After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  The head disappeared. Gelfand, still holding the boy tightly, moved backward and jumped over the wall again to the garage ramp. He kept his gun trained on the man, pinning him to the wall with the force of the unspent bullet. “Don’t move,” he repeated to his quarry. “Don’t shoot,” the man repeated back. “I got no gun on me, look, just a knife in my pocket.”

  How long, Gelfand wondered, do you wait for some stranger to maybe call for help, who will maybe come to the rescue? And just what do you do once you’ve decided you’ve waited long enough?

  Gelfand turned slightly to the boy without taking his eyes off the man. “Who are those kids?” he asked of the other two, who he could now make out crouched at the bottom of the ramp. “One of them’s my brother,” the boy managed. The shadow down below was obviously the older sibling, maybe the reason he hadn’t just taken off. He was probably breaking his little brother into the business, Gelfand thought, and might actually catch some hell if he went home without him. “Hey,” Gelfand yelled down. “Get back up here. I’ve got your brother. I’m going to find out who you are anyways.” The two older boys slowly moved back up the ramp.

  “He told us to suck his dick,” the youngest boy’s voice repeated from the recesses of Gelfand’s underarm. “First he was going to do it to us, but when we got up here, he changed it. He said if I didn’t do it, something would happen. I thought he was going to kill us.”

  Now Gelfand could hear patrol cars arriving, sirens screaming. It sounded as though units were coming in from all over the city. A “1013” must have gone out, Gelfand realized, a call that brings everyone—“officer in need of assistance.” He considered the logistics of reaching around his young hostage to take out his handcuffs, then remembered his handcuffs were back in the office. Boy, did he ever need assistance. But the man against the wall didn’t look like a big threat, even without cuffs. He was crying audibly. Gelfand felt the cool air against his sweat-drenched face as he holstered his pistol. He never wore a uniform, and his streetwear could easily raise doubt in the minds of the approaching cops. Better not to be waving a gun.

  Uniformed officers were now moving up the ramp. “This guy is under arrest,” Gelfand called. “Attempted sodomy. He tried to have sex with the boy.” One of the cops approached with his cuffs, and the suspect was led away down the ramp and into a radio car. Gelfand got in with them, and they headed to the closest precinct, as other officers followed, bringing the young victims.

  At the station, Gelfand read the man his rights, and he immediately asked for a lawyer. So much for questioning him. He did give up his name—Jose Antonio Ramos. The name didn’t mean anything to Gelfand, and he started going through Ramos’s things. He found a wallet, and two knives; one the kind used for cutting carpet, the other a bone-handled hunting knife.

  Gelfand pulled a Bible out of the suspect’s worn brown leather backpack. “Please, give that back to me,” the man pleaded, still crying. “I’ve been hearing things,” Gelfand thought the man muttered, between sobs.

  “I’m under a lot of pressure,” Ramos continued. “I felt they were trying to lure me.”

  Gelfand mentally rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you glad I showed up in time?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said Ramos.

  Gelfand looked at the Bible on the table. He couldn’t resist playing with the guy’s head a little. “Do you think God was watching you, and that’s why I was there?” he asked.

  Again, Ramos agreed. Well, what have we here—a devout child molester, thought Gelfand. Must pray a lot to be absolved from his sins. Gelfand went through the wallet and wasn’t that surprised to find pictures of kids—six of them. These guys liked to remember their conquests. Some of the boys were blond and blue-eyed, most were smiling in what looked like separate photo-booth snapshots. One was clearly taken in Washington Square Park—in the background Gelfand could see the identifiable arch at the entrance to the square.

  The blond hair in some of the photos had immediately conjured up the name Etan Patz. Gelfand still passed the posters on the streets; one hung on the wall of his office at Public Morals. The Washington Square arch reminded Gelfand—that was just blocks from where the Patz boy had lived back in 1979. Not compelling evidence, he knew, but he felt a slight quiver, that proverbial gut feeling.

