This is overwhelming, Kitty thought, of the chaos and the din. She spent her days talking about missing children and knew how easy it was for a child to suddenly vanish in a sea of faces. Other parents can let their children run around here, how can I do that? Kitty was acutely aware of her anxiety—even, she’d admit, her paranoia. If she was so disconcerted, she wondered how Julie could deal with this scene. But she noticed the way Julie kept an eye on her children without seeming to smother them. It was subtle, just a sense that she didn’t stop to look at every exhibit or spend twenty minutes trying on earrings. Instead she would intermittently skim the crowd, noting where Shira and Ari were and what they were doing. Kitty found herself modeling her behavior after the older woman’s as the fair surged around them.
When her kids pleaded to go on the Ferris wheel, and Kitty just couldn’t shake off her fear of heights, Julie laughed and held out her hand.
“I’ll take them all,” she said. Kitty stayed safely on the ground, tracking Julie and the four children riding to the top for a view of Greenwich Village and the festival spread out below them. She smiled as she watched her kids shriek with rapture, arms thrown up in the air, and she remembered one of Julie’s remarks that had stuck with her from the Philadelphia morning talk show where they’d met.
“I die a thousand deaths every day before they come home,” she’d said in response to a question about her two other children. “But you have to draw the line between letting them grow up and gain independence and not letting them be taken away.”
Later that summer, Karen DiGia, the owner of Gallery 345, brought Julie for a picnic near Kitty’s home north of the city. They talked about the recent release of Still Missing, a novel by the mother of one of Julie’s former preschoolers, about a six-year-old boy who goes missing and what his family endures. The author, Beth Gutcheon, had spent a lot of time with Julie in the months following Etan’s disappearance. She was one of the few to whom Julie had allowed herself the luxury of unloading her anguish, and although Beth had told Julie that the topic of her book was missing children, Julie hadn’t expected it to mirror so closely her own family’s circumstances. Now the book was all over the press, and an ad in the New York Times heralded a movie in the offing. It was the talk of the neighborhood, and the talk of the women’s picnic. The Patzes had a mixed reaction to the book; on the one hand it might indeed raise the profile of the missing children issue. But on the other, it felt invasive to Julie, who also worried that readers would confuse the novel’s fictional details—the disintegrating marriage of the boy’s bereft parents, for example—with the real-life story of her family. She found that out firsthand when a local paper called asking for pictures of Etan to accompany the review of the “Etan Patz” book.
“You mean it’s fiction?” the caller asked. “We all thought it was about Etan!”
Reiterating that it wasn’t, Julie had refused the photo request, asking to speak personally to the reviewer, to beg him to emphasize that unlike the invented Alex Selky, Etan was still missing. At the picnic she was still circumspect about her feelings, but Kitty couldn’t contain her outrage.
“I had a fit on the phone with Beth,” Kitty admitted to the other women. “I told her I thought not only was it a cheap way out, but people are going to think Etan’s been found, and they’ll stop looking. I know she thinks it’s going to help. I think I really shook her up.”
The following month, in early August, life showed just how much uglier it often is than fiction. Julie got a call from Kitty one Saturday to say she’d be in the city on Monday meeting with a Florida couple whose son had disappeared two weeks earlier from a shopping mall and hadn’t been seen since. Adam Walsh was six and a half, just like Etan. He’d gone with his mother to the local Sears, and while she went to look at lamps, he’d stayed in the nearby toy section to watch some older boys play with a new toy, called a video game. When his mother came back minutes later, all the kids were gone. One of the employees had kicked out the others for being too rowdy, and no one knew if Adam had been swept up with the group.
John and Revé Walsh were to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America with David Hartman, and Kitty was going to try to meet with them. John Walsh was already championing the need for a better way to track these cases, calling the current void a national disgrace. Kitty wanted to tell him more about their own efforts and discuss joining forces. But it was, of course, a delicate thing. The parents were frantic; Revé especially was a wreck. Would Julie be around if she needed her? This was the kind of encounter that always unnerved Kitty. Again, she doubted her fledgling expertise, but people like the Walshes were turning to Child Find for help. If anything, Kitty knew more about divorced parents who abducted their own children, and she knew that Julie would be much more effective offering her shoulder. Of course, Julie assured her. Call me when you need me.
