They almost never talked to each other about the toll that it all took. The subject was too raw to think of inflicting it on one another, and besides, they had to stay strong. In self-defense, they began to see themselves as investigators, as though they were looking for someone else’s child.
The whole family was in counseling, off and on, and Julie found it enormously helpful, giving her a place to unload some of her grief. Stan was less enthusiastic. His New England upper lip was usually stiffened resolutely into a “No.” He kept his feelings in—where they belonged—but he was sure that within his body they’d rerouted into the excruciating, chronic back and leg pain that had only begun after Etan had vanished.
He and Julie took their small comfort from the task force’s reassuring, unflappable presence. The initial mutual wariness soon faded, as on one side the cops grew to understand the defense mechanisms behind Stan’s gruff manner and biting wit. On the other side, Julie acknowledged and rejected her unconscious biases toward police—“the man”—as some kind of faceless paramilitary force. She had grown to see them as humans—humans who made mistakes like everyone else, but who had the best of intentions to help. They worked overlong hours and came in on their days off, sometimes bringing their own kids to hang out in the loft and play with the Patz children.
With his benevolent smile and dry humor, Detective Bill Butler was lovingly dubbed a “second father,” cruising the neighborhood in his battered yellow car, prowling Prince Street with a stash of photo cards of Etan tucked into his pocket, scratching down new leads with an endless supply of patience. But the case clearly haunted him, and he took it home at night. He would jolt awake sometimes in his bed wondering, “Did I do that? Did I remember this?”
Butler was convinced that if Etan had been murdered, there would be a body to show for it. So he maintained a positive outlook.
“I know we’re going to get our boy back,” he’d say to Stan and Julie. “It’s just a matter of time.”
But Julie felt trapped between true believers on the police force like Butler and the shopkeepers who’d quietly begun to take down Etan’s posters, convinced there was no longer a need to look for him. If she believed, as they now did, that her son was dead, it might break her heart irreparably. But it would also allow her to begin to mourn. She herself had begun to tentatively feel out the heretical possibility he was not coming back, but she felt she could never say it—that would be a betrayal to the cheery optimism that met her every time a member of the task force came to the door. Despite her affection and gratitude for their efforts, she sometimes resented the cops’ blind conviction.
At Christmas the Patzes made the semiannual pilgrimage to Julie’s family in Massachusetts, where they would also see Stan’s parents. Along with Julie’s eight siblings and their families, the New York contingent would converge on Sudbury, to the modest house that never changed, not its faux clapboard aluminum siding outside to ward off the harsh New England winters nor its striped, flowered wallpaper inside. The Patzes would stay in the cozy upstairs bedrooms, once shared by all the siblings and still occupied by the two youngest ones. In the summer visits they spent the days dispersed outdoors, but at Christmas the house swarmed with children, babies passed from shoulder to shoulder, cousins playing with their parents’ old toys on the large enclosed front porch, teens swapping a year’s worth of tall tales. Most of Julie’s brothers and sisters had settled in the area, the only exceptions a sister who’d moved to nearby Connecticut and, of course, Julie.
When Etan had disappeared, Julie had called her parents soon after Stan had called his, but she’d forbidden her family from coming to New York. She’d been adamant. She hadn’t even wanted them to call, knowing she would fall apart in the face of their own sadness. The Patzes had missed the Fourth of July reunion, and so this marked the first time they had all been together since the previous winter. Remarkably, no one spoke of Etan or his absence. It was Christmas, Julie’s parents thought. He’s gone, and everyone knows it. It’ll just make things worse, when we should all just try to enjoy the holidays.
Back in New York, the new year brought not a single spark of light to shine on the dark hole that had swallowed Etan. How could a six-year-old boy have made it to seven on his own? How could Etan still be alive? How long could they sustain the fantasy of Etan alive and healthy, being cared for by strangers? In the real world, that just never happened.