  Then Gelfand unfolded a creased newspaper clipping and stood up straight. He stared at the picture alongside the written copy, of the man he’d just arrested, although the photo showed a bushy beard. “Tunnel Dweller Didn’t Harm Kids,” shouted a New York tabloid headline from late March, three months earlier. “Bellevue Examining Recluse.” He’s his own PR rep, marveled the cop as he read about the “eccentric recluse discovered living in a drainage tunnel.” The article, unlike several that were written at the time, didn’t mention a Patz connection. Even though this didn’t confirm Gelfand’s hunch, it pressed harder on his gut instinct.

  Gelfand realized he knew very little about the Patz investigation, and he didn’t want to blow it by grilling his suspect about someone else’s case. He left Ramos to be booked, and called Missing Persons.

  “P.O. Joseph Gelfand here from MSPMD,” he started, giving his shield number. “I just picked up a pedophile in Times Square and he’s being booked now. This guy had photographs of kids who looked like Etan Patz.”

  The voice at the other end could not possibly sound more condescending, thought Gelfand. “Oh, really?” said the detective, but what Gelfand heard was, “Who the hell do you think you are calling me with this bullshit? You locked up a guy with pictures of kids that you think look like Etan Patz, a kid who’s been gone for three years? Are you kidding me?” Gelfand relayed the details to what sounded like dead air, then hung up the phone in disgust.

  Typical, he thought. No wonder no one’s found the kid yet.

  Days later, Gelfand was out at a Queens precinct, working a gambling sting. The commanding officer of all of Public Morals happened to cross his path. Aaron Rosenthal was reputed to be tough on his cops, so when he stopped Gelfand in the hall, there was that momentary twinge of “oh-oh.”

  “Joseph,” said Rosenthal, “that was a nice arrest you made last week.” Gelfand was surprised the big boss even knew his first name, let alone his work. “I was only doing my job, Inspector,” he said. “Well, you could have just looked the other way,” said the man. “Good arrest.”

  Armed with the warm praise, Gelfand followed the progress of his first Vice case a little more zealously than an old hand might have. He waited for the DA’s Office to call him to a grand jury. After the arrest that night, other cops in the squad had taken the three young victims home to Queens and reported back that they had no phone. Gelfand wondered how the witnesses would be contacted, but he figured he could always track them down just by going to the home. He looked forward to telling his story before a judge.

  Once a suspect is arraigned, which usually happens within hours of his arrest, he must get a hearing within seventy-two hours, as his right to a speedy process. But if he makes bail, the hearing can happen on a more leisurely timetable. With the pace of the criminal courts, Gelfand knew how often “leisurely” slipped into “inert.” After three days and no call, he assumed Ramos had made bail. But then months went by and there was still no call. Gelfand would periodically grouse about it. That night on the rooftop had taken a few weeks off of his life in adrenaline alone, and it involved kids, for Christ’s sake. Maybe they weren’t the best victims, but if nothing else, Gelfand could still remember the littlest one shivering under his arms. He wasn’t going to let it go.

  What he never knew was that Ramos had spent the entire fall in Rikers. The young ADA who took Gelfand’s statement set bail at $15,000, BUT, she wrote, underlining the word twice in her initial report, she wanted him held anyway for a “730,” or psych exam. She made note of Gelfand’s account of the newspaper clipping and photos, but made no specific reference to Gelfand’s instinct about the Patz case. “He seems like a real psycho,” she finished
the note.

  The newspaper article Ramos kept in his pocket had traced his mental history, so in mid-September the DA’s Office ordered psych records from several Bronx hospitals. North Central Bronx Hospital sent back an extensive report written in February 1982, the month before Ramos was arrested in the drainage tunnel, six months before Gelfand had him up against the rooftop wall. Ramos had come into the hospital requesting “individual psychotherapy,… [and] secure living arrangements from welfare.”

