After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  “I have a lawyer now,” she said when they came to get her the following day. “Any more questions—you go through him.”

  Sandy Harmon had little more to say about the case after that, but investigators couldn’t help seeing her as a nexus leading to tantalizing clues beyond their reach. At the very least, authorities thought, she knew more than she was saying.

  BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  A PROCLAMATION

  … The date of May 25 has particular significance in the cause of missing children. On that day in 1979, six year old Etan Patz disappeared from his home in New York City. Unfortunately, Etan has never been found. His brave parents have fought to increase our awareness of this tragedy and to improve the agencies that work to solve this unique type of crime….

  Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 25, 1983 as Missing Children Day…. I urge all our law enforcement agencies to take particular notice of the danger that threatens any child who has lost his or her home. I urge every American family to take the proper precautions to protect their children.

  —May 24, 1983

  Stan Patz had always dreaded the days leading up to the May 25 anniversary, but by 1983 it wasn’t just about the heartbreaking memories of the day itself. Inevitably, as Etan’s disappearance was becoming increasingly synonymous with the missing children movement, May 25 meant requests for appearances, flashbulbs, and smooth soundbites to advance the cause. Stan especially hated hauling out his public face, preferring to mark the day quietly and to let Julie speak for them both. But when a national day had been named by the president after your family’s personal tragedy, that seemed inadequate, and he also felt he owed something to the others working so diligently to push for needed change.

  In New York there were press conferences and a fund-raiser at a trendy midtown eatery. Actor Cliff Robertson chaired the event; John and Revé Walsh flew up with their new baby, Meghan.

  “I believe my wife and I are symbols of the fact that this type of crime can happen to anybody,” Stan told the press that day. But in the days and months that followed, the Patzes were beginning to consciously disengage from their role on the public stage. All along, Julie had been weighing the costs to her other children of the constant travel and media appearances, and at some point she’d decided that they were too high. Whether it was Ari’s fears as he lived through the dangerous year of six, or Shira’s persistent nightmares, Julie knew she needed to turn to her “two children at home.”

  She was grateful there were others, like John Walsh, or Jay Howell, a top Senate attorney who had led the fight to pass the National Missing Children’s Act, who would continue to build on the momentum. From the sidelines she supported the push to move beyond the NCIC computer bank and finally create the national clearinghouse that she, Stan, and many others had been talking about for years. That dream was realized in the spring of 1984, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was established. But when Howell called to invite the Patzes to appear with President Reagan in the White House East Wing for the center’s unveiling, he got the same response he’d been hearing from them for the past months to these kinds of requests.

  “I’m sorry,” Stan or Julie would say, “we’re just not able to do that now.” The Patzes called it a “soft no,” and if colleagues had pushed the need, they would make an effort to provide their services. But usually the “soft no” was answer enough.

  Psychotherapist Gary Hewitt did attend the opening of the National Center, representing his own Center for Missing Children, a smaller entity established a year earlier in Rochester, New York. Hewitt’s center focused on a narrow spectrum of the field that received little attention but demonstrated a huge need. He treated the families of the missing, as well as victims who returned, carrying the emotional baggage of their captivity. Hewitt had spent time with Steven Stayner, among others, who’d left home a freckle-faced seven-year-old and returned almost a full-grown man. Stayner was still struggling to adapt to a life that on the one hand was free of the abuse he’d suffered in his captor’s clutches, but on the other was bound by the parental limits he’d shed during his time away. He chafed at his parents’ authority, and cringed at the taunts from peers about his sexuality. Hewitt counseled Stayner’s parents too, as well as many parents of children who had never returned.

  Hewitt had also been in contact with Julie Patz over the past year, offering his services and seeking her advice. Now he called to invite her to an experimental retreat to take place over several days at the beginning of August. Hewitt would be bringing together several families of missing children, to talk, work, and play at a college campus in upstate New York. This was not an “appearance” in front of cameras, Hewitt assured her—no media allowed.

  “I really hope you can bring the kids,” Hewitt told Julie. “There’s a pool and the lake, and we’re planning lots of activities to keep them busy.”

  Shira was planning to be away with friends for part of the scheduled days, and Stan said he had too much work, when in reality he could have rearranged his schedule. He just found talk therapy and sharing feelings suspect. Hot-air balloons and speedboats were really, he thought, lures to get people like himself into a room and force them to talk about a painful subject. He’d prefer to get the post report. But Julie thought it could be helpful for Ari. He had come to her on his seventh birthday to express relief he’d made it through the scary age of six, but a year later he was still suffering the effects of his brother’s loss. He’d recently spent hours up in the night weeping after a particularly bad nightmare. Now he would celebrate his eighth birthday in the company of trained therapists and the hopefully empathetic siblings of other missing children.

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! Happy Birthday, dear Ari, Happy Birthday to you.”

