In the jury room, Fischer took an oath swearing to tell the truth and answered every question GraBois asked, recounting his interactions in segregation with Jose Ramos. He tried to describe the tawdry details with as little hesitation as possible, although he could sense that some of the jurors flinched as he listed them. Afterwards, before Fischer left to meet up with his wife, GraBois told him he’d been highly believable.
But despite the informant’s grand jury testimony and GraBois’s creative brainstorming, the federal role in the Etan Patz case was coming to an end. It was clear that the jurisdictional issue could not be overcome. Four weeks after Fischer testified, GraBois and Galligan met with the U.S. attorney, Otto Obermaier, and his senior staffers to make a final presentation of their evidence. If their conclusions were correct, and Jose Ramos had raped and killed Etan Patz in New York City, then it was a prosecution for the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to pursue. They would approach Morgenthau’s office in the coming weeks and present their case. Finally, even though GraBois had been unofficially keeping Stan Patz abreast of events, the FBI also planned to bring in both parents and give them the official results of its six-year investigation. Everyone in the room agreed that they had a right to know.
GraBois and Galligan called Stan Patz the next day.
“We’d like to sit down and bring you up to speed on the progress of the case,” GraBois said. “There are some things you already know, but a lot you don’t.”
“Give it a little thought,” Galligan added. “If you have a question and we know the answer, we’ll tell you.”
Stan considered this, in his measured way.
“Let me discuss it with Julie. I don’t know if she’ll want to come. But I will. I’d like to hear your information.” Over the years Stan had always looked forward to these offers, rare as they were, of an official progress report. They made him feel there had in fact been progress on the case. After twelve years, he was encouraged that anyone was still paying enough attention to give him an accounting. This time he would urge Julie to come too. Stan had been in much closer contact with GraBois since the Pennsylvania case, and he’d gotten phone updates from time to time. Julie didn’t hear any of this, so it was always his task to pass it along, or decide not to. Often he didn’t, but when he did, he recognized that the secondhand information lacked the legitimacy that came from direct contact with authorities.
That night Stan got a preview of where the case stood—and some of the reasons authorities considered Ramos the prime suspect—when the PrimeTime Live piece aired. Watching it alone, he also saw for the first time what Ramos had to say. GraBois too watched the segment at home with his wife. In the television report, he had the last word.
“Is this case closed now?” Jay Schadler asked him.
“Closed? For as long as I’m in this office, absolutely not,” GraBois replied, his voice firm with conviction. “What do you tell the Patz family, ‘Sorry, your son is gone and there’s nothing anyone can do about it anymore’? You can’t just say, ‘Forget about it. It’s over.’ Because it’s not over.”
In his den, GraBois listened to the words come out of his mouth on the screen, and hoped that Jose Ramos was hearing them too, because they were a direct promise. Jon Morgan had told GraBois that Ramos believed he would be left alone once GraBois had moved on from the case; that no one who came after him would care about it the way GraBois did. All Ramos had to do was ride out “the temporary storm,” he’d told Morgan, “and the rain would stop.”
Ramos was wrong. GraBois and the Patzes had had a rough start, but over time he and Stan had developed a truce that had grown into respect. GraBois had meant it when he’d said he owed it to the Patz family. Their feelings were never far from his mind as he had worked this case. That was one of the things that had kept him going.
While he could never imagine the pain they’d experienced, he had gotten a small taste of it two months earlier, a few days before the twelfth anniversary of Etan’s disappearance. GraBois and his son had gone to a nearby department store to buy a Mother’s Day present for his wife. The two were in the electronics department, and his son was watching TV while GraBois talked to a salesclerk. When he turned back, Andrew was nowhere in sight. He’d sat down near a television set, immersed in a baseball game, oblivious to the search around him. GraBois would never forget what those few moments felt like, and he just couldn’t imagine living with that feeling.
This case might be moving to another venue, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to pursue it. He’d figure out a way; he was very creative. Prosecuting Ramos in Pennsylvania had proved that.
