Continuous Effort Pays...It Is Just A Matter of Time

NEW YORK: A man has confessed to strangling to death a boy who vanished on his way to school in 1979, apparently solving a crime that terrified parents across America and baffled police for three decades, New York police chief Ray Kelly said yesterday.

 

The man, Pedro Hernandez, “confessed to choking Etan 33 years ago tomorrow in a basement” of a Manhattan grocery store where he worked, Kelly told a news conference.

The confession was a stunning breakthrough in a cold case that had defied one of the country’s most sophisticated city police departments and ushered in the modern era of anxious parenting.

Kelly said Hernandez confessed for three hours and accompanied New York Police Department detectives to the scene of the crime, which was then a grocery store, or bodega, and which now sells eyeglasses.

He told investigators that he had lured Etan Patz, who was six and taking the school bus alone for the first time, “with the promise of a soda.”

“He then led him into the basement of the bodega, choked him there and disposed of the body by placing him in a plastic bag and placing it in the trash.”

According to Kelly, Hernandez is married with a teenage daughter, a US citizen with no criminal record and has not previously been a suspect in the high-profile investigation.

Police were led to him by a tip that followed a sudden reactivation of the search, with police and FBI agents digging up a different basement in Manhattan last month.

“The individual came forward because of the recent notoriety of the case,” Kelly said.

 

Although he escaped the authorities for more than three decades, Hernandez had apparently become guilt-ridden. He “told family and others that he had ‘done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,’” Kelly said.

Detectives who interviewed Hernandez thought “he was remorseful,” Kelly said. The confessed murderer appeared “to think it was a feeling of relief.”

Patz’s parents have been informed, Kelly said, adding he hoped the development would “bring some measure of peace.” However, he did not expect that the remains of the boy would ever be found. “It’s unlikely, very unlikely,” he said.

Patz’s disappearance was so shocking that he became a symbol for growing fears over the safety of children playing outside the home.

He became the first missing child to have his face pictured on milk cartons with an appeal for information. The date of his disappearance, May 25, became known as National Missing Children’s Day.

Taken from here