  “Mr. Ramos stated that he struggles against voices telling him to harm others, that people upset him a lot, that he has trouble with his memory and needs a place to live,” wrote the intake worker. Under Current Life Situation and Brief Recent History, she wrote, “Mr. Ramos has been unemployed since 1973. Prior to that, had worked in commercial arts. Presently he lives ‘in the woods,’ receives welfare, and eats at local diners. He has no friends and has not had a contact with family members for three years…. Last personal relationship was in 1968. He lived with a woman for 9 months. They had a daughter which he cared for. They had an argument over the child, he ‘hit her hard,’ and she left with daughter. No contact with them since. Hospitalized at Jacobi for 3 months (cannot recall when exactly). Reports that mother tricked him, and that he did not benefit from treatment there.”

  Describing his mental status, the intake worker wrote that “Mr. Ramos… reports auditory hallucinations (male voice telling him to hit others when he is upset) and exhibits psychotic ideation (eg animal friends come to visit him in the woods)…. Reports desire to jump in front of a bus (but suicidal intent questionable).”

  She recorded a diagnosis of “chronic schizophrenia, undifferentiated,” and suggested a “6 week evaluation to assess case further” as a course of treatment.

  In mid-October Ramos took his “730” exam from behind bars and passed. He was found competent to appear at a grand jury. A date was set for early November. But Gelfand didn’t know about any of this. He never got the call to come down.

  Sometime before the end of the year, Gelfand called the DA’s Office. “What happened to my case?” he asked. The young ADA he had spoken with before told him it had been dismissed. “We sent a letter to the victims and they never responded,” she said. He was livid. “What do you mean, you sent them a letter? I wouldn’t have shown up if you sent me a letter. If anyone had told me, I would have gone up there myself and just drove them down to court. We do that all the time.” The ADA had nothing further to say. Ramos had been released. Nothing more to be done.

  The other cops on the squad, with the patience of mother hens teaching a young chick, explained to the outraged newcomer that this was simply the way it worked. The Manhattan DA’s Sex Crimes Unit, Gelfand was told, didn’t like pedophilia cases. Especially when the victims were streetwise toughs, thirteen going on thirty. The kids don’t show up, Gelfand heard. Hearings have to be rescheduled. And even if they do show up—only after the vice cops truck up to the broken homes where these lost boys live with their indifferent parents under heartbreaking conditions and drag them down to court—they do terribly with juries, who see them as hustlers asking for it, not as minors in the eyes of the law. Some cops who worked these cases felt that way too, but not all of them. Joe Gelfand didn’t.

  A month or so after he heard the case had been dismissed, Gelfand got a call from Missing Persons. “Do you know where Jose Ramos is?” asked the detective. “We want to talk to him.”

  “Well,” replied Gelfand, unwilling to conceal his sarcasm, “I knew exactly where he was the night I called you guys back in August.”

  CHAPTER 8

  New Life

  WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

  … WHITE HOUSE DC OCT 8

  MR. AND MRS. STAN PATZ

  ON BEHALF OF THE PRESIDENT I AM INVITING YOU TO WITNESS THE SIGNING OF THE MISSING CHILDREN ACT… THE CEREMONY WILL BE HELD TUESDAY OCTOBER 12, AT 1:00 PM IN THE ROSE GARDEN… WE WILL NEED YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER AND DATE OF BIRTH. GUESTS MAY BEGIN ARRIVING TO THE SOUTHWEST GATE AT 12:30 PM

  —White House telegram for October 12, 1982, signing of National Missing Children’s Act

  SEX CLUB CLUE IN HUNT FOR SOHO BOY?

  Porn pix found—are they Etan Patz?

  —New York Post, front page, December 20, 1982

  Quiz ex-cabby in Etan Patz case: “Believe I picked up Etan & Man”

  —New York Daily News, front page, December 22, 1982

  Stan Patz was long overdue at the dentist, and he sat in the chair facing a new hygienist. She bent over him, made typical small talk while she cleaned his teeth. It was the kind of conversation two strangers usually started with, just not from this physical proximity.

  “So, are you married?” she asked genially, scraping away.

  “Uh-huh,” Stan answered as best he could with the instruments in his mouth.

  “Kids?”

  Again, yes.