The meeting with Stan and Julie Patz was scheduled for a Monday in late August, the week leading into Labor Day weekend. Both GraBois and Galligan approached it with some trepidation. They knew the details would be unimaginably painful to hear. Should we really be doing this to them? Galligan wondered, changing her mind a dozen times. GraBois reflected on the rare occasions he’d told other parents their child had been molested. Even if they already suspected, there was always that moment before the words were said when the knowledge was just floating in the air, and then the endless moment after, when you could never take them back. He realized today would be the first time for him that those irrevocable words would be “Your child is dead.”
Julie Patz came to the meeting with her husband after all, the two looking strained and subdued. They expected to see Mary Galligan and Stuart GraBois when they walked into the FBI’s twenty-ninth-floor conference room, but they were also introduced to John Winslow, to Galligan’s boss and her boss’s boss, who as the highest rank would open the meeting. With all these layers of authority, the room had the solemn feel of a formal proceeding. Stan and Julie sat close to each other across the long rectangular table from the others.
GraBois took the lead and Galligan followed up with some of the details. Starting from the beginning they outlined what the federal government had learned during their nine-year investigation. The evidence, they said, clearly pointed to Jose Antonio Ramos as the prime suspect.
“I will tell you, I’ve only been on this case for two years,” Galligan added, “but I know the scope of what’s been done, and in order to conclude Ramos did it, we’ve had to rule out a host of leads. Agents have traveled around this country and even across the world in that capacity.” Stan asked and Galligan answered several follow-up questions—about the unsubstantiated NAMBLA connection, the “Bubble Man,” and other theories he’d been privy to in the past.
GraBois confirmed previous accounts that Ramos had already admitted taking a young boy he thought was Etan to his apartment that day. Galligan then gave the FBI consensus—it was their view that Ramos had molested Etan, and killed him.
“We believe Etan is dead, and that his body may never be found.”
The Patzes said nothing in response, but silent tears wet Julie’s face, and Stan struggled to hold his in. The words were not earth-shattering; they weren’t saying anything that twelve years into the case both parents didn’t already know. But now for the first time law enforcement was sitting across the table, telling them that the weight of evidence supported their worst fears. Stan reached over to soothe his wife, gently placing his hand on her shoulder.
There were credible informants, GraBois went on, who’d heard Ramos incriminate himself. In addition, both he and Galligan had heard much of this from Ramos’s own mouth.
“And so with this conclusion,” Galligan said, “the FBI has gone as far we can go in our investigation at this time. We are ending the active investigation. The next step would be an indictment and a prosecution.”
“The thing is,” GraBois added, “our conclusion means that, as much as we want to, the U.S. Attorney’s Office can’t do that. We just don’t have jurisdiction.
“But it’s not the end of the road,” he hastened to say. “It’s true Ramos didn’t confess, but there is strong, convincing, circumstantial evidence against him. Now what
happens is that we take this case to the New York County district attorney, who can prosecute it. Agent Galligan and I will personally present our case to the DA in the next few weeks. We’ll hand over everything we’ve got, share all our evidence, and go from there.”
As difficult as the meeting was, Stan Patz was relieved. When he’d heard Galligan say the FBI was “ending the active investigation,” the words had tapped into the disquieting concern always lurking in the back of his mind that someday one or another of these agencies was going to say, Sorry, we didn’t find anything, and it’s over. Goodbye. But as he listened further, he felt hopeful that it wasn’t over, just moving to the next step—one step closer. “Thank you,” he said. He knew that they had all worked so hard, and he felt as though he couldn’t adequately convey his appreciation. “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You can’t know how much it means to us.”
Julie echoed her husband’s words, saying, “We’re grateful that you brought us here today.” She looked at the woman directly across from her, as though she’d sensed Galligan’s apprehension. “As hard as it is to hear this, it’s better than what my mind can, and has, imagined.”
