Probe of ’79 case renewed


Associated Press

NEW YORK

The investigation into the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz has stretched through decades and countries, from basements to rooftops and seemingly everywhere in between.

No one ever has been charged criminally — and the little boy with sandy brown hair and a toothy grin was declared dead in 2001.

Last week, after more than a decade of relative quiet, the case suddenly ran hot again, after a cadaver- sniffing dog picked up a scent in an old basement down the street from the boy’s home.

By Saturday, investigators had finished ripping up the basement’s concrete floor with jackhammers and saws and were digging through the dirt in hopes of finding the boy’s remains or any other evidence.

So far, authorities haven’t given any outward sign that they’ve found anything.

It’s not clear what, if anything, the dig will turn up, but the investigation has reached similar highs before — only for the trail to go cold for years at a time.

Etan vanished May 25, 1979, while walking alone to his school-bus stop for the first time, two blocks from his home in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

There was an exhaustive search by the police and a crush of media attention. The boy’s photo was one of the first of a missing child on a milk carton. Thousands of fliers were plastered around the city, buildings canvassed, hundreds of people interviewed.

Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie, offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the boy’s whereabouts, and sightings were reported frequently, to no avail.

A name gradually emerged as a possible suspect: Jose Ramos, a drifter and onetime boyfriend of Etan’s baby sitter. In the early 1980s, he was arrested on theft charges and had photos of other young, blond boys in his backpack. But there was no hard evidence linking Ramos to the crime.

Missing-persons cases, like homicides, generally are considered cold after six months, but they’re never closed. And with seemingly no new leads, the case would go quiet for years. In three decades, 10 detectives have been assigned to head up the case. The FBI and police are working jointly.

A fresh lead came in 2000, after Ramos, now in prison in Pennsylvania for sexually molesting two boys in unrelated cases, admitted he was with Etan the day he disappeared. He was said to have told a cellmate: “Etan is dead. There is no body, and there will never be a body.”

That prompted police to scour for clues in the building where Ramos lived at the time. They dismantled the furnace and searched it for DNA. But they found only animal traces.

By the next year, father Stan Patz, who never moved or even changed their phone number in the hope their son would reach out, had Etan declared dead in order to sue Ramos in civil court.

A civil judge in 2004 found him to be responsible for the disappearance and presumed death of the boy. Ramos says he didn’t do it.

The case was quiet until 2010 when new district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said he was going to revisit it.

The focus has shifted to the basement that had been used at the time as a workspace for a handyman named Othniel Miller. He was interviewed after the boy went missing, and his space was searched then but never dug up. Law-enforcement officials have spoken to him as recently as Wednesday.

The 75-year-old Miller hasn’t been identified as a suspect, and his lawyer says he has nothing to do with the case.

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