The Walshes arrived in New York on Monday, for an early Tuesday morning appearance on Good Morning America. At 5:30 a.m. John received a call in the room from his best friend in Florida. The man needed to get his hands on Adam’s dental records. He told John that a head had been found in a canal one hundred miles north of their home, and while investigators doubted it was Adam’s, they wanted to eliminate the possibility. On air a few hours later, John Walsh hinted at the possible break in the case.
“What happened last night?” David Hartman asked. “Can you tell us that?”
“They had found the remains of a young person,” John said, “and at this time they are trying to identify them.”
Afterwards Julie got a call from Kitty.
“It’s so awful. They may have found Adam’s remains in Florida,” Kitty said anxiously. “Can you come to the Plaza? Revé and I are having something to eat, and I need your help.” Julie could see as soon as she walked into the hotel restaurant that Revé Walsh was in bad shape, wan and fragile. The woman looked shell-shocked and had already skipped several meals. Julie and Kitty tried to talk her into eating. Between them, they convinced her to order breakfast.
The talk stayed on a light, superficial level. John’s best friend had been so supportive and Revé wanted to buy him a new kind of gadget he couldn’t yet find in stores back home. Julie and Kitty were trying to help her figure out where to get a “Walkman,” when Revé was paged. The next minutes were complete chaos. Julie remembers a Plaza staffer bringing a phone to the table and he happened to place it in front of her. Revé, sitting next to Julie, turned even paler than she already was as Julie handed her the receiver. Revé listened, gave a cry, and dropped the phone. It was clearly bad news, and she needed to get back to the hotel, now.
Julie watched helplessly as Revé collapsed, sobbing and gasping for air. Julie and Kitty half walked, half carried her down the street to the Walshes’ hotel room at the St. Moritz. Someone called the EMTs to administer first aid. Julie and Kitty sat waiting in the lobby, unsure what to do next, each numbly lost in her own thoughts. Before the Walshes left for the airport, to return to Florida, John Walsh came to say goodbye to the two women.
They hugged him, murmuring words of regret.
“This isn’t over,” John said fiercely. “We have to change things.”
A little over two months later, Julie Patz and Kitty Brown were on an American Airlines flight to Chicago. It was a real nail-biter, the plane dipping and bucking all the way, and the two women finally indulged in a drink to steady their nerves. But they were also celebrating, in a sense, because the following day, along with the Walshes, Camille Bell, and an Oklahoma couple, John and Norma Pallett, whose daughter Cinda had been missing a month, they were scheduled to tape The Phil Donahue show.
It was a reunion of sorts, because just two weeks earlier John Walsh, Julie, and Camille Bell had sat at a rectangular table in a Dirksen Senate hearing room, testifying on behalf of S 1701, a bill introduced the day before. The bill joined a similar effort in the House by Congressman Paul Simon that would require missing children to be entered into the NCIC database and c
reate a national tracking system for unidentified bodies. Paula Hawkins, an enthusiastic and passionate freshman senator from John Walsh’s home state of Florida, had authored the Senate’s draft and called for the hearing. Together in a public forum for the first time, the three parents told their stories, and a cumulative grief filled the room. Some in the audience were moved to tears as they heard about the urban child missing from a close-knit New York artists’ enclave; an African American nine-year-old from the Atlanta projects found strangled in an abandoned school; and the son of a marketing executive who had vanished from a suburban Florida mall. It didn’t matter who you were, the message was clear: It can happen anywhere, to anyone.