  “Oh, how many?” And there it was—the question Stan didn’t know how to answer, the one he’d been grappling with for some time now. One of the many unspoken topics in the Patz household was whether or not they should begin to acknowledge the possibility that Etan was no longer alive, and how. It had always seemed beside the point. They would continue to look for him, to return every phone call about sightings in New Mexico and Alberta and Spain. But after three years, it was during the small moments like this one that Stan could see the need for a position, one way or the other.

  “Two, I guess,” he answered the woman.

  She laughed, assuming he was being playful. “You guess? What do you mean, you guess? Don’t you know?”

  “Well, no.” Someone else might have artfully deflected, but Stan wasn’t made that way, nor did he have the mental stamina to parse out an honest yet uncomplicated answer. “One of my children is missing, and we don’t know if he is alive or not.”

  The woman stopped scraping. “That’s terrible,” she said. “Have you told the police about this?”

  “Yes.” Stan could speak clearly while the hygienist stood staring at him, her dental scaler unused in her hand. “We did, and they’ve been looking for him for several years now.”

  Sitting in the chair watching this woman stare at him, Stan decided in the future he would answer as Julie did:

  “Yes, we’ve got two at home.”

  Three years into the case, that was still all that Stan and Julie knew for sure, but their feelings about what they knew were shifting. Interspersed with the stoic optimism Stan had always professed, he had begun to dwell on the harm that three years away would inflict on a small child. Even if Etan were to come home, his father sometimes thought, he would never really be theirs again. Under the best of circumstances, which after the drainpipe incident Stan was no longer able to blindly believe, he feared the damage would take a lifetime of love and healing to undo. As for Julie, she had often said that being in this endless limbo was the hardest part of their ordeal, but now she’d become more open about just how hard it was.

  “I really believe that not knowing what has happened to Etan is far more difficult than even knowing the worst,” she said in an interview marking the third anniversary.

  “As horrible as that might sound,” she continued, “I hope and I pray he’s still alive, but even if I were to learn tomorrow that he has in fact been dead for three years… we could grieve fully and completely… we can be sad, we can cry, we can allow ourselves to feel the full pain of that death and be able to get it behind us.”

  Stan finished her thought. “Etan might have no more pain, but we do. We suffer on a daily basis.”

  This third year would be marked in a way designed to go beyond the plight of one New York boy, beyond even his home state. In the year since the gallery exhibit on missing and exploited children, Kitty Brown’s advocacy group Child Find had come up with the idea of creating a special day, to focus annually on the problem. Let’s not wait for the next horribly tragic announcement of a stolen child to grab people in a knee-jerk
response, its advocates theorized, let’s proactively mobilize public opinion. They picked a day to guarantee that anyone thinking about missing children would think about Etan Patz.

  At Child Find’s urging, governors from twenty-six states, including New York governor Hugh Carey, signed proclamations declaring May 25, 1982, National Missing Children’s Day. Julie navigated a round of promotional appearances throughout the city, including a stop at City Hall to greet Mayor Ed Koch as he too marked the occasion. She made a carefully prepared plea for school programs to teach students how to avoid abduction, and a call to support the still pending legislation.

  But while both Stan and Julie attempted public enthusiasm on that day, they were still reeling from the response that had bombarded them after the announcement of a reward for the first time the week before. Acting through an intermediary attorney, an anonymous donor had offered $25,000 for information leading to Etan’s recovery, and the Patzes had finally taken this long-avoided step. The cops’ earlier counsel that money would only bring the worst of humanity crawling out of the woodwork was immediately borne out. While the calls had always been heavier around the previous anniversaries, they now quadrupled in number, and many came collect. The Patzes felt compelled to accept the charges, fearing the even higher cost if they didn’t. For every sympathetic soul and lunatic—literally—calling from a mental institution, the award also attracted the circling, flesh-eating vultures.

  “I know where your fucking kid is,” snarled a nameless male voice. “He’s alive and I want $50,000 ransom…. I’m not bullshitting. King’s Highway and Flatbush Avenue on Saturday morning at nine. Thank you.”

  When the hoopla of the anniversary day ended, the ugliness didn’t. Perhaps the worst call came a week later. Julie scrambled to copy the message verbatim, in all its depravity: