, silhouetted by harsh fluorescent lights overhead. The walls crumbled in places, as though someone had tried to escape through them, with footprints plastered all over their scarred surface. Broken tiles lay scattered on the floor. They sat him down and strapped him in. After asking a series of test questions the officer got down to business.
“Did you take part, in any way, in the abduction of Etan?”
“No.”
Just hearing Etan’s name made him feel like he was being gouged with a knife. Stan couldn’t concentrate. Not just from the emotional pressure, but from physical discomfort. He could not stand having something around his arm. When Etan had disappeared, Stan was already a stick—five foot eight, 140 pounds. He’d lost more weight; within days he was down another fifteen pounds. When they put a strap around his biceps to press the sensor against an artery, his arm went numb. The pins and needles creeping up from his fingertips made Stan itch to bolt from the chair.
“To the best of your knowledge, have you had any contact with Etan since he disappeared on 5/25/79?”
“No.”
He could hardly think of anything except getting the tourniquet off. As he struggled to answer the questions, he certainly looked guilty. During the thousands of calls in the last week, and the countless trips through the streets, to the parks and ball fields, Stan had talked to hundreds of kids. Many had sounded or looked like Etan. He’d had glimpses—he’d thought, he’d hoped—of his son at every bodega, on every street corner within a five-mile radius of his home. He didn’t really know the right answer to that question. And indeed the test showed “signs of deception.”
After Etan Page 5