Hawkins and cosponsor Senator Ted Kennedy had listened with appropriate expressions of shock and horror to the three parents telling their stories. Yet the testimony didn’t get the public’s attention as the three had hoped. That night on the evening news there was no mention of the hearing or the bill. Every newscast was consumed with the day’s bigger story—the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
But someone at the Donahue show had noticed. In 1981 The Phil Donahue Show was the hottest, most watched national talk show on television. Donahue was substantive, it was topical, it was the dream of any nonprofit or cause to land even a segment, and the show wanted to devote the whole hour to missing children. More than eight million viewers would hear the stories of Etan, Yusef, and Adam and their parents, and with bills pending in the House and Senate, they would be urged to take specific action.
The group stayed up late in the hotel coffee shop the night before, strategizing and assigning different points each one should be sure to hit the next day. A current of anticipation hummed through the air, with the idea that they would be able to accomplish something important. Someone might be watching who would get a child back home. Parents would learn how to keep their children safe. And new law might be made. These were the moments that in some infinitesimal way countered Julie Patz’s grief.
Standing on the talk show’s set was like being onstage in an actual theater. The crew was extremely professional, expertly pinning on the lapel mikes as soon as the guests sat down. For all the local broadcasts, the AM Detroits and the Midday Lives, Donahue was as big as it got, and the broadcast did everything Julie and the other guests had hoped for. They showed pictures not just of Etan and Cinda Pallett, but of several other missing children. Etan sightings were coming in while they were still on the air, although Donahue cautioned about all the false leads Julie had already endured. Together, the parents and other advocates lobbied for a national clearinghouse and broadcast Child Find’s 800 number several times. They personalized the bureaucratic words of the legislation, not just with their own accounts but other stories as well. One family in Texas had spent their entire life savings, $40,000, on private investigators to find their missing daughter, only to learn later that her body had sat in a nearby morgue for eighty-seven days.
“It could be your child, or anyone else’s child, next,” Camille Bell pleaded. “If nothing else, please write your congressmen and senators and get this bill passed.”
At the end of the broadcast, Donahue paid tribute to the families sitting on the set in front of him, who were able to channel their own grief for a greater good.
“They hope, as do all of us, that their children will be found. We can’t really say much that’s going to make you feel any better, other than you make us feel good about human beings, just the fact that you are on your feet. You are a testimony to the human spirit.”
It was a heady moment. For days the Child Find phones, which at the time consisted of two or three lines manned by a handful of volunteers, were overwhelmed with sightings and tips. Congressional offices, especially in the home states of the Donahue panelists, were flooded with phone calls, letters, and petitions calling for support of the Missing Children’s Act. At House hearings the following month, Florida representative Clay Shaw credited the power of the media.
“I have in my office received literally thousands of names on petitions and letters,” he said, “perhaps more than on any other issue than I have seen…. Much of this was caused by the good work of Phil Donahue on his nationally broadcast show.”
The November hearings led to revisions on the House’s draft legislation to bring it in line with the pending Senate bill, and in early December a comprehensive summit of politicians, academics, law enforcement, child advocates, and the parents of missing children themselves met in Louisville to create an agenda for the next push. It would take another full year before the legislation was finally signed into law, and two years after that for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be created, but by the end of 1981, dozens of disparate, far-flung organizations were coalescing into a movement and a national dialogue had begun. Americans were now aware that the problem existed.
For Julie Patz, who knew all too well about the problem firsthand, the gains were gratifying. But her own child’s case—which had gotten the attention so many others had not—wouldn’t benefit from that attention. The sightings called in during the Donahue show had, like all the others before, led nowhere. She and Stan still had no idea what had happened to their own son. All the lobbying and new laws wouldn’t change the fact that there wasn’t a single clue to grasp on to and follow to its conclusion.
CHAPTER 6
The Devil in the Drainpipe
TV news anchor: It’s a hauntingly familiar picture. A little six-year-old boy who vanished on a street in the SoHo section of Manhattan. That was almost three years ago. Etan Patz is still missing and no trace of him has been found yet. But an arrest in the Bronx yesterday has again revived interest in the case. A man named Jose Ramos is charged with petit larceny, a misdemeanor. Police believe Mr. Ramos may be able to provide them with leads in the case. John Miller reports.
