A heartbreaking mystery that tortured a Manhattan couple and stymied police for more than three decades apparently was solved Thursday after a New Jersey man confessed to strangling 6-year-old Etan Patz.
Pedro Hernandez was charged with second-degree murder one day before the 33rd anniversary of little Etan’s disappearance — a crime that shocked New York and gave rise to the missing child movement.
“We have probable cause to make this arrest,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “We believe that this is the individual who is responsible.”
PHOTOS: A TIMELINE OF THE ETAN PATZ CASE.
Hernandez, 51, who was working as a stock clerk at a SoHo bodega when Etan vanished while walking the 174 steps from his home to the store, was expected to be arraigned Friday.
“We have a confession, a written confession, a signed confession,” Kelly insisted. “He spoke for three and a half hours. We have videotaped statements.”
Under questioning, Hernandez spun a sickening tale for investigators, describing how he, then just 19 years old, lured the innocent little boy into his clutches with a cold soda, how he led him down into a basement, how he strangled him — and stuffed him in a bag.
He gave no explanation for why he killed the boy.
“He was repeatedly asked why he did it, and he couldn’t give us an answer,” one source said. “He said he had no idea why he did this.”
And the cruel and callous way that Hernandez got rid of the boy’s body shocked investigators.
HISTORY: ETAN PATZ CASE CHANGED THE WAY POLICE HANDLED MISSING KIDS CASES.
“It was taken a distance from the bodega, to another location in the neighborhood and left in the trash,” Kelly said. “About a block, block and a half away.”
Hernandez’s confession dashed whatever hopes Etan’s long-suffering parents might have harbored of burying their son.
It is “very unlikely” that Etan’s body will ever be found, Kelly said. “We can only hope that these developments bring some measure of peace to the family.”
Asked if Etan was sexually assaulted, Kelly said no.
PEDRO HERNANDEZ GAVE NO SIGN TO NEIGHBORS HE WAS HARBORING A SINISTER SECRET.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr., who promised the Patz family that he would take a fresh look at the case when he took office in 2010, wasn’t present when Kelly announced the arrest.
Asked if the case against Hernandez was strong, Kelly said, “That’s a question for the district attorney. Our issue is probable cause. We have probable cause to make this arrest.”
Hernandez, who lives with his wife and college-age daughter in South Jersey and has no police record, is the first person to be arrested in a case that has long bedeviled investigators.
PEDRO HERNANDEZ GAVE NO SIGN TO NEIGHBORS IN NEW JERSEY THAT HE WAS HARBORING A SINISTER SECRET
Although cops canvassing the neighborhood for clues were aware that Hernandez worked at the bodega at 448 West Broadway and questioned his co-workers, Kelly said that for reasons that are unclear Hernandez was never questioned.
A month after Etan vanished, so did Hernandez.
For the next 33 years, he lived in obscurity. And he might have continued eluding justice if he hadn’t blabbed.
“In the years following Etan’s disappearance, Hernandez had told a family member and others that he had done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,” Kelly said.
And this week, one of those relatives picked up a phone and called police, sources said.
On Wednesday, they arrived at Hernandez’s home in a suburb of gritty Camden, N.J.
Chuck Diehn, a retired Philadelphia cop who lives next door to Hernandez’s modest two-family house, watched the arrest go down.
“I saw the men in black,” said Diehn. “I assume they were FBI. There was a group of them. They walked him out to the car. There was no struggle. They didn’t handcuff him. There was no expression” on Hernandez’s face.
The slim suspect stood out amid all the dark suits because he was wearing a pale yellow T-shirt.
“I only caught a brief glimpse of him when he was walking,” said Diehn. “I could see it was him, because he’s baldheaded. I could see that very easily.”
Investigators also drove off with his wife, Rosemary, and daughter, Becky.
FLASHBACK: DAILY NEWS COVERAGE OF THE ETAN PATZ CASE.
Back in New York, Hernandez started spinning a tale that sparked hope, suspicion and revulsion in the investigators who had been struggling for years to solve this crime.
“Hernandez described to the detectives how he lured young Etan from the school bus stop at West Broadway and Prince St. with the promise of a soda,” Kelly said.
“He then led him into the basement of the bodega, choked him there and disposed of the body by putting it into a plastic bag and placing it into the trash.”
Kelly described the killing as a crime of opportunity. The suspect had never seen Etan before.
When Hernandez finished talking, it was as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Kelly said.
“He was remorseful and it seemed to the detectives it was a feeling of relief on his part,” Kelly said.
But detectives reacted warily to the confession.
Hernandez insisted that two days after the killing he went to retrieve the bag with Etan’s body — and it was gone.
He disappeared shortly after Etan, moving to New Jersey and working in construction. He has been on disability since injuring himself in 1993, Kelly said.
Kelly said Hernandez told relatives, as far back as 1981, that he had “done something bad” and killed an unnamed child in New York City. One of the people Hernandez, who attends a Pentecostal church, told was a spiritual adviser, a source told the Daily News.
“There was a comment years ago that he did something,” the suspect’s brother-in-law, Jose Lopez, told ABC. “But I was never told about it, he never told me nothing, or my wife or anybody in the family that I know.”
Kelly, who was returning to New York from London after a meeting on safeguarding the Summer Olympics when word of Hernandez’s arrest leaked out, at first confirmed cops had a possible suspect. But he was careful to not raise false hope.
Typically, the anniversary of Etan’s disappearance was the day detectives got deluged with phony leads about the case.
And as investigators grilled the suspect, it was with the knowledge that others had confessed to the crime before — and that each time it led to a dead end.
Before Hernandez was arrested, law enforcement agents returned Thursday to his home in suburban Maple Shade, N.J. Once again, they left with his wife and daughter.
“Don’t push me,” Rosemary Hernandez barked at reporters as she and her weeping daughter fled the house under police escort.
Meanwhile in SoHo, news trucks, reporters, and photographers converged again Thursday on Prince St. where Etan’s parents still live.
Detectives and a representative of the NYPD’s press relations office paced the streets outside the apartment after news of the confession came out.
“As a father, I cannot imagine what they’ve gone through,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “I certainly hope we are one step closer to bringing them some measure of relief.”
SoHo residents echoed the mayor’s remarks.
“Everyone is looking for closure,” said Roz Radd, who has lived in the neighborhood 45 years. “Hopefully, he can tell us where his body is and the family can get some peace.”
There was no immediate reaction to the arrest from Etan’s long-suffering parents, Stan and Julie, who were in Cambridge, Mass., for their daughter’s college graduation while Hernandez was spilling his guts at the district attorney’s office.
They had canvassed SoHo with hundreds of flyers after Etan went missing and refused to move or even change their phone number while hoping against hope that he would be found.
Before Kelly’s stunning announcement, they gave no indication of being aware that an arrest was imminent.
“We don’t even know what the latest developments are,” Julie Patz told a reporter for The News.
Stan Patz was also uneager to talk about the latest chapter in what has been his family’s lifelong tragedy.
“We’re here for my daughter’s graduation,” he said and sped off in a minivan.
Hernandez — who lived on West Broadway near the bodega, which is now an eyewear store — still has family in SoHo. They insisted they had done everything they could to help police.
“My father Juan has been cooperating with investigators every single year for the last 30 years,” said the suspect’s nephew, Danny Santana, 22.
Asked about Hernandez’s arrest, Santana said, “Right now from every report we’ve read, he’s being demonized.”
SoHo was a tough neighborhood — nothing like the boutique-filled tourist mecca it is now — when the sandy-haired boy set off on his first solo trip to a school bus stop May 25, 1979.
Etan’s disappearance helped launch a nationwide movement to put the photographs of missing kids on milk cartons. He was declared dead in 2001 but his case was not closed.
Interest in the case was revived in April when detectives dug up a SoHo basement that was the workplace of former handyman Othniel Miller, who knew Etan from the neighborhood.
The building containing Miller’s workshop was on the two-block route Etan was taking when he disappeared. But the search turned up no new evidence.
Miller’s lawyer, Michael Farkas, said his client is “relieved” investigators are now focusing on somebody else and “very pleased that those responsible for this heinous crime may be brought to justice.”
Miller, 75, of Brooklyn, was “not involved in any way” with Etan’s disappearance, said Farkas.
Until Thursday, a pedophile named Jose Ramos was the prime suspect.
His girlfriend baby-sat for Etan. And Ramos, who is doing time in a Pennsylvania prison for molesting two boys, had admitted taking a young boy back to his apartment to rape on the same day Etan disappeared.
Ramos said the boy looked like Etan, but insisted he let the boy go.
The creep, who is due to be released in November, was declared responsible for Etan’s death in 2004 in a New York civil case.
And every year, on the anniversaries of Etan’s birthday and disappearance, Stan Patz sent Ramos a copy of his son’s missing child poster.
It always bears the same type-written message: “What did you do to my little boy?”
Retired NYPD Detective Joseph Gelfand, who arrested Ramos in 1982 after catching him molesting a 12-year-old boy in Times Square, said the arrest of Hernandez raises a sickening possibility he hadn’t thought of before.
“That would mean that you had two pedophiles, possibly three, operating in one small neighborhood,” he told The News.
With Greg B. Smith, Joanna Molloy, Beverly Ford, Edgar Sandoval, Kerry Burke and Janon Fisher
rparascandola@nydailynews.com
