After Etan

by Lisa R. Cohen

  O’Dwyer had yet to tell him the biggest obstacle to overcome. In order to file a wrongful death suit, the lawyer explained, the Patzes would have to go to court and have Etan declared legally dead.

  “There’s no way we could proceed without it. It’s a legal prerequisite.”

  Stan looked bleak. “That would be very difficult,” he said.

  “I understand.” O’Dwyer handed Stan a memo outlining the research his office had done on the law. Stan scanned the page, then put it away for careful perusal at home.

  “This is all very interesting and I appreciate the time you’ve put into it, but a lawsuit would no doubt be prohibitively costly.”

  “Stan, Brian has offered his firm’s services pro bono,” GraBois said.

  Stan turned to his new acquaintance with a quizzical look, but O’Dwyer had a ready explanation.

  “My father’s philosophy at the firm had always been that at the end of every year, when we look back, if the only thing we did was make money, then the year was a failure. We’ve always had a tradition to take a certain number of cases pro bono, to give back. And frankly, so much of the work I do can’t give me the kind of personal satisfaction your case would.”

  Stan perked up at the mention of Paul O’Dwyer. He’d heard the pro bono explanation before and didn’t always buy it, cynically seeing it as nothing more than a soul-saving device for wealthy but guilt-ridden corporate lawyers. In this case, though, he believed the idealism behind the words. As far as he was concerned, Paul O’Dwyer had walked on water. He would have voted for him no matter what the office. His admiration for the man was part of the reason Stan had agreed to this lunch, despite his apprehension. From what he could see, Brian O’Dwyer was cut from the same cloth as his father.

  Then the attorney explained how he’d been so personally affected by the case. He was well aware from GraBois that Stan had been victimized often in the past by people “trying to help,” and wanted to reassure the man his motives were pure. “I have a son too,” O’Dwyer said. “I can’t possibly know what you’ve been through but I can empathize, and so I want to do whatever I can.”

  These were the moments that spurred Stan Patz to see this case through. People like Stu and Brian made an effort not just because it was their job but because they had felt touched by the crime itself.

  “Obviously, it’s a decision you have to think on long and hard,” O’Dwyer said. “The way I look at it, a civil case may have a great deal of value. It may have some value. But it won’t have no value.”

  Stan walked back home after lunch, reflecting on what he’d heard.

  He believed that people like Jose Ramos shouldn’t go unpunished, and in that sense, it had almost nothing to do with Etan. Someone who commits these kinds of crimes shouldn’t be ignored. He should be held accountable, yes, to prevent him from doing it again, but also to let him—and everyone—know that it’s not acceptable behavior to molest and murder children. This was the equivalent of society shaking its collective finger to say, You simply can’t do this. That’s what justice was for. Justice wasn’t some vague concept etched in stone on a courthouse wall. It was how society was supposed to keep itself from falling apart.

  Stan could feel mercy toward robbers and burglars, but crimes against children were almost inexplicable, and they were certainly unforgivable. If he didn’t seek justice—if he simply shut the door and tried to forget—wasn’t that wrong too? Especially when so many had worked hard to track this villain for over a decade. Yes, Ramos was in prison, but someday he’d get out if no one tried to stop him.

  By the time Stan got home, before he even broached the subject to Julie, he knew what his answer to the lawyers would be. But he could guess how Julie would react. She’d have the same concerns he did with none of the incentive or the same conviction of Ramos’s guilt.

  This was their fork in the road. When she’d left the FBI office after that last meeting all those years ago, there’d been an unspoken understanding that they weren’t to talk of it again. She had no interest in learning further details of the case against Ramos, no interest in making up her mind one way or the other. Any mention of the case or what might have happened to Etan was simply a razor to her heart, ripping and shredding at the layers of scars that protected her. Stan loved his wife and never wanted to add to her pain, so he’d always been complicit in her disengagement. Now he was going to have to wield the blade.

  Julie’s divergent path took her into a very different world than her husband’s. By nature a much more social person, she didn’t work in the cocoon of a home office, where Stan conducted business largely by phone, fax, and Internet. She left the loft every morning and caught the uptown subway to a bustling, overinhabited public school. Out of their home, she was much more exposed to the raw elements. Sometimes, even now, she’d be recognized on the train.

  “I know you,” strangers would say. No you don’t, she’d think, as she smiled and nodded and wished them away. She was the one, not Stan, who had to deal with random, well-intended, but heartstopping comments from people who thought they’d seen Etan once, back in 1982, or 1993, or yesterday. Thank you, she’d say politely, although it was ridiculous to think it helpful now. At school, the staff, the parents, and by some point every year many of the students knew who she was and what she had suffered. Her experience, working at a place as transient as a school, was like being in the movie Groundhog Day. Every year, a fresh crop of kids would discover the tragedy all over again and the stares would begin, sympathetic, suspicious, pitying—that special, urgent anguish adolescents feel so acutely. Then she’d be the one to comfort some poor thirteen-year-old crying on her shoulder after a night spent online researching twenty years of Julie’s life. It never stopped.

  Fortunately, it was easy to distract herself with the hectic workload, and she often felt that as crazy as it was, the work kept her sane. Julie’s official title was supervisory school aide. She’d come to the Manhattan middle school in the late eighties, when Ari was starting sixth grade there. Though she was no longer an unpaid volunteer, the modest salary only jumped her a narrow step up the ladder, and she worked exhaustedly for it. Crammed into the top floor of a building that housed a bigger elementary school below it, the school wasn’t for the faint of heart. On fire drill days especially, the hundreds of steps to go down and then back up wreaked havoc on the knees, not so much for the young and agile students but for the staff. Other than teachers, staff consisted for many years of the principal… and Julie. The two shared an office and Julie was the de facto secretary, nurse, school aide, handyperson, lunchroom monitor, assistant principal, and disciplinarian. Every day she performed triage, racing the halls, ponytail flying, or her neat bun adorned with extra pens and pencils, dispensable to needy, forgetful young teens. She was the one called to fix the copy machine, even as Stan teased her about any home repair attempts in her actual home. She wrapped students shivering with fever in a blanket and held them while they waited for a parent to come, and she held them tighter after they learned the parent wasn’t coming. She matter-of-factly explained the basics to the girls who got their periods for the first time—in school—and were too embarrassed to tell anyone else, not even their own mothers. She awarded detention to the student she caught in the bathroom, pants off, leg in the sink, frantically wielding a razor as the first class bell rang.

  “I didn’t have time to shave my legs at home this morning,” the girl said plaintively. “I’m sorry, Miss Julie.”

  Julie loved it. She was a mother; that’s what she knew how to do well, and she found her efforts here every bit as meaningful as the speeches she’d given in Washington advocating new missing children laws. She even found herself reprising some of her earlier words. The middle school allowed its eleven- to fourteen-year-old students to leave the building for lunch, in one of the pizza joints or delis within a several-block radius. Every year a few parents balked at giving the necessary permission, branding their fledgling teens with an irre
deemable stigma. Julie would intervene occasionally to plead a student’s case.

  “They have to grow and gain confidence in themselves,” she’d say to a reluctant mother, reassuring her of the proximity of the school’s security guards. “You can’t lock them in the house or in class. They’ll never learn how to fend for themselves.” Some parents were ignorant of Julie’s history, but others knew, and they were the ones more likely to listen.

  “Walk with them,” she’d counsel. “Teach them how to protect themselves. Give them a life.”

  She advocated for her young charges in other ways too. One year she fast-talked first the principal into ceding a small room and then the PTA out of a few dollars for books.

  “We need a library,” she told them. “Some of these kids don’t even know their alphabet. I’ll be the librarian, too.”

  She begged, borrowed, and hustled books, then spent her own money in the hidden recesses of secondhand bargain bookstores. She recruited a volunteer student corps, taught them how to sign out books, and how to reshelve—which required a thorough knowledge of the alphabet. At first, her little room remained empty save for delinquents kicked out of class and banished to the only available space. Julie probed them for their closely held passions, then enticed them with customized books.