—studio intro to John Miller report, Channel 5 News, March 19, 1982
Car 615, responding to Van Cortlandt Park search near Gun Hill Road.”
The voice crackled over his police scanner as Channel 5’s John Miller drove his midnight blue Buick LeSabre south through Manhattan on his way to the newsroom. He turned his car around. It was a brisk end-of-winter Friday in March, a slow news day so far but, Miller thought, maybe no longer. In the three years since he’d interviewed Stan Patz in his SoHo loft a day after Etan vanished, Miller had solidified his credentials as a crime reporter. He usually kept his scanner tuned to the NYPD Special Operations Division frequency to monitor communications with the emergency vehicles, helicopters, and police launches; anyone that would respond to the kind of newsworthy events Miller cared about.
Car 615, he knew, was Daniel St. John, a.k.a. “the Saint,” the high-profile commanding officer of all emergency services. If St. John was heading to a routine search in the middle of nowhere, the Bronx, something was going on. Miller pointed his car north, but without an exact address he’d have to shoot for the general direction, then go by instinct. While it sometimes got him into trouble, more often that instinct landed him the lead story on the 10 p.m. broadcast. Maybe it’s a Mafia graveyard, Miller thought hopefully, or a cache of bombs. He didn’t want to use his two-way radio to alert the newsdesk; the competing NBC station shared their band, so he stopped at a street-corner pay phone to call in and request that a camera crew head up to meet him. Driving up and down streets near Gun Hill Road, Miller finally spotted an emergency vehicle turning down Webster Avenue and followed. When he saw the cars lined up in front of the metal fence across from a cemetery, he stopped and rummaged around in the trunk that basically served as his mobile office to grab a flashlight from its place next to a bulletproof vest and a set of walkie-talkies. Folding his suit jacket neatly, he shrugged on a weather-worn khaki coat, then walked three hundred feet downhill from the gate, following a trail made by the cops. Pushing through the brush, Miller finally could make out his destination ahead, the entrance to a wide-mouthed drainage pipe wedged in below the Conrai
l tracks. There were heavy wooden planks obscuring one side of the pipe’s entrance, but Miller could see cops practically crab-walking out sideways, holding armfuls of what appeared to be trash.
He quickly ran back and guided the camera and soundman in by radio. The camera crew filmed the operations outside, as Miller looked around for St. John, who seemed to have come and gone. Miller folded his six-foot frame and ducked into the tunnel, moving around slowly. Still daylight outside, it was full dark inside. Switching on the flashlight, he inched farther down the length of the pipe and realized that midway through someone had set up house. Whoever it was, he was a lousy housekeeper. The floors, walls, and ceiling, such as they were, were completely obscured by refuse. Indistinct piles of clothes, sheets, and blankets were strewn around like hurricane wreckage. Stacks of decaying magazines—Hustler, gay porn—and newspapers covered the floors, mixed with piles of old bottles and other objects, mostly unidentifiable, except for a large plastic blow-up doll. Back outside he looked around and approached one of the cops.
“John Miller, Channel 5 News.” Miller always said it like it was one word, his signature greeting to any potential source. “Whaddya got?” That was NYPD parlance to ask for a quick summary. Usually it worked to signal that Miller was comfortable and accepted at crime scenes. Long after-hours sessions in countless bars, trading quips and tips, had made him “one of the boys.” It did the trick here. He learned that the previous day railway police had arrested the drainpipe’s inhabitant on a petit larceny charge. That wasn’t worth bringing the head of emergency services up here a whole day later, he thought. Except that the victims were two young boys who’d run home to tell their parents a strange-looking man had taken their schoolbooks, then tried to entice them into the tunnel to get the books back. The story got more interesting when Miller learned what the cops had found on the perp: several photographs of young boys, some with blond hair and blue eyes.
After Etan Page 10