5:38—WQXR—Bob Lewis, Merced, Calif. [Teenager] (14 yrs old—missing 6 years) found walking st. 200 m. N of home w/5 yr old kidnapped boy.
—Patz logbook, March 2, 1980
Almost ten months into a year that seemed to hold no hope, a small boy peered into the windows of a Ukiah, California, police station and was spotted by an officer, who followed him outside. On the street the boy was talking to a teenager.
“What’s going on?” the cop asked the two. “We’re just trying to find this kid’s home,” the older boy said.
The “kid” was five-year-old Timmy White. Missing for two weeks, he’d been the subject of an intense local search. The other boy, a fourteen-year-old named Steven, wasn’t sure of his full name. But authorities were astonished to discover he was Steven Stayner, abducted from Merced, California, seven years earlier by a forty-year-old man named Kenneth Eugene Parnell. Parnell had enticed the then seven-year-old into his car by asking if he wanted to contribute to a charity and then telling him they’d go ask his mother for permission. For almost seven years, Steven Stayner had lived two hundred miles from his home, with the man he’d come to call Dad. He had escaped only after being forced to recruit a new boy for Parnell. At the time of Stayner’s stunning reappearance, no one knew what horrors he’d endured. For a few weeks at least, the news was simply painted as the miracle it was. But soon, reports of his sexual abuse surfaced, changing the tone of the story.
For Stan and Julie Patz, Steven Stayner’s return to his parents opened the door to a whole new range of conflicting emotions. Was Etan out there thinking they weren’t looking for him? Despite an extensive search, that’s what Steven Stayner had believed. Your parents don’t want you, Parnell had told him, saying he’d legally adopted the boy from his parents.
If their own son were alive, Stan and Julie wondered, did he even want to come home? The thought was disturbing, although far better than an alternative that saw Etan abused and hurt. While the Patzes rejoiced at the news that the teenage Stayner had come home, his return also meant that unless they found their son, or his body, there would never be a date after which they could assume the worst. Not one year, not two, not seven, or even more. And after hearing some of what Stayner had gone through, they were no longer sure what “worst” meant.
12:43 p.m.—Harold—25 yr old girl w/hypo glycemia disappeared in middle of night almost a year ago—no clue.
—Patz logbook, March 21, 1980
Scattered among the look-likes and the lunatics in the pages of the logbooks were messages from bewildered parents of other missing children, who would call or write begging for Stan and Julie’s help. It was ludicrous, Stan and Julie thought, that they were considered experts and sought out for advice. But they had now spent the last several months learning as much as anyone else about what to do—and not to do—when your child goes missing.
Since her daycare center had closed, Julie had been unable to find work. Her skills and interest lay with childcare, but she still suffered from the stigma of “losing her child.” (“We didn’t ‘lose him,’ ” Stan would bite out angrily every time it was phrased that way. “He was taken from us.”) Finally, one administrator at a school where Julie had applied revealed that he feared the parents there would object to her hiring. After she was interviewed at another school, the director was approached by a group of parents who actively opposed her employment. Since no one yet knew what had happened to her son, they were uncomfortable having their own children in her care. The Patz family was slipping into debt, but there wasn’t much they could do to shovel out.
As Stan slowly returned to his photography, Julie’s full-time, nonpaying job was the search for Etan. But as the months passed it had gradually become about more than just her son. As she met other parents of missing children and heard their heartwrenching stories, as they shared the frustration of nowhere to turn for help, Julie saw a gap that demanded to be filled.
09:45 Gus Engelman WABC—Radio, telephone taped interview
14:32 Gene Ruffini, NY Post, sorry about the bad rewrite job….
16:10 Rich Lamb, WCBS—Radio, coming here now for interview
15:00 Carl Gottlieb? Ch 11 w/c/b for appt later in week
10:22 Pamela Roderick—WINS Radio
11:00 Jane White/AP
12:09 Richard Higgins Boston Globe 10 AM Thursday
17:04 Ch 2. News to be here 6:15 pm
12:00 60 MINS Allan Maraynes Mike Wallace/Producer
15:48 Peggy Stockton WNEW radio will come for interview
16:13 Jim Unchester WNBC-TV will call Sunday for interview
11:30 Mark Kresing (sp) Ch 11 re: interview today
11:55 Sylvia Pahy (?) photog will be here for NYT mag Sunday 5/25 at 11
15:13 Jerry Schmetterer Daily News article Sunday
08:00 approx WMCA Radio—I declined telephone intvw—woke me up.
—Patz logbook, various entries, week of one-year anniversary, May 1980
A few days before May 25, Stan looked around the front room at the circle of reporters and cameras gathered to prepare their stories.
“Thank you for coming here on this very sad anniversary. I hope you don’t mind me saying that next year I’d prefer not to be seeing you all again.”
In the weeks of press leading up to the one-year mark, both Stan and Julie had decided the media message deserved to be something beyond “Have you seen my son?”
“There are lots of failings in the system of locating missing children,” Julie said to the SoHo Weekly News. “No one even knows exactly how many children disappear each year. There is no effective nationwide system.”
They wanted to talk about a whole list of ideas for making change going forward, but the weight of the past year was also never far from their thoughts.
“It’s not getting easier, it’s getting harder,” Julie told the New York Times’s Anna Quindlen. “We thought that any minute it would be over,” she said.
“You can always come to grips with a set of circumstances—I mean the finality of death,” Stan continued his wife’s thought. “This is a psychological wound that will never heal, never close up, without a resolution of one kind or another.”
He shook his head sadly, his mouth tight. “We’re sitting here with as many questions as we had the first day.”
“More,” Julie said. As they talked, Julie’s feet perched on the couch next to her husband, Quindlen saw two profoundly broken people who seemed to each have their hands full holding the other together. She marveled at a marriage staying intact under such conditions.
An AP reporter whose anniversary feature appeared in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, Fargo, Honolulu, and dozens more papers around the country wrote a stirring account that highlighted the couple’s determination and the efforts so many were continuing to make on their behalf.
“Sometimes I think the worst thing that could happen would be never knowing what happened to Etan,” Julie told the reporter. “It is something we live with every day.”
There were few personal calls noted in the logbook in the days leading up to or just after May 25. Even on that Sunday itself the phone was relatively quiet. But a few days later, Stan took the kids on another photo expedition and spotted a local tribute to Etan on a cast-iron column around the corner from the loft. In uneven block letters, the paint trickling down from the I and the M, someone had spray-painted the words I MISS ETAN P.
CHAPTER 5
The Bigger Picture
11:27 Diana, let her know on 4 city talk-show by end of week. (Boston, Phil, Baltimore, Pittsburgh)
15:00 Bob Morton, would like to have Julie 6/17 on Tom Snyder “Tomorrow” tape from 6 to 7 pm, runs from 1 to 2 am, same night. Interview just Tom and Julie…. NBC 30 Rock Plaza, Studio 3K, 5:30 Be there!
—Patz logbook, June 1980
I know where thousands of missing kids are,” Stan Patz said, even if he didn’t know where his was. His voice had that characteristic trace of irony and sarcasm that put some people off, until they considered his circumstances, and then they usually found his manner perfectly reasonable. “They’re in schools. Many are enrolled in schools in other states. Maybe just one state away from where their families are.”
The reporter perched on their living room couch was taking notes on his yellow legal pad as fast as he could. Richard Rein was a freelance journalist, who wrote for People magazine and other general-interest magazines, and he had come by one day in September 1980 as the new school year was getting under way. Shira herself was in class; Ari had just turned four and was bouncing in and out of the room as the adults talked.