  “I like weapons,” a boy might confide, and days later a World War II memorabilia book would magically appear. Julie would first tear off the cover that revealed its fourth-grade reading level, then cajole her new disciple into taking a look. Gradually, the library developed a following, and Julie knew the exhilaration of matching a book to a student, then watching a resistant mind open, if just a crack.

  “Oh, Miss Julie,” a normally mute young teen would say, “that was so wonderful. Do you have any more like that?”

  “It’s what makes me jump out of bed in the morning and race to work,” Julie would tell Stan. And Stan, whose mother had been a librarian, was so proud.

  Julie cried on the first day of school the year she came in to find the principal had reappropriated his room. But she never stopped working with the students, learning their names and interests, engaging them in the smallest and largest of ways. And always, she would talk to them about the books she loved and encourage them to love books too. What she gave to “her kids” was perhaps the deepest possible expression of love for the son she had lost. Whether she acknowledged it consciously or not, hers was a very personal way to honor his memory. It was different than Stan’s more direct approach—to seek justice—but no less heartfelt or valid.

  When Julie reached home from school and Stan met her with news of the proposed civil suit, as he’d expected, her reaction was immediate, spare, and unreceptive. She didn’t see the point. Any new jolt in the press would raise her profile yet again, and even if it were Stan’s turn now to face the incoming fire, she wouldn’t be able to escape the fallout. She’d spent over a third of her life in this hell, and she wanted it to be over.

  “It won’t bring Etan back,” she said aloud to her husband. Stan acknowledged that truth, then quietly went on to outline the lawsuit’s first step. Even though they both knew Etan was gone, the thought of making it official was just too painful for Julie to even consider.

  “You do what you have to do,” is how she finally left it, “but I can’t have any part of it.”

  Only the weekend kept Stan from letting GraBois know he was ready to move ahead. On Monday morning Stan was told the lawyers would prepare the case, and he’d get word when the documents were ready to be faxed over. There’d be no court appearance, just his name on a piece of paper.

  When Ramos was denied parole the next week, Stan felt some satisfaction. But he knew the inmate would be eligible again in two years. By the end of the summer the lawsuit was announced, and on November 15, 2000, Stan presented himself to Brian O’Dwyer’s office to finish off the paperwork that would ask a judge to rule Etan was dead. All that was required of him was a simple rote signature. He would tell reporters gathered afterwards in the conference room that he felt like he’d just signed his son’s death certificate, although in the moment he sensed no more than his pen moving across the paper.

  But in truth there was a well of emotion behind that gesture. Stan believed he had failed his son. Probably many times, when he was too busy working to look at Etan’s artwork or play ball; but one time when it was irrevocable. He had failed to protect him, which was his job, his duty, the biggest responsibility he’d ever been given. He’d always told himself it wasn’t anyone’s fault—not Julie’s, not his. There was evil in this world and there was bad luck. The two had collided that morning, and no one could have done a damn thing about it. But now there was something he could do. He’d never been able to get Robert Morgenthau to make this case, and he knew the lawsuit might not sway the DA either. But for more than twenty years, he’d been forced to sit back and helplessly watch the cops and the task forces and the prosecutors and the FBI do their best. Now for the first time he had the opportunity to take a step on his own, and he couldn’t just stand still. He had to do what he could to further his own cause, to get justice for Etan.

  CHAPTER 29

  The True Story

  … To Stanley Kenneth Patz send greetings:

  Whereas, Etan Kalil Patz died intestate on May 25, 1979 and whereas the decree of this court made July 17 2001 directed the issuance to you of LETTERS OF ADMINISTRATION….

  … NOW THEREFORE, KNOW YE that you are hereby authorized to administer the estate of the said deceased subject.

  —death certificate of Etan Patz, granted by Judge Eve Preminger, July 17, 2001

  Twenty-two years after the moment had passed, Manhattan Surrogate Court judge Eve Preminger declared it so.