  On the first night, a group of some sixty strangers sang to Ari, then shared his birthday cake after a buffet dinner at Keuka College, 212 gloriously green lakefront acres in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Gary Hewitt presented the boy with a newly minted coin set for his collection, and hoped the familiar birthday ritual would help to break the ice at this somber, awkward gathering of fourteen families. But it would take more than cake and party balloons to chip away their sorrow. These were mothers and fathers who had molded themselves rigidly into an unnatural public persona, or had kept an isolated vigil by the phone in hopes of a call. Many had completely lost sight of relating to other people. Looking around, Julie felt the oppressive weight of the collective tragedy in the room, and realized she was the veteran of the group. She doubted whether some of these people had smiled or laughed a single time since their child had disappeared. Over the past five years she had already learned some of the lessons this retreat hoped to impart, about the critical need to do just that; to talk to each other, and to listen. She didn’t quite know what to expect, but she knew that nothing like this had ever been done before, and that this group sorely needed it. She needed it.

  The next day, at the first working sessions, the adults were split off from the children, as everyone divided their time between group therapy and play. Parents talked to parents, kids to kids. Ari sat in a classroom with other children ranging from seven to seventeen, who were encouraged to tell their stories. Gradually, the youngsters opened up, but it wasn’t until the evening when the families came together again that the parents had their own shells cracked, by their own children.

  One after another, with safety in numbers, the youngest voices said what they’d been holding inside. Our brother or sister may be gone, but we’re still here. We need to get out of the house, move forward, take a vacation, be normal. Every aspect of life had been put on hold, and these children were suffering for that too, not just for the loss of their loved one. As parents listened, and the tears flowed, they acknowledged the truth of what their children were saying. In the group therapy sessions that followed over the next days, adults and children ali
ke talked about their most private fears.

  In the children’s group around a campfire one night, Ari heard from the others about how they grieved for siblings they barely knew or remembered. Like everyone there, he’d never met anyone else in the same position. As one of the youngest, the eight-year-old spoke up only occasionally, but when he did, he felt a burgeoning sense of authority as a pro who’d essentially spent his entire short lifetime dealing with Etan’s absence. He warmed to the adult therapists who praised his counsel.

  In between the talking and listening was what Julie jokingly called the “forced” recreation. These were people who had lost the ability to relax and play, to feel unencumbered by their grief, or by the appearance they needed to maintain, so that neighbors wouldn’t find it unseemly, even suspicious, to see them laughing. Here they were cajoled into waterskiing, swimming, and canoeing. There was tai chi in the mornings for the most sedentary of the adults, and counselors who doubled as clowns armed with balloon animals for the youngest of the kids. And there were goofy parlor games, designed to coax laughter from even the most grim.

  Ari loved racing through the grassy fields outside the dorm rooms where they slept at night. In an indelible moment, the boy and his mother even peeked down from the basket of a striped hot-air balloon suspended twenty-five feet in the air. They waved at the people in the truck that tethered them to safety, or gazed hypnotically upward to the roaring fire that kept them aloft but breathed dragon-fire heat on their heads. While Julie screamed in terror next to him, Ari was thrilled as for an instant the wind pulled the line taut and seemed to lift the back end of the truck clean off the ground.

  It was a rare adventure for all the children, and an even rarer break for the parents. For Julie too, the entire Keuka retreat was a singular experience and one she would never forget. For the first time in five years she was spending time with other parents—besides Stan—who had shared the same horror she did, and they were free of media, law enforcement, or other “nonvictims.” She didn’t have to worry what anyone thought of her when she cried over an irrational fear, or, more importantly, laughed at a joke. The relief she felt at being able to express herself went far beyond anything she had ever expected. She was astounded at the commonality of their almost identical experiences. She took on a leadership position, as a role model for some of the other parents. And in the faces of mothers whose loss was more recent, she herself could recognize the Julie of several years ago, and realize how far she’d actually come in her “recovery.” For the first time, she began to feel a grasp of her former self-esteem. And for the first time, she felt almost like the healthy, happy woman she barely remembered, the one who had disappeared on May 25 too.

  Both she and Ari also spent time with eighteen-year-old Steven Stayner and his parents. She witnessed firsthand that the reunited family was functioning, and she knew then that it could be done. Ari thought Stayner was a cool guy, but for Julie their conversations were the antidote to a creeping paralysis that overcame her whenever she allowed herself to imagine Etan actually coming home. Speaking to Steven Stayner frankly about what he had gone through, she could envision her own son’s ability to survive such horrors. And she began to believe in her own strength too. If she had to, maybe she could even learn to live with the unknown, of never finding out why Etan never returned.

  “I at least carried home one clear message,” Julie wrote years later in a testimonial letter to Gary Hewitt. “Reach out and grab at life again; take back your self-confidence and joy in what you do; stop hiding! I was not quite ready to do that then. But the seed of awareness had been planted, and I could not ignore it.”