Rein had contacted the Patzes for an interview because he was thinking about writing a book, not about their case, but about the bigger phenomenon of missing children, a topic of growing national interest. He’d come to meet the most renowned example, to hear their story and their thoughts on what needed to be done. Stan and Julie were glad to hear that this wasn’t just about their sad plight. Yes, they wanted to use the coverage to look for their son, but they had learned so much more about what needed to be fixed, and they were eager to pass it on. “We have something to say,” Stan told Rein, “other than that we’re waiting for Etan to come back.”
As strange as it seemed, they knew they’d been lucky, at least compared with the parents of other missing children they were hearing from. Their local law enforcement had been the NYPD, not a small-town sheriff with few resources and little reach outside his county. Unlike local authorities in many other parts of the country, the New York police hadn’t been hamstrung by twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour waiting periods before beginning their search. Some police departments required seventy-two hours—three days and nights—to allow a child to return home on his own before getting involved. The Patz case had garnered phenomenal publicity, and as much as they hated cameras being thrust in their faces, Stan and Julie knew what a gift they’d been given. They felt that they needed to use their platform to advocate for the less visible and to make real change.
“Even if we can’t help ourselves,” Stan said, “maybe at least someone else won’t have to go through the ordeal we have. What we are trying to stress is the vulnerability of all children.”
Stan especially wanted Rein’s readers to understand just how large a role schools could play. As he talked he became less caustic and more earnest. The Patzes were particularly sensitive to the school angle and had given it a great deal of thought. They couldn’t ever lose sight of the fact that Etan had left home at eight in the morning and almost another eight full hours had passed before Julie had known there was a problem. Schools, stressed Stan and Julie, needed to let parents know when their kid didn’t show up. It could literally be a matter of life and death.
“It’s a question of poor inventory control,” Stan acidly told Rein. “Our children are our most precious possession, but any business has tighter inventory control than almost any school. Adults come to the schools, they take children out on a regular basis. Kids come in late, they don’t show up in the morning. It’s all very loose. People move from state to state, and take their kids with them. There’s no control.”
While the technology was fledgling, Stan’s own brother Jerry was a software programmer, and he had developed a program several years earlier to help the Boston school system keep attendance. “We have to look at this like we’re living in the ’80’s,” said Stan, “and use technology that private businesses have been using for years.”
But beyond such “inventory control,” there was so much more schools could do, Stan explained. The bigge
st problem facing parents of missing children like them was that there was no coordinated way to search outside their hometown. Like Steven Stayner, who’d attended several schools in his home state, Etan could even be alive and well, sitting in a classroom right now as close as New Jersey, and they might never know. And if he turned up dead, his body could sit in a local morgue unidentified until it was buried in an unmarked grave. There was virtually no way to match up the missing with the dead.
Although he liked to call himself a “knee-jerk liberal,” Stan Patz found himself advocating national fingerprinting programs for schoolchildren, which, with their shades of Big Brother, would have been abhorrent to him before Etan disappeared
“I now see this as just as inevitable as Social Security numbers,” he wrote in a letter published in the New York Times on December 7, 1980. “I know that groups like the A.C.L.U. strongly oppose fingerprinting, and I agree with its concern for privacy, but since tens of millions of people have already been fingerprinted, I believe these civil libertarians should concentrate on ways to prevent abuses of this system.
“The pros and cons of national fingerprinting should be openly discussed. A person’s right to privacy should be tempered by the fear of becoming an anonymous corpse.” It went against Stan’s long-standing convictions that he and Julie had given up their privacy, but they would have done so gladly before the fact instead of after.
The Patzes had already begun the painstaking effort to search the schools themselves, contacting school district superintendents throughout the country, asking that Etan’s poster be circulated to check it against new students. They had successfully tracked down contacts for all the public school districts, but had no easy way to contend with all the private schools. The postage alone was ultimately prohibitive. Months of their own fruitless efforts underscored the weakness in a national infrastructure to look for missing children. Apparently, there wasn’t one.
After Etan Page 8