  Once Stan had set the legal wheels in motion by signing his name, they’d moved excruciatingly slowly. Because Julie Patz had refused to sign the documents, a seven-month waiting period was required by law, in case she decided to file an objection to Stan’s request. She did not, and on a fresh, balmy June day in 2001, Brian O’Dwyer and Stuart GraBois were in court to accept the decree. Neither Stan nor Julie needed to be there, and they weren’t. On any regular business day, the exquisite Beaux-Arts, landmark Surrogate Court, with its ornate carved woodwork, elaborate façade, and twin marble fireplaces drew tourists along with New Yorkers finalizing adoptions or authenticating a loved one’s will. Often a backdrop for television shows like Law and Order, the Surrogate Court was packed with press on July 17 to hear the judge announce Etan Patz’s death. It was the last place Etan’s aggrieved parents would want to be.

  Afterwards, in an informal Q&A outside the courtroom, one of the younger reporters asked the Patzes’ lawyers how any parent could have let their child walk the city streets alone at such a young age.

  “It was a different time,” Brian O’Dwyer replied, speaking for himself as much as the zeitgeist. “For many parents, May 25, 1979, was the end of innocence.”

  Even as the civil case received a green light, the NYPD was making its own revived push for a criminal prosecution. Over the last few years, the Missing Persons Unit had revisited the case, and in particular 234 East Fourth Street, where Jose Ramos had lived in 1979, and where some investigators now believed Etan Patz may have died. This new round of detectives tackled the same scattered paperwork and discovered that back when Ramos had first become a suspect—after the 1982 drainpipe arrest—very few people had been canvassed in his old building. By then three years had already passed since Etan’s disappearance, and 234 East Fourth was a transient, crime-ridden quasi–shooting gallery in the drug-infested “Alphabet City” neighborhood. The names on the mailboxes were perpetually outdated, a procession of tough characters or struggling artists, including, in her salad days, Madonna. In the early eighties she’d lived briefly in the apartment directly below the one where Ramos had once brought his young victims. Many of the elusive tenants were junkies who scored their dope in the conveniently located heroin spot on the first floor
, welfare scammers, and poor, mistrustful immigrants, all unlikely to answer the door to a police knock. But flash forward to the late nineties and that earlier level of crime in the building became a helpful investigative tool to Missing Persons detective Frank Saez. He was able to pore over the faded DD5 police reports of robberies, drug deals gone bad, and shots fired that in 1979 had constantly brought squad cars streaming to 234 East Fourth Street. There were so many incidents, Saez was able to piece together a fairly complete list of the building’s inhabitants in the years around Etan’s disappearance.

  Jose Ramos himself had filed complaints against one of his neighbors, and Saez tried to track the man down. When the detective called a contact number, explained he was from Missing Persons and was looking for Jose Lopez, Lopez’s widow assumed the detective was looking for her son, Jose Jr., now a cop himself. She passed along the message, and the young Detective Lopez, a burly, genial man in his late twenties, appeared in person one day at the MPU to ask who was looking for him. When the mistake was cleared up, Lopez Jr. explained that his father, a renowned drug dealer and heroin addict, had died of AIDS several years earlier. But the son was happy to help, and was handed a mug shot of Ramos.

  “That’s ‘Hippie,’ ” he immediately said, using a nickname the cops had heard before. Lopez knew Ramos by sight if not by name, as the man folks in the building stayed away from. He was weird, Lopez told the other detectives, and went after the little kids. Then he told a chilling story.

  As a chubby seven-year-old with a Saturday Night Fever hairdo, Lopez was playing with his sister one morning in their bedroom when he happened to glance out the window to see a row of toy soldiers and an old Barbie doll magically appear. He drew closer and realized they were dangling from above, suspended by clear fishing wire. Curious, he opened the window and reached toward one of the toys. But before he could touch it, the line was yanked upward a few inches. He tried again, and again the toy jumped up. Lopez craned his neck out the window, looking up to find the source of this manna from heaven. Sitting one flight above on the fire escape that led to his upstairs apartment, “Hippie” grinned at him widely. Seeing Jose Ramos gesture for him to climb the rusty metal stairs, the boy slammed the window shut. He told his sister not to say a word to anyone about the man who was literally fishing for his prey.