  There was something else Julie Patz brought home from Keuka. She returned to face the rest of her family with a new understanding that each one was dealing with Etan’s disappearance in his or her own way and time, and that was how it had to be. As she and Ari excitedly recounted their adventures to Stan and Shira, Stan saw how much they had benefited, and he too understood that he had missed out. But he was taking his own time, in his own way.

  CHAPTER 9

  Reversing the Odds

  To be an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York requires commitment to absolute integrity and fair play; to candor and fairness in dealing with adversaries and the courts; to careful preparation, not making any assumptions or leaving anything to chance; and never proceeding in any case unless convinced of the correctness of one’s position or the guilt of the accused.

  —certificate presented by U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour to his assistants, 1973; presented to all AUSAs for several years to follow, including AUSA Stuart GraBois

  Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it.

  —“J’Accuse,” Emile Zola’s open letter to the French president in the newspaper L’Aurore, regarding the Dreyfus Affair, January 13, 1898

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois usually pulled into a parking space at One St. Andrew’s Plaza and placed his government-issue permit onto the dashboard. He was at his desk by 7:30 in the morning, having retrieved his voicemail messages along with his second cup of coffee. He was an early riser anyway, and he liked to start the day before the halls were full. He got his best work done in the morning, although he rarely left the office for the commute home from lower Manhattan before 6:30 in the evening. AUSAs often juggled dozens of cases, and in GraBois’s unit, Major Crimes, they might be interviewing witnesses for a fraud case in the morning and be in court for a bank robbery case in the afternoon, rarely seeing the same faces two days in a row. It was a full plate, but GraBois loved the variety, and he loved the work.

  GraBois seemed taller than his six feet, and he cut an imposing figure. Everything about him bespoke a sense of strength. Steely hazel eyes with steel gray hair to match. A big man, not heavy, but solid; an immovable force. He dressed meticulously, in nicely turned-out conservative suits. The dark suits, the ever-ready dark shades, it all said: I am a Federal Prosecutor.

  Stu GraBois had been in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for three years, but today was his first full day on the Etan Patz case. The day before his immediate boss, chief of the Major Crimes Unit Barry Bohrer, had given him the assignment. It was late May 1985, the sixth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance. Etan had now been missing almost as long as he’d been living safely at home, and the odds of his recovery were growing longer every day. The Patzes were still fielding requests from all over the country for his photo because of possible sightings, but his beautiful six-year-old portraits couldn’t help much to identify him at age twelve and a half. Although New York artist Nancy Burson had created an experimental computerized age progression of the boy at the FBI’s request, his parents were loath to distribute it. If it turned out not to look like him, searchers would be thrown off track.

  Instead, it was the six-year-old image of Etan, measuring eight feet by nine feet, that looked down on Times Square. Chosen by the New York City Police Foundation, his was the first missing child’s portrait to be displayed there on an electronic Diamond Vision billboard. His elfin visage—laughing broadly, head thrown back—blinked on the screen twice an hour that spring, to be replaced after a month by another missing child.

  Indeed it seemed as though everywhere you looked there were now pictures of missing children. The previous year, a handful of midwestern dairies had begun featuring them on their waxy milk cartons and the idea had taken off. By the spring of 1985, more than seven hundred independent dairies—almost half the nation’s eighteen hundred—were putting milk on the breakfast kitchen table along with small faces and toll-free hotline numbers. Missing children were showing up on every imaginable blank surface: pizza boxes, grocery bags, gas bills, highway toll tickets. And they yielded highly publicized results. A Californ
ia runaway called home after her face stared back at her from a milk carton. An eleven-year-old whose mother had abducted her was returned home after an informant saw her picture and tipped off police. Two sisters whose parents were locked in a custody battle eventually turned up in Las Vegas with their father, who had kept them hidden inside his hotel room for fear that the advertising campaign would expose him.

  Almost every one of these children, both the ones recovered and all those on the pizza boxes and milk cartons to begin with, were abducted by one parent from another in a vicious custody dispute. Or they were runaways. And while the parents of those recovered children were grateful for the massive public campaign, some were beginning to question the statistics that fueled such an onslaught of what critics called fearmongering hype. Contrary to public perception and these nebulous statistics, only a tiny percentage of missing children were snatched by unknown intruders, although actual studies didn’t confirm that until some years later. Eventually, it would be determined that the figure for annual stranger abductions across the United States was not in the tens of thousands or even thousands, as some feared, but in the low hundreds. Child advocates were undaunted. Try telling a frantic mother whose abusive ex-husband has stolen her child that it’s not kidnapping, they argued. And even if stranger abductions are a small fraction of the numbers, if just one child is returned to his parents unharmed, how can anyone be against taking action?