“I want you to know this doesn’t mean we’re giving up on this case,” Galligan replied. “If and when there is more that we can do, we absolutely will.”
“And even though we may not be actively involved, you can bet we’ll be involved,” GraBois concluded the meeting. “We’ve gotten too close, and the stakes are too high.”
CHAPTER 28
Civil Action
ETAN PATZ’S FATE STILL A MYSTERY AFTER 20 YEARS
… Etan Patz vanished from a SoHo street 20 years ago today, launching one of the city’s greatest unsolved mysteries and galvanizing public awareness of missing kids.
… A former federal prosecutor who spent eight years investigating the case believes the prime suspect is Jose Ramos, 54, who is serving 20 years in a Pennsylvania prison for sexually abusing a young boy….
Despite strong circumstantial evidence against him, Ramos has never been charged in the Patz case. He is eligible for parole in Pennsylvania next year.
—New York Post, May 25, 1999
Stan Patz sat in front of his office computer in the spacious sun-drenched front room that formed his workshop/photo studio, taking a break from his latest assignment. He had spent the morning at his second computer, laboring over a project, deftly adjusting hues and softening shadows, retouching the image with Adobe Photoshop. In the past he would have handed off a finished project by relinquishing the original film; now he delivered the photos to his clients on a disc. He hadn’t used his darkroom to print out actual paper pictures in almost two years.
He’d grown more solid over the years, still trim, but no longer slight. These days his professional dress tended to collared cotton knit shirts and khakis, to match his closely cropped graying beard and neatly combed thinning brown hair. The especially strident howl of a power tool many years earlier had saddled him with tinnitus, which he masked by filling his studio with an ever-present low background noise of classical music.
In the eight years since federal authorities had taken their case to the Manhattan district attorney, much had changed. The missing children’s movement had continued to grow; in fact, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was in the midst of a move to spacious new headquarters outside D.C., equipped with state-of-the-art computer systems that linked directly to the FBI, Customs, and the U.S. Postal Service through the burgeoning World Wide Web. The previous year the center had inaugurated its CyberTipline, allowing anyone with access to a computer to file tips about child exploitation online, and had already received over ten thousand submissions. Since it was founded in 1984, NCMEC had reported working with federal authorities on over sixty-six thousand cases, in which some forty-seven thousand youngsters had been found.
Sadly, tragedies still occurred, and out of them had come other innovations. In 1993, twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was murdered, which pushed California to pass strict laws requiring sex offenders to register their whereabouts and be monitored by authorities. A year later, seven-year-old Megan Kanka was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a New Jersey neighbor who was a convicted sex offender, and two years after that, President Bill Clinton signed Megan’s Law, asking state law enforcement to release sex offender data to the public. And in 1996 Amber Hagerman’s abduction led to AMBER Alerts, a partnership between law enforcement and broadcasters to rapidly send out the word as soon as a child went missing.
But in New York City, one thing had not changed. The Etan Patz case, along with all of the background information and the Feds’ offers of help, was sitting somewhere in the DA’s files. Officially, it remained an ongoing case, but that was all anyone would say. In the first months after the case had been presented, there’d been some positive signs, and a series of meetings between GraBois and various Manhattan assistant DAs. But as time passed, it became clear the case wasn’t moving forward. They say they need more evidence, GraBois reported back to Stan, and they’re looking for a smoking gun. GraBois disagreed and he told them so, but it wasn’t his case anymore.
At first Stan had held out hope this phase would be just like all the other incarnations. GraBois’s efforts had taken years to pay off. But gradually, when no one except a frustrated Stuart GraBois called to check in, Stan Patz knew he was being told by the DA’s Office “we’re done, goodbye.” In 1993, Stan had begun a twice-yearly ritual to signal that while the authorities might be done, he wasn’t.
Stan called up the Word document he’d been looking for, a single sentence on the stark white screen. He walked through the small “computer room” that had been Shira’s bedroom before she’d moved to Brooklyn, and stepped into the adjacent darkroom. He had to yank hard on a heavy back drawer before it crankily responded. Stan thumbed through, then carefully removed one 8½-by-11-inch sheet from the stack of posters he kept tucked in the rear of the drawer. These days he visited this particular file only twice a year, once on Etan’s birthday and again a few days before the May 25 anniversary.
The poster he chose was the one most people would remember, with two pictures of Etan, artfully rendered with professional lighting, designed to highlight the playful glint in his eyes. There was no shyness, no awkward formality in his expression—he was sitting for his own father. One of the pictures had the Future Flight Captain hat transplanted onto his head. The other photo came from the shirtless series, the one that had raised such eyebrows, but the likeness was so true that Stan preferred using it, so he had cropped it to show Etan from the neck and shoulders only.
Stan could see the posters were yellowing as he gently smoothed the faint wrinkles from the one in his hands. But there were more than enough left to last until 2014, when Jose Ramos would walk out of prison a free man.
When Stan had left the meeting with the FBI and GraBois in 1991, he’d thought long and hard about what they’d said. There were subsequent conversations with both GraBois and Galligan to fill in details, and to Stan the pieces fit together. Finally, after all the years facing an agonizing void, there was a completed picture, and he wanted to assure Ramos that the crime he’d committed was not part of a long-forgotten past.
He returned to the computer and fitted the missing poster backward into the printer. He scrolled down on his screen to change the date to the current May 25, 1999, and clicked the “print” icon. The paper ran through the printer in an instant, and came out with just one sentence on the back, in a typewriter-like Courier font.
May 25, 1999
What did you do to my little boy?
Stan had chosen that typeface to be consistent; he had still been using a typewriter when he’d started sending this message to Jose Ramos.
Back then, he’d thought he’d react differently when it became clear the prosecution was permanently stalled. He’d expected to mourn all over again and then move on. And it wasn’t as though he did nothing but stew on the case. Yes, he c
ould honestly say that twenty years later Etan still came into his thoughts at least once every single day. But he had moved on—he’d raised his other two children, supported his family, puttered with his myriad hobbies, railed about politics with his friends. In high school, a precocious teenage Stan had settled on three life goals—the right job, the right place to live, and the right companion. He had accomplished those goals. After almost thirty-five years, he loved his wife, he got to play with all of his toys—the gadgets and technology that surrounded him in his very comfortable home. He viewed his life as privileged, except for one thing.
And he couldn’t just forget about it. He agreed with Stuart GraBois—it wasn’t over. He’d waited all this time, watching as the case moved forward in tiny increments, stood still interminably, moved a bit, stopped cold, and on and on. There had to be more. He’d wait a lot longer if he had to.
From his computer database Stan pulled up Ramos’s name and printed out an envelope with the address: State Correctional Institution at Frackville, a maximum-security prison in eastern Pennsylvania. Ramos had been moved five times since 1991, and Stan had found him each time. After methodically folding the customized but unsigned poster in thirds, Stan slid it into the envelope and sealed it.
He was alone in the apartment. Julie would return midafternoon, like most days, from her job at a local middle school. With Shira out of the house, that left only twenty-two-year-old Ari living at home. After high school, some college, and world travel, he had settled back down in his old bedroom as he taught some photography classes and figured out what to do next. Currently a longtime girlfriend was living there too, the daughter of an old family friend they’d all known for years. It was an unconventional arrangement, but they were both such likable kids, and Ari was very helpful setting up and maintaining Stan’s new computer systems. Besides, both Stan and Julie couldn’t help guarding their time with Ari possessively. The boy, now a handsome young man, had grown up with two very attentive parents. He was always the first to say that he didn’t feel smothered, but his mom had been a presence in nearly every school he’d attended and he’d certainly played a lot of ball with his dad. Ari was playing for two, Stan sometimes thought.
After